Henry Farrell

Chained to Globalization – with Abraham Newman

Why It’s Too Late to Decouple

In 1999, the columnist Thomas Friedman pronounced the Cold War geopolitical system dead. The world, he wrote, had “gone from a system built around walls to a system increasingly built around networks.” As businesses chased efficiency and profits, maneuvering among great powers was falling away. An era of harmony was at hand, in which states’ main worries would be how to manage market forces rather than one another.

Friedman was right that a globalized world had arrived but wrong about what that world would look like. Instead of liberating governments and businesses, globalization entangled them.


Read the full article at Foreign Affairs

Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Constructing Mid-Range Theories of Trust: The Role of Institutions” in Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible (the Capstone volume of the Russell Sage Foundation project on Trust) – eds. Karen Cook, Russell Hardin and Margaret Levi

November 25, 2009 eds. Karen Cook Russell Hardin and Margaret Levi Russell Sage Foundation: 2009
The last fifteen years have seen an explosion in research on trust, but there are still important gaps in our understanding of its sources and consequences.1 In particular, we know relatively little about the relationship between trust and the other sources of cooperation that social scientists have identified, most prominently institutions, sets of rules that ...
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Academic Article

Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion – with Abraham Newman

July 1, 2019 featured International Security 44 Weaponized Interdependence
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2019), “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, 1:42-79. Reprinted in Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, Brookings Institution 2021. Liberals claim that globalization has led to fragmentation and decentralized networks of power relations. This does not ...
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