Milan Babic
Biographic Data
| ID | 3759835 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Milan Babic |
| GIVEN NAMES | Milan |
| FAMILY NAME | Babic |
| SIGNATURE | BABIĆ M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Roskilde University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9179-8120 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 183 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Susan K sell best reviewer award
The Review of International Political Economy introduced a best reviewer award in 2023, named in the honor of the late Susan Sell. Susan was a former member of RIPE’s editorial advisory board, and
Timothy Sinclair Best Article Award
The Review of International Political Economy introduced a new Best Article Award in 2023, named after the late Timothy Sinclair. Tim’s work influenced how the field of IPE understands the sociolog
Cable wars? Mapping the political economy of submarine cables in an era of geoeconomic competition
Submarine cables are the indispensable yet often overlooked global infrastructure of our digital age. While geoeconomic competition over cables has increased, its political-economic context, where private corporations dominate nearly every aspect of the network, remains poorly understood. This article examines how geoeconomic competition unfolds within the submarine cable network. We provide a comprehensive mapping of the patterns of ownership an…
What Can the Environmental State Actually Do? Three Critiques and Their Limits
Three critiques of the environmental state shape the discussion of its possibilities and limits. First, states are deemed structurally unable to mitigate climate change due to the “glass ceiling” of systemic transformations. Second, governments play contradictory roles in sustainability transitions because of the manifold societal demands they are facing in an age of overlapping crises. Finally, state bureaucracies and agencies are often branded …
Green finance in the global energy transition: Actors, instruments, and politics
All aspects of the global energy transition - from decarbonization to adaptation - require massive investments of several trillion US Dollars annually. In the respective debates in political economy and beyond, the question of how to mobilize adequate volumes of such ‘green’ finance is central. However, there is little agreement on what constitutes this type of finance and how energy research can employ the concept to critically analyze and evalu…
The Geoeconomic Turn in International Trade, Investment, and Technology
This thematic issue brings together a set of articles that empirically map the state of the ongoing geoeconomic turn in the global political economy from an international political economy (IPE) perspective. Changes in the modus operandi of the global political economy urge the development of new conceptual and theoretical tools to grasp the new geoeconomic reality of world affairs. At the same time, the contemporary study of geoeconomics remains…
Mapping Corporate Investments Between China and Europe in an Era of Geoeconomic Competition
The consolidation of geoeconomic competition puts core aspects of global economic interdependence, such as the mutual China‐EU investment relationship, under increased pressure. Headlines about ‘derisking’, ‘decoupling’ or ‘deglobalization’ dominate current debates but tend to be overly simplistic. To push the debate on China‐EU economic relations forward, we provide an empirically driven account of the first phase of the global geoeconomic turn …
Decarbonization under geoeconomic distress? Energy shocks, carbon lock‐ins, and Germany's pathway toward net zero
How can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic shocks through investment, operational, a…
Mobilising critical international political economy for the age of climate breakdown
Globally accelerating environmental breakdown necessitates a large-scale mobilisation not only of the natural and engineering sciences, but also of insights generated from social sciences. Consequently, recent interventions in International/Global Political Economy (IPE) demand a gearing of the field towards putting climate breakdown centre stage. We respond to this call by drawing attention to the role critical IPE approaches can offer to the fi…
From tax havens to cryptocurrencies: Secrecy-seeking capital in the global economy
The global backlash against tax havens has pushed secrecy-seeking capital to explore alternative opportunities in non-tax-haven countries and new financial technologies (FinTech). We identify two major corporate practices—organizational ring-fencing and swarming—that have enabled secrecy-seeking capital to adapt to new regulatory realities and illustrate these practices empirically with the extreme case of Estonia. In the 2010s, several Nordic ba…
Is the China Effect Real? Ideational Change and the Political Contestation of Chinese State-Led Investment in Europe
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incre…
Decarbonising states as owners
Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and co…
Special issue introduction: What Is the New State Capitalism
This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the 'new' state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a numbe…
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across th…
The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order: Geopolitical Fissures and Pathways to Change
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and exacerbates many preexisting tendencies in the global political economy. Consequently, the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO), which has been ongoing for several years, is also being affected by the pandemic. These effects are, however, not uniform: some aspects of the crisis of the LIO, as a multidimensional phenomenon, are under more pressure than others. In this article, I detail these varied …
State capital in a geoeconomic world: Mapping state-led foreign investment in the global political economy
What are the consequences of the rise of foreign state-led investment for international politics? Existing research oscillates between a ‘geopolitical’ and a ‘commercial’ logic driving this type of investment and remains inconclusive about its wider international reverberations. In this paper, I suggest going beyond this dichotomy by analyzing its systemic consequences. To do so, I conceptually delineate a geoeconomic approach that emphasizes the…
Let's talk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal world order
The liberal international order (LIO) is in crisis. Numerous publications, debates and events have time and again made it clear that we are in the midst of a grand transformation of world order. While most contributions focus on either what is slowly dying (the LIO) or what might come next (China, multipolarity, chaos?), there is less analytical engagement with what lies in between those two phases of world order. Under the assumption that this p…
The rise of transnational state capital: State-led foreign investment in the 21st century
Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contribut…
Actors, Not Markets: Bringing Corporate Power Back in International Studies
One of the most striking oddities of contemporary international studies is the persistent absence of the modern corporation in analyzing global power relations. What Susan Strange noted almost three decades ago seems to be even more evident today: understanding who holds power in the international system is virtually impossible without moving global corporations from the periphery to the center of analysis (Strange 1991). Today, global giants lik…
States versus Corporations: Rethinking the Power of Business in International Politics
Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to t…
The rise of transnational state capital: State-led foreign investment in the 21st century
Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contribut…
Special issue introduction: What Is the New State Capitalism
This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the 'new' state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a numbe…
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across th…
State capital in a geoeconomic world: Mapping state-led foreign investment in the global political economy
What are the consequences of the rise of foreign state-led investment for international politics? Existing research oscillates between a ‘geopolitical’ and a ‘commercial’ logic driving this type of investment and remains inconclusive about its wider international reverberations. In this paper, I suggest going beyond this dichotomy by analyzing its systemic consequences. To do so, I conceptually delineate a geoeconomic approach that emphasizes the…
Let's talk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal world order
The liberal international order (LIO) is in crisis. Numerous publications, debates and events have time and again made it clear that we are in the midst of a grand transformation of world order. While most contributions focus on either what is slowly dying (the LIO) or what might come next (China, multipolarity, chaos?), there is less analytical engagement with what lies in between those two phases of world order. Under the assumption that this p…
Decarbonising states as owners
Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and co…
Is the China Effect Real? Ideational Change and the Political Contestation of Chinese State-Led Investment in Europe
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incre…
Green finance in the global energy transition: Actors, instruments, and politics
All aspects of the global energy transition - from decarbonization to adaptation - require massive investments of several trillion US Dollars annually. In the respective debates in political economy and beyond, the question of how to mobilize adequate volumes of such ‘green’ finance is central. However, there is little agreement on what constitutes this type of finance and how energy research can employ the concept to critically analyze and evalu…
Decarbonization under geoeconomic distress? Energy shocks, carbon lock‐ins, and Germany's pathway toward net zero
How can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic shocks through investment, operational, a…
Mobilising critical international political economy for the age of climate breakdown
Globally accelerating environmental breakdown necessitates a large-scale mobilisation not only of the natural and engineering sciences, but also of insights generated from social sciences. Consequently, recent interventions in International/Global Political Economy (IPE) demand a gearing of the field towards putting climate breakdown centre stage. We respond to this call by drawing attention to the role critical IPE approaches can offer to the fi…
From tax havens to cryptocurrencies: Secrecy-seeking capital in the global economy
The global backlash against tax havens has pushed secrecy-seeking capital to explore alternative opportunities in non-tax-haven countries and new financial technologies (FinTech). We identify two major corporate practices—organizational ring-fencing and swarming—that have enabled secrecy-seeking capital to adapt to new regulatory realities and illustrate these practices empirically with the extreme case of Estonia. In the 2010s, several Nordic ba…
The Geoeconomic Turn in International Trade, Investment, and Technology
This thematic issue brings together a set of articles that empirically map the state of the ongoing geoeconomic turn in the global political economy from an international political economy (IPE) perspective. Changes in the modus operandi of the global political economy urge the development of new conceptual and theoretical tools to grasp the new geoeconomic reality of world affairs. At the same time, the contemporary study of geoeconomics remains…
The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order: Geopolitical Fissures and Pathways to Change
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and exacerbates many preexisting tendencies in the global political economy. Consequently, the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO), which has been ongoing for several years, is also being affected by the pandemic. These effects are, however, not uniform: some aspects of the crisis of the LIO, as a multidimensional phenomenon, are under more pressure than others. In this article, I detail these varied …
Mapping Corporate Investments Between China and Europe in an Era of Geoeconomic Competition
The consolidation of geoeconomic competition puts core aspects of global economic interdependence, such as the mutual China‐EU investment relationship, under increased pressure. Headlines about ‘derisking’, ‘decoupling’ or ‘deglobalization’ dominate current debates but tend to be overly simplistic. To push the debate on China‐EU economic relations forward, we provide an empirically driven account of the first phase of the global geoeconomic turn …
States versus Corporations: Rethinking the Power of Business in International Politics
Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to t…
Actors, Not Markets: Bringing Corporate Power Back in International Studies
One of the most striking oddities of contemporary international studies is the persistent absence of the modern corporation in analyzing global power relations. What Susan Strange noted almost three decades ago seems to be even more evident today: understanding who holds power in the international system is virtually impossible without moving global corporations from the periphery to the center of analysis (Strange 1991). Today, global giants lik…
The rise of transnational state capital: State-led foreign investment in the 21st century
Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contribut…
Let's talk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal world order
The liberal international order (LIO) is in crisis. Numerous publications, debates and events have time and again made it clear that we are in the midst of a grand transformation of world order. While most contributions focus on either what is slowly dying (the LIO) or what might come next (China, multipolarity, chaos?), there is less analytical engagement with what lies in between those two phases of world order. Under the assumption that this p…
The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order: Geopolitical Fissures and Pathways to Change
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and exacerbates many preexisting tendencies in the global political economy. Consequently, the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO), which has been ongoing for several years, is also being affected by the pandemic. These effects are, however, not uniform: some aspects of the crisis of the LIO, as a multidimensional phenomenon, are under more pressure than others. In this article, I detail these varied …
State capital in a geoeconomic world: Mapping state-led foreign investment in the global political economy
What are the consequences of the rise of foreign state-led investment for international politics? Existing research oscillates between a ‘geopolitical’ and a ‘commercial’ logic driving this type of investment and remains inconclusive about its wider international reverberations. In this paper, I suggest going beyond this dichotomy by analyzing its systemic consequences. To do so, I conceptually delineate a geoeconomic approach that emphasizes the…
Is the China Effect Real? Ideational Change and the Political Contestation of Chinese State-Led Investment in Europe
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incre…
Decarbonising states as owners
Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and co…
Special issue introduction: What Is the New State Capitalism
This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the 'new' state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a numbe…
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across th…
Mobilising critical international political economy for the age of climate breakdown
Globally accelerating environmental breakdown necessitates a large-scale mobilisation not only of the natural and engineering sciences, but also of insights generated from social sciences. Consequently, recent interventions in International/Global Political Economy (IPE) demand a gearing of the field towards putting climate breakdown centre stage. We respond to this call by drawing attention to the role critical IPE approaches can offer to the fi…
From tax havens to cryptocurrencies: Secrecy-seeking capital in the global economy
The global backlash against tax havens has pushed secrecy-seeking capital to explore alternative opportunities in non-tax-haven countries and new financial technologies (FinTech). We identify two major corporate practices—organizational ring-fencing and swarming—that have enabled secrecy-seeking capital to adapt to new regulatory realities and illustrate these practices empirically with the extreme case of Estonia. In the 2010s, several Nordic ba…
Green finance in the global energy transition: Actors, instruments, and politics
All aspects of the global energy transition - from decarbonization to adaptation - require massive investments of several trillion US Dollars annually. In the respective debates in political economy and beyond, the question of how to mobilize adequate volumes of such ‘green’ finance is central. However, there is little agreement on what constitutes this type of finance and how energy research can employ the concept to critically analyze and evalu…
The Geoeconomic Turn in International Trade, Investment, and Technology
This thematic issue brings together a set of articles that empirically map the state of the ongoing geoeconomic turn in the global political economy from an international political economy (IPE) perspective. Changes in the modus operandi of the global political economy urge the development of new conceptual and theoretical tools to grasp the new geoeconomic reality of world affairs. At the same time, the contemporary study of geoeconomics remains…
Mapping Corporate Investments Between China and Europe in an Era of Geoeconomic Competition
The consolidation of geoeconomic competition puts core aspects of global economic interdependence, such as the mutual China‐EU investment relationship, under increased pressure. Headlines about ‘derisking’, ‘decoupling’ or ‘deglobalization’ dominate current debates but tend to be overly simplistic. To push the debate on China‐EU economic relations forward, we provide an empirically driven account of the first phase of the global geoeconomic turn …
Decarbonization under geoeconomic distress? Energy shocks, carbon lock‐ins, and Germany's pathway toward net zero
How can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic shocks through investment, operational, a…
What Can the Environmental State Actually Do? Three Critiques and Their Limits
Three critiques of the environmental state shape the discussion of its possibilities and limits. First, states are deemed structurally unable to mitigate climate change due to the “glass ceiling” of systemic transformations. Second, governments play contradictory roles in sustainability transitions because of the manifold societal demands they are facing in an age of overlapping crises. Finally, state bureaucracies and agencies are often branded …
Susan K sell best reviewer award
The Review of International Political Economy introduced a best reviewer award in 2023, named in the honor of the late Susan Sell. Susan was a former member of RIPE’s editorial advisory board, and
Timothy Sinclair Best Article Award
The Review of International Political Economy introduced a new Best Article Award in 2023, named after the late Timothy Sinclair. Tim’s work influenced how the field of IPE understands the sociolog
Cable wars? Mapping the political economy of submarine cables in an era of geoeconomic competition
Submarine cables are the indispensable yet often overlooked global infrastructure of our digital age. While geoeconomic competition over cables has increased, its political-economic context, where private corporations dominate nearly every aspect of the network, remains poorly understood. This article examines how geoeconomic competition unfolds within the submarine cable network. We provide a comprehensive mapping of the patterns of ownership an…
Politics (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · State Capitalism and Financial Governance (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Law (6 works) · State (computer science (6 works)