Call for Papers: Global Power Competition

The recently formed Centre for the Study of Global Power Competition embraces the study of social sciences through an interdisciplinary lens. We call experts in Political Science, Sociology, Law, Economics and Business Studies to join us at our 2023 Workshop on Global Power Competition.

This workshop seeks to bring together perspectives on great power competition from multiple disciplines to evaluate how it is manifest across various dimensions of interaction, both in theory and practice. In doing so it seeks to understand how increasingly transactional postures in the military, diplomatic, technology, legal, and economic spheres affects actors and sectors beyond the national security state, in supply chains, energy, raw materials, and intellectual property.

We invite abstracts for papers from scholars working in International Relations, Political Theory, Law, Business Studies and Management, Political Science, Economics and Finance, Sociology, Psychology, and History, on all aspects of great power competition.

The deadline for submission is 31 March 2023. Please submit your abstracts here.

Why Care about Global Power Competition?

The return of great power competition raises some important questions about exactly what kind of competition is taking place. What are states competing over, or for? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that there are fewer and fewer areas of international political, economic, and social life untouched by competitive dynamics. This workshop therefore seeks to integrate perspectives on great power competition from a wide range of disciplinary specialisations—including International Relations, Political Theory, Law, Business Studies and Management, Political Science, Economics and Finance, Sociology, Psychology, and History—to evaluate how competition is manifest across multiple dimensions of interaction, both in theory and practice. In doing so it seeks to understand how increasingly transactional national postures in the military, diplomatic, technology, legal, and economic spheres, affect actors and sectors beyond the national security state, in supply chains, energy, raw materials, and intellectual property.

Over the past decade, the concept of ‘great power competition’ has been resurrected by pundits and decisionmakers alike, to describe both the nature of contemporary international politics and the tasks of statecraft. Today, the acronym ‘GPC’ dominates—substitutes for?—strategy debate in Washington and London, and is invoked in the capitals of self-proclaimed great and middle powers alike.

But the return of great power competition—whether in fact or in discourse—poses some important theoretical questions about exactly what kind of competition is being referred to. It is rarely clear if GPC is to be understood as a consequence of ongoing power shifts, or the outcome of state strategies. At one level, great power competition is a mundane statement of the reality of international anarchy. At another, it is an edict to compete—but over, or for, what?

Nicholas Kitchen is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Power Competition (CGPC).

Joshua Andresen is Associate Professor of National Security and Foreign Relations Law at the University of Surrey.