NWB2023_Geopolitical influences on global collaboration patterns in science and how they affect the Nordic countries

Recent years have seen increasing tensions between science policies advocating openness and globalization on the one hand, and foreign policies much more focused on competition, trade sanctions, self-containment, and security and defence on the other. The deteriorating relation between China and the USA, the two largest science-producing countries, is creating new configurations in global collaboration patterns with internal Asian collaboration on the rise. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed European collaboration patterns. So far, global collaboration in science has not followed the borders of defence alliances, but this is changing. The aim of this contribution is to present the trends in global scientific collaboration as a context for a closer look at the Nordic countries’ international collaboration until recently. The analysis will be based on data from Web of Science updated until September 2023. I will partly use an indicator of the Relative Intensity of Collaboration presented by Fuchs, Sivertsen & Rousseau in Scientometrics, 2021, which is an improvement of the widely used indicator presented by Luukkonen, Persson & Sivertsen in Science, Technology & Human Values in 1992.