Invasive Species in Post-2020 Global Environmental Politics

As goods and people more rapidly traverse our interconnected world, invasive alien species (IAS) are increasingly frequent, ecologically damaging, economically significant, and culturally concerning. Through examinations of IAS, global environmental politics (GEP) scholars can more deeply engage long-standing and newly emerging research problems within the three areas of global governance, global political economy, and environmental security. First, GEP scholars can use IAS research to further develop insights about the impact of problem structure on global governance. Second, examining IAS dispersal risks and associated costs, as well as intercountry variation in management responses, can generate insights about North–South power dynamics in the global political economy and how distributive conflict is likely to shape future invasion risk. Third, notions of environmental security in GEP scholarship can be challenged and further developed by examining the conceptualization and operationalization of “biosecurity” amid increasingly diverse multispecies assemblages. Greater research attention to IAS in GEP is long overdue, and we intend for this article to open novel pathways for GEP interdisciplinary research on IAS.

Foreign state investment and international politics: mapping state-led geoeconomic competition in the global political economy

What are the consequences of the rise of foreign state-led investment for international politics? Existingresearch oscillates between a “geopolitical” and a “commercial” logic driving this type of investmentand is thus inconclusive about its wider international reverberations. In this paper, I suggest goingbeyond this dichotomy by analyzing its systemic consequences. Conceptually, I argue that foreign stateinvestment creates system-level patterns, which have consequences for international relations: similarsectoral and geographic investment behavior carries the potential for intensified geoeconomiccompetition and conflict. I map this phenomenon on a global scale for the first time, using the largestdataset on foreign state investment. Empirically, I show how foreign state investment is highlyconcentrated in Europe, North America and East Asia, and among a few powerful states as owners. Itis especially European geo-industrial clusters that represent opportunities for such competitivedynamics. The findings also suggest that three global industries – energy production, high-techmanufacturing, and transportation and logistics – form the key areas for current and future state-ledcompetition. With these conceptual and empirical contributions, the paper illuminates the increasingpresence of states as owners in the global political economy, and its consequences for internationalpolitics

Conceptualizing contemporary markets: Introduction to the special issue

Contemporary markets are evolving in numerous ways that affect their structure, dynamics and consequences. Yet while the concept of the market is central to comparative, international and global political economy, there exists no concerted body of literature dedicated to debating and articulating different conceptions of the market and that critically self-reflects on how these empirical transformations are intersecting with the central theoretical concerns of political economy: power, contestation and change. This special issue enriches the debate by looking to decentre the concept of the market from its traditional home in mainstream neoclassical/liberal political economy. Western-centric conceptualizations of the market based on a minimal atomistic classical definition have dominated international economic discourses but it is becoming increasingly clear that different understandings of markets and the functions they serve are crystalizing between market stakeholders at the global level. This special issue addresses these concerns via the historicization of the concept of the market, the development and refinement of the concept of the market, as well as the decentring of the concept of the market via empirical studies of global market change informed by an awareness of the political, economic, social and cultural embeddedness of markets. In so doing, the special issue leverages the insights of global political economy and cognate disciplines to achieve richer insights into the analytical potential of the concept of the market.

AFRICA AND THE ‘GLOBALIZATION BARGAIN’: TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY

Africa’s existential situation in the prevailing global order is such that no state thereof can afford to take national sovereignty too seriously. Apart from the myriad of structural challenges imposed on the continent by globalization, Africa is faced with a gamut of political and economic problems that can only be meaningfully addressed through some form of strategic multilateral collaboration. Africa’s aspiration to economic sovereignty has been constrained by the structural conditionalities of globalization, which have kept the continent overly weak, dependent and underdeveloped. The constraint is so immanent that individual African states can hardly afford even the relative sovereignty to harness a strategic balance in the fast ossifying asymmetries of interdependence that characterize the contemporary global political economy. It is posited in this paper that the remedy for Africa lies in the ability of her states to transcend their disempowering territorial-cum-nationalistic divides and capitalize on the existing continental multilateral mechanisms towards mainstreaming collective sovereignty, based on the principle of pan-African supranationalism. To that end, leveraging and maximizing the gains and prospects of extant regional and continental supranational organisms would become both salient and expedient.

From Latin American International Political Economy to Latin American Global Political Economy

This paper focuses on the differences between International Political Economy (IPE) versus Global Political Economy (GPE) in Latin America. It explores how IPE tends to be taught and researched beyond mainstream IPE but in dialogue with it. It engages with the main literature of this field to discuss the contours and extension of a transition in teaching and research. It rests upon a historical sociological approach and employs a qualitative analysis of syllabi and curricula of various masters and doctoral programs on International Relations/Studies and underlying disciplines, and is complemented with semi-structured interviews with leading scholars of IPE from across the region. The paper argues that there is a shift from mainstream IPE to a new Latin American GPE as the result of a revitalization of the field and as a response to the new regional and global challenges. New dynamics of development, conflict and a changing world order coexist with old problems, pushing our field to find new responses, demonstrating the limits of the traditional knowledge, and requiring the development of new contributions. While the shift may be minor, it is constant and steady, and is neither homogenous nor dominated by a unique vision of the field, but it is defined by heterogeneity and plurality.