Extant studies on cross-border venture capital (VC) investment predominantly focus on how country-level formal institutions impact the flow of VCs across borders, but the potential role of country-level sentiments in this process has received less attention. Drawing upon the trust literature, we explore how home country political sentiment affects cross-border VC investment. Using data on Chinese VCs’ cross-border investments from 2000 to 2021, we find that home country political sentiment positively affects the amount of cross-border VC investment. Government VC (GVC) and connected VC (through sentiment transmission) positively, while investor managerial team education and investor host country experience (through sentiment suppression) negatively, moderate the influence of home country political sentiment.

Population is a key factor of national power. Declining fertility rates, especially in major economies, are reshaping global power dynamics by shrinking workforces amidst aging populations. In response, more nations are adopting techno-natalist policies, promoting reproductive technologies (“reprotech”) like IVF to increase birth rates. Advances in genetic embryo selection, gene editing, in vitro gametogenesis, and artificial wombs could further enhance these policies by improving birth rates, health, and human capital. This article examines current and emerging reprotechnologies, the policy landscape, socioeconomic and geopolitical implications, and future research directions. By shaping national and global gene pools, reprotech policies and practices offer a paradigmatic case of gene–culture coevolution. If these technologies prove safe and effective, nations that embrace them are likely to gain geopolitical and evolutionary advantages over those that do not.

This article tries to explain the flourishing of geopolitical alternatives to the nation-state form and foreign policies organized around giant militarized power blocs during the two decades after World War II. The first section presents these new approaches to organizing the world. The first set of alternatives consisted of ideas and practices of the federation and the amalgamation of states into larger political units. These included Senghor’s vision of a postcolonial federation in which France and its former colonies would be equals; Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa; and various short-lived amalgamations of states, including the Mali Federation and the United Arab Republic. These new geopolitical alternatives also included nonalignment, which originated with Jawaharlal Nehru of India and culminated with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia but also encompassed Ireland between 1957 and 1961 and France in the early Fifth Republic. One of the distinctive features of this conjuncture is that these experiments were not limited to the global peripheries, colonies, and recently decolonized states, but also characterized certain nonhegemonic European core countries. The second section examines a set of four factors in this period that created an opportunity structure or space of possibilities for geopolitical experimentation: (1) late colonialism; (2) the Cold War; (3) the character of decolonization; and (4) the United Nations. The coexistence of these factors opened spaces of maneuver and autonomy for a flourishing of geopolitical imaginaries. The final section discusses possible reasons for the end of this period of experimentation.

The rise of antagonism between the German and Czech nationalist activists in the mid-19th century has been neither clearly explained nor convincingly dated. Although this is a topic closely linked to the history of nationalism, the state of research has paradoxically been misguided by the nationalist approach adopted by historians analyzing it. The reason is that nationalism was not the cause but just one response to a greater phenomenon. The aim of the article is therefore to clarify the German-Czech relationship in the broader context of European history and the history of international relations using the perspective of geopolitics and security. As it claims, it was not cultural, linguistic, or constitutional issues but the fear of external threats that caused the mutual distrust of political activists that led to hostility and conflicting policies. Under the impact of international events and within the context of their relations to other international actors this process originated in 1839 by the latest. During subsequent years it developed rapidly and became obvious during the 1848 revolutions. The article thus reveals that this year did not represent the beginning but merely another chapter in a process that had begun nearly a decade earlier.

This introductory article challenges foundational assumptions that structure how international legal theory conceptualizes “the Global.” The prevailing approach remains anchored in a Eurocentric legacy that conflates the earth with a geometrically spherical, chronometrically linear, and cartographically fixed model of space and time. This triad has rendered “the Global” an ostensibly objective terrain—embodied by an iconic World Map of states that is presumably atheoretical and transhistorical. I argue this is a form of “misplaced concreteness,” which constrains international legal thought as it confronts increasingly fluid and non-contiguous patterns of global ordering that have become difficult to visualize via the reigning cartographic imaginary. Further, it ignores how “the Global” was constructed by multiple and intersecting types of power, which together manifested demarcations, borders, territories and states as proclaimed mimetic reflections of planetary reality. As contemporary challenges—ranging from e.g. climate change to cyber governance—create trans-territorial or planetary scales of consequence, time is ripe to unfold international legal theory beyond the legacy of a priori conceptualization. Accordingly, the special issue encourages bottom-up, practice-oriented approaches, inviting international lawyers to explore how global spatiality and temporality are actively (re)produced across diverse legal contexts—from mobility regimes and global value chains to counterterrorism forums and planetary systems. Rather than treating “the Global” as a fixed totality or singular map, this special issue reframes it as a historically engineered concept, shaped by ongoing practices of geo-political, geo-economic and legal world-making.

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, has the potential to transform Pakistan’s economy through economic cooperation, large-scale infrastructure projects and other forms of investment. Many observers fear, however, that the CPEC will become the “New East India Company,” effectively turning Pakistan into a Chinese client state. Through extensive interviews with key stakeholders in Pakistan as well as documentary research, we weigh the arguments on both sides of this debate. While the CPEC has the potential to become what many fashionably term a “game changer” for Pakistan, economic and social problems will likely prevent the country from fully realizing the CPEC’s transformative potential. On the other hand, the CPEC seems likely to expand the China–Pakistan relationship beyond its historical military and security emphasis to bring substantial social and economic benefits to Pakistan, while the complexity of the Pakistan case makes comprehensive “colonization” unlikely.

One century ago, US Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes made the first official statement regarding US policy toward Antarctica by declaring it would not recognise sovereignty in areas that could not actually be settled. The Hughes Doctrine formalised US opposition to countries dividing Antarctica into sovereign territory, a doctrine that has become the bedrock upon which subsequent US decisions toward the region were built. This paper gives a broad overview of the development of US policy toward Antarctica, starting with the Hughes Doctrine, including the period when the United States secretly considered making its own claim to sovereign territory before deciding to champion then maintain the multilateral, sovereign-free region based on the Antarctic Treaty in order to achieve its national goals. This paper also reviews how the policies are working today and considers the significant challenges and costs the United States would incur if it altered its century-old policy toward Antarctica.

To solve contemporary humanitarian, poverty, and climate crises we need to involve new or more actors and come up with innovative forms of collaborations, partnerships, finance, and solutions adapted to local circumstances. This is one of many reasons for growing interest in South–South security cooperation (SSSC). This concluding article seeks to draw parallels between the growing literature on SSSC and the broader body of literature on South–South cooperation to explore how and to what extent they enrich each other and further our understanding of South–South engagements. The article highlights the heterogeneous and relational nature of SSSC and points to a two-speed global South where larger, (geo)politically more potent and richer countries in the global South assist or export models to, or intervene in, smaller, politically and economically less powerful states. It also highlights internal power dynamics in the global South and carves out the complex ways in which traditional, historically informed power relations also affect the actions of Southern actors.

Over the twentieth century, various types of synthetic fibers were invented, mass-produced, and widely distributed across the globe. This article analyzes the political power that was exercised to generate this innovation in musical instrument industries. Synthetics also contributed to the growth of the global garment, textile, sporting goods, and military industries, among many others. This article specifically discusses the politics behind the transition from the use of silk to nylon during the World War II and Cold War eras. Modern cultural industry's tendency in the mid- to late twentieth century to favor synthetic and other “man-made” fibers over natural ones was importantly shaped by political-economic—and political-ecological—conflicts between the United States and Japan, especially during World War II. These conflicts prepared the ground for the rise of global capitalism's synthetic regime.

As part of the “Solar Geoengineering: Ethics, Governance, and International Politics” roundtable, this essay examines dilemmas arising in exploring nonideal scenarios of solar geoengineering deployment. Model-based knowledge about solar geoengineering tells us little about possible climatic responses to malicious, self-interested, or competing deployments, and even less about political or cultural responses outside of the climate system. The essay argues that policy for governing solar geoengineering in a world of multiple states and uneven power relations requires a broader base for solar geoengineering knowledge, beyond that offered by modeling, and a better understanding of nonideal scenarios, especially those motivated by logics beyond reducing climate impacts. It highlights the interests of military and security actors in such knowledge, and the potential for it to facilitate securitization and further reduce the prospect of multilateral collaborative governance of geoengineering in the public interest. The essay concludes that further research can be ethically justified but must be comprehensively governed.