To delve deeper into the concepts covered in REMIT’s second conference session’s topics, and to offer participants a glimpse of what awaits them (or why you should register if you haven’t already!), we’ll be rolling out a Session Series in the weeks leading up to the event.
The next in our coverage is the first of our panels!
| April 15, 14:30 – 16:00 | Panel 1: “The Geopolitics of Strategic Technology Governance” Chair: Katja Creutz (Finnish Institute of International Affairs) Speakers: Michal Onderco (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Carolina Polito (Luiss Università di Roma), Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs), Sophie Vanhoonacker (Maastricht University) |
The panel is led by REMIT’s Finnish partners, Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
The panel explores the technological competition between major powers, such as the EU, the US and China, and its impact on global governance. It also examines how Global South actors are participating in this race for innovation and how they are affected by the dynamics occurring between Washington and Beijing in particular.
Session speakers
Katja Creutz is Programme Director of the Global Security and Governance research programme at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. She is also an Affiliated Research Fellow with the Erik Castrén Institute at the University of Helsinki. Her main field of expertise is international law and especially issues of responsibility, human rights and global governance. Dr Creutz holds a Doctor of Laws degree (2015) and a Master of Laws programme degree from the University of Helsinki (2004) and a Master of Political Science from Åbo Akademi University (2000).
Creutz has previously worked as Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights of the University of Helsinki. She is the former Executive Editor of the Finnish Yearbook of International Law. She has published extensively on responsibility in international law, non-state actors, human rights and Nordic issues.
The latest academic publications by Creutz include: The Law of International Responsibility Situated: From Halcyon Days to a Fragmented Global Order, Multilateral Development Banks as Agents of Connectivity: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Rights Protection: Revisionist or Just Another Kid on the Block? and Nordic Experiences in the UN Human Rights Council: A Tour d’Horizon of 2019 with Iceland and Denmark. She is also the author of the monograph State Responsibility in the International Legal Order: A Critical Appraisal (CUP, 2020).
Michal Onderco is Professor of International Relations at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is an expert on international security, with particular focus on political aspects of arms control and disarmament. He studies in particular how different material incentives and normative structures influence decision-making. In the past, he held positions at Columbia, Stanford, EUI and Waseda University. Within REMIT, he works on governance of military applications of artificial intelligence. His paper on what the war in Ukraine means for NATO’s positioning on AI was the most widely read paper in Journal of Strategic Studies in 2025.
Carolina Polito is a PhD Candidate in Politics at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. Her doctoral research investigates how biometric technologies shape identity governance, citizenship, and state–market relations through a socio-technical and historical lens. Her work bridges International Relations, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Systems, examining the political and epistemic dimensions of data infrastructures. She is also an Associate Researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels, where she contributes to EU-funded projects and policy studies on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies. Her research and policy work lies more broadly at the intersection between technology governance, security, and digital geopolitics. Her publications have appeared in Politicsand Contemporary Italian Politics. Carolina has been a Visiting Fellow at Stellenbosch University and ESSEC Business School and serves as a peer reviewer for Information Technology for Development.
Ville Sinkkonen is Leading Researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Center on US Politics and Power. He also holds the Title of Docent in International Politics at the University of Turku. His research focuses on US foreign policy, great-power politics, the changing international order, normative power and the politics of trust in international relations.
Sinkkonen has published in various peer-reviewed academic journals, including the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and the European Foreign Affairs Review. Sinkkonen has co-edited the volume Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Palgrave, 2026) and is the author of A Comparative Appraisal of Normative Power: The European Union, the United States and the January 25th, 2011 Revolution in Egypt (Brill, 2015).
Sinkkonen holds an LL.D. (International Law) from the University of Turku, where he defended his doctoral dissertation Failing hegemony? Four essays on the global engagement of the United States of America in the 21st Century in December 2020.
Sinkkonen was the chairperson of the Finnish International Studies Association (FISA) from 2023 to 2025. He is a co-editor of the Nordic Review of International Studies (NRIS).
Sophie Vanhoonacker is Professor in Administrative Governance at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. From 2016 to 2020, she served as dean of the faculty. Her research focuses on the institutional aspects of EU External Relations and administrative governance in the area of foreign and security policy. In her latest work, she has focused on the emerging EU level system of diplomacy and the EU’s response to the rapidly changing international geopolitical context. She is co-editor of the ‘New European Union Series’ of Oxford University Press (with Dermot Hodson) and the ‘European Administrative Governance’ book series at Palgrave Macmillan (with Thomas Christiansen).