The Second Cold War
US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks
Bibliographic Data
Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imagined pasts. These projects are mutually exclusive and animate contemporary geopolitics. Second, we conceptualise the spatial logic of great power rivalry in the Second Cold War. In contrast to the first Cold War, when great powers sought to incorporate territory into blocs, the US and China currently compete on a global scale for centrality in four interrelated networks that they anticipate will underpin hegemony in the 21st century: infrastructure (e.g. logistics and energy), digital, production and finance. We review the state of competition in each network and draw two broad conclusions: (1) this mode of competition makes it difficult for either side to conclusively ‘win’ the Second Cold War, and (2) many countries are likely to remain integrated with both the US and China
Business · Centrality · China · Cold war · Economics · Economy · Political science · Politics · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Law
Introduction
The petrochemical pivot
The great systemic clash
Audiences, contexts, and cues
Drafting a Cybersecurity Standard for Outer Space Missions
Infrastruktura kao sociološki fenomen
Pericentricity on the Congolese copperbelt
Towards Financial Autonomy
How does transport infrastructure development impact rural livelihoods in the Global South? A systematic review of the English language academic literature
Stay or leave? US-listed Chinese companies under financial decoupling push and the reshaping of global financial networks
Gatekeeping beyond the state
Explaining Countries’ Formal Engagement with the People’s Republic of China’s Digital Connectivity Plan
Why Sinoscepticism will Remake British Politics
State Platform Capitalism
The Spectre of State Capitalism
Infrastructural Perspectives on Global Ordering
Narrating and Practising the US–China “Tech War
The geopolitical underpinning of global value chains and production networks
Charting 25 years of labour geographies in JEG
Wind of change
Whose head servant? TikTok’s conundrum between digital capitalism and states
How Do Uncertainties Reshape Supply Chain Efficiency? In an Era of Turbulence
Geopolitical Rivalry and the New Global Economic Geography
The Spatial Limits to Weaponizing Interdependence
Navigating the nexus
The U.S. and China
‘Global Transformation’
Digital geopolitics in a Vuca world
Rebuilding the Ladder? Contemporary Contests Over Industrial Policy
Private Network Realignment
Why Ports Matter to Cities
A critical approach to techno-nationalism in the ‘New Cold War’
Decoding the New Cold War
The Long Twentieth Century, and counting? Global financial networks, geopolitics, and the making of China Concept Stocks in the US
From ‘Strategic Indispensability’ to ‘Comprehensive Offers’
The Triple Nexus and the Future of Multilateral Governance
Between soft power and suspicion
Reconceptualizing vaccine nationalism
E-commerce as a battlefield in the US–China tech race
Mundane Geopolitics, Strategic (De)Coupling, and Chinese Infrastructure Investment in Europe
Economic Statecraft of the Hinge State
Contesting coercion
Doomscrollers by day, gamers by night
Polyalignment as geoeconomic bridging
Connecting ambitions
The emergence and politics of polyalignment
Infrastructural polyalignment and Himalayan geopolitics
The visual politics of polyalignment in Argentina
Between compute and geopolitics
Variegated decoupling
The China Gambit
Generative AI‐Making and State‐Making
Pride and Patriotism
Six paths of Global China
The US-China Strategic Competition in the GCC Countries
Decarbonization and the Capitalist State
Chinese investments as part of infrastructure-led development
A new age of infrastructure development? An historical comparison of nested dependency in Pakistan and Egypt
Transformation of the global digital labour marketplace
Cable wars? Mapping the political economy of submarine cables in an era of geoeconomic competition
Digital dependencies
Methods of economic statecraft
Complex cooptation
Why is economic interdependence not weaponised? Security constraints on geoeconomic coercion in Southeast Asia
The political power of digital multinational companies in an era of geo-technological competition
Institutional layering as (counter-)hegemonic strategy
The Consequences of ‘Eastern Opening’
Toward a geographical stack
Political geography II
The indirect effects of structural power
Steering FinTech
Geostrategic globalization
New cold war or 'world civil war'? Wertkritik and the critical theory of capitalism in an age of conflict
Global structures of digital dependence and the rise of technopoles
Explaining China’s approach to the global governance of sovereign debt distress
Bringing technology into the balance of power politics
The new security grey zone
On the frontier of party-state capitalism
Hedging energy transition
The new economic nationalism
Intersections of new state capitalism, infrastructure scramble, and the Second Cold War
Post-Peak China in Africa? Insights from Zambia
Metro Manila's digital infrastructure ecosystem. Insights into critical data centre studies in the majority world
Doing Industrial Policy in a Geo‐Tech World
Geoeconomic Exposure and EU Industrial Policy
Structural power redux
The mutually transforming effect
The EU global gateway and energy infrastructure
Micro Geopolitics in the World of Standards
Digital Geopolitics and Technology Exports to Africa
The Politics of Connections in Greenland
The fossil-AI nexus
Knowledge regulation and US centrality in the semiconductor production network
Global environmental governance after liberal environmentalism
The end of open door globalism
Die neue globale Geoökonomie
Repositioning climate finance
The state of the state
Locating Africa in the Second Cold War
Technology Policy Maneuvers Amid Hegemonic Pressures
Integrating China into the Global Economy
Armageddon averted
Rethinking Chinese Politics
Global Development
Great Games, Local Rules
Red Globalization
Global Production Networks
The Global Cold War
Exit from Hegemony
How China Escaped Shock Therapy
Global Value Chains and Development
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Money, Markets, and Monarchies
The Stack
China's overseas lending
Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank's Economic Growth in the 1990s
Dilemma not Trilemma
Toward a Geoeconomic Order in International Trade and Investment
Cultural Backlash
The Cold War analogy’s misrepresentation of the essence of US–China strategic competition
Intellectual monopoly in global value chains
Chinese Political Nostalgia and Xi Jinping's Dream of Great Rejuvenation
Mao's China and after
Shadow Cold War
Capital, the State, and War
The Emergence of Global Maoism
Ripe for Revolution
China's Gilded Age
The Sino-Soviet Split
Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015
"Revising Postrevisionism," or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History
New Bottles for New Wine
Who is afraid of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’? Geopolitical narratives, agency and the multiscalar distribution of risk
Veiled futures? Debt burdens, the Belt Road Initiative, and official Chinese lending after coronavirus
The China Shock
Globalisation, uneven development and the North–South ‘big switch’
The Cold War as a historical period
A Certain Idea of Science
The Pivot between Containment, Engagement, and Restraint
Cold War historiography at the crossroads
The Last Empire
The Cold War and the international political economy in the 1970s
What does the state do in China’s state-led infrastructure financialisation
Beyond geopolitical fetishism
Private infrastructure in weaponized interdependence
A novel pathway to power? Contestation and adaptation in China's internationalization of the RMB
Hegemony Studies 3.0
The Road Is Tortuous
Debt, distress, dispossession
Geoeconomic Competition
China's Party-State Capitalism and International Backlash
Weaponized Interdependence
State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime
Getting the territory right
Open Door Expansionism Reconsidered
Crashed
The digital Silk Road
Not one inch
Shutdown
Globalizing’ regional development
The new cold war and the rise of the 21st‐century infrastructure state
The geopolitics of connectivity, cooperation, and hegemonic competition
Towards a critical geopolitics of China– US rivalry
The Triumph of Broken Promises
The long peace, the end of the cold war, and the failure of realism
The Cold War
The persistent myth of lost hegemony,” revisited
Beyond ports, roads and railways
Goodbye Washington Confusion, hello Wall Street Consensus
Geopolitics
D/developments after the Meltdown
The territorial trap
After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics
Spatial' relationships? Towards a reconceptualization of embedded ness
The strange geographies of the 'new' state capitalism
Data access and regime competition
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
Post-neoliberalism in Latin America
Introduction
The Increasing Importance of Geoeconomics in Power Rivalries in the Twenty-First Century
Uneven and combined state capitalism
Leading from Behind - American Exceptionalism and President Obama's Post-American Vision of Hegemony
Theorizing Sociospatial Relations
The US-China rivalry and the emergence of state platform capitalism
Westward ho-the China dream and 'one belt, one road
South-South Cooperation or Core-Periphery Contention? Ghanaian and Zambian Perceptions of Economic Relations with China
China's Contingencies
Coordinated Credit Spaces
How not to learn from history
Financialization of the Economy
Peasant protests over land seizures in rural China
| Unique citing works | 141 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 70,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 128 |