The Global Race for Technological Sovereignty: Institutional Inertia, Systemic Risk, and AI Governance — Ingrid Ott

Speaker

Ingrid Ott (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

Abstract

The global race for technological sovereignty has become one of the defining economic policy challenges of our time. Governments invest heavily in frontier AI, semiconductors, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructures to strengthen productivity, strategic autonomy, and geopolitical competitiveness. Yet the same technologies also create increasingly systemic risks that transcend national borders. This paper asks whether the pursuit of technological sovereignty can unintentionally undermine the governance capacity required to sustain it. We argue that institutional inertia fundamentally changes this trade-off: when governance adapts more slowly than technological change, continuous increases in technological competition may trigger abrupt transitions into persistent high-risk regimes.

The paper develops a dynamic theory of technological competition in which systemic risk and governance capacity co-evolve over time. It shows how strategic competition, dynamic externalities, and institutional inertia jointly determine whether technological progress remains sustainable or pushes the system beyond critical thresholds. Combining theory with new empirical evidence from the complete corpus of UN Security Council resolutions (1946–2025), the paper offers a new perspective on technological sovereignty, AI governance, global public goods, and institutional adaptation under accelerating technological change.

Methodologically, the paper combines differential game theory, dynamic optimization, nonlinear dynamical systems and bifurcation analysis with large-scale text analysis using Structural Topic Models (STM), providing an integrated theoretical and empirical framework for studying governance under technological acceleration.

Room

Colm Room (A-111)

Colm Room & online – if interested, please send an Email to kcg-office@kielinstitut.de to receive the Seminar-Link or to register for participation in Kiel.

If you would like to be regularly informed about upcoming Kiel Trade Talks, please subscribe to our mailing list here.
If you do not wish to receive any further e-mails from us, please click here.