The classical canon — Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, Kennan — explains the enduring structure of power: who controls the heartland, the rimland, the sea lanes. But the conflicts of the 2020s are being fought with instruments those thinkers never imagined — financial chokepoints, semiconductor supply chains, data-localisation laws, and regulatory standards exported across borders. A new generation of scholars has mapped this terrain, and their work is shaping policy in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing in real time.
This page profiles the contemporary thinkers whose recent work is most worth reading — filtered for rigour and originality rather than media profile. They are the analysts that policymakers and serious students of strategy are actually citing.
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Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman¶
Weaponized interdependence. Farrell and Newman’s term — now standard vocabulary in Washington — for how the hubs of global networks become instruments of coercion. The same plumbing that knits the world together hands whoever sits at its centre a stranglehold: the dollar-clearing system, the SWIFT messaging network, undersea data cables. It is why cutting Russia off from SWIFT in 2022 functioned as a weapon, not merely a sanction. Their book Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy is the essential text for understanding sanctions, export controls, and the “de-risking” debates now reshaping digital sovereignty policy.
Rush Doshi¶
Does China actually have a master plan to displace the United States — or are we pattern-matching onto noise? Doshi answered by reading the Communist Party’s own words: thousands of internal speeches, memoirs, and documents in the original Mandarin. The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order finds a deliberate three-phase design — blunt, build, expand — first neutralising American power in Asia, then building Chinese alternatives, now projecting globally. The argument was influential enough that Doshi went on to run China policy on the US National Security Council, shaping great-power competition and China’s grand strategy from the inside.
Chris Miller¶
Chips are the new oil — and Miller is the historian who proved it. Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology traces how the entire digital economy came to rest on a few impossibly narrow choke points: one Taiwanese company, TSMC, fabricates roughly 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and a single Dutch firm, ASML, builds the only machines capable of etching them. Control those nodes and you hold a hand at the world’s throat — which is why advanced fabrication is now the central front of semiconductor geopolitics and techno-nationalism.
Anu Bradford¶
Why does a bloc with no Google, no Amazon, no TikTok still write the rules those companies live by? Bradford’s answer is the Brussels Effect: the EU market is too large to abandon, so its rules on privacy, competition, and AI harden into de facto global standards — the reason cookie-consent banners now follow you across the entire web. The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World and her later Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology are foundational for the regulatory dimension of digital sovereignty and the EU’s role in the tech order.
Nadège Rolland¶
Most coverage treats the Belt and Road as ports, railways, and debt. Rolland — reading Chinese strategic writing in the original — argues it is something far more ambitious: the scaffolding for a Sinocentric order across Eurasia, a sphere of influence laid in concrete and fibre-optic cable rather than declared outright. China’s Eurasian Century?: Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative reframes the Belt and Road Initiative as grand strategy rather than generosity, and is essential for anyone who wants Beijing’s long-range design instead of its slogans.
Ketian Zhang¶
Why did China freeze Norwegian salmon imports over a Nobel Prize, and gut South Korean retailers over a missile-defence radar — yet wave through provocations many times larger? Zhang’s China’s Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion shows that Beijing’s economic punishment is far more selective and calculated than the headlines suggest: it is deployed only when the stakes, the target’s dependence, and the signal sent to others all align. A crucial corrective to the assumption that China coerces reflexively.
Mark Leonard¶
Unpeace — Leonard’s word for the grey zone where states neither make war nor keep peace, but turn the ties between them into weapons. The migrants Belarus funnelled to the EU’s border, the gas Russia switched off, the supply chains quietly throttled: The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict argues that the very connections meant to bind nations together have become the arena of struggle — the European complement to weaponized interdependence and a key text for the strategic autonomy debate.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens¶
How a government secures itself at home shapes how it acts abroad. Greitens follows that thread into China’s vast internal-security apparatus — Beijing has at times spent more on domestic “stability maintenance” than on its military — and shows how that machinery is now an export, as surveillance technology and policing models sold to governments worldwide. Her work is indispensable for reading China as a security actor from the inside out, connecting its domestic priorities to its behaviour beyond its borders.
Also Worth Reading¶
- Stephen Kotkin — Still producing some of the highest-quality work on Russia, authoritarianism, and great-power competition, alongside his ongoing Stalin biography.
- Hal Brands & Michael Beckley — Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China offers a sharp, evidence-based case that the most dangerous phase of US–China rivalry is a near-term window, not a distant peak — a provocative counterpoint to the Thucydides Trap framing.
- Adam Tooze — Economic historian whose work on crisis, finance, and geopolitics (and his widely-read Chartbook) makes him one of the most influential voices on the economics–security intersection.
- Quinn Slobodian — A sharp critic of neoliberal globalisation and its geopolitical consequences; Crack-Up Capitalism traces how market logic fractures and reshapes sovereignty itself.