Published 2023, Open Access in Geopolitics.
By Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo, Nicholas Jepson, Steve Rolf, Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ, Louis Cyuzuzo, Meredith DeBoom, Alireza F. Farahani, Imogen T. Liu, Hannah McNicol, Julie T. Miao, Philip Nock, Gilead Teri, Maximiliano Facundo Vila Seoane, Kevin Ward, Tim Zajontz, and Yawei Zhao
The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks
ABSTRACT | 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 and animate contemporary geopolitics. Second, we conceptualise the spatial logic of great power rivalry in the Second Cold War. In contrast to the first Cold War, when great powers sought to incorporate territory into blocs, the US and China currently compete on a global scale for centrality in four interrelated networks that they anticipate will underpin hegemony in the 21st century: infrastructure (e.g. logistics and energy), digital, production and finance. We review the state of competition in each network and draw two broad conclusions: (1) this mode of competition makes it difficult for either side to conclusively ‘win’ the Second Cold War, and (2) many countries are likely to remain integrated with both the US and China.
The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide
Tensions between the US and China have escalated as both powers seek to draw countries into their respective political and economic orbits by financing and constructing infrastructure. Wide-ranging and even-handed, this book offers a fresh interpretation of the territorial logic of US-China rivalry and explores what it means for countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. The chapters demonstrate that many countries navigate the global infrastructure boom by articulating novel spatial objectives and implementing political and economic reforms. By focusing on people and places worldwide, this book broadens perspectives on the US-China rivalry beyond bipolarity. It is an essential guide to 21st-century politics. Link.
“A must-read for those interested in how transformations in geopolitical power are fought over with steel and concrete as pivotal weapons.” - Dr. Erik Swyngedouw, The University of Manchester
“While the world is fast-changing, this book helps us makes sense of processes that will shape the future for decades to come.” - Dr. Giles Mohan, The Open University
“A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the global impacts of US-China rivalry. These extraordinarily rich and detailed case studies offer fascinating new insight into how states around the world are navigating the current era of growing geoeconomic competition.” - Dr. Kristen Hopewell, University of British Columbia
Published 2022 in Area.
By Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo
Towards a critical geopolitics of China-US rivalry: Pericentricity, regional conflicts, and transnational connections
ABSTRACT | The deterioration of bilateral relations between the US and China heralds a new chapter in geopolitics increasingly characterised by competition and confrontation. We introduce insights from contemporary Cold War historiography, which we suggest can help deepen our understanding of the present. Historians have largely rejected the notion that the Cold War was a bipolar struggle between great powers. Instead, the “Global Cold War” is increasingly interpreted as an era, order or context whose diverse localised manifestations necessitate multilingual research around the world. This scholarship draws attention to the conflict's “pericentric” nature, its diverse regional manifestations and the transnational connections it enabled. We demonstrate that these concepts can inform research on contemporary China–US rivalry and suggest a multi-scalar and multi-sited research agenda in line with approaches of feminist political geography and critical geopolitics. Link.
In China's Wake: How the Commodity Boom Transformed Development Strategies in the Global South
Nicholas Jepson, Columbia University Press
ABSTRACT | In the early 2000s, Chinese demand for imported commodities ballooned as the country continued its breakneck economic growth. Simultaneously, global markets in metals and fuels experienced a boom of unprecedented extent and duration. Meanwhile, resource-rich states in the Global South from Argentina to Angola began to advance a range of new development strategies, breaking away from the economic orthodoxies to which they had long appeared tied. In China’s Wake reveals the surprising connections among these three phenomena. Nicholas Jepson shows how Chinese demand not only transformed commodity markets but also provided resource-rich states with the financial leeway to set their own policy agendas, insulated from the constraints and pressures of capital markets and multilateral creditors such as the International Monetary Fund. He combines analysis of China-led structural change with fine-grained detail on how the boom played out across fifteen different resource-rich countries. Jepson identifies five types of response to boom conditions among resource exporters, each one corresponding to a particular pattern of domestic social and political dynamics. Three of these represent fundamental breaks with dominant liberal orthodoxy—and would have been infeasible without spiraling Chinese demand. Jepson also examines the end of the boom and its consequences, as well as the possible implications of future China-driven upheavals. Combining a novel theoretical approach with detailed empirical analysis at national and global scales, In China’s Wake is an important contribution to global political economy and international development studies. Link.
Published 2022 in Geopolitics
By Ilias Alami, Adam D Dixon, Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente, Milan Babic, Seung-Ook Lee, Ingrid A. Medby & Nana de Graaff
Geopolitics and the ‘New’ State Capitalism
ABSTRACT | We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across the world economy while generating a multiplicity of geopolitical tensions. This Forum reflects upon what it means, theoretically, methodologically, and politically, to articulate a geopolitics of contemporary state capitalism. It brings together interventions which draw on various theoretical approaches, including critical political geography, historical materialism, geographical political economy, and power structure research, in order to probe into the multiple spatialities at the core of contemporary state capitalism. The contributions aim to destabilise the assumptions and taken-for-granted ideas which have largely framed the debate thus far, including problematic binaries such as liberal/illiberal, state/market, commercial/geopolitical logics, and realist narratives of interstate power-maximising behaviour. Studying the (geo)political re-organisation of global capitalism requires moving beyond the castigation of a ‘rogue’ state capitalism as well as narratives of a clash between rival political-economic models, and disassembling the category state capitalism.
Published 2021 in Antipode
By Ilias Alami, Adam D. Dixon, and Emma Mawdsley
State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime
ABSTRACT | Official discourses of Development are being redefined. If the key geopolitical contexts shaping the post-war Development project were decolonisation and the cold War, the defining world-historical transformations shaping the emerging vision development are the expansion of state capitalism and the rise of China. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, other multilaterals, and bilateral partners are increasingly taking stock of the rise of state capitalism, and acting as ideational vectors of this emerging regime. However, this new“state capitalist normal” is also portrayed as carrying risks. There is anxiety regarding the direction the political form of global capital accumulation is heading: with the unchecked proliferation of state capitalism possibly blunting competition, politicising economic relations, and intensifying geoeconomic tensions. This anxiety underwrites the current re-articulation of Development, one which embraces the state as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital; even as it critiques China’s use of similar instruments. Link.
Published 2021 in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
By Seth Schindler, Jessica DiCarlo, and Dinesh Paudel
The new cold war and the rise of the 21-st century infrastructure state
ABSTRACT | The unipolar international order led by the USA has given way to a multipolar order with the emergence of China as a great power competitor. According to many commentators, the deterioration of Sino–US relations in recent years heralds a “new Cold War.” The new Cold War differs from its namesake in many respects, and in this paper we focus on its novel territorial logic. Containing the USSR was the overriding objective of American foreign policy for nearly four decades, but in contrast, the USA and China are engaged in geopolitical-economic competition to integrate territory into value chains anchored by their domestic lead firms through the financing and construction of transnational infrastructure (e.g., transportation networks and regional energy grids). We show this competition poses risks as well as opportunities for small states to articulate and realise spatial objectives. We present cases from Nepal and Laos that demonstrate that by hedging between China and the USA and its partners, their governments are able to pursue spatial objectives. In order to achieve them, however, they must implement significant reforms or state restructuring. The result is the emergence of what we term the 21st-century infrastructure state, which seeks to mobilise foreign capital for infrastructure projects designed to enhance transnational connectivity. Link.
Africa’s infrastructure reveals many shades of competition and contests that can influence the continent’s future
Gilead Teri looks at how Africa’s infrastructure reveals many shades of competition and contests that may influence the continent’s future. Link.
The geopolitics of financialisation and development
An interview with Ilias Alami by Frauke Banse and Anil Shah (Kassel University) about his recent work on the relationship between geopolitics, financial flows for development and emerging forms of ‘state capitalism,’ as well as related new imperialist formations. It covers a series of International Political Economy topics. Ilias first locates the emergence of the Wall Street Consensus in the long and turbulent histories of the relation between finance and development as well as in secular capitalist transformations. He then outlines some of the conceptual tools he’s developed in his work in order to make sense of the contemporary interconnections of money and finance and the reproduction of imperialism and race/coloniality. Next, he situates these interconnections within broader scholarly debates about financialisation and highlights the similarities and differences between ongoing sovereign debt crises in the global South and the so-called 1980s ‘Third World debt crisis.’ Finally, Ilias discusses the recent emergence of new forms of ‘state capitalism’ and their complex relation to the extension and deepening of market-based finance. Link.
Will Biden pass the America LEADS Act and start a new Cold War with China?
Jessica DiCarlo and Seth Schindler examine the Act that may accelerate America's economic confrontation with China. Link.