With Strings Attached: Gift-Giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US Foreign Policy

In 1958 the United States of America offered two mobile radioisotope laboratories to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as gifts. For the USA, supplying the IAEA with gifts was not only the cost of “doing business” in the new nuclear international setting of the Cold War, but also indispensable in maintaining authority and keeping the upper hand within the IAEA and in the international regulation of nuclear energy. The transformation of a technoscientific artefact into a diplomatic gift with political strings attached for both giver and receiver, positions the lab qua gift as a critical key that simultaneously unlocks the overlapping histories of international affairs, Cold War diplomacy, and postwar nuclear science. Embracing political epistemology as my primary methodological framework and introducing the gift as a major analytic category, I emphasize the role of material objects in modeling scientific research and training in a way that is dictated by diplomatic negotiations, state power, and international legal arrangements

Special Issue Article

Abstract This special issue stresses the importance of material culture in diplomatic studies of science and technology. In our studies, objects are considered powerful tokens of complexity in diplomatic encounters and of asymmetry in international relations. The contributors are committed to theorizing about the role of objects in diplomatic exchanges during the postwar period and, at the same time, the role of diplomacy in constituting the materiality of nuclear things. Our approach combines attention to the political and diplomatic nuclear history with recognition of the roles played by nuclear artifacts throughout the whole spectrum of diplomatic activities. On the whole, we argue that the material approach should be located at the center of the study of nuclear history and the diplomatic exchanges that made it possible

Diplomacy in the Time of Cholera

Turning everyday ordinary happenings into struggling moments for existence—from breathing to socializing—is how the Covid-19 pandemic will mark history. What we ask here is not how the ordinary becomes abnormal but how it becomes political and diplomatic. We argue that the spread of the Covid-19 virus, which is measured through virologic and epidemiological models, overlaps with feverous diplomatic and political activities taking place among big geopolitical powers. Yet, this is not new in history of health. The first encounters between diplomats and health professionals were elicited by the social and economic challenges caused, on a global scale, by the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century. Indeed, health sciences and diplomacy have been historically co-produced. Such a historical perspective on science and health diplomacy facilitates our understanding of international institutions such as the World Health Organization as highly political and diplomatic endeavors. The Diplomatic Studies of Science, a new interdisciplinary research field underpinned by a historical perspective on science diplomacy, sheds light on the multiple factors contributing to the worsening of the global COVID-19 crisis we are facing nowadays