Susan Strange Research Articles

Sino-Belgian research collaborations and Chinese military power

ABSTRACT China’s rise as a scientific superpower and its increasingly assertive geopolitical stance have raised concerns among Western governments over the security implications of research collaborations with China. Indeed, studies have revealed how China uses technology transfers to advance its military capabilities. In this article, we examine the links of Sino-Belgian research collaborations to the Chinese military and the evolution of these collaborations using a mixed methods approach comprising a bibliometric analysis and two case studies. Our study finds that 10% of Sino-Belgian collaborations were on critical technologies and conducted with scientists affiliated to Chinese institutes with military links. The collaborations with a military link have increased rapidly over the last two decades and have grown faster than the overall Sino-Belgian research collaborations. The results of the study reveal that research collaboration in the knowledge domain has crucial ties to the security domain and should therefore be considered in international security analysis. However, invoking Susan Strange’s structural power theory, we argue that Sino-Belgian research collaborations should not only be seen as contributing to China’s military power but also as a function of China’s growing overall power, including in the knowledge structure, where it entails the power to convey or deny knowledge.

Images of international thinkers

Abstract This article analyses photographic portraits of three international thinkers – Merze Tate, Margery Perham, and Susan Strange – to shed new light on the intellectual and disciplinary history of Internationa Relations (IR). Photographic portraits are ubiquitous, and feminist intellectual recovery projects lend themselves to photographic representation. But IR’s historians have neglected portraits. Drawing together two thriving IR subfields for the first time, visual studies and international intellectual history, this article demonstrates the theoretical and historical gains from analysing portraits of international thinkers. When read alongside other primary and secondary sources, portraits can enable new ways of seeing IR’s history and specific thinkers, offering a distinctive and powerful resource for new narratives about the professional, gendered, and racialised contexts of international thought.

Negotiating currency internationalization: An infrastructural analysis of the digital RMB

AbstractIn what ways might the digital renminbi (RMB), also known as e-CNY, bolster China’s efforts to internationalize its currency? Utilizing Susan Strange’s concept of currency negotiation and borrowing the concept of infrastructures from science, technology, and society studies, this article argues that RMB internationalization is a gradual process that relies heavily on negotiation involving both state and non-state actors (i.e., private financial authorities). It further argues that while e-CNY may create new opportunities for RMB internationalization, it also raises new challenges. First, the e-CNY’s lack of coordination with other central banks represents a challenge for future evolution and standardization with other digital currency platforms, thus rendering first-mover status a potential disadvantage. Second, as a result of China’s divergent data governance direction from both the US and the EU, the e-CNY is disadvantaged when it comes to interoperability, trust of users, and diversity of data. The purpose of this study is not to predict the future of RMB internationalization once the e-CNY rolls out but rather to highlight various ways in which the latter may influence the former in order to widen analyses of the topic.

Africa’s roads to digital development: paving the way for Chinese structural power in the ICT sector?

Over the past few decades, China emerged as Africa’s main partner in digital development. Sino-African cooperation in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector meets African demand for advanced technologies and know-how while helping China to position itself in the global ICT sector. Albeit crucial for Africa’s digital development in the short term, this paper argues that the breadth of Sino-African cooperation carries important long-term consequences that could afford China latent control over Africa’s digital development. Drawing on Susan Strange’s pillars of structural power, this paper considers how the rollout of fiber-optic network cables underpins Chinese control over production, how the construction of data centers might impinge on security, and how research partnerships enhance norms and standards in future innovation—the knowledge pillar. The paper argues that the enabling force of Sino-African cooperation in these three realms is Chinese finance. To test this claim, I conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 42 states in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing that Chinese aid and, to a lesser extent, Chinese loans are the main drivers of Sino-African ties in the ICT sector. The paper concludes that Chinese financial support not only promotes Africa’s digital development but also paves the way to Chinese structural power in the ICT sector.

Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America by Mario Daniels and John Krige

Reviewed by: Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America by Mario Daniels and John Krige Torsten Kathke (bio) Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America By Mario Daniels and John Krige. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 440. Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America is Mario Daniels and John Krige's foray into a subject heretofore seldom explored: How did knowledge regulation—in the form of export controls for otherwise unclassified material, objects, and the movement of people with know-how—shape U.S. foreign policy from World War II on? And how did the complex rules governing the exportation of technologies and technical knowledge shape not only the sharing but also the creation of knowledge? Daniels and Krige's attempt is remarkable because of the breadth of the research required, but also because it breaks new ground. Academic insularity has previously precluded the further exploration of the category of "knowledge regulation" that they here propose as one of the central tenets of the national security state. Daniels and Krige especially single out the fields of economics, economic history, international relations, and security studies as "basically separate scholarly universes that barely overlap" (p. 15), echoing older critiques by Susan Strange and Michael Mastanduno. Knowledge regulation as defined by the authors traces its origins to the Espionage Act of 1917, which created a template that the United States would come back to in World War II and more permanently during the Cold War. Differing from other regimes of informational and economic control, like sanctions, export controls comprised information and "know-how"—a term emerging in the early Cold War to describe complete apparatuses of technological creation, including the researchers and engineers that operated them and their tacit knowledge—that were not directly classified but still considered as providing the United States with a valuable advantage over its rivals. This became known as "lead time," positing the United States as a technological leader that needed to use its technological prowess to keep Soviet Russia and its larger reserves of materiel and human power at bay. Even though it begins in fits and starts and remains contested between three departments of the U.S. government and their specialists (Commerce, State, and Defense), as well as Congress, the White House, companies, universities, and various adjacent bureaucracies, knowledge regulation, according to the authors, is one of the defining, if not the defining way in which U.S. foreign policy and the American scientific landscape developed since the 1940s. [End Page 636] The authors move chronologically through the development of this category, beginning with the lead-up to the Cold War from 1917 to 1945 and the early regulatory regime in the United States, as well as the development of knowledge regulation through the 1950s and 1960s. They then discuss the changes wrought on export controls beginning in the 1970s, including in academia. The second half of the book shifts geographically to Asia, addressing technology transfers to Japan in the 1980s and the challenges of the U.S.–Chinese relationship, with an epilogue about U.S.–Chinese relations and academia during the Trump administration concluding the study. Daniels and Krige offer up diligent and at times quite creative source work, and their argument that we should look at the category of "knowledge regulation" as one—though contradictory and hard to grasp—whole is a useful intervention. Framing the history of U.S. foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century as concerned with hegemony through (military and commercial) technology, and therefore by extension its restriction, is a lens that scholars might do well to mount more often. What is somewhat missing from this book is the level of actors. While some individuals—mainly in government—do get attention, further studies should consider how academics and their institutions responded to the regulations they were faced with. Questions of whether restrictions applied to certain academics or engineers more than others, for example, would be an important aspect to explore. Were white, male, senior engineers considered more trustworthy than minorities, women, or junior ones? Did McCarthyite paranoia figure into the sanctioning of some individuals with know-how while others remained unencumbered? Knowledge...

Analysis of Indonesia's Loss against the United States of America in the Horticultural Trade Dispute at the World Trade Organization

This paper examined the World Trade Organization (WTO) trade dispute settlement between Indonesia and the United States of America on the horticultural issue in 2018 . The WTO aims to encourage free trade mechanisms by eliminating trade barriers, providing a negotiation forum for international trade disputes, and as a mediator to international negotiation forums on trade dispute settlement. The USA reported Indonesia to the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) of the WTO because Indonesia was considered to have implemented a number of policies on imports of agricultural products that created trade barriers to the USA’s products. This research will explain the causes of Indonesia’s loss in the dispute by using Susan Strange’s concept of structural power. This research used qualitative methods and obtained data sources through primary and secondary data sources. Primary data was obtained directly through field study by interviewing related parties in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Trade of The Republic of Indonesia. Secondary data was collected by conducting literature reviews of journals, books, news, and other sources. It showed that Indonesia was defeated in the dispute because it violated the quantitative restrictions rules in article XI. I GATT 1994. The USA used its knowledge structural power, such as the existence of scientific studies and research, to strengthen its case. Indonesia could not match the knowledge structure that the USA had. This was seen in Indonesia’s weaknesses in a legal capacity and inability to show facts based on research and scientific studies regarding Indonesia’s actions.
 Keywords: Defeat, Dispute Settlement Body WTO, Horticultural, Indonesia, United States of America

States and new markets: the novelty problem in the IPE of finance

Finance has changed, and the study of finance needs to change with it. Previously marginal actors—hedge funds, index providers, tech firms, etc.—have become lynchpins in the global financial system. Likewise, the traditional subjects of international political economy (IPE)—states, international organizations, banks, central banks, etc.—are engaging in once-peripheral spheres. Yet, these novel trends have been largely ignored in mainstream political science and international relations venues for IPE scholarship. We demonstrate this through a discussion of two trends—the rise of shadow banking and central bank involvement in climate change—and an analysis of publications in top international relations and political science journals. While previous commentaries identify a methodological and epistemological divide in IPE, our results suggest an empirical one. We then construct a practical framework to remedy this problem by returning to the work of Susan Strange. Strange’s approach embodied a radical ontology, a focus on structures and their interaction, and an analytical eclecticism that provided keen insights into the politics of finance. We argue that these principles, often embraced in Review of International Political Economy, should be applied more broadly by IR scholars to better contribute to debates on emerging political economic issues.

The economic and institutional dynamics of China’s growing financial influence: a “structural power” perspective

What are the economic and institutional dynamics behind China’s growing aspirations to expand its financial influence? Drawing on Susan Strange’s notion of “structural power”, this article examines China’s quest for superiority within the financial realm since the early 2000s. Our findings suggest that China’s financial rise is mainly driven by its efforts at increasing its “international monetary power” and developing its ability to control international credit and investment flows within a new normative and institutional framework. The main contribution of this article lies in conceptualizing China’s growing financial influence based on a comprehensive set of indicators to develop Strange’s theory.

The U.S. Quantitative Easing Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Influence on the Growing Number of Indonesian Retail Investors

This research aims to determine whether the quantitative easing policy issued by the United States government to boost the United States economy during the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted stock price volatility on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX), which resulted in the increasing number of individuals (retail) investors on the Indonesia Stock Exchange increased. The quantitative easing policy taken by the United States government in 2020 to ease the economic burden during the COVID-19 pandemic made JCI volatility high, eventually affecting individual (retail) investors seeking opportunities in the high volatility of the Indonesian capital market. This research examines using the theory of Financial Structure power by Susan Strange and used publicly available data as secondary data and primary data taken through observations of the Indonesian stock market or JCI and interviews with experts to find whether the U.S. quantitative easing policy had an influence on the growing number of new retail investors in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research discovered that the U.S. quantitative easing policy had indirect influence on the growing number of new retail investors in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic. For future research, economic standpoints and theories are needed to get better analysis for this topic.

Critical junctures and state actors: towards a micro-strategies approach of the global political economy

Scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE) has traditionally explored the systematic nature of global economies and, due to its founding moment in the 1970s, placed a particular emphasis on global capital movements. Famously, Susan Strange, one of the founders of the discipline, examined the new troubles around currency and monetary systems and called for a deliberate linking of the political and the economic, as well as the domestic and the international. Even though this call could not be timelier in the 21st century, already ridden with crises – contemporary mainstream IPE scholarship has shied away from examining complex relations of the domestic and the global, focusing instead on rational interests of voters, sectors and factors of production. The state, while relevant as an entity that aggregates these interests, is not included as an independent agent. This commentary argues that there is already important scholarship which places ‘the state’ at the centre of a complex global economy. But we need to delve deeper. In order to understand what ‘states do’, we also need to understand what ‘what state actors do’ and assess them as fundamentally purposive and independent agents. To make sense of the nexus of the economic and the political, the global and the domestic, we need to understand the interests, relationships and conflicts of individual state actors in the global political economy.

Globalización Y Desarrollo. Análisis A Las Realidades Internacionales. Revisión Entre Estados Unidos Y Colombia

El presente artículo es resultado de un análisis en perspectiva de crítica al desarrollo en el que se abordan las realidades internacionales como condicionantes de la agenda política global y de las acciones internas de los Estados, especialmente desde la influencia de los países desarrollados sobre los subdesarrollados. De esta manera, se inicia abordando la globalización y el desarrollo y las relaciones de costo beneficio entre los Estados, donde se defiende la tesis de como el desarrollo de unos se sostiene sobre el subdesarrollo de otros, evidenciándose el desarrollo desigual y sus impactos en los Estados en vía de desarrollo.En cuanto a los aspectos metodológicos, la presente investigación se desarrolló en perspectiva cualitativa, desde la utilización de métodos de análisis de contenidos, en el que se abordaron desde una visión crítica postulados teóricos y datos sobre desarrollo humano y sostenible. Finalmente, el artículo presenta un análisis comparativo entre Estados Unidos y Colombia, como una forma de observar desde la práctica la interacción internacional y la forma en que se configura la desigualdad en el Desarrollo dentro de las relaciones entre países desarrollados y países subdesarrollados, a partir de aspectos como el índice de desarrollo humano, el cumplimiento de los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible, entre estos el fin de la pobreza, el trabajo decente y el crecimiento económico, y por último, desde la capacidad comercial.

“’Tis a reckless Debowch of a Game”: Chance and Resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s Novels

This paper seeks to consider games — and more particularly card games and gambling — as an American form of resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s novels. As opposed to agôn, a category of games that Roger Caillois delineates in Man, Play and Games (1958) as “a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions,” alea encompasses games of chance which are “a strict negation of controlled effort, […] efficacious resort to skill, power, and calculation, and self-control; respect for the rules; the desire to test oneself under conditions of equality.” It will be my contention that alea, in Pynchon’s novels, offers the possibility of an alternative world and becomes a necessary mode of resistance in the face of a plenty-flushed adversity which threatens to hold sway over the American continent. For Pynchon’s players, more often than not cheaters and fraudsters, use such games of chance to fulfil their longing for emancipation and flight, at a time in history when the American continent is about to be mapped by the abstractions of colonial companies and Enlightenment science. Gaming clubs — ranging from taverns in Mason & Dixon to casinos and gambling dens in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Against the Day (2006), and Inherent Vice (2009) — can be recognized as heterotopian sites where otherwise dispersed groups of people momentarily gather in order to gain freedom from the ruling few. Although the moralism of Puritan ministers sternly reminded their flocks to refrain from wasting their earnings on rash bets, gambling can thus be envisioned as a way to escape from the hyper-productivity expounded by modernity, intersecting with Walter Benjamin’s discourse on the materialist form of gambling within industrial capitalism. Following Gerda Reith’s and Susan Strange’s arguments in The Age of Chance (1999) and Casino Capitalism (1986), I will further argue that, in the new capitalist economy, Pynchon anticipates in his novels the attention of late capitalism to new areas for capitalization, overseeing both the commodification of idleness and the insinuation into the fabric of existence of the same risk assessment strategy as that applied by capitalism.

The made in China challenge to US structural power: industrial policy, intellectual property and multinational corporations

This paper addresses the question of United States’ power in the global economy, suggesting that China’s structural power potential vis-à-vis its American counterpart has been underestimated in recent international political economy (IPE) literature. It examines the US-China trade and technological conflict and maps China’s autonomy and influence in the global economy, offering a new interpretation of structural power, assessed on the basis of the growing importance of intangible assets in global value chains. The paper focuses on the notion of productive power, expanding on Susan Strange’s definition of productive power by breaking down this category of power into four subcategories: 1) centrality in global value chains, 2) market power, 3) ownership of assets, and 4) technological standard-setting. The paper begins by framing the US-China tech and trade confrontation in terms of a relative power contest between the two superpowers. Examining data and literature on China’s ascent in the realm of intellectual property protection and commercialization, global value chain ascension, as well as standard setting and competition policy, it points to China’s growing strengths in each of these categories, respectively. It concludes that China possesses latent productive power, and that the Made in China 2025 and related industrial policy plans aim to actualize China’s structural power potential.

China’s Structural Power and the Fate of the BCIM Economic Corridor

ABSTRACT In 2013, China and India officially established an economic corridor (the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor, BCIM-EC) that would cut across Myanmar and Bangladesh. But while the formal process of cooperation among the four countries is in place, many obstacles to its implementation remain at the international, national and local levels. Is meaningful collaboration possible within the BCIM-EC framework? In terms of two dimensions of structural power as conceptualised by Susan Strange, security and trade, China’s structural power in Myanmar is much stronger than India’s. It is therefore likely that this imbalance will prevent the BCIM-EC project, which currently appears to be overshadowed by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, from having a fruitful outcome.

A geopolítica asiática e seus desdobramentos globais

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a Organização para a Cooperação de Shangai (SCO), sua história e evolução. Além de analisar as questões relativas ao alargamento da Organização, e com base na contribuição teórica de Susan Strange, a partir de suas estruturas de poder, busca-se avaliar, em particular, os papéis preponderantes exercidos pela China e pela Rússia nessa Organização. A hipótese defendida é que a SCO é parte de um leque de ações que a China vem realizando para consolidar sua liderança na Ásia. A SCO é fruto de um acordo estabelecido em 1996, quando Cazaquistão, China, Quirquistão, Rússia e Tajiquistão fundaramos Cinco de Shangai, e foi criada em 2001, com a entrada do Uzbequistão, agregando, em 2017, a Índia e o Paquistão. A princípio, e primordialmente, a Organização tinha por foco questões de segurança, visando o que chamavam de “três males”: terrorismo, separatismo e extremismo. Atualmente, a Organização ampliou suas preocupações para questões econômicas e de infraestrutura. Finalmente, o artigo discute a relação entre a SCO e o projeto One Belt One Road, que insinua a projeção chinesa na região da Eurásia.

Counter-Hegemonic Strategies in the Global Economy

Since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a running debate among international relations scholars about the future of the open liberal economic order. In many ways, however, this debate has generated more heat than light. Little thought has been given to considering the theory and process of great-power revisionism in the global political economy. In the presence of an existing hegemonic order, how would a rational revisionist develop a viable, peaceful counter-hegemonic strategy? This paper considers what a counter-hegemonic approach would look like in the absence of a great-power war. Building on Susan Strange’s concept of structural power, this paper concludes that there is an optimal revisionist sequence to challenge a hegemonic economic order. Such a sequence prioritizes attacking the ideational dimensions of the order before its material dimensions.

Developing Disaster: Power, Structural Violence, Insurance-Linked Securities, and the International Political Economy of the Disaster Politics Nexus

Abstract This article presents an alternative framing of disasters as a form of structural violence resulting from the unequal distribution of structural power between various groups, organizations, institutions, and states in the contemporary global political economy. The article utilizes a theoretical framework that combines Johan Galtung’s typology of violence and Susan Strange’s conceptualization of structural power to open up new space for analysis in the disaster politics nexus. The article applies its framework to explore how an understanding of disasters as a form of violence problematizes trends within mainstream disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies. Specifically, the article examines the integration of financial risk-sharing mechanisms into the disaster politics nexus through new public–private partnerships between insurance and reinsurance firms, international financial institutions, and governments to transfer catastrophic risk to global capital markets. The article seeks to repoliticize these changes and bring questions of power back into the larger conversation surrounding DRR policies.

Power and Counter-Power: Knowledge Structure and the Limits of Control

In this article, we explore Susan Strange’s multidimensional and non-reductive international political economy (IPE) approach to structural power. Strange’s key weakness is the failure to account for her knowledge structure’s regulative form relative to her security, production and financial structures. We seek to develop Strange’s account through the addition of Manuel Castells’ account of digital network structures. Castells’ morphogenic structural approach to digital network power helps to clarify the mechanisms by which today’s knowledge structure achieves autonomy, internal regulation and generative capacity. This sociological completion of Strange’s theory, an international socio-political economy approach as it were, better explains the capacity and limits of today’s digital network knowledge structure to resist reduction to other structural interests. Strange’s non-reductive structural approach to power is significant for sociology as it helps identify ‘social order’ in a global age, but an additional sociological dimension is also necessary for the fulfilment of Strange’s theoretical project.

Actors, Not Markets: Bringing Corporate Power Back in International Studies

One of the most striking oddities of contemporary international studies is the persistent absence of the modern corporation in analyzing global power relations. What Susan Strange noted almost three decades ago seems to be even more evident today: understanding who holds power in the international system is virtually impossible without moving global corporations from the periphery to the center of analysis (Strange 1991). Today, global giants like Google or Apple are not only omnipresent in the everyday lives of people all around the world but are also key actors in globally relevant political themes, such as global tax avoidance, mass data collection, global value chains, technological change, and energy security. They not only influence state-state relations but also sit at the forefront of battles for political power, often exceeding states in their capabilities to act and react in global capitalism. Despite this key role, the study of global corporate power remains severely underdeveloped, and the few existing works in the field are like “oases in an arid landscape” (Wilks 2013 as cited in Mikler 2018, 4).

Behind the veil of good intentions: power analysis of the nuclear non-proliferation regime

Susan Strange argued that one of the main problems with the use of the concept of regime in IR is the way in which it ‘distort[s] reality implying an exaggerated measure of predictability and order in the system’. Instead, she claimed, scholars should look at the numerous and dynamic bargains on which regimes are based. This article examines four bargains displaying various operations of power that have underpinned the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The four bargains are: first, the superpower collusion in the establishment of the non-proliferation treaty; second, coercive diplomacy and the use of force in preventing access to nuclear materials and technology; third, institutional contestation regarding the aims of the non-proliferation regime and its technical maintenance; and fourth, the creation of particular hierarchies of states via the non-proliferation norm. These bargains have been hidden behind the veil of good intensions, which is the conviction that preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is an unquestionable global good. The veil of good intentions, in turn, has helped to maintain the unequal distribution of material capabilities at the heart of the non-proliferation regime.