Artificial intelligence, big data, and other technological transformations
Emerging powers, especially Brazil, India and China
Global economic and digital governance
This project tracks the creation of three technopoles organized around the US, China and, to a lesser extent, the EU. It builds on a multilingual corpus of strategy documents, laws and policy directives from each technopole as well as descriptive statistics, media analysis and expert interviews. The work is theoretically innovative in that it provides a series of causal mechanisms linking otherwise disparate developments in cybersecurity and the digital economy. It is a collaboration with Prof. Maximilian Mayer (University of Bonn).
This project contextualizes and explains Southern states’ digital development innovations within changing global power relations. Specifically, I seek to account for the impact Southern actors have on how digital development and the digital economy evolve as well as the role of broader foreign policy factors (such as a desire for more global influence) in affecting the same. Research methods include both traditional and computer-assisted methods, such as qualitatively analyzing social media data and juxtaposing topic modeling with qualitative content analysis.
Research funded by grants from the International Studies Association.Emerging powers (EPs) have been a dominant trend in international affairs and analysis since the early 2000s. Who are they? And how will they affect global affairs? This project addresses issues of conceptual incoherence and differentiation by examining the motivations and framing strategies of three EPs (Brazil, India and China) and one established state (the US) in technological and economic governance. Although policy discussions of EPs continue to view them collectively, my findings highlight the distinctiveness of EP motivations and policy goals. This has enhanced competitive pressures among EPs as well as in their interactions with developing economies, making collective achievement of shared economic and technological ambitions increasingly unlikely.
Research funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) project #369896954.
Additional funding received from the International Studies Association and the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD).
http://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/369896954?language=en
This project examines why emerging powers like Brazil and India have diversified the strategic loci of their trade policy activities since the early 2000s despite gaining substantial political and economic benefits from their ongoing membership in the World Trade Organization. I argue that the dominance of political ideas and/or economic interests in domestic policymaking situations encourages politicians to use, substitute or seek to reform the WTO in reference to both trade liberalization and dispute settlement. Main findings are available in The Trade Policy of Emerging Powers: Strategic Choices of Brazil and India (Palgrave Macmillan 2013, paperback 2016).
Research funded by grants from the Ruhr-University Bochum and the International Studies Association.