This special issue brings together a diverse set of cases from Asia with the aim of decentring established historical narratives about science diplomacy. With a critical perspective bringing together the bodies of literature in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) and critical Asian Studies, we argue that these cases foreground a geopolitical history with multiple forms of sovereignty – often contested ones – and a range of political institutions and actors that enables us to revisit science diplomacy as a means for understanding the relationship between science and international affairs. In doing so, the articles in this issue consciously eschew the normative ‘centring’ of superpowers or Western imperial powers as the primary actors, focusing instead on the agency and subjectivity of actors within Asia, many of whom were prominent in their respective local contexts. Additionally, we argue that the cases presented here, which examine issues from across science, technology, medicine and the environment, collectively demonstrate the further need for the ‘science’ in ‘science diplomacy’ to be interpreted more broadly, incorporating as it does many aspects of human engagement with the material world.

This paper is a study of the intersection between aviation and diplomacy in the semi-autonomous Indian state of Jodhpur in the final decades of British colonial rule in India. Jodhpur's Maharaja Umaid Singh established a major international aerodrome, patronized one of India's first flying clubs and collaborated with British authorities to make aviation laws for the Indian states. He would also serve in the Royal Air Force during the war and placed Jodhpur state's aviation resources at the disposal of the king-emperor. This paper argues that Jodhpur was able to leverage its aviation resources to wield substantial influence both within and beyond the British Empire through both war and peace. An analysis of Jodhpur's engagement with aviation diplomacy is also revealing of some of the limitations as well as possibilities for the deployment of science diplomacy frameworks, especially in non-Western contexts.

This article focuses on the 1952 visit to the Jingjiang Flood Diversion Project, the first large-scale water infrastructure built on the Yangzi river after the founding of the People's Republic of China, by a foreign delegation from the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference. Serving as a form of technology diplomacy, this trip advanced two main purposes for the newly established country – to build up closer ties with ‘foreign friends’ who advocated international peace in the context of the Korean War, and to demonstrate China's own technical capabilities and achievements as part of the national campaign of ‘peaceful construction’ of the early 1950s. I argue that vernacular technologies, which were grounded in indigenous knowledge and practices for water control in the mid-Yangzi region, were essential in shaping China's self-reliant modernization and China's public diplomacy, which targeted individuals without scientific or technical backgrounds.

This article explores medical diplomacy as a means of navigating distinct but related nation-building and internationalist projects during the Cold War. It examines how medical professionals from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) utilized their expertise to bolster foreign relations and assert national independence. This article focuses on how three tuberculosis (TB) specialists – Đặng Đức Trạch, Phạm Ngọc Thạch and Phạm Khắc Quảng – adopted, adapted and circulated techniques of TB control, including a modified version of bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine. Amidst these endeavours, these medical-doctors-cum-diplomats navigated various forms of internationalism while soliciting medical assistance. Their roles within the DRV's state apparatus were prominently showcased from the 1950s to the 1970s, particularly at international gatherings such as the conferences of Ministers of Health of the Socialist Countries (MOHOSC). Because of the political complexities inherent in socialist internationalism, these conferences provided a crucial platform for dialogue among socialist nations when other avenues were limited. Consequently, the DRV's medical experts cultivated goodwill and garnered political support, despite encountering mixed results in their TB control initiatives.

This paper explores the role of World Health Organization (WHO) medical experts in ambitious projects for substance control during the Cold War in Thailand and India. The circumstances surrounding opium production in these two nations were very different, as were the reasons for requesting expert assistance from the United Nations. Whereas the Thai military regime was concerned with controlling illicit traffic to secure its borders, the Indian government wanted to direct its opium raw materials towards domestic pharmaceutical production. Overlapping and sometimes competing agendas of country governments and international agencies converged upon each project, complicating the consultants’ work and requiring careful navigation. In both cases, medicine as a science concerned with human health and well-being was subordinated to more pressing agendas. At the same time, the article argues that WHO consultants left an important impact, though not necessarily due to their skills and training in medicine. Instead, they provided exemplars of sound governance and delivery of public health in a politically stable and economically developed country.

Focusing on South Korean biologists and their efforts to establish national parks in the 1960s and 1970s, I illuminate the ways in which they negotiated their relationship with the ecological diplomacy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the anti-communist and developmentalist diplomacy of the South Korean government. To justify their activities, these South Korean biologists emphasized the importance of nature conservation activities in the competition for international recognition and economic development with their northern counterparts. The national-park initiative was thus subsumed into the politics of this legitimacy competition between the two Koreas, or what I call ‘victory-over-communism’ diplomacy. The IUCN's influence over South Korea was limited to the extent that both the government and scientists recognized the diplomatic merit they could gain in the context of their Cold War competition and developmentalism. It is also shown how, during the short detente period of the two Koreas, South Korean biologists used victory-over-communism diplomacy to renew their government's attention to their activities. This Korean episode contributes to the wider perspective of decentralizing the Cold War history of environmental diplomacy in the free-world bloc by illustrating the importance of its entanglement with the Cold War politics surrounding Asian developmentalism.

Given that the practices and institutions of knowledge production commonly referred to as ‘science’ are believed to have ‘Western’ origins, their apparent proliferation entails negotiations and power dynamics that shape both science and diplomacy in specific locales. This paper investigates a facet of this co-production of science and diplomacy in the emergence of knowledge infrastructure in Japan during the Allied Occupation. It focuses on the 1947 delegation from the United States National Academy of Sciences to Japan and its role in creating the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). While historians view this mission as having been dispatched to provide advice on the foundation of the SCJ, it was in fact an unintentional outcome. The original plan was to recruit long-term scientific advisers on science policy to Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. The creation of the SCJ was not the brainchild of any individual but the result of an unforeseen alteration of the original idea through negotiations among various actors. By examining the transnational aspects of this process and the complex social process underlying it, and drawing on Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory, this paper proposes the concept of ‘techno-diplomatic assemblage’ for understanding the transnational construction of knowledge infrastructure such as the emergence of the SCJ.

Gordon Barrett (GB): Research Associate, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK (special issue co-editor).