Policy Brief No. 233 — March 2026
Realist Innovation Diplomacy: Managing Knowledge Flows Under Rivalry Mark Daley
Key Points → Openness in science and technology is a policy variable, not an axiom. In an era of systemic rivalry, states must choose where to collaborate and where to constrain, and the choice should follow from explicit reasoning about what is at stake. → A two-dimensional map organizes instrument choice: domain salience (Δ) indexes how strongly advances affect relative power; chokepoint intensity (X) captures how concentrated control is along supply, compute or standards chains. → Verification capacity is the hinge variable. As the ability to detect leakage improves, trusted coalitions can expand without proportionate risk, making investment in secure enclaves, audit protocols and credible sanctions a strategic priority. → Proportionality requires diagnostics. Controls should specify, at enactment, the observable indicators that would trigger review, and policy makers should defend the open commons in domains where closure yields no security dividend.
Introduction States are building walls and bridges simultaneously. In the same policy cycle, governments impose export controls on advanced semiconductors, screen foreign investments in artificial intelligence (AI) firms and restrict researcher access to sensitive facilities, while also fast-tracking talent mobility within alliances, standing up joint research and development (R&D) accelerators and funding trusted data enclaves for coalition partners. The apparent contradiction dissolves once one sees the pattern: this is not incoherence but strategy. The familiar triadic slogans of science diplomacy — “science in diplomacy,” “science for diplomacy” and “diplomacy for science” — offer little purchase here (The Royal Society 2010). They describe roles and aspirations, not a logic of instrument choice. They presume openness as an unalloyed good and treat closure as deviation. Yet in an era of systemic rivalry, openness is not a default; it is one policy variable among several, whose value turns on what is at stake and who controls the bottlenecks.