UPCOMING EVENTS
Monthly
— Podcast recording
— Research Associates meet regularly for reading seminars and small writing groups on topics such as global China, Cold War history, and sector-specific competition.
9-10 Oct 2023
Workshop call for papers on Europe in US-China rivalry: The implications of great power politics, organised by Nana de Graaff, Nick Jepson, Imogen T. Liu, Seth Schindler. Deadline: 15 July 2023.
5-9 Sept 2023
16th Pan-European Conference on International Relations (ESIA): Envisioning a New Normal at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Early Career Researchers Workshop, Call for Papers: The Second Cold War: US-China Rivalry for global network hegemony
Organised by: Elisa Gambino, Philip Nock, Alice Politi, Contact: elisa.gambino@manchester.ac.uk
This one-day interdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars in International Relations, International Political Economy, Geography, and Development Studies focused on US-China competition. Building on the work of the global collective of scholars Second Cold War Observatory (SCWO), the workshop introduces a novel conceptualisation of US-China rivalry, which is seen in a continuum with the First Cold War in terms of its challenging of the US-led international order. Based on this premise, this workshop’s contributions explore the dynamics of competition for centrality in a range of discrete yet closely interrelated networks crucial to geopolitics in the 21st century: infrastructure, digital, production, and finance. The workshop addresses the overarching question: How does US-China competition for global hegemony shape the 21st century’s most important networks? Deadline: 7 July 2023. Link.
PAST EVENTS
May 2023
Keynote Lecture by Seth Schindler: The Second Cold War and the geopolitics of connectivity in (Eastern) Europe, at the EEGA Annual Conference 2023: Beyond the collapse: Globalization projects in Eastern Europe before and after 2022. Register here.
22-27 March 2023
Presentations at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Denver, Colorado, US
15-17 March 2023
Silk Road Cities & Beyond: New dialogues in the emerging urban geographies of infrastructure-led development, ICTA-UAB, Barcelona
10 November 2022
'Winning the 21st century: US-China rivalry and the rise of state
platform capitalism' with Seth Schindler and Steven Rolf
China/Europe and the Changing Global Order Seminar Series,
The Open University and York University.
28 October 2022
Bridging Africa’s energy and infrastructure gap: A conversation with Amani Abou-Zeid
The latest African Cities podcast episode features Amani Abou-Zeid – African Union Commissioner in charge of infrastructure, energy and ICT – in conversation with ACRC’s city of systems lead Seth Schindler about energy security and infrastructural development in Africa. Link.
13 October 2022
The Rise of the Infrastructure State Book Launch
with Jessica DiCarlo, Charis Enns, Dinesh Paudel, Nick Jepson, and Seth Schindler
Hosted by the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Institute for Asian Research at the University of British Columbia
Link.
3 October 2022
Making space for the new state capitalism, Hosted by the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics
In recent years many commentators have pointed to the presence of a ‘new’ state capitalism, in both the extent and form of state intervention. However, insufficient attention has been paid to questions of uneven geographical development, and to the multiple spatialities and scales at which state capitalism is produced, enacted, and imagined. In this roundtable discussion, we introduced the Environment and Planning A Special Issue exploring the geographies of the new state capitalism through a roundtable discussion with the SI editors Adam Dixon, Ilias Alami, Heather Whiteside, and Jamie Peck. Link.
13 August 2022
The Rise of the Infrastructure State Book Panel in Argentina
Seth Schindler, Marcelo Saguier, Meredith DeBoom, Maximiliano Vila Seoane
Hosted by the School of Politics and Government
Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Link.
21 July 2022
China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South included three sessions in which some Observatory members either organised or participated.
SESSION I : Link.
The Future Research Agenda on China’s Digital Expansion – Richard Heeks, Angelica Ospina, Chris Foster, Ping Gao, Xia Han, Nicholas Jepson, Seth Schindler & Qingna Zhou (University of Manchester)
Learning Along the Digital Silk Road? Technology Transfer, Power, and Chinese ICT Corporations in North Africa – Tin Hinane El Kadi (London School of Economics)
China’s Digital Expansion in Africa: South to South Cooperation or South Dominance? – Grace Wang (Stellenbosch University)
SESSION III: Link.
The Chinese Surveillance State in Latin America? Evidence from Argentina and Ecuador – Maximiliano Vila Seoane (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina) & Carla Álvarez Velasco (Institute of Higher National Studies, Ecuador)
China’s Expansion in Brazilian Digital Surveillance Markets: Between Public Actors and Foreign Enterprises – Esther Majerowicz (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte) & Miguel Henriques de Carvalho (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Alibaba in Mexico: Adapting the Digital Villages Model to Latin America – Guillermo J. Larios-Hernandez (Universidad Anahuac Mexico)