Working with the “Enemy”: Supervised Space, Free Space, and Cross-Border Collaboration amid Geopolitical Rivalry

As the world grapples with intensifying geopolitical competition and ideological conflict, many organizations face the daunting task of navigating the complexities of geopolitics and fostering effective cross-border partnerships. For members of these organizations, such political dynamics might create new barriers to their ability to carry out collaborative activities. In a historical case study of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project—an unprecedented partnership between the space programs of the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War—we identify how organizational members navigated the turbulent geopolitical environment. We found that collaborative meetings between organizational members were limited to a supervised space that ensured government oversight but created interactional barriers. Organizational members realized that their ability to overcome these challenges would require them to develop practices outside of the organization, using boundary work to carve out free space outside the purview of political supervision. The free space served as a laboratory in which they reconciled informational, techno-cultural, and ideological differences and created solutions to the challenges they faced in the supervised space through translation work. Our study theorizes how geopolitics complicates the interactional processes of cross-border partnerships and underscores the importance of free space for fostering collaboration amid geopolitical rivalry.