Presentation of the cross-disciplinary project

Recent global disruptions - including the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war against Hamas, the BRICS initiative to establish its own currency, and the re-election of Donald Trump - have heightened uncertainty and conflict in the global arena regarding the movement of goods, capital, and people. These developments have exposed a critical gap: many business leaders remain ill-equipped to anticipate and manage geopolitical risks.

To better understand these risks, we adopt the analytical lens that international relations are fundamentally shaped by domestic political dynamics. From this perspective, we see geopolitical risk as an outcome of national political processes reflecting the interests and demands of constituencies within a particular nation-state. Our aim is to understand how factors such as the distribution of power among social groups, national identity and culture, civil society, institutional checks and balances, political ideologies, and policy goals, among others, influence domestic politics - and, in turn, generate specific geopolitical risks. Understanding these underlying mechanisms is essential for the accurate prediction of ways in which geopolitical risks affect business operations and for designing effective contingency plans. To pursue our goal through this novel lens, we propose forming a group with complementary expertise in geopolitics, political economy, social movements, corporate strategy, management, and multinational companies.