Tech Rivalry and the Global Power Reordering: Geopolitics, Governance and the Political Economy of Technological Transformation

Global politics is increasingly structured around the competition for tech leadership, centred on artificial intelligence advances and semiconductor supply chains, but also enveloping other “strategic” industries such as green tech, biotech, quantum, infrastructure, and more.  This “tech war” with the US-China rivalry at its centre is transforming how power is accumulated, how violence and coercion are produced and how interdependence is governed. The workshop brings together three research groups whose complementary perspectives illuminate different layers, dynamics, and actors of this transformation. From a macro-structural perspective, competition over frontier technologies is intensifying geopolitical tensions and redefining power capabilities (and vulnerabilities). At the same time, high-tech and in particular artificial intelligence-driven platforms and data infrastructures reshape military decision-making, redefine corporate-government and private-military relations and produce new forms of violence embedded in sociotechnical routines. These developments unfold against a broader reconfiguration of globalisation, marked by techno-nationalism and shifting interdependencies. By integrating geopolitical, sociotechnical and political-economic analyses, the workshop examines high-tech competition as an evolving process that reorders global hierarchies, restructures markets and securitises and redefines state–industry relations. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the workshop aims to identify conceptual bridges, empirical synergies and future research avenues to advance a more integrated understanding of the role of advanced technology in the contemporary world order.

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