About

The Second Cold War Observatory (SCWO) is a collective of scholars committed to advancing historically and contextually situated understandings of contemporary great power rivalry. We interpret contemporary US-China rivalry as the most recent episode in a long history whose unifying concept is China’s growing centrality to world affairs and its sustained challenge to the US-led international order. The expansion of China’s global engagements challenges Washington’s role in the post-war era as the architect and arbiter of international rules and norms. The resultant great power rivalry constitutes a second – rather than ‘new’ – cold war.

Our approach and objectives fundamentally diverge from “hawkish” invocations of Cold War and China competition. Alongside great power politics, we advocate for localized and grounded research to draw connections between the local and global, recognizing the perspectives and agency of third actors and their transnational connections. A strength of the approach in geopolitics is that it has breadth in terms of time (it's a longue duree approach and focused on long-term processes), it's multi-scalar, it’s multidirectional (i.e., bringing together top-down and bottom-up approaches) and it's geographically expansive.

We are committed to offering analyses that explain how geopolitical competition manifests worldwide and influences people and places. A core mission is to develop expertise across issue areas (trade, finance, technology, climate change), scales, and geographies. We have diverse viewpoints, disciplinary backgrounds, and regional expertise, which we employ to analyze China-US competition from a range of places, sectors (e.g. digital and infrastructure networks), and scales from local to global.