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:

Academic Article

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

March 8, 2012 Annual Review of Political Science 15:35-52.
Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the ...
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Academic Article

Useful for What and Useful to Whom? IR and Its Public – with Jack Knight

May 13, 2021 International Studies Review with Jack Knight
Henry Farrell and Jack Knight (2021), “Useful for What and Useful to Whom? IR and Its Public,” International Studies Review, 23,4:1933-1958. The contributors to this forum all draw significantly from pragmatist philosophy and social theory for making sense of international politics. Collectively, we affirm the value of pragmatist work beyond metatheory and methodology, both politically ...
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