2026-27 Theme Seminar: Emerging Forces in Global Political Economy

Protectionism, resurgent national industrial policy, and growing corporate concentration in key sectors are shrinking the share of economic activity coordinated primarily by markets. At the same time, the ambitious, transformative projects required to address shared global predicaments such as climate change pose formidable challenges for resource mobilization and coordination. The theme seminar will explore how societies navigate this changing political economy. 

Neoliberal governance confined state power to facilitating market-based coordination among citizens, firms, and states themselves. One focus of the theme is on how, more recently, firms, financial institutions, and states have expanded the realm of non-market coordination and how, in this newly corporatized world, societies mobilize capital, people, and knowledge. How and why do globe-spanning firms such as Apple or BYD withdraw swaths of economic activity from the market through horizontal and vertical integration? What are the implications of ‘private’ capital controlled by a small number of venture capital and private equity firms replacing ‘public’ stock and bond markets as the headquarters of financial coordination? Does China’s epoch-making industrial development reveal contemporary production processes as growing too large to be coordinated by consumer-driven markets, instead requiring long-term state planning?

A second focus of the theme is the political implications of this resurgence of non-market resource mobilization and coordination. On one hand, the enlarged footprint of non-market logics in the economy may provide new openings for democratic politics and for the democratization of economic life. On the other hand, corporatization and other forms of power concentration may undermine existing forms of democratic representation and justice-minded global governance. Can democracy and redistributive transnational and multilateral institutions adapt to a corporatized world? What are the implications of states reimposing control over economic activities in an age of diminished state capacity? And what are the conditions for peaceful cooperation between fundamentally different regimes of resource mobilization?

The theme is led by Benjamin Braun, Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and 2026-2028 Visiting Professor in the School of Social Science.

• Jens Beckert
• Benjamin Bradlow 
• Benjamin Braun
• Susannah Glickman 

• Jens van 't Klooster 
• Wendy Leutert 
• Noam Maggor 
• Kathleen R. McNamara 

• Calvin Thrall 
• Ntina Tzouvala
• Yingyao Wang