King's College London

Susan Strange Times: The Future of Global Capitalism took place in June and brought together academics, activists and students from across broad spectrum to consider how Professor Strange’s ideas continue to inspire critical thinking about world politics and political economy.

Funding for the two-day conference was kindly provided by the Department of European and International Studies at King's College London and the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was followed by a series of presentations and discussions at the British International Studies Association annual meeting.

These events were organised by the Susan Strange Centennial Committee, which includes: Randall Germain (Carleton University), Blayne Haggart (Brock University), Nat Dyer (independent scholar), Joseph Baines (King's College London), and James Morrison (LSE). 

The organisers said: “The conference was a well-attended and lively affair, demonstrating yet again why Prof Strange’s legacy remains a vibrant springboard for academic research and political activism.”

Anyone interested in pursuing the work of Susan Strange and the scholarship generated by those who engage with her ideas should visit susanstrange.org, a website dedicated to preserving and extending her work and legacy.

Conference blog

by Randall Germain

Day 1

The conference kicked off its first day with Benjamin Cohen speaking about Strange’s key contributions to the fields of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE), and Patricia Owens detailing the many challenges she faced during the course of an unconventional career path in a male-dominated profession. In addition to applauding Strange’s institution building and mentoring legacies, Cohen (a prominent IPE scholar who first met Strange over fifty years ago) emphasized the enduring influence of her approach to power – and structural power especially – and her insightful analysis of world money. These are signal contributions even if they are not without tensions. Owens, a ground-breaking IR theorist, took a step back to ask how Susan Strange actually became a legacy with so many accomplishments. Owens’ many insights included the irony that a scholar who has become almost persona non grata amongst contemporary feminists took great delight in disabling the patriarchy that put so many obstacles in the way of her career progression, even if she did not directly challenge the gender hierarchy at work in academia itself.

Ronen Palan and Amy Verdun led the second panel of the conference, which focused on her legacy as a teacher. Palan, a leading IPE scholar who first met Strange at the LSE during his graduate training, outlined what he called ‘Susan’s Rules’, which he summed up as 1) pay attention to what is going on in the world; 2) use theory to explain how the world works, not for its own sake; 3) always be interested in how power and control operate; and 4) reach for political economy explanations of big issues because IPE is the most useful way to understand a world of complex transactions. For Palan, these rules continue to be a fit foundation for timely and relevant research. Verdun, who was one of Strange’s last PhD students at the European University Institute, spoke about Strange as a supervisor, and noted that her students needed to be independent, organized and self-motivated in order to take advantage of her supervisory guidance. She herself found that Strange’s injunction always to try and ‘locate authority’ had served her own research agenda very well.

Engagement with Strange’s work has not come only from academia, and the third panel of the conference heard from two activist-scholars on why Strange’s ideas continued to inspire them. For Nat Dyer, an independent scholar and journalist, Strange’s ideas struck a chord in his efforts to address the effects of climate change, where American power, financial innovation and the role of offshore financial centers all played an important role. He acknowledged that her work had blind spots, but its holistic vantage point continues to provide a necessary entry point to understanding a complex world. These remarks were reinforced by Ann Pettifor, the founding director of Prime Economics and a moving force in the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel the debt of many of the world’s poorest countries. She found Strange’s focus on the broad structural factors at work in the global economy – especially the international organization of credit – still to be an invaluable guide to challenge the power of those who reap disproportionate rewards from economic inequality. For Pettifor, as for Dyer, Strange’s work helps to make finance ‘visible’, so that the harm it causes can be identified and addressed.

The final session of the day was a set of reminiscences by four people who knew her well. Frances Pinter published some of Strange’s early research, including States and Markets, perhaps her best-known book. She conveyed the sense of excitement connected to publishing Strange’s work, and left us with a beautiful video montage of works that engaged with Strange’s ideas. Roger Tooze, a long-time colleague who worked with and alongside Strange for years, reprised the profound ways in which she challenged the so-called IR barons of her time, and the deep insights which informed her convictions, but which are not always recognized by her critics. His key take-away was to speak to how Strange’s values motivated both her professional accomplishments, such as building the first postgraduate program in IPE at the LSE, and her research. Phil Cerny, another of the small band of academics who with Strange launched IPE in Britain, stressed the openness of Strange’s theoretical framework, which among other things inspired him to think creatively about the broad range of influences on world politics and political economy. And then Susan’s son, Adam Selly, spoke to her personal side, as a parent and mother, but also as someone deeply connected to her sense of place and belonging. He recalled how, in the final months of her life, she worked in her garden so that others could enjoy the fruits of her labour long after her own time had drawn to a close. It was a tender reflection that reminded everyone of her unique character: scholar and gardener, mother and supervisor, friend and colleague. It was the perfect end to a thrilling and informative day.

 

Day 2

If Day 1 started off looking backwards to consider the inspirational and aspirational features of Strange’s work and legacy, Day 2 looked forward to consider the current purchase of her ideas. The first panel of the day focused on the knowledge economy and how Strange’s ideas remain relevant to understanding this critically important feature of the modern global economy. Blayne Haggart, an IPE scholar from Canada, adapted Strange’s structural power approach, so valuable because it keeps control and authority at the center of analysis, to provide what he called a ‘multi-disciplinary scaffolding’ to help understand the new dynamics of our era. This theoretical scaffolding highlights the dangers when knowledge and especially data are commodified, which is a process much further along now than during Strange’s time. This danger was the starting point of Cecilia Rikap’s presentation on how the concentration of corporate power in Big Tech amplifies the natural monopoly tendencies at work in the knowledge economy. Rikap, who teaches at University College London, pointed to how Strange’s late career focus on triangular diplomacy, where firm/firm relations had become as important as state/state and state/firm relations, provided a valuable template for charting the way in which knowledge dominance operates under conditions of ‘cloud’ technology. Interestingly, her argument here questions the possibility of a technological de-coupling between China and the West, simply because the firms that are at the heart of the knowledge economy – such as Microsoft – are in fact equally invested across both sides of the technological ‘divide’. Monica Horton, a knowledge practitioner, brought the arguments of Haggart and Rikap to a more granular level by unpacking the infrastructural power of the communication platform ‘WhatsApp’. With over two billion users, it has not only become part of the knowledge infrastructure, but also the site of an intense power struggle over who is able to gain access to its content. Horten’s main point here is simple but provocative: the communication infrastructure is to the knowledge economy what protectionism and trade rules were to the industrial economy, and their intersection will shape how security and knowledge evolve over the foreseeable future.

The panel on the knowledge economy fed naturally into a lively session on the geopolitical question of the moment: what is the future of China’s challenge to American hegemony? This question was also a mainstay of Strange’s scholarship, although in her time it was Japan rather than China that preoccupied (mostly American) scholars. She of course had no truck over her career with the idea that American hegemony was waning, and nearly 40 years on from her best known publication on this topic (whose title says it all – ‘The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony’), the debate has lost none of its sharpness. Carla Costa, who teaches at the University of Lisbon, led the discussion by pointing to the many ways in which China has become a first mover in the knowledge economy, most importantly by leading the way in economic and technological system-design and rule-making for an increasing proportion of the world. From her vantage point China is without question building out its structural power in the global political economy.

Geoffrey Underhill, an IPE scholar who teaches at the University of Amsterdam and was a colleague of Strange’s at Warwick University, countered by listing the gaps in both American and Chinese sources of power, which for him made a confrontation between market-based America and non-market based China almost inevitable given their respective economic footprints. Somewhat cheekily, he made a modest proposal to sharpen this divide by accentuating rather than smoothing the points of economic contact between China and the West. Lou Pauly followed Underhill and took a different stand, pointing to the liberal roots of Strange’s political economy and how this embraced a healthy dose of optimism even when the ‘human condition’ seemed to be on the ropes. Pauly, an accomplished Canadian IPE scholar who first met Strange while a graduate student at the LSE in the 1970s, returned to the way in which Strange’s liberal values were seasoned, as it were, by her healthy respect for realism, and saw perhaps that China’s challenge might at last push the United States to conduct itself more responsibly as a ‘global’ political and economic leader, much as Strange herself suggested when she intervened in these debates several decades ago. And Sean Starrs, an IPE scholar at King’s College, closed off this panel with a robust empirical demonstration of the many ways in which American power remained undiminished or even stronger today than when Strange last considered the state of American hegemony. Starrs is convinced that we need to recognize the range and depth of American dominance, which can be clearly and precisely measured by focusing on the leading position of corporate America throughout key economic sectors. This was a provocative panel that Susan Strange would have clearly enjoyed!

 

The Next Generation

The conference closed out by giving the next generation of students a platform to show how leading edge research can be informed by an engagement with Strange’s work and ideas. Several students engaged directly with her skepticism towards accepted or prevailing ideas such as hegemony. Kasper Arabi, a PhD student at Warwick University, spoke to how everyday resistance to liberalism and the gold standard in Britian during the 1930s was organized, often below the lines of visibility that typically capture our attention. Structural power works at the level of the everyday, and measuring this is a new frontier for IPE research that keys off of Strange’s ideas. Oksana Levkovych, a recently graduated PhD student from the LSE, was partly inspired by Strange’s work to explore in some detail how Britain’s elite turned toward protectionism in the 1930s. Much like Strange’s depiction of liberalism as a kind of ideological fig leaf for British imperialism, Oksana found that British elites’ commitment to liberalism was not as deep as often portrayed.

Other students explored the intersection of enduring themes under new conditions. Stephen Haizel, a PhD student at Plymouth University, is interested to ask Strange’s qui bono question with respect to why African countries have to pay a disproportionate cost of climate change. He puts Strange in dialogue with pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah and focuses on Ghana’s participation in the climate change financing regime, considering how its design has exacerbated the costs for African countries at a moment of extreme climate disruption. Korey Pasch, a PhD student from Queen’s University in Canada, also employs the qui bono question to ask how climate risks are being mitigated through the creation of new financial assets. Financial innovation is being touted as a solution to this emergent problem, but it is a solution that fails to redistribute costs away from the vulnerable and towards those who bear a greater share of causing the harm in the first place. Strange placed real faith in the ability of the qui bono question to yield useful knowledge to solve real world problems, and research like this bears out the continuing relevance of this way of framing research. Dan Wood, a PhD student at Warick University, is also exploring the consequences of financial innovation. In his case it is the emergence of new financial actors in the asset management industry, who command and direct a growing proportion of the world’s capital. These new actors are part of the ‘new masters of capital’, and their growing power is something to which Strange would have directed her attention.

Students were also interested in the organization and operation of the knowledge economy. Fábio Colombo, a PhD student at the University of Lisbon), presented research on how the EU and China were pursing global connectivity strategies. He understands these initiatives as part of their efforts to promote structural change, and in the case of China also as a kind of hegemonic strategy. In this reading, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is becoming a key part of a global infrastructure which might soon challenge American dominance. Like Strange, Colombo is thinking creatively about how hegemony is built piece by piece, or structure by structure. And Andreas Kanaris Miyashiro, a PhD student at Warwick University, keyed off of Strange’s long-held antipathy towards formal modeling to consider how far the behaviour that models assume in fact strips away any political meaning that individuals might hold. His angle of engagement with Strange is to bring a genuinely multi-disciplinary approach to unpack the assumptions of socio-technical forms of engineering that are often found in the Science and Technology Studies literature. In this he seeks in part to return our analytical frameworks to a more recognizable core of values, much like Strange insisted we must do.

 

Debating the Future

Such a broad sweep of presentations generated provocative Q & A sessions at all panels, with a number of themes cropping up time and again. The audience was interested to learn about Strange’s intellectual commitments and ideas, including their heritage. Strange herself was of course schooled in British liberalism, and never lost an appreciation for the foundational importance of economic growth and wealth creation. Poverty and inequality were for her among the tap roots of instability and organized state violence, which made Strange a refusenik for any association with non-democratic states. Perhaps this helps to explain her refusal to give up on America as the global economy’s political guardian, even if she was often critical of American policies and biases. Strange’s intellectual anchorage in a complicated form of liberalism was mirrored by several of the contributors, and elicited a spirited set of questions from students across several sessions, about how it was possible, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, for anyone to remain committed to liberal values of any sort, given the harm they have been associated with over the past several centuries? There is of course no clear resolution to this conundrum, but it certainly made for lively exchanges.

Another question that came up more than once was the relationship between (international) politics and (international) economics, especially in relation to the role of credit and finance on a global scale. Part of the debate here was directed to eliciting what Strange herself might say about global finance today. We cannot know for sure, but what we can point to is Strange’s enduring belief on the functional utility of market-based finance under appropriate regulatory oversight, especially with respect to financial innovation. She was a longtime critic of unbridled and open-ended financial innovation, but where exactly she would draw the line is difficult to answer. Easier to identify would be her response to the status of economics as the academic discipline best placed to comprehend and advise on how to organize and make rules for a market economy. Economics has a role, but it must be embedded within a more holistic understanding of human behaviour, meaning of course that economists should not be allowed to direct policy on market structure. Sadly, deep into the twenty-first century we remain in a condition not only of mutual neglect between economics and other social sciences, but there is also a stark divide in the type of knowledge used to guide the development of the market economy across a wide spectrum of sectors and transactions. Economics is in control, and Strange would have been highly critical of this state of affairs.

 

The conference did not close on an entirely pessimistic note, however. For all of the concerns raised by conference participants and the audience, and the very real challenges identified by Susan Strange in her final publications, optimism is available both in the analytical promise held out by Strange’s ‘multi-disciplinary scaffolding’, as Blayne Haggart phrased it, and in the payoff of speaking truth to power through good social science research. Strange did not engage with theory for theory’s sake, but to illuminate how the world really works so that harms can be identified, solutions outlined, and challenges met. Yes, new problems and issues have crystallized – knowledge commodification, the concentration of power in Big Tech and acute geopolitical tensions among them – but making these visible and outlining their ramifications is step one in the process of meeting them. Strange’s deep sense of history is also of value here, given the scale and scope of problems the world has recovered from over the twentieth century. Strange did not give up hope, even if on occasion it faced some hard knocks. This conference is testament to the enduring quality of her work, legacy and ideas, and to their future use in the cause of advancing the human condition. Which of course is exactly how Strange would have wanted us to proceed.