P&E: Scientific cooperation and our role in overcoming global inequality through them

Hardly any other subject benefits as much from international scientific cooperation and student exchange as physics. On the one hand, this promotes scientific progress and, on the other, contributes to global development and international understanding. Almost 40% of Cologne’s MSc students come from the Global South.

This is currently being called into question by the German government and the EU on very fundamental grounds: cooperation is only to take place where it fits in with the government’s current geopolitical strategy, and scientific exchange and collegial cooperation are being declared a security risk. Since 2023, the German government has been striving to lift the peace clause (“civil clauses”) at universities and to systematically mix military and civilian science (“dual use”) following the example of Israel and the US, which would make most international cooperation impossible because almost everything would be subject to military secrecy. (Not only) we have always advocated against that for a much more conscious internationalist and explicitly anti-militarist orientation of universities, and so far, universities have largely refused to go along with the reorientation of science policy. However, the pressure is currently being increased massively: there are discussions about linking third-party funding, which accounts for well over 50% of total funding in Cologne’s physics department, to research projects having a secondary military use. Master’s and PhD students who have studied at the wrong university are suddenly no longer getting their employment contracts extended and are also losing their visas as a result.

The debates are currently raging, but above all it is clear that we want and must counter this with a fundamentally different approach. The kick-off event of this semester’s Physics & Ethics Workshop is dedicated to the question of what this approach can and should consist of