DIESL members Kunhan Li and Kaarlo Liukkonen took part in the Nordic International Studies Association (NISA) symposium “Nordic International Relations in Times of Global Ruptures”, held in Mariehamn, Åland, on 19–21 August 2026.
Kaarlo Liukkonen presented “The aftermath of weaponized interdependence: What explains the effects of the Snowden Revelations on countries’ email outsourcing decisions”, co-authored with Vili Lehdonvirta. The paper takes up the question of why countries’ digital dependencies on U.S. Big Tech email providers diverged after 2013, and what that divergence tells us about how states respond once a dependency has been revealed as a channel of surveillance.
Kunhan Li presented “Space Sovereignty as a Process: Demarcation, Exclusion, and Representation in the U.S.–China Space Race”, co-authored with Markus Holmgren, a former visiting fellow at DIESL. The paper treats sovereignty in orbit as something produced through practice rather than held as a settled status, and reads the competition between the United States and China as a contest over where boundaries fall, who is kept out, and whose claims are recognised.
The symposium’s focus on early-career researchers gave both papers extended discussion, and the setting supported exchange with scholars working on related questions across the Nordic institutions.