Abstract
Science diplomacy (SD) is an emerging field of study at the intersection of international relations and science policy. Despite such a growing interest, the region of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe has received limited attention by the scholars studying this increasingly significant topic. This article presents the preliminary results of a research focusing on international scientific collaborations between the countries that are members of the Central European Initiative (CEI), an intergovernmental forum for regional cooperation spanning across this broad region of Europe. Using social network analysis (SNA), the paper explores which countries are the most prominent in these cooperation networks and whether the countries sharing EU membership are clustered into separate, distinct subgroups, with fewer or weaker ties with Non-EU members.
Highlights
The importance of S&T for public policy and international affairs (Krige and Barth, 2006; Simon, 2019; Weiss, 2015; Weiss, 2005) and the quest for international collaborations in this domain of activities has fostered an increasing interest in the ‘mutual influence’ between science and diplomacy (Kaltofen and Acuto, 2018: p. 8), helping ‘facilitate the emergence of science diplomacy’ (Flink and Schreiterer, 2010: p. 3), as ‘the particular field of international relations where the interests of science and those of foreign policy intersect’ (Ruffini, 2017: p. 3).As a result, science diplomacy (SD) represents a paradox
All respondents have an academic background in the social sciences and humanities, with most of them saying they were trained in diplomacy and international relations (9), and in classics (3), and literature (1)
The article tests this approach by analysing collaboration networks between the Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European countries that are members of the Central European Initiative (CEI)
Summary
The importance of S&T for public policy and international affairs (Krige and Barth, 2006; Simon, 2019; Weiss, 2015; Weiss, 2005) and the quest for international collaborations in this domain of activities has fostered an increasing interest in the ‘mutual influence’ between science and diplomacy (Kaltofen and Acuto, 2018: p. 8), helping ‘facilitate the emergence of science diplomacy’ (Flink and Schreiterer, 2010: p. 3), as ‘the particular field of international relations where the interests of science and those of foreign policy intersect’ (Ruffini, 2017: p. 3). Considering the several lines of geopolitical tension, either potential or already underway, crossing this region, the CEI has traditionally played a ‘bridging role’ over the last 3 decades, supporting connections between—and interactions among—the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’ (in and out of the EU; in and out of NATO; in and out of various EU macro-regional strategies; etc.) in order to strengthen cohesion along the Eastern and South-Eastern borders of the EU, via a combination of intergovernmental policy dialogue, project-oriented cooperation and confidence-building measures From this perspective, science—as an effective vector of soft power—and SD—as an emerging and promising dimension of international relations—are powerful tools both to implement the CEI political mission and to reinforce inter-state relations along the East-West axis, until now, this broad portion of Europe has been generally ignored by the (growing) debate on SD at global and European level. We considered a positive answer to our second question if the detected communities are homogeneous according to the EU membership of their nodes (EU members or non-EU members)
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