Public Writing
Featured Essays:
Essay Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
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Academic ArticleEssay Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman
Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, ...
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Essay The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman
For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there ...
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Public Writing Archives
Featured Interviews:
Interview “Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne
A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape? “The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. ...
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Interview Interview with economist Tyler Cowen on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or the EU courts asserting that countries can force Facebook to take down content globally, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion. Tyler and Henry discuss these issues and more, including what a big ...
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Interviews
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Essays
A Most Lonely Union
In September 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On ...
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The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online with Marion Fourcade
Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes ...
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Will Governments Restrict Foreign Access to Pandemic Supplies? – with Abraham Newman
As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, there is a lurking threat that we can no longer ignore: What happens if countries hoard or even nationalize vital ...
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Will the Coronavirus End Globalization as We Know It? – with Abraham Newman
The new coronavirus is shaping up to be an enormous stress test for globalization. As critical supply chains break down, and nations hoard medical supplies ...
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The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire – with Abraham Newman
When Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel U.S. forces from the country earlier this month, the Trump administration’s response was swift and forceful: it refused to ...
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Choke Points – with Abraham Newman
Since the end of the Cold War, businesses have built an awe-inspiring global infrastructure. Digital pipelines move vast amounts of capital and data around the ...
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Socialists Will Never Understand Elizabeth Warren (I’d have chosen a different title)
The Democratic candidate is part of a long intellectual tradition that’s gone forgotten in the West: pro-market leftism. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s politics seem like a ...
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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 ...
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US and China are Weaponising Global Trade Networks – with Abraham Newman
Great powers such as the US and China are wielding supply chains as weapons in their grand disputes, while smaller states such as Japan and ...
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Weaponized Globalization: Huawei and the Emerging Battle over 5G Networks – with Abraham Newman
The US and China are engaged in a bitter fight over Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant. The US has blocked Huawei from its markets and ...
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Don’t Ask How to Pay for Climate Change. Ask Who
Last week, CNN announced plans to host a climate crisis town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on September 4. MSNBC scheduled a multiday climate ...
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Introducing a New Paper on Weaponized Interdependence – with Abraham Newman
Last month, Ellie Geranmayeh and Manuel Lafont Rapnouil wrote a report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, arguing that Europe needed to hit back ...
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Weaponized Interdependence – with Abraham Newman
In May 2018, the US Administration announced that it was pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, reimposing sanctions. Most notably, many penalties do ...
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“Democracy’s Dilemma” with responses from Riana Pfefferkorn, Joseph Nye, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Allison Berke, Jason Healey, Astra Taylor and danah boyd, and a reply to the responses by Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier. with Bruce Schneier
The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The ...
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Democracy’s Dilemma – with Bruce Schneier
How can democratic societies protect—and protect themselves from—the free flow of digital information? The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that ...
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