This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy

In the current moment, global governance institutions face unprecedented threats. The existing literature on contestation has focused largely on disruption and crisis generated by revisionist challenges from both rising and established powers. In this project, we look at the other side of the coin and analyze the politics of global governance defense.

What kinds of actors are likely to defend institutions? And exactly how do they go about defending institutions? To address the first question, we develop a simple, two-variable framework to show which kinds of actors are likely to defend, maximize, spoil or follow in global governance institutions. We also theorize the how of institutional defense under conditions of high and low degrees of conflict among stakeholders. We then test the plausibility of these propositions through case study analysis of the international standardization of digital technologies, an arena of global governance that has emerged as central in geopolitical rivalry between the US and China. Based on multi-year qualitative fieldwork, we identify one group of “defenders” (concentrated in Europe) and two “maximizer” actor constellations (in China and the US) and illustrate European stakeholders’ evolving defense tactics in this domain of global governance.

Bio: 

Sarah Eaton is Professor of Transregional China Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and co-founder of the Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN). She is interested in the study of contemporary Chinese politics and political economy from comparative and transregional perspectives. A major focus of her current research is the politics of standardization governance, for which she has received funding from the German Research Foundation as well as the European Research Council.