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Research

24 peer-reviewed works from the international-political-economy and economic-geography literature, indexed via OpenAlex. Scoped to 2015+ and to journals in the IPE/geopolitics allowlist (Geopolitics, RIPE, NPE, Political Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, etc.). Each box shows journal · year · citations, authors, the first ~500 characters of the abstract, and topical concept tags. Click any title to open the DOI.

origin paper

The article this portal tracks

Geopolitics·2023·180× cited

The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks

Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo et al.

Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imagined pasts. These projects are mutually exclusive …

infrastructureOpen accessCentralityCompetition (biology)ChinaProduction (economics)
dimension

infrastructure

6 works
International Affairs·2016·553× cited

Westward ho-the China dream and ‘one belt, one road’: Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping

Peter Ferdinand

China's domestic politics and foreign policy have evolved considerably under President Xi Jinping. Domestically the regime has actively promoted the idea of the ‘China dream’ to restore optimism and enthusiasm about its future, particularly among young people. Yet it has also sought to differentiate the socialist China dream from any resemblance to the American dream. Its main emphasis is on making China ‘strong and powerful’ again. In foreign policy, the leadership has become more active. While…

infrastructureOpen accessChinaGeopoliticsEnthusiasmForeign policy
Third World Quarterly·2016·341× cited

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

Tim Summers

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed pa…

infrastructureChinaSILKPoliticsEconomy
Third World Quarterly·2019·324× cited

Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: beyond ‘grand strategy’ to a state transformation analysis

Lee Jones, Jinghan Zeng

China’s massive ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa – is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down ‘grand strategy’, reflecting Beijing’s growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China’s foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a cohe…

infrastructureGrand strategyChinaPolitical scienceState (computer science)
Geopolitics·2017·309× cited

The Geopolitics of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative

Jean‐Marc F. Blanchard, Colin Flint

China’s “One Belt, One Road” project is comprised of two components: the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—that were announced separately in 2013. Each component has the potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape through the construction of interrelated infrastructure projects including ports, highways, railways and pipelines. Such hard infrastructure requires the complementary construction of soft infrastructure, such as free trade and inv…

infrastructureGeopoliticsChinaDynamismScope (computer science)
Political Geography·2020·180× cited

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground

Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira, Galen Murton, Alessandro Rippa et al.

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine…

infrastructureOpen accessGeopoliticsChinaBeijingGovernment (linguistics)
Geopolitics·2023·180× cited

The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks

Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo et al.

Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imagined pasts. These projects are mutually exclusive …

infrastructureOpen accessCentralityCompetition (biology)ChinaProduction (economics)
dimension

digital

6 works
International Affairs·2021·147× cited

The new map: energy, climate and the clash of nations

Rasmus Abildgaard Kristensen

Control over and access to energy resources and markets are important attributes of state power and have been the cause of multiple conflicts over the last hundred years. Historically, shifts in energy supply and demand are often linked to parallel changes in geopolitics. Daniel Yergin's book, The new map: energy, climate and the clash of nations, is about the new geopolitical map that is being shaped by changes in the global energy landscape, including the shale revolution in oil and gas and th…

digitalGeopoliticsEnergy policyEnergy securityPolitics
The Chinese Journal of International Politics·2019·87× cited

Towards Economic Decoupling? Mapping Chinese Discourse on the China–US Trade War

Wei Li

Abstract Tremendous changes have occurred in China–US relations since Donald J. Trump took office in the White House, but the most significant event is the outbreak of the China–US trade war, whose unprecedented scale and impact has drawn wide attention in China and sparked considerable debate. This article aims to review the four main stages of this great debate on the China–US trade war among China’s influential intellectuals and prominent thinkers. It covers the three-year period since beginn…

digitalOpen accessChinaTrade warEconomic diplomacyPolitical science
Review of International Political Economy·2022·63× cited

Global rivalries, corporate interests and Germany’s ‘National Industrial Strategy 2030’

Julian Germann

This article asks how Germany could have pursued a far-reaching ‘National Industrial Strategy 2030’ despite the fierce opposition of German industry. To resolve this puzzle—which realist-inspired and institutionalist analyses struggle with—it deploys a critical state theory attuned to the uneven and combined development of global capitalism. The twin challenge of China catching up and the US forging ahead has not only prompted German officials to develop a ‘defensive-mercantilist’ response; new …

digitalOpen accessPolitical scienceEconomicsEconomic systemPolitical economy
Environment and Planning C Politics and Space·2016·57× cited

Paperwork and the decoupling of audit and animal welfare: The challenges of materiality for better regulation

María Paula Escobar, David Demeritt

This article uses the case of animal welfare to contribute to academic debates about audit and better regulation reforms designed to reduce administrative burdens and increase regulatory effectiveness. Combining desk-based policy document analysis, on-farm field visits, and 31 interviews with livestock farmers and animal health and welfare inspectors in England, it explores farmers' record-keeping practices and the contrasting role regulatory records are understood to play in assurance and good …

digitalOpen accessAnimal welfareAuditBusinessWelfare
The Chinese Journal of International Politics·2020·48× cited

Bipolar Rivalry in the Early Digital Age

Yan Xuetong

Abstract The year 2019 saw the curtain rise on a US–China bipolar rivalry quite different from the Cold War US–Soviet bipolarity. The fundamental difference between the current bipolar rivalry and that during the Cold War is that ideology is no longer the main engine driving international competition, but rather the new digital dimension of strategic competition that is emerging between the United States and China. Technological advancement over the past 15 years has led world history’s entry in…

digitalOpen accessRivalryPolitical economyPolitical scienceCompetition (biology)
International Affairs·2023·40× cited

The digital Silk Road: China's quest to wire the world and win the future

Chuanying Lu

Journal Article The digital Silk Road: China's quest to wire the world and win the future Get access The digital Silk Road: China's quest to wire the world and win the future. By Jonathan E Hillman. London: Profile Books. 2021. 368pp. £20.00. Isbn978 1 78816 685 0. Available as e-book. Lu Chuanying Lu Chuanying Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, China Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 3, May 2023, Pages 13…

digitalChinaPolitical scienceLibrary science
dimension

production

6 works
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers·2016·388× cited

Assemblage thinking and actor‐network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross‐fertilisations

Martín Müller, Carolin Schurr

This paper shows that assemblage thinking and actor‐network theory (ANT) have much more to gain from each other than debate has so far conceded. Exploring the conjunctions and disjunctions between the two approaches, it proposes three cross‐fertilisations that have implications for understanding three key processes in our socio‐material world: stabilisation, change and affect. First, the conceptual vocabulary of ANT can enrich assemblage thinking with an explicitly spatial account of the ways in…

productionOpen accessAssemblage (archaeology)Affect (linguistics)VocabularySpace (punctuation)
Journal of Economic Geography·2019·352× cited

Global production networks: mapping recent conceptual developments

Neil M. Coe, Henry Wai‐chung Yeung

Abstract In this framing paper for the special issue, we map significant research on global production networks during the past decade in economic geography and adjacent fields. In line with the core aim of the special issue to push for new conceptual advances, the paper focuses on the central elements of GPN theory to showcase recent rethinking related to the delimiting of global production networks, underlying political-economic drivers, actor-specific strategies and regional/national developm…

productionOpen accessFraming (construction)Conceptual frameworkPoliticsEconomic geography
Review of International Political Economy·2019·271× cited

Power in global value chains

Mark Dallas, Stefano Ponte, Timothy J. Sturgeon

Power has been a foundational concept in global value chain (GVC) research. Yet, in most GVC scholarship, power is not explicitly defined and is applied as a unitary concept, rather than as having multiple dimensions. Clarifying the concept of power has become particularly urgent in recent years as GVC research has proliferated beyond dyads of transacting firms or firm-state linkages and incorporated other stakeholders and mechanisms such as NGOs, labor unions, standards, norms and conventions. …

productionOpen accessGlobal value chainScholarshipPower (physics)Corporate governance
New Political Economy·2017·207× cited

Outsourcing governance: states and the politics of a ‘global value chain world’

Frederick W. Mayer, Nicola Phillips

Politics, and by extension states, are marginal in debates about the genesis, evolution and functioning of the global value chain (GVC)-based global economy. We contend here that the core complexity of state agency and state power needs to be much more carefully understood in GVC and related debates, as a basis on which the governance of the evolving GVC world can be properly theorised as revolving around the inseparability of economic and political power. We advance a framework for understandin…

productionOpen accessCorporate governanceOutsourcingPoliticsGlobal value chain
Progress in Human Geography·2015·182× cited

Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

Gillian Rose

This paper addresses how geographers conceptualize cultural artifacts. Many geographical studies of cultural objects continue to depend heavily on an approach developed as part of the ‘new cultural geography’ in the 1980s. That approach examined the cultural politics of representations of place, space and landscape by undertaking close readings of specific cultural objects. Over three decades on, the cultural field (certainly in the Global North) has changed fundamentally, as digital technologie…

productionCultural geographyMeaning (existential)Cultural studiesField (mathematics)
Geopolitics·2023·180× cited

The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks

Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo et al.

Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imagined pasts. These projects are mutually exclusive …

productionOpen accessCentralityCompetition (biology)ChinaProduction (economics)
dimension

finance

6 works
Progress in Human Geography·2016·208× cited

Municipal statecraft

John Lauermann

The entrepreneurial city is no longer (only) a growth machine: recession and austerity, new forms of financialization, and diverse experiments in urban policy have diluted local elites’ focus on growth. But entrepreneurial urban governance remains remarkably resilient despite its inability to deliver growth. Indeed, in many cities entrepreneurial tactics – e.g. municipal speculation, place branding, and inter-urban competition – are simply standard operating procedure. Recent scholarship on entr…

financeCompetition (biology)Corporate governanceSpeculationAusterity
Review of International Political Economy·2019·153× cited

American hegemony: intellectual property rights, dollar centrality, and infrastructural power

Herman Schwartz

How does dollar centrality persist in the face of continuous US current account deficits and a steadily worsening net international investment position? Two mechanisms create a structural basis for dollar centrality, explaining how dollars enter global credit markets and why surplus countries continue to hold dollar-denominated assets. First, institutional structures deriving from late development suppress domestic demand in major current account surplus countries, making them reliant on externa…

financeHegemonyCentralityIntellectual propertyLiberian dollar
New Political Economy·2015·123× cited

Derivatives and the financialisation of the Italian state

Andrea Lagna

The existing literature on financialisation has devoted insufficient attention to how governments wield the market-based practices and technologies of financial innovation to pursue statecraft objectives. Because of this inattention, scholars have missed the opportunity to examine a crucial facet of the financialisation of the state. To remedy this limitation, the present article investigates how and why the Italian government designed derivatives-based strategies during the 1993–9 period. It ar…

financeOpen accessAllianceSpeculationContext (archaeology)State (computer science)
Review of International Political Economy·2020·106× cited

Theorizing China-world integration: sociospatial reconfigurations and the modern silk roads

Maximilian Mayer, Zhang Xin

This paper develops a spatial perspective to examine the nature of China’s transnational influence, focusing on the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for international relations. Drawing upon political economy, regional studies and critical geopolitics, we argue that the most interesting puzzle concerning the BRI pertains to the ongoing reconfigurations of political space. Contemporary sociospatial reconfigurations as analyzed through a multidimensional framework offer key insig…

financeGeopoliticsChinaExpansionismPolitics
Development and Change·2019·89× cited

The (Ineffective) Financial Statecraft of China's Bilateral Swap Agreements

Daniel McDowell

ABSTRACT Since 2008, the People's Bank of China has signed bilateral swap agreements (BSAs) with 35 foreign central banks. Collectively, these deals amount to nearly US$ 500 billion in Chinese renminbi (RMB) available to Beijing's foreign partners. What has led China to be so aggressive in its efforts to sign so many swap agreements? What are the political economic implications of the swap programme for the US‐centric global economic order? China's BSAs can be understood as a form of financial s…

financeRenminbiSwap (finance)ChinaBeijing
Economy and Society·2017·83× cited

How the City of London lost at Brexit: a historical perspective

Helen Thompson

The nature of the City of London as an offshore financial centre has long made London dependent on the British state providing protection from external political regulation, even as London’s foreign currency business separated its interests from British governments’ economic policy preoccupations. Since the 2008 crash and the onset of the eurozone crisis, London has faced threats to both its autonomy from external regulatory demands and to its offshore business interests at the same time as the …

financeOpen accessBrexitPoliticsReferendumEuropean union
new · primary sources

SCWO Archives — government documents behind this literature

A companion archive to this academic-literature view: the primary-source policy texts (US, China, EU, Russia, Japan) that the papers above cite and the articles on the front page report on. Organised the same way — one section per dimension.

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