Governments and businesses should strive to limit the use of economic sanctions, which have increased dramatically since the 1970s, advises , assistant professor of history in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频.
Sanctions are 鈥減ushing globalization in a more unstable and military conflict-prone direction,鈥 Mulder wrote on the World Economic Forum鈥檚 website, and 鈥渢he most effective sanctions are often those that are merely threatened.鈥
The forum tapped Mulder to share his expertise on sanctions and other key trends in geo-economics for Strategic Intelligence, which seeks to help government, private sector and nonprofit constituents make sense of the forces driving transformational change in the global economy.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of talk about a crisis of globalization,鈥 Mulder said. 鈥淧ractitioners and policymakers are looking for historical perspective to understand and anticipate what might happen.鈥
Mulder contributed essays on six trends in geo-economics, which refers to nation-states trying to achieve strategic aims through economic means. Mulder calls sanctions 鈥渢he economic weapon,鈥 which is also the title of his forthcoming book. The other trends he addressed are trade conflict; institutional and regulatory instability; security scrutiny of foreign funds; infrastructure decoupling; and strategic industrial policy.
Mulder curates a feed of recent news and research on the Strategic Intelligence site, which also features a 鈥渢ransformation map鈥 that visualizes how each geo-economics trend intersects with other subject areas. Sanctions, for example, link to nine topics including financial and monetary systems, international security and Iran.
鈥淭he map provides an important resource for users seeking to understand and position themselves in the modern global economy,鈥 said James Landale, head of content and partnerships for Strategic Intelligence, a publicly available site with more than 250,000 users.
Mulder said the platform offers an opportunity to step back from the tumult of the daily news cycle to consider a bigger-picture context for the financial crises, rising nationalism and trade wars that have placed international institutions under pressure over the past decade.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a broad perception that this is a historic moment, and there鈥檚 a need for this kind of analysis,鈥 he said. 鈥淗istory provides a rich and sophisticated way of understanding some of these shocks and developments.鈥
Geo-economics as a term dates to 1990, and geo-economic rivalries did not fully emerge until after the 2008 financial crisis, Mulder wrote on the site.
But his analysis draws on expertise in the interwar period 鈥 from November 1918 to September 1939 鈥 which many see as providing a parallel to the present, Mulder said. The comparison has prompted fears of impending 鈥渄e-globalization,鈥 a term Mulder said he considers misleading.
鈥淚t鈥檚 not de-globalization but globalization moving in a different direction from what we have become used to,鈥 he said. 鈥淲hat we鈥檙e seeing is not the world falling apart, but certain connections that existed before are decreasing and connections in other areas are increasing.鈥
On a hopeful note, Mulder, who this fall plans to teach a course titled, 鈥淪tability and Crisis: Capitalism and Democracy, 1870 to the Present,鈥 said recent global events don鈥檛 presage a rerun of World War II. On the other hand, climate change represents a severe new stress that will require an unprecedented and urgent level of cooperation between nations.
鈥淕lobal stakeholders should think about how to best contain geo-economic tensions,鈥 Mulder wrote. 鈥淐oncerted public-private action, for example, could help revive effective international cooperation on matters like climate change, migration and the impacts of COVID-19.鈥
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