To inquire about any of these projects, please contact our Project Coordinator Sarah Mesich at sarahstokes@tamu.edu or email economicstatecraft@tamu.edu.
Database of Contemporary Economic Statecraft
This project is an ongoing effort to collect a detailed picture of economic statecraft episodes from 2013-2023. The dataset breaks down events across 17 different aspects including sender and target states, government and non-governmental actors, catalytic events, and associated security externalities. Current efforts are centered around developing a model to accelerate the data collection process leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. Future efforts include expanding the base dataset to deliberately include episodes from other national contexts to round out the dataset. This extension work would also support a comparative analysis of economic statecraft across a diverse array of domestic political economic institutional contexts (e.g. Japan, Germany, France, UK, China, India, Russia, South Korea, and others)
Conceptualizing Security Externalities
This project showcases a typology of security externalities that specifies the full range of ways by which economic interaction may be used to generate security consequences for states. The objective is to provide a more precise vocabulary and analytical framework for thinking about the relationship between economics and national security. Doing so illuminates the strategic consequences of various economic interactions and specifies the mechanisms states can use to pursue their grand strategic objectives. The resulting paradigm greatly improves our field’s understanding of precisely how economics relates to national security.
Principles and Recommendations for US Economic Statecraft
This multi-year research effort elucidates foundational principles and the key assumptions that inform US efforts to engage in economic statecraft. The project examines such assumptions through empirical validation, compiling a novel dataset of recent economic statecraft cases to evaluate what does and does not work in contemporary economic statecraft. This effort is designed to help forge a common lexicon, shared concepts, and an overarching approach to doctrine that can inform deliberate strategy and planning processes across the multitude of US government departments and agencies; equipping any office utilizing economic tools of national power in this important and rapidly emerging arena of competition.
Mapping and Organizing Economic Statecraft Authorities in the US Government
This project entails the compilation of a comprehensive collection of organizational charts identifying economic statecraft authorities resident across 36 government departments and agencies including the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and State, among others. It aims to produce a complete picture of the actors, strategies, and policies the US government can utilize within the arena of economic statecraft. This work complements and advances some of the principles for strategic organization that emerged as part of our project on Principles and Recommendations for US Economic Statecraft. This work informs a framework for cohering disparate authorities and scattered capabilities into functional communities of interest.
University Research Security
This project seeks to continue the conversation about security considerations for the university research and development (R&D) enterprise. In the context of the current technology competition between the US and China, this sort of original, innovative, and sustainable policy-focused research exploring the relationship between academia and government is vital to protecting US national security and the innovation system.
Globalization and Security
This project has produced two related lines of research on globalization: a) how global standard-setting and the creation and maintenance of international institutions generate structural power for states, and b) how the tradeoffs between productivity and security might be mitigated on a spectrum of isolation and integration when determining how to pursue/produce critical and emerging technologies.
