How Anticipatory Science and Diplomacy Can Renew Multilateralism
Diplomats gather daily at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations in Geneva, New York, Nairobi and beyond to address our planet’s dire challenges while advancing their own national interests. This dichotomy of interests – and the 21st century’s geopolitics of multipolarity among global powers – demands a new, collaborative approach that anticipates the breakthroughs made possible by science and technology.
By John Heilprin
September 1, 2023
Over the summer, diplomats and researchers from Switzerland to Bangladesh weighed in on the relative merits of science diplomacy. One thing stood out as grounds for common agreement: There’s been a strong upsurge of interest in it lately.
A Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETHZ) article entitled “The Promise and Paradox of Science Diplomacy” takes note of GESDA’s anticipatory approach and the vital role that science and diplomacy play in Switzerland’s strategy.
Science diplomacy is a dynamic new policy concept that interconnects science, technology and international relations but contains a “productive tension” between collaboration and competition, writes Leo Eigner, a Senior Researcher in the Swiss and Euro-Atlantic Security Team at ETHZ’s Center for Security Studies (CSS). That’s because of its growing uses in tackling both global and national challenges.
“The rationale of science diplomacy thus appears paradoxical: it is implemented to collaboratively address global issues and to competitively advance national interests,” Eigner argues in the July edition of the CSS Analyses in Security Policy series. Nations such as Switzerland, the U.S., the U.K. and Japan and some scientific institutions already refer to the concept in their policymaking, he notes.
Science diplomacy activities frequently have three simultaneous dimensions: They make use of scientific advice to inform foreign policy, diplomacy to facilitate international science projects, and collaborations to improve international relations.
Eigner calls it “converting the soft power of science into broader political objectives.” In that regard, others agree. Science diplomacy has great potential as a force multiplier in multilateralism by helping to tackle complex global and national issues, according to professor and economist A.K.M. Atiqur Rahman of Bangladesh.
“Increasingly, science diplomacy is seen as a multilateral effort to address both global challenges and global public goods, through science-related international events, international NGOs and various science-policy interfaces,” he writes in an opinion article published in a leading Bangladesh news portal in July.
“Just as science diplomacy can strengthen regional and international cooperation in science and technology on a bilateral and multilateral basis to achieve national development goals, it can also be a key component of international relations,” Rahman says.
Recent high-level political negotiations around the world have been assisted by top scientists and academics, Maricela Muñoz, GESDA’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, told the UN Summer Academy Trend Talk sponsored by the UN System Staff College in Italy and Germany.
That highlights the crucial role science plays in addressing global challenges such as poverty, climate change, public health emergencies and the digital divide, said Muñoz, a veteran diplomat for Costa Rica and the United States.
From the doctors who helped found the International Committee of the Red Cross to the physicists at CERN, scientists who set out to gain and share understanding and knowledge have played a crucial role in Swiss-hosted international diplomacy since the 19th century.
Swiss U.N. priorities
That also was the message of Switzerland’s first-ever presidency of the U.N. Security Council in May, when Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis chaired the first Swiss-hosted flagship event to strengthen the 15-nation council’s confidence-building approaches and instruments for sustainable peace.
The council meeting was overshadowed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and shifting European alliances. However, Cassis, a proponent of Geneva’s multilateral hub, emphasized that “trust is built on facts” which can lead to “21st century solutions” through anticipatory science and diplomacy.
‘Funmi Olonisakin, who as Vice-President and Vice-Principal International at King’s College London has lead responsibility for all international matters at the college, told the New York-based Security Council that advances in science and technology are critical drivers of war and peace and must be part of future policymaking.
She pointed to GESDA, the Geneva Center for Security Policy (GCSP) and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs as trailblazers in the field by creating a new global forum to advise policymakers on the future of conflicts.
Where the science and diplomacy can take us
GESDA co-hosted with its partners GCSP and SIPA some debates in Geneva and New York earlier this year on anticipating the future of peace and war. The first workshop in Geneva focused on the methodology, while the workshop in New York looked at how to apply this methodology to concrete situations.
One of the main aims of the project is to identify tipping points where peace begins to be undermined and the probability of a future conflict increases, then find ways to take action to prevent them.
Such work has been a priority at GESDA for several years and has informed discussions at both the first and second annual GESDA Summits, based on the insights of hundreds of scientists globally contributing to the forward-looking Science Breakthrough Radar.
The findings in the 2022 Science Breakthrough Radar®:
Based on the latest Radar, here’s where we stand in several important areas:
1.6 Collective Intelligence
Many people with diverse experience and expertise will be needed to solve the world’s greatest challenges, making collaborative work a top priority. This is where the emerging field of Collective Intelligence (CI) comes in. Its aim is to better understand the dynamics of human collaboration, and find new ways of enhancing and guiding these processes.
The field draws on disciplines such as biology, psychology and computer sciences, and is based on the principle that when people come together to solve problems, the sum is greater than its parts. Organizational management, citizen science and open democracy use its applications, which could improve everything from social media moderation to managing natural disasters. It also could further the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals through more inclusive global governance. Radar, page 60.
1.6.1 Large-scale collaboration
Digital technology enables collaboration on a previously unimaginable scale. Crowdsourcing is helping tackle challenges as varied as training AI to predicting floods. Citizen science projects engage the general public to collect and analyze data or develop new theories. Open innovation platforms let companies outsource engineering challenges to independent experts.
AI is also playing a growing role in facilitating CI by filtering and summarizing complex data, organizing human knowledge, helping to connect experts, and optimizing deliberative processes. CI may ultimately incorporate both humans and AI agents working together. Decentralization technologies such as blockchain and quadratic voting are also opening up new avenues for enhancing CI. Radar, page 62.
Anticipation in a nutshell
5-year horizon: Basic CI becomes everyday tool
10-year horizon: CI applications grow
25-year horizon: Open innovation hits the mainstream
3.2 World Simulation
Humanity needs more transdisciplinary understanding to craft evidence-based policymaking and resource management that addresses the 21st century problems of climate change, population growth and global economic disruptions. One thing that’s helping is our increasing ability to put data and models into “world simulations” that leverage global networks of environmental sensors and ever-growing computing power.
Some hope to create an integrated planetary avatar that offers decision-support tools by spanning physical, biological, social and economic dimensions from local to global scales. These tools may allow governments, corporations, NGOs, and citizen groups to explore alternative future scenarios and make more informed decisions. Radar, page 118.
4 – 4.4.4 Science & Diplomacy
Diplomacy is inextricably linked to the influence of science and technology. Computational modeling, analysis and artificial intelligence are set to play important roles in international relations, especially when it comes to interactions between groups of people. Science-based diplomacy is based on computational social sciences, mathematics, optimization theory or behavioral research and covers different emerging fields of research, such as computational diplomacy and negotiation engineering.
Computational diplomacy is concerned with our emerging ability to map the landscape of international relations, to gather and analyze data on unprecedented scales and to simulate potential outcomes. It is revealing not only the complexity of modern international relations but the potential knock-on effects of future actions. Negotiation engineering is a solution-oriented approach that uses quantitative methods in a heuristic way to find an adequate solution. It can defuse emotion from negotiation problems and enable resolutions of complex issues. Radar, page 162.
5 – 5.3.4 Knowledge Foundations
Foundational knowledge covers topics from basic sciences, engineering sciences, social sciences and the humanities. Society consists of a wide variety of densely connected, interdependent systems. These networks of networks enable the flow of information, ideas, goods, services and money. This connectedness, or globalization, also makes our world vulnerable to extreme events.
It is apparent from the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century that externalities need to be better incorporated into the economic decisions of firms, households, and governments. Globalization also has dramatically changed the nature of trade in the last quarter century, but it must be sustainable and resilient towards systemic risks into the future. Although it is generally considered a positive force, rising tensions over some of its consequences threaten its future. Radar, page 192.
Debate 4: Science & Diplomacy: What Do People Say?
Multilateralism is discussed positively in Africa, Central and South America, Asia and Australia, but not strongly mentioned in North America and Europe. Overall, there are underlying concerns about the future of democracies, and feelings of anxiety around disinformation and cyber attacks by geopolitical entities. However, there is a gap between the sentiment and topics of discussions on social media and what specialists are reporting. Radar, page 270.
Debate 4: Science & Diplomacy: What Do People Do?
Most awareness-raising activities dealt with the consequences of cyber attacks and data breaches, and what needs to be done to protect cyber infrastructure. In this case, the stakeholders were local governments, NGOs and small businesses. Quite a few detected actions drew attention to the consequences of misinformation campaigns, as well as the responsibility of “big tech” to find the right balance between censorship and tackling misinformation.
On science-based diplomacy, awareness-raising activities focused on the contributions of game theory and data-driven decision making to our understanding of complex global problems such as climate change and conflicts. Those were classified as awareness-raising activities around fundamental science, in contrast to cyber-related activities, which are more about technology. Finally, behavioral studies in the area of economics, linguistics and decision-making were also frequently mentioned. Radar, page 274.