Actors are considered to be the central units of the international system, which is where they exist and interact. They are, essentially, dynamic parts or elements of the system that constantly interact between themselves through a large variety of ways (conflict, cooperation, competition, etc.) with the goal of satisfying their personal interests. Currently, we can identify a large variety and quantity of actors, both State (countries) and non-State (companies, international organizations), that coexist and interact as parts of the international system.

To be considered as an international actor, one must have the capacity of creating or participating in relations that are internationally significant for the international system as a whole. This means that we must not include in this concept groups or entities that, despite having played an important role in the international scene in a particular historical moment, have lost that prominence as a consequence of the changes that took place in international society, or those that are somewhat relevant in a field but not in others.

In the current historical context of the beginning of the 21st century, we can differentiate a vigorous group of actors with a need to participate in and influence the field of ISR. Some of them have a long tradition in the production and management of scientific knowledge, while others are looking to become more deeply involved in the dynamics and processes of STI for the very first time.

Old and New Actors

Among the most relevant changes in the international system in recent decades, there are changes in the number, power, function, and behavior of actors. In our current international context, the modern Nation-State has started showing signs of fatigue, while the international prominence of new non-State entities is growing. This same reality can be observed in the subfield of ISR, where traditional actors are trying to adapt to the new relevance of scientific knowledge, while new actors, both State and non-State, are starting to show interest in participating in this increasingly dynamic system. All of them are going through a strong reconfiguration of their old functions, their roles as scientific and social actors, and in the way in which they interact with their peers and with the rest of the actors within ISR.

In recent decades of the 20th century, the world started a frenzied transformation, prompted by multiple global processes that have operated in parallel within the world order and have generated significant changes in the whole of the international system: the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, the new trends towards globalization and regionalization, the new challenges to the Nation-State, the evolution towards a new stage of capitalism, and an unprecedented scientific and technological revolution are some of the more relevant processes that have affected the international system and that are creating a new world order in the 21st century.

This new context implies substantial changes in the international order, that have generated (and still are generating) a structural transformation of the political, economic, social, technological, educational, and cultural spheres. The majority of experts agree that nowadays we are experiencing a period of systemic transition within international relations, characterized mainly by the speed, magnitude, and complexity of the changes.

To perform a detailed, in-depth analysis of this new global order, it is necessary to study the main parameters of the international system (actors, interactions, and processes) to understand how these elements would shape a new world order.

Actors of the International System

The first of the elements we must consider are the main actors that take part in the global dynamics. In our contemporary international reality, there coexists a large range of actors with varied characteristics according to their number, power, role, and interests. The post–Cold War international system has opened a new stage where the traditional actors of international relations coexist alongside new actors and where the Nation-State is forced to interact with non-State actors that exhibit a renewed prominence.

Changes in the role of the Nation-State

The world order created by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 crowned the Nation-State as the main actor of international relations and made it the main actor responsible for security, administration, cooperation, justice, and social integration. However, in recent decades, the State is being challenged by new actors and non-State entities, such as transnational corporations (TNCs), intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Being witnesses to an extraordinary historical moment due to the quantity, depth, and complexity of the changes that are taking place, the search for valid explanations that give an answer to new topics, phenomena, and actors that can be observed in the current international system must be understood as a social and scientific need. The starting point for this book has been the author's deep belief in the urgency of advancing the research on the intense changes that have taken place in the last few years in the field of international studies. The strong restructuring of the world order and the magnitude and speed of these changes make analyzing and understanding these global transformations, as well as rethinking the theoretical and methodological framework we use to give an answer to the phenomena we study, an unavoidable task.

The profound modifications that have taken place at the core of the international system in the past 30 years have given rise to a new and complex world configuration characterized by the growing phenomenon of globalization, the intensification of the scientific and technological revolution, the appearance of new international actors, and the emergence of a renewed global agenda. In the tumultuous global context of the beginning of the 21st century, science, technology, and innovation (STI) acquires a special and strategic relevance as a global agenda topic. Even though scientific knowledge has been an important factor in many past societies, what has changed is that it has become indispensable in this new phase of international relations, as the main source for generating economic benefits, political power, and social development.

The links between STI and international relations are not a new phenomenon in the international system; on the contrary, scientific knowledge has always been considered an important factor in many historical periods, from Ancient Egypt, through the European colonial empires, to its peak in the 20th century. However, in the current international system, the decisive factors are the magnitude, depth, and intensity those links have acquired. The world is changing rapidly and intensely, and scientific knowledge is one of the main causes, having become a critical variable in the international system where its prominence and influence are only growing.

The systemic study carried out up to this point on ISR (Part 2: Analytical Framework) has allowed us to discover and examine the global international context (Chapter 2), to identify the main international actors taking place in its dynamic (Chapter 3), to recognize the different interactions established between them (Chapter 4) and, finally, to discover the operative processes and mechanisms that develop within them (Chapter 5).

As a result of this analysis, in this chapter, it will be possible to identify and analyze some emerging realities that have arisen precisely as a result of the links established between the context, the actors, the relations, and the processes within ISR. These emerging phenomena become distinctive characteristics of ISR, with a great impact on the entire international system.

ISR is understood in this research as a system of interrelated actors and, as far as some of their main characteristics are mere results of the property of its members (the so-called hereditary or resulting properties), some derive from the relations among the actors, but without the actors possessing them themselves (the so-called emerging or collective properties). The interactions between actors in the field of ISR produce emerging patterns of conduct that, even though no one has planned, wished for, or sought them out, proliferate as global characteristics and become trends and macrotrends that feed back to the rest of the international system.

For this reason, in this chapter, it will be important to identify, characterize, and explain which most relevant emerging realities are stemming from the study on ISR and to discern the possible consequences they might have for the new world order.

New Emerging Phenomena

Through the extensive study of the systemic parameters of ISR, it has been possible to distinguish some emerging realities. Among them, we can mention the rise of STI diplomacy, the new struggle for global talent, the emergence of international cooperation networks, the development of scientific diasporas, the appearance of new methods of production and forms of intermediation of scientific knowledge, and the emergence of a renewed and intense competitive race between the different international actors to achieve a higher development of their STI systems.

Having examined the different elements that form the ISR (Chapters 2 to 5), the new realities that have emerged within ISR (Chapter 6) and having defined the main roles adopted by scientific knowledge in the current international system (Chapter 7), the goal of this chapter is to explore the final configuration that ISR has acquired in the current world order.

A complete explanation of the current configuration of ISR requires a detailed description of two main elements of any world order:

• –the systemic parameters, and

• – the global structure that forms.

Systemic Parameters

Systemic parameters are all the constituent parts and elements of the system, which operate within the system's limits and, due to their dynamic nature, influence and are influenced by the system as a whole. All these parameters perform a key role in determining the final configuration of the system, and for this, it is necessary to analyze what kind of traits they transfer to the global configuration.

Actors

The first element of analysis in the current configuration of ISR is the international actors that have emerged as essential units that act and pursue their interests within the international system. In this sense, it is possible to define various characteristics of the international actors that influence the final configuration of ISR:

• – A larger number of international actors show interest in STI (seen as a strategic resource for economic, political, and social development), which is manifested in higher participation of actors in all processes related to scientific knowledge (production, intermediation, distribution, application, and governance).

• – A larger number of international actors (both States and non-State) are interested in STI, which means an expansion of participants and interests.

• – A larger diversity of actors taking part in the processes linked to scientific knowledge, be they States (including emerging and less developed countries) or non-State actors (such as transnational companies, epistemic communities, or think tanks).

• – The university, the actor traditionally charged with producing and transmitting knowledge, must now share its tasks with other actors and take on new functions (the third mission), because of which it has started to develop new strategies to adapt to this new global context.

The systemic analysis of the ISR (Part 2: Analytical Framework) has revealed that scientific knowledge has a privileged place in the 21st century's international system. Without a doubt, STI has been an important factor throughout history, but in the current world order, scientific knowledge has acquired an important role that transforms it into a key resource. For this same reason, the goal of this chapter is to offer a detailed and in-depth explanation of the roles and functions that knowledge has in the field of ISR and the influence that it has on the entire international system.

As a result of the observations throughout the investigation, it is possible to consider at least five main roles that scientific knowledge has in the current context of ISR:

• – as a resource for economic gain,

• – as an instrument of power,

• – as a mechanism of social innovation,

• – as a democratizing element, and, lastly,

• – as a military-strategic factor.

Resource for Economic Gain

Nowadays, scientific knowledge is becoming an essential resource for the generation of economic wealth in the current context of the capitalist economic system. Although scientific knowledge has been used in this way in the economic field at least since the Industrial Revolution, what is novel now is its absolutely central and essential role in this new economic stage as a resource to obtain economic benefits.

In recent decades, scientific knowledge has made headway as a primary resource in the capitalist economic system. Since the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s, a new scenery of an international, postindustrial economy started to emerge, in which scientific knowledge became one of the most relevant resources for the generation of economic gain (Drucker, 1969; Bell, 1974). Since the ‘80s, knowledge started to be considered as a key factor for growth, innovation, and the competitiveness of companies, which allowed for a fundamental change in the world economy, going from comparative advantages (David Ricardo, 1817) to the new importance of the competitive advantages(Porter, 1998, 2011). This evolution in the role of knowledge started to consolidate in the ‘90s when transnational companies started to focus their strategies on the more efficient creation, application, and expansion of knowledge.

For the first time in the history of humanity, we bear witness to a time where the international system is increasingly dependent on a large number of actors. The past 300 years of history clearly show that we are seeing something unusual: the continuous multiplication of actors capable of affecting this international system. The Nation-State has lost its central role as the sole sovereign actor of the international system and must now interact and negotiate with new actors such as NGOs, mafias, multinational corporations, and hackers, among many others.

To this multitude of actors and interactions, we also add a new spectacular revolution in communications (a term too old to capture what is truly happening nowadays, with all its nuances and ramifications), which is introducing a new way of building power and a different way of establishing alliances and creating conflicts on an international scale.

These two factors have generated a new international scenario in which the actors, both large and small, have equal access to state-of-the-art technology (military, biological, energetic, chemical, industrial, and cybernetic), which gives these domestic-and international-level entities a substantial increase in power and influence. We are already three decades into what has been called the computerization of armies, the automation of air armaments, the implementation of high tech to the navy, and the rise of long-distance wars. These advances, along with cyberterrorism, make States much more dependent on access to new technologies now than in any previous point in history.

Unlike what happened in the past, nowadays science, technology, and innovation are changing rapidly and have a decided influence on global power. This combination has created a new dimension of something that is already very well known: scientific and technological espionage. The global system is no longer an arena totally controlled by States and, as such, espionage is no longer an activity funded and dominated completely by governments.

As has always happened, Nation-States live with the constant pressure of trying to improve the technology linked to its military apparatus. However, scientific and technological development is not only reduced to traditional armament but also biological and chemical weapons, nuclear technology, communicational and visual know-how for high-precision large- distance warfare and cybernetic combat.

One of the most relevant topics in the field of ISR is the ensemble of operative processes that take place within it. As with any other system, ISR possesses specific methods of interconnection and interaction between its actors that generate particular internal mechanisms. In our current global context, it is possible to recognize some essential internal processes typical of scientific knowledge, which are a part of the operative mechanisms developed in the field of ISR but which, due to their relevance, influence the international system as a whole. Essentially, these processes describe and explain knowledge's life cycle from its creation to its final application and global governance.

It must be considered that all these internal processes of the ISR are part of a dynamics that is not linear, uniform, or progressive, but, on the contrary, these processes are strongly interlinked, which generates a more discontinuous, interrelated, and complex process. In practice, they are interactive processes that admit a certain degree of overlapping in time and whose protagonists intervene in diverse moments and play diverse roles. In reality, they are interactive processes where the interdependency between their mechanisms is the main characteristic and where each one of them is complex in itself due to the many actors establishing multiple interactions and carrying out many tasks with dissimilar results.

Consequently, the goal of this chapter is to tackle and examine the almost indecipherable black box that scientific knowledge represents, studying each of the processes and mechanisms that form it in depth. For that, it is necessary to make a detailed and deep analysis of the five main processes in ISR: production, intermediation, distribution, application, and governance.

Production

The production of scientific knowledge is one of the first processes that must be studied in the field of STI. The first approach allows us to see that the conjunction of the changes that have taken place in the global configuration of the international system, and the specific modifications that have happened in ISR (new actors, the redefinition of interactions, and the revaluing of scientific knowledge) have strongly affected how new scientific knowledge is produced.

The research carried out to this point has been presented to the reader as an ambitious intellectual work, but also being conscious of the difficulties and limitations faced when analyzing an issue so complex as the link between STI and international relations. Facing such a challenge, the author has carried out a research project approaching a subject of study (science, technology, and innovation), analyzed a subdisciplinary field (international scientific relations), used a disciplinary perspective (focused on international studies, but also openly interdisciplinary), used a methodological focus (systemic paradigm), and applied research techniques (systemic models) that have shown a great descriptive, analytic, and explicative potential. The challenge and the intellectual enterprise were huge, but the social and academic need for specific answers encourages the realization of this project.

The main objective of this research has been studying the empirical space emerging from the interaction between STI and international relations. The analysis has shown three important findings:

• – first, the existence of new actors, relations, processes, and phenomena, and a strong agenda that demands more scientific treatment;

• – second, the confirmation of a promising and vigorous field of study called international scientific relations;

• – third, the fact that STI as a subject matter requires new and deeper approaches from the field of international studies.

Based on this new empirical and academic context, it is pertinent to introduce this research that tries to contribute in the same direction as those scientific works that are encouraged to face the current global challenges. The final result has been an extensive, detailed, and holistic analysis of the new reality of scientific knowledge within the international system and the main changes and continuities that are currently happening in the subfield of ISR. This has allowed us to offer answers to three main problems: (i) the role that STI plays in the current international system, (ii) the main characteristics shown by the current global configuration of ISR, and (iii) the impact that STI and ISR have on the 21st century's international system.

Role of science, technology, and innovation

STI is a determining factor in the 21st century's international system.

After the in-depth analysis of the new roles played by knowledge in the current international system (Chapter 7) and studying the main characteristics of the current global configuration of ISR (Chapter 8), the last thing to do is to identify the main interactions and the mutual impact established between ISR and the international system. The goal is to examine how ISR, understood as a specific field or subsystem in international relations, links with other subsystems and with the international system as a whole.

The use of the systemic methodology has allowed us up to this point to analyze ISR as a dynamic and complex system whose parts interact between themselves, develop internal processes, and conceive new emerging realities that end up characterizing the system as a whole. However, the same systemic perspective allows us to go further with the analysis through positioning ISR within a wider system (the international system) that contains it and conditions it and where, at the same time, it interacts with other subsystems such as the economic, political or social systems. This allows us to see how ISR links with the other subsystems that form its environment, as well as to discover how it interacts with the international system as a whole.

Within this conceptual and methodological framework, this last chapter seeks to answer three fundamental questions:

• (i) How does ISR interact with other

• (ii) What are the most relevant trends generated by ISR and how do they feed back into the international system?

• (iii) What impact does ISR have on the 21st-century World Order?

The main goal behind these questions is to identify the main demands that ISR receives from other subsystems and know their answers; to understand how these demands are processed within ISR and how they become trends that affect the international system as a whole; and, lastly, to recognize the impact ISR has on the world order that is forming at the beginning of the 21st century.

Interactions with other Subsystems

The first question to be answered concerns the interactions established between ISR and other subsystems in the world order.

The new international context characterized by an extraordinary scientific and technological revolution, the expansion of the phenomenon of globalization, and the unprecedented development of information, communication, and transportation technologies is stimulating a constant increase in the relations and interactions between all the actors of the international system, which suggests a future scenario where the number and the diversity of the interconnections will multiply exponentially.

This same reality can be observed in the field of ISR, where the reevaluation of scientific knowledge as a strategic resource and the renewed interest of old and new international actors in STI are shaping a new global structure with new means and a larger quantity of interactions and relations between different actors. Currently, if possible, observing an expansion in the number, nature, and reach of the interactions between the different actors and places of knowledge production leads not only to more knowledge being produced but also to the acceleration and intensification of connectivity.

The main objective of this chapter is to identify the main interactions and relations that are generated between the major actors of ISR and to describe their main characteristics, because, as Strange (1994) points out, a large part of the researcher's job is “trying to unravel the complex network of overlapping, symbiotic or conflictive authorities that can be found in any sector or any time we are asked who gets what.”

Interaction and Relation Mechanisms

The huge contact, link, and interaction network that exists in the field of ISR among the many international actors comprise a huge network of relations (Dagnino and Thomas, 1999), which we see represented the main economic and political interests of the actors involved in scientific and technological activities, who can either be producers, consumers, or funding agencies. Within this network, a process of reciprocal influences between all these actors takes place, where these interactions generate a breeding ground in which values are shared at the same time that research priorities are established. In the configuration of this relationship matrix, policies are defined and the allocation of resources that define the fields of relevance, the research trends, the specific weight of the different areas of research, the priorities, and even the criteria of quality are decided.

Although the links between science, technology, and innovation (STI) and international relations have been very close throughout history, the magnitude, depth, and relevancy acquired by this relation in the current international stage is unprecedented. The deep changes that have taken place in the international system in the past 30 years have boosted STI as a key instrument for achieving economic, political, and social development. This has resulted in the acceleration and intensification of the interaction dynamics between STI and international relations with strong repercussions for the configuration of the world order.

The scientific and technological transformations and their economic, social, political, and cultural implications that have occurred within the international system from the last quarter of the 20th century to the present day give the impression of living in a key moment in the history of humanity. The speed and depth of the intensive application of new technology to numerous areas of daily life make it difficult to assess the impact that all these changes are generating on the new international system. Nonetheless, it is safe to say the post–Cold War international system is experiencing a reconfiguration of its main systemic parameters in which STI has become a critical factor.

Despite the historic relevance of STI to the international system, in the theoretical and academic field of international studies, the treatment of the phenomenon of scientific knowledge has been rather sporadic, reduced, and unarticulated. This growing and strategic link between STI and international relations has driven the social and academic need to examine and deepen the analysis of how scientific knowledge and international affairs connect with, impact, and provide feedback to each other.

With this objective in mind, this introductory chapter will address some basic conceptual definitions, a brief evolution of STI throughout the history of international relations, a description of STI in a new context of knowledge economy and knowledge society, and introduce the novel interaction and overlap between STI and international relations,

Science, Technology, and Innovation

The dawn of science

The origin of scientific knowledge and modern science can be traced back to Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) and Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637), the starting point from which we can consider knowledge to be scientific.