Successful Early Career Workshop on Tech Rivalry and Global Power Reordering at VU Amsterdam 

On 28-29th January 2026, ReGlobe hosted a highly successful early career workshop, Tech Rivalry and the Global Power Reordering: Geopolitics, Governance, and the Political Economy of Technological Transformation, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The workshop brought together five excellent research groups from across the Netherlands and Belgium: Platform Wars (University of Antwerp, PI: Marijn Hoijtink), CODE (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, PI: Antonio Calcara), the Critical Infrastructure Lab (PI: Niels ten Oever) and RegulAIte (PI: Daniel Mügge) (both from University of Amsterdam) and ReGlobe (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, PI: Nana de Graaff). 

The workshop assembled a diverse group of highly talented early career researchers working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, security, and capitalism. Participants exchanged cutting-edge work from a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, and empirical perspectives, fostering rich interdisciplinary dialogue. 

Key discussions focused on geopolitical competition and the infrastructures of “tech war”; techno-nationalism and the politics of decoupling; the platformization of military power; markets, firms, and the political economy of securitizing technology; algorithmic and data-driven forms of violence; and the regulation of AI as a sociotechnical practice. Across these themes, the workshop explored how competition over advanced technologies—from semiconductors and AI to biotech and data infrastructures—is reshaping global power relations, state–industry relations, and contemporary forms of governance and conflict. 

The workshop provided an intensive and collegial space for in-depth feedback on work-in-progress, strengthening intellectual connections across projects and institutions and laying the groundwork for future collaboration among early career scholars working on the geopolitics of technological transformation.

The programme can be found here