Henry Farrell

Consulting Firms Have Stumbled Into a Geopolitical Minefield – with Abraham Newman

Earlier this year, McKinsey executives found themselves in serious political trouble. The Financial Times reported that their China branch had boasted in 2019 of its economic advice to the Chinese central government, while a McKinsey-led think tank prepared a book which advised China to “deepen cooperation between business and the military and push foreign companies out of sensitive industries.”

McKinsey, which had previously gotten media attention for promoting China’s Belt and Road initiative, responded with a statement saying that China’s central government had never to its knowledge been a client, and stressing its “75 year history of supporting the US government.” But the damage was done: Senior Republican policymakers called for McKinsey to be banned from tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Consulting Firms Have Stumbled Into a Geopolitical Minefield,” Foreign Policy, May 22, 2024.

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Negotiating Privacy across Arenas – The EU-US ‘Safe Harbor’ Discussions,” in Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance – ed. Adrienne Hèritier

May 28, 2002 ed. Adrienne Hèritier Rowman and Littlefield: 2002
Much recent theoretical attention has been devoted to the provision of common goods across arenas. The normal problems of common good provision (Olson 1968; Hardin 1982) are exacerbated when these problems spill across arenas (there are usually no actors capable of imposing hierarchical solutions), but there are also new difficulties. Solutions in one particular arena ...
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Academic Article

Introduction: Blogs, Politics and Power – with Daniel W. Drezner

September 27, 2007 Bloggers Blogs Internet
There is good reason to believe that blogs are changing politics, but we don’t know exactly how. Nor do we know whether the normative consequences of blogs for poli- tics are likely to be good or bad. In this special issue, we and our co-authors undertake the first sustained effort to map the empirical and ...
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