Editorial Note: this post contains spoilers. Christopher Nolan is one of the most important working American movie directors. He is one of the few directors in the Hollywood system who consistently delivers non-franchise blockbusters. Many of his films,...
A century before Trump’s tariff threats, Joseph Chamberlain pitched the same idea: use duties as a “big revolver” to force rivals into “fair trade.” That history helps explain why “unfairness” rhetoric and coercive foreign policy keep returning when hegemonic powers decline.
Dominant theories of international political economy leave little room for the influence of individuals. They also never anticipated that the United States might seek to completely upend the global economic order.
Who, if anyone, rules the world? Answering a question like that requires grappling with both the character of international order and the global distribution of power—facets of political life that...
The Biden administration just issued the government’s first ever anti-corruption strategy. The upshot: It’s needed. It’s analytically informed. It raises the prioritization of fighting kleptocracy. The downside: It’s not all that realistic. It defines corruption so widely that it makes prioritization fanciful. And it defers most of the real work to some to-be-determined imaginary future on the other side of Republican authoritarianism. Eons ago, during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle, anti-corruption was a major theme in the progressive foreign...
Financial hegemony brings with it substantial benefits, most notably reserve currency status. In order to successfully compete, rising powers need to lure financial institutions away from incumbent powers. They often try to make themselves more attractive to international finance by removing longstanding financial regulations.
Corruption is an issue largely off the radar screens of many IR scholars. How can they better theorize corruption’s pervasiveness in international politics, while avoiding the biases of past approaches?
Divorces don’t usually send shockwaves through the global policy field. They almost never create uncertainty about the health of hundreds of millions of people. The split between Bill and Melinda Gates is doing both. It affects the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has an endowment worth almost $52 billion. In 2019, the foundation disbursed roughly $6 billion in aid and grants. About thereof of was spent on health in “developing” countries. No wonder stakeholders in global health governance are worried. We’re not just talking about small nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)...
California is home to the US’ largest garment industry, where many migrant women toil for far less than minimum wage. I examine recent legislation to improve conditions, as well as how the LA garment industry is shaped by global forces that create gendered and racialized patterns of vulnerability among workers.
The White House is close to announcing "301s" (investigations under Section 301 of U.S. trade law) into Chinese use of industrial subsidies. It matters because 301s are the prelude to tariff imposition. If you import stuff from China that gets classified as requiring Section 301 import duties, you'll have to pay that extra margin, which means U.S. importers must either directly eat the cost of tariffs or pass those costs on to consumers (or they can appeal to the Court of International Trade for a refund of Section 301 duties, which then burdens the taxpayer and incurs administrative cost)....
Does China's more ambitious foreign policy and bid for "national rejuvenation" come at America's expense? It's a question where some neoliberals and some on the anti-imperialist left converge — in opposition to Washington conventional wisdom. Most of the D.C. Establishment now takes for granted that, obviously, China seeks to displace the United States, in Asia and the world. The Sinologist community is divided on the question. The neoliberal view of China that prevailed from roughly the Tiananmen Square massacre to the 2008 Great Recession sought to make China a "responsible stakeholder" in...
Fast fashion is generating more than just cheap clothing: it’s also a crisis of disposability affecting livelihoods in the Global South.