Decentring histories of science diplomacy: cases from Asia

This special issue brings together a diverse set of cases from Asia with the aim of decentring established historical narratives about science diplomacy. With a critical perspective bringing together the bodies of literature in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) and critical Asian Studies, we argue that these cases foreground a geopolitical history with multiple forms of sovereignty – often contested ones – and a range of political institutions and actors that enables us to revisit science diplomacy as a means for understanding the relationship between science and international affairs. In doing so, the articles in this issue consciously eschew the normative ‘centring’ of superpowers or Western imperial powers as the primary actors, focusing instead on the agency and subjectivity of actors within Asia, many of whom were prominent in their respective local contexts. Additionally, we argue that the cases presented here, which examine issues from across science, technology, medicine and the environment, collectively demonstrate the further need for the ‘science’ in ‘science diplomacy’ to be interpreted more broadly, incorporating as it does many aspects of human engagement with the material world.

In March 2024, we attended a workshop hosted by Peking University's Department of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.¹ This workshop, about the entanglement of science and international affairs seen through the lens of data exchange chiefly in East Asia after the Second World War, had both English- and Chinese-language titles, the former being Science and Diplomacy: A History of Scientific Data Flows. Many of the speakers’ presentation slides were similarly bilingual, with their English-language text making frequent use of the term ‘science diplomacy’. Yet there was a small but crucial difference in the nature of the Chinese-language versions of the event title and most presenters’ slides: these used the term keji, most directly and often translated as ‘science and technology’ or sometimes as ‘technoscience’.² In both these cases, as in much of the discussion, participants followed a common convention in switching between the dominant term used in each respective language. However, halfway through the workshop, a participant noted this linguistic divergence after one of the presentations, raising the issue of potential conceptual implications for the differences between keji waijiao (literally ‘science and technology diplomacy’) and ‘science diplomacy’. Along with many in the room, we had not consciously noted those differences on each side of the event title or slide texts prior to this being raised in discussion. We had taken for granted the distinctions in the terms as used in each language since, as specialists of China (Barrett) and Japan (Homei), we have been so accustomed to automatically translating Chinese keji and Japanese kagaku gijutsu (‘science–technology’) into ‘science’ in English in certain contexts such as this.³

Not only did this prove to be a highly impactful intervention in the workshop discussion, but also its timing proved particularly important for us while working on the writing of this introduction and other final preparations for this special issue, which seeks to ‘decentre’ science diplomacy through examining cases from Asia.⁴ On the back of that discussion about language in a workshop environment that categorically put Asia at its centre, we could not help but see ‘science diplomacy’ and its associated English-language scholarship in relative terms. In that setting and in that space, it was ‘science and technology diplomacy’ that sat at the centre, having the most immediacy and relevance in academic activities and in policy making alike. Meanwhile, for all its visibility at the workshop and our own familiarity with it as scholars based at an institution in the English-speaking world, it was ‘science diplomacy’ in its English-language formulation which felt less central, like a variant that needed to be conceptualized and considered in relation to the local context.

The irony in this is that English-language literature on ‘science diplomacy’ – even those contributions which push to ‘globalize’ it – has typically treated that term and its Anglo-American origins as the starting point for any discussion. Thus in that context science diplomacy as a neologism and a concept emerged after the Cold War in the specific context of the US engagement with foreign affairs. Its entry into academic discourse came through interventions by practitioner–advocates, such as Nina V. Fedoroff, whose influential 2009 article for Cell foregrounded her credentials as a geneticist and molecular biologist while written in her capacity as Science and Technology Adviser to both the Secretary of State and to the Administrator of the US Agency for International Development.⁵ The most influential and seemingly inescapable definition emerged from similar practitioner–advocate sources the following year, promoted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society in a policy report. This conceptualized it as having three core manifestations: first, as ‘informing foreign policy objectives with scientific advice (science in diplomacy)’; second, as ‘facilitating international science cooperation (diplomacy for science)’; and third, in ‘using science cooperation to improve international relations between countries (science for diplomacy)’, with further differentiation into two diplomatic tracks involving state and non-state actors respectively.⁶ For all that scholars of the humanities and social sciences have been consistently cautious about such uncritical and under-conceptualized formulations, these – and their Anglo-American origins – have invariably been centred time and again in English-language scholarship on ‘science diplomacy’.⁷

And yet, during this same period when ‘science diplomacy’ was gaining popularity in policy discourses and activities in places such as the United States and the United Kingdom, actors from East Asia were actively mobilizing similar – yet distinct – languages as part of parallel pushes to integrate aspects of foreign science and technology policies. Such was very much the case in Japan and South Korea alike, where government-connected bodies were advocating for the advancement of ‘science and technology diplomacy’.⁸ Such interconnected and yet distinct development in Asia underscores not just the need for further interrogating and expanding how ‘science diplomacy’ is deployed in English-language scholarship, but also the extent to which the region can indeed be an effective site with which to decentre the concept across multiple key axes.

This special issue brings together a diverse set of cases from Asia with the aim of reappraising established historical narratives about science diplomacy. Among historians of science, technology and medicine (STM), there has been a well-established interest in the interplay between science and international politics which long pre-dates the emergence of the term ‘science diplomacy’.⁹ As with social scientists, some have criticized the neat definition provided by the Royal Society/AAAS and its usage in policy as lacking nuance and meaningful historicization.¹⁰ Others have pointed out that the definition comes from a certain vantage point that privileges the perspectives of the anglophone Western world and emphasized the need to globalize our historical understanding of the concept.¹¹ Crucially, for historians of STM, their engagement with science diplomacy coincided with the rise of the ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ turns in the discipline.¹² This has led them to reappraise and develop further the existing historiography of science and international affairs by considering a transnational movement of a broader range of actors, artefacts and knowledges, in order to come up with a range of critical responses to the now established, yet recalcitrantly simplistic, concept of science diplomacy.¹³

This special issue emerges from such a community of scholars, in particular the members of the Commission on Science, Technology and Diplomacy (STAND). A part of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology's Division of History of Science and Technology (IUHPST/DHST), the commission was founded in 2017 at the DHST's Rio de Janeiro congress and has offered a platform to generate conversations connecting the historians of STM with scholars of international relations and practitioners of science diplomacy. A consistent feature of the STAND-supported scholarship has been to emphasize the need for greater global coverage and diversity of perspectives in exploring the history of science diplomacy.¹⁴ This special issue is the result of a long-term collaboration supported by STAND and based on a series of four virtual ‘mini-workshops’ held between January and May 2021, involving scholars from across Asia, Europe and North America.¹⁵ For the series, participants were invited to circulate and comment on papers on cases examining how the contours of international and transnational politics both within and with Asia shaped science, technology, medicine and environmental practices, and vice versa.

How, then, can cases from Asia contribute to decentring the larger historiography of science diplomacy? First, these cases foreground a geopolitical history featuring multiple forms of sovereignty – often contested ones – and a range of political institutions and actors. On the one hand, much discussion of science diplomacy in the policy arena has adopted a framework that makes the modern state the primary foundation for the practice of science diplomacy. This is in no small part due to the practitioner-derived origins of this discussion, in which the earliest and most influential articulations of the term were put forth by scientists, diplomats and foreign-policy professionals working for ‘Western’ governments in the post-Cold War period.¹⁶ However, even when state actors are central to the cases covered in this special issue, these do not always neatly align with the normative assumptions or typological expectations embedded in such conceptualizations, such as with revolutionary socialist states like the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), discussed by Michitake Aso, and the People's Republic of China (PRC), discussed by Yue Liang.¹⁷ Meanwhile, other cases depart even further from those norms, such as in Aashique Ahmed Iqbal's article analysing the role played by aviation diplomacy in advancing the interests of Jodhpur, a semi-autonomous princely state, as it navigated the British imperial system on the Indian subcontinent.¹⁸ Thus the cases from twentieth-century Asia considered in this issue allow for the consideration of the impacts and influences of a plurality of actor types operating across a range of contexts.

As such, we propose that Asia is a productive space to test the utility of science diplomacy as a heuristic device with which to conduct what Zuoyue Wang in this issue's ‘Concluding conversation’ has called ‘meso-level analysis’, one that bridges the gap between global and transnational levels.¹⁹ The ‘meso-level analysis’ enabled by this formulation of science diplomacy permits us to identify the ways in which scientific objects, personnel and expertise travelled across national borders through dynamic interactions of both state and non-state actors without losing sight of the various contours of different political units – be it a sovereign state, an empire, a colony or an intergovernmental or an inter-regional organization – that shaped the transnational scientific exchange.²⁰ As a region, Asia is especially effective for this type of analysis precisely because its modern history showcases the intricacy of such political units, some of which do not easily conform to the assumptions in the existing literature, which tends to focus on the US or European cases. In particular, we see a variety of imperialisms at play in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Asia, not least the Japanese Empire as ‘homegrown’, and the world's only non-European modern empire having a significant presence in international affairs.²¹ By emulating the European colonial powers but simultaneously asserting its uniqueness – especially taking advantage of the perceived racial affinity with the colonial subjects – the Japanese Empire complicated the geopolitics inscribed in the scientific exchange within and beyond the region. Moreover, Asia also had China, which, although officially maintaining its sovereignty throughout the modern period, had a special status with the treaty ports as ‘hyper-colonies’, and from 1932 with Manchukuo as a ‘puppet state’ of the Japanese Empire.²² Even the areas subjected to European colonial rule at times defied the simple ‘colonizer–colonized’ dichotomy. As Iqbal's paper shows, the structure of British colonial rule in South Asia created a space in which Jodhpur as a princely state acted as a critical actor of both diplomacy and transnational exchange for technological innovation.²³

Finally, in the mid-twentieth century, as the Japanese Empire collapsed and US imperialism expanded its sphere of influence in the Cold War, Cold War geopolitics and the rise of the developmentalist discourse further subdivided sovereignties in the region according to ‘capitalist–socialist’ and ‘developed–developing’ dichotomies.²⁴ This, in turn, later coalesced into the shorthand dualism of ‘global North–global South’ that has remained pervasive in present-day developmental discourses.²⁵ Jaehwan Hyun's article shows how, in this Cold War context, ‘victory over communism’ provided the fulcrum for transnational scientific exchange in South Korea, while Michitake Aso's article shows that socialist internationalism provided the basis on which tuberculosis experts from the DRV deployed the intertwined projects of medical diplomacy and nation building.²⁶ At the same time, Reiko Kanazawa's paper illustrates how experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) were compelled to navigate layers of often conflicting interests in countries in South and South East Asia, which, though appearing at first glance to be predicated on the hierarchical relations of the ‘developed’ global North versus the ‘underdeveloped’ global South, were in fact more complex.²⁷ Moreover, mid-twentieth-century Asia was also a hotbed of the non-aligned movement.²⁸ In this context, some sovereignties within the region sat awkwardly in the dichotomies mentioned above, as indicated in Kenji Ito's paper on the making of the Science Council of Japan.²⁹ Asia through modern history with multiple and contested sovereignties points to the limitation of adopting existing categories for understanding the political institutions that played a major part in science diplomacy. It is this point that makes cases from Asia a particularly effective tool with which to test our decentring agenda.

Furthermore, these cases from Asia contribute to the growing effort instigated by historians of science, medicine and technology to move away from the normative ‘centring’ of superpowers or Western imperial powers as history's primary actors. These efforts feature a multiplicity of new actors and perspectives, as attested by recent works which have focused on actors from Asia in particular.³⁰ Following in the footsteps of these works, in this issue, we will focus on the agency and subjectivity of actors within Asia, many of whom were prominent in their respective local contexts. For example, Liang's article foregrounds how the political elites of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s set out to establish the People's Republic of China (PRC) as an exemplar of ‘peaceful development’ through initiatives such as the Jingjiang Flood Diversion Project on the Yangzi river.³¹ At the same time, cases in this issue continue this process of shifting focus by contextualizing the activities of non-local or ‘foreign’ actors in Asia. Kanazawa draws attention to the rank-and-file officers dispatched from the WHO to Thailand and India for narcotic-substance control, showing how their trajectories dramatically diverged due to distinctive local circumstances.³² Meanwhile, by detailing the ground-level negotiations using Japanese- as well as English-language sources, Ito challenges the existing interpretation in the historiography that the American scientific delegate visited Japan under the Allied Occupation with the intention of establishing the Science Council of Japan.³³ By foregrounding such diversions and unintended consequences accompanying their actions, such cases show the inherent messiness, multidirectional nature and historical contingency of science diplomacy, even when discussing examples involving power differentials between those involved.

The final dimension of our decentring agenda, linked to the episode at the beginning of this essay, is to take an intentionally broad definition of ‘science’ when we talk about science diplomacy. In part due to the dominance of the focus on post-Second World War diplomacy, certain scientific domains, particularly nuclear science, have played an outsized role in existing discussions on the history of science diplomacy.³⁴ In this special issue, partly inspired by East Asia's modern history with ‘science–technology’, we have chosen to consciously step back and consider science diplomacy in terms of an umbrella of approaches and practices, involving science, technology, medicine and the environment. Our inclusion of medicine and environment is especially important here because of the burgeoning bodies of scholarship on ‘health diplomacy’ and ‘ecological diplomacy’, distinct and well-developed literatures that can be conspicuously absent from discussion on science diplomacy, despite their clear relevance.³⁵ This agenda to bring these literatures into explicit dialogue has been central to this special-issue project from the very beginning, not simply by bringing together scholars from across those subdisciplinary specialist divides who developed their articles alongside one another through mutual discussion and input via ‘mini-workshops’ as part of the writing process.

Taken together, the interconnections and mutual relevance of the articles in this issue call into question the utility of conceptualizing science diplomacy as a distinct form, separate and unrelated to health diplomacy or environmental diplomacy. Instead, we argue for ‘science’ in science diplomacy being deployed in a similar manner to a long-established perspective in the history of STM that considers science to also incorporate various human efforts to modify and improve things, their bodies and what surrounded them.³⁶ Thus each article contains multiple connections and crucial parallels to other articles in the issue, some already highlighted in this introduction. Yet there are many others besides. For example, much as Ito's article upends established narratives about the relative levels of American versus Japanese influence in the formation of the Science Council of Japan, Aso's similarly subverts expectations about inter-regional power relations in his article on tuberculosis control.³⁷ In it, Aso demonstrates that the DRV's leveraging of socialist internationalism was not simply to enhance its ability to solicit medical assistance, but also simultaneously to establish itself as an exporter of medical assistance in its own right.³⁸ This duality between domestic development and international outreach in the DRV's medical diplomacy analysed by Aso had both distinctive characteristics and deep parallels with the technological diplomacy being deployed by its much larger northern neighbour, the PRC. Focusing on delegates’ visit to the Jingjiang Flood Diversion Project as part of the 1952 Asia-Pacific Peace Conference, Liang demonstrates how the PRC sought to use it to showcase to a non-specialist audience the fledgling revolutionary state's approach to development, one that purported to pursue modernization through leveraging of ‘vernacular technologies’.³⁹ Crucially, the PRC's utilization of technology as part of its engagement with the international peace movement came while the country was a combatant on one side of the early Cold War's most formative international conflicts, the Korean War. As with Aso on the DRV and Liang on the PRC, Jaehwan Hyun's contribution considers a case involving contested sovereignties. Yet his article does so from the perspective of biologists from the Republic of Korea, thereby exploring a case of ecological diplomacy from the other side of the Cold War's ideological divide. Examining their engagement with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Hyun shows how nature conservation activities became an active vehicle for competition between the two Koreas and reflected the relationship between ideology and politics in Asian developmentalism.⁴⁰

Crucially, while we focus on the cases of Asia, we are not taking ‘Asia’ at face value. On the contrary, we acknowledge that the world region has been constructed historically, thus the contours of what constituted ‘Asia’ differed through history. In particular, we want to remind ourselves that the categorization of Asia into the subregions of East, South East and South Asia that have political currencies today is itself a product of US-led science diplomacy during the Cold War.⁴¹ Moreover, we are not uncritically celebrating Asian identities even as we foreground the importance of the local subjectivity. As Claire Edington aptly points out in the ‘Concluding conversation’ in referring to Aihwa Ong's book, biomedical science in Singapore, for instance, has served to consolidate the idea of an ‘Asian disease’ while at the same time constructing the notion of ‘Asian populations’ that defied the earlier colonial narratives that pathologized Asian bodies.⁴² The complexity of postcolonial identity formation in Asia and how that was entangled with the ways in which science, technology and medicine were made has been pointed out by some scholars who propose adopting Asia as a heuristic device through which to seize a global history of STM and the environment in a decolonial manner.⁴³

Mindful of this trend in the area-specific scholarship, this special issue considers Asia as more than a shorthand that refers to a geographical world region. Kanazawa's paper shows Asia in the mid-twentieth century as a site of intervention in the global politics of socio-economic development, one in which the nature of intervention varied conisderably.⁴⁴ At the same time, as Homei points out in the ‘Concluding conversation’ and elsewhere, Japanese actors in international cooperation in family planning flipped the image of Asia to their own benefit, to justify Japanese bilateral cooperation with other Asian countries and to establish Japan's position in international communities.⁴⁵ Therefore a crucial aspect of the agency exerted by multiple actors from Asia involved leveraging their own positionality, intra-regional power dynamics and knowledge of discourses or assumptions about Asia.

The papers that follow interconnect and intersect with one another in a range of ways that are neither simple nor static; the primary interlinkages that appear between them shift and reset depending on the vantage point from which they are being viewed. As such, they collectively challenge the notion of there being a singular, straightforward definition of a science diplomacy that can fit all cases and encompass all contexts. Our aim in this special issue is not to articulate an alternative science diplomacy applicable only to a particular region, actor, period or domain. Nor is it to simply refine or replace existing universalist definitions such as that advanced by the Royal Society and the AAAS. Instead, this exercise in decentring can be characterized as a conceptual disruption aimed at stepping away from what Kate Sullivan de Estrada describes as utilization of ‘cases and concepts and categories as fixed mental furniture’.⁴⁶ This intervention is not only relevant in terms of its characterization of the issue's agenda, but also because of the context in which it was articulated: as part of a multi-positional, multidisciplinary dialogue in this issue's ‘Concluding conversation’. Rather than a summing up from a singular vantage point or voice, the final element of this issue is a reflective conversation, drawing on the expertise and perspectives of three established scholars who each approach the discussion of science diplomacy and the articles in this issue from their own perspective. Consequently, that contribution of Sullivan de Estrada's was made in response to and building on Claire Edington arguing for science diplomacy having utility as a means of ‘contemplating points of connection or entanglements between different places, politics, kinds of expertise’.⁴⁷ The special issue aims to do precisely that. The cases explored here offer such accounts of connection and entanglement, ones that point toward a notion of science diplomacy as fundamentally dynamic. Truly globalizing our understanding of science diplomacy requires decentring that understanding and, in doing so, embracing the extent to which aspects of this concept can change and be reconfigured based on context.