Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

In the current moment, global governance institutions face unprecedented threats. The existing literature on contestation has focused largely on disruption and crisis generated by revisionist challenges from both rising and established powers. In this project, we look at the other side of the coin and analyze the politics of global governance defense.

What kinds of actors are likely to defend institutions? And exactly how do they go about defending institutions? To address the first question, we develop a simple, two-variable framework to show which kinds of actors are likely to defend, maximize, spoil or follow in global governance institutions. We also theorize the how of institutional defense under conditions of high and low degrees of conflict among stakeholders. We then test the plausibility of these propositions through case study analysis of the international standardization of digital technologies, an arena of global governance that has emerged as central in geopolitical rivalry between the US and China. Based on multi-year qualitative fieldwork, we identify one group of “defenders” (concentrated in Europe) and two “maximizer” actor constellations (in China and the US) and illustrate European stakeholders’ evolving defense tactics in this domain of global governance.

Bio: 

Sarah Eaton is Professor of Transregional China Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and co-founder of the Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN). She is interested in the study of contemporary Chinese politics and political economy from comparative and transregional perspectives. A major focus of her current research is the politics of standardization governance, for which she has received funding from the German Research Foundation as well as the European Research Council.

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This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

‘Security first’ has increasingly come to define Chinese economic governance, seemingly reversing decades of economic policy that placed ‘development first’ through export trade promotion, negotiated openness to foreign direct investment and socialization within a US-led liberal economic order that has been developmentally successful and a cornerstone of regime legitimacy. In this talk, Liu problematizes the great power security competition thinking that has been much attributed to these developments, adopting instead a Gramscian political economy that takes seriously the domestic and transnational sources of state authority to make sense of the national security turn in China and indeed of the broader security turn sweeping across national capitals. 

Driven by crisis-prone conditions of escalating US-China rivalry, intra-state factional stalemates over China’s industrial overcapacity, and deepening societal inequality, Liu argues that a Xi Jinping-led national security faction has sought to recalibrate the Chinese hegemonic project not wholly in response to inter-state security competition but as a means to further extract the latent growth potential from China’s development model and consolidate the position of Chinese state actors and of China between a US-led Global North and China-led Global South.

Bio:

Imogen Liu is an an Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her current research is animated by questions surrounding the politics and governance of finance, production and energy systems under conditions of heightened geopolitical competition. A consistent theme in her work is the role of transnational firms in shaping divergent trajectories of industrial development between Global North and South. Her research has been featured in journals including New Political Economy, Geopolitics, Journal of Economic Geography, Dialogues in Human Geography and Development and Change. She is co-organiser of SASE Network Q: Asian Capitalisms and co-lead of the Finance and Money working group of the China in Europe Research Network.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.