Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. In our introduction to this special issue, we argue that this approach promises insight into science diplomacy because of the tools historians of science bring to their work. In particular, we observe that not only are historians of science currently poised to chart the diplomatic aspects involved in the transnational circulation of technoscientific knowledge, materials, and expertise. They are ready to bring critical global analysis to an important phenomenon that (...) has too often been treated as a benign diplomacy device deployed by the Global North without equal reference to the Global South. Through cases discussed in the articles of the special issue, however, we see that historically, in the Global South as well as the Global North, science diplomacy has often functioned to mediate the circulation of technoscientific knowledge and materials, and its historical study helps to better illuminate the resulting knowledge-power nexus. (shrink)

This special issue explores the power that images with a techno-scientific content can have in international relations. As we introduce the articles in the collection, we highlight how the study of this influence extends current research in the separate (but increasingly interacting) domains of history of science and technology, and political science. We then show how images of different types (photographs, cartoons and plots) can inform inter-state transactions through their public appeal alongside the better-studied dialogic practices of the diplomatic arena. (...) Finally, we offer an analysis of the interlacing of different diplomatic tracks based on words and images and conclude that, in contrast with words, images conflate agency and argument, therefore creating opportunities to inform transactions and negotiations which their designers may not have even intended. (shrink)

This article examines the attempt by the Kingdom of Morocco—a country of pivotal geopolitical importance in the late 1970s and early 1980s—to secure a research reactor. It finds that by treating that reactor as a diplomatic object, we can observe the different diplomatic frameworks in which that object was conceived of, contextualized, and negotiated. The historical emergence of these frameworks occurred in close relationship with the IAEA, which acted as an intermediary linking various administrations, programs, and countries, including Morocco. In (...) the end, this history reveals that the late Cold War nuclear world involved multilateral actions and forces, some of which encouraged Morocco in its bid to acquire a reactor, but others of which left that same reactor orphaned and unfinished. (shrink)

When the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) began operations in 1958, one of its first routine tasks was to create and circulate a brief non-technical periodical. This article analyses the creation of theIAEA Bulletinand its circulation during its first years. It finds that diplomatic imperatives both in IAEA leadership circles and in the networks outside them shaped the form and appearance of the bulletin. In the hands of the IAEA's Division of Public Information, the bulletin became an instrument of science (...) diplomacy, its imagery conveying the motivations for member states to strengthen ties with the IAEA, while simultaneously persuading them to accept the hierarchies and geopolitical logics implicit in those relations, as well as to endorse the central position of the IAEA as a clearing house and authority of globally circulating nuclear objects and information. (shrink)