,
18 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
1. @ANewman_forward and my article on "weaponized interdependence" has just been published by @Journal_IS and is now available ungated - mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.11… . We are really happy to see it officially published, citable etc. 
2. We have also been lucky (for 'the world going to hell in ways that seem highly compatible with your theory' values of lucky). Since the piece's initial submission, states have begun to weaponize interdependence with a vengeance. Some key examples:
3. The ways that the US has sought to strangle the Iranian economy after pulling out of the JCPOA and putting intense pressure on its allies to follow suit. The efforts of Europe to push back through the creation of INSTEX (which we discuss briefly here: nationalinterest.org/feature/americ… )
4. The Huawei saga. This can be read two ways. First, the widespread suspicions about Huawei reflect a key strategic weakness of China - it plays only a minor role in the global networks that have become key tools of coercion and surveillance. Is Huawei an effort to change that?
5. The US, of course, has used its strategic positioning in the Internet's global network to hoover up data. China plausibly would like to do the same. But also - the tools used against Huawei involve the exploitation of Huawei's and China's supply chain vulnerabilities.
6. China's countermoves against US companies. FedEx as the key target, since it is quite exposed (given its role in supply chain logistics) and has previously cooperated extensively with US law enforcement. All of these match pretty well onto the logic we have identified.
7. Whereby global economic networks become the key tools of coercion and surveillance, and states that have privileged positions (control over key nodes in those networks) and appropriate institutions enjoy a considerable strategic advantage.
8. However, our article is just one step towards a much bigger research agenda, which is to really start pulling together the debates about what is happening to the world economy as security risks that were buried come to the fore. That will take work by many other people.
9. And some real changes in existing academic structures. First and most obviously - it will require a _lot_ more work that crosses the boundaries between international security and international political economy in international relations.
10. With some notable exceptions, there is remarkably little out there. The two sub-subdisciplines tend to publish in different journals, invoke different theories and speak to entirely different audiences. That has to change - and quickly. People like Abe and I can help along
11. But the real change is probably going to have to come (as it nearly always comes) from younger scholars, starting to write their dissertations, or looking for new post-dissertation projects. If this involves people taking potshots at our work, that is fine.
12. (as they age, academics increasingly serve the useful social function of providing scratching posts on which younger, hungrier scholars can sharpen their claws - maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/bake… - that is basically a good thing ).
13. Second, it will require a lot more genuine cross-disciplinary work. Economics obviously. But maybe even more importantly history. The new financial history, the history of empire, and some corners of intellectual history provide crucial ideas and deep empirical engagement.
14. Abe and I discovered, after we had written and submitted, that Nicholas Lambert's Planning Armageddon described a very similar set of problems and ideas in the immediate pre-WWI period. In an ideal world, more historians would/should get hired at international affairs schools
15. There is also a lot of crossover with economic sociology, economic and political geography, communications and other disciplines. All of these are beginning to confront the same problems using different disciplinary lenses. The more cross disciplinary conversation, the better
16. Finally, we need more empirical data. The networks that are shaping the world, and allowing weaponization to happen are often very poorly understood. They have received little attention, because they appeared, to a superficial glance, to be technical and boring.
17. They are anything but. Yet we don't have nearly the qualitative or quantitative data we need to make sense of what is happening. Gathering it will be hard (and in some cases impossible, because of commercial sensitivity or other problems) - but is urgently necessary.
18. In short, we are very happy to have our own work out there at last - but it is just one step towards a far bigger set of intra disciplinary and cross disciplinary projects and debates that will necessarily involve a lot more people, with a wide variety of agendas. Finis.
