The Technopolar World Divides: Pax Silica, WAICO and Türkiye

This paper argues that the technopolar world order completed its institutional formation in the summer of 2026. With the second Pax Silica Summit consolidating 24 signatories around the United States in June, and 29 states founding the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) around China in Shanghai on July 16, the two poles of the technopolar system now possess names, addresses, founding texts and membership rosters. The paper reads this bipolarization through the Cold War analogy while insisting on its limits: alignment is enforced today not by armored divisions but by infrastructural dependency, the membrane between blocs is porous, as Kazakhstan’s dual membership demonstrates, and the deepest stake of the rivalry is epistemic rather than territorial. Drawing on the frameworks of cognitive diplomacy, epistemic dependency and augmented geopolitics, the paper contends that bloc alignment now determines the conditions under which entire publics will reason, since each pole exports not merely hardware but a complete regime of knowledge production. Against this backdrop, the paper defines Türkiye’s stance as selective engagement combined with computational sovereignty: she engages both poles without acceding to either, as evidenced by her signature on the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity alongside her absence from the Pax Silica Declaration. The Artificial Intelligence Action Plan announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, examined here through the philosophy of its four axes, Perceive, Harness, Forge and Govern, is designed to provide the indigenous capacity on which the credibility of this posture will rest. The paper concludes by proposing connected sovereignty as the formula for the unaligned majority of the international system, an offer of shelter rather than discipline, rooted in the çınar of Türkiye’s founding state tradition.