23: Crises and transformation: towards better worlds? (Le Anh Long, Shawn Donnelly, Stefan Telle, Su Yun Woo, Caroline Fischer, Florence Metz, Igor Pessoa, Sikke Jansma, Maryam Haeri)
Crises can stimulate a desire for deep societal, institutional, and normative transformation among citizens, politicians, and academics. However, the role of crises, transformation, and science, technology, and innovation (STI) in making better worlds is not straight-forward. Calls to re-imagine social, technological, and ecological systems require value-guided orchestration and steering. In short, transformation requires governance. But what type of governance is needed to steward processes of transformation in a context fraught with cascading and overlaying crises, rapid (and non-linear) technological innovation, conflicting value-systems, entrenched power dynamics, and deepening global and local interdependencies within socio - ecological and - technical systems? To address this overarching question, panels in this track are organised as (hybrid) roundtable discussions where panel chairs pose broad questions to which each panellist provides insights, drawing from their own research and engagie with the audience in a collective reflection on how to transform crises into opportunities to build a better world.
Panel 1 (Social Crises): Salvation or threat – technology in the social domain. Organisers: Fischer & Haeri. This panel addresses dynamics at the intersection of digitalization and social inequality. It offers insights into the ways technology can both exacerbate and alleviate social crises, offering a nuanced understanding of this critical intersection between innovation and societal challenges.
Panel 2 (Conflict & Crises): Cyberspace for human and national security? Organisers: Donnelly & Long
This panel concentrates on the intersection of cybersecurity and surveillance, open-source intelligence, classic national security issues and the prosecution of war crimes and genocide. It interrogates how the governance of digital information is changing in light of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and transforming our notions and practices of security.
Panel 3 (Climate Crisis): Water futures. Organisers: Metz, Long, and Jansma. This panel addresses questions related to ‘water futures,’ how experts and people imagine addressing upcoming challenges and which policies they would accept to maintain the resource intact for themselves and the environment.
Panel 4 (Democratic Crisis): Crisis of the liberal order: towards a better world? Organisers: Telle, Donnelly, Woo, Pessoa & Kutlay. At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama proposed that the triumph of Western liberal order constituted the “end of history” suggesting that the combination of democratic politics, capitalist economies, and rules-based international cooperation realises the best possible world. Today, widespread democratic backsliding, widening economic inequality, growing geopolitical tensions, an anaemic UN system, and rising authoritarianism indicate that the liberal political order is in crisis. This panel brings together diverse perspectives from the Global South and from Europe to critically reflect on whether a radical transformation of the liberal order is desirable, or if incremental adjustment and democratisation of the current system could ensure that it delivers on its promise.
Keywords: crises, democracy, emerging technology, governance, climate change