Lingbo Zhao has received the Raymond E. Lombra and Roberta Lombra Outstanding Graduate Research Award to recognize her solo-authored “Global Value Chains and Corporate Opposition to Sanctions,” in International Studies Quarterly.
There is an enormous literature on when, why, and how states sanction each other, and on how target states work to evade sanctions. There is also an enormous literature on the specific design-principles influencing whether sanctions are successful at changing target state behavior. Lingbo’s article is the first ever to look at international economic sanctions from the perspective of firms. This is critically important because states do not trade with each other, corporations in one country trade with corporations in other countries. Increasingly, corporations “trade” with subsidiaries of their own corporation located in other countries. Ever since China joined the WTO in the early 2000s, multinational corporations have redistributed their supply- and distribution-chains around the world. Thus, the global value chains firms have constructed are directly affected when home state governments sanction states where firms have located their value chains. In democracies where lobbying of government is allowed, corporations lobby to influence the design of sanctions in ways to insulate their value chains from the negative consequences of sanctions.
Using complex datasets describing corporate value chains and characterizing who pays for lobbying in American politics, Lingbo designed a study to link corporate lobbying and sanctions. Lingbo’s findings are literally a first of their kind. An entirely new approach to international political economy is evolving that embeds global value chains in explanations of international economic/political behavior. Lingbo is at the cutting edge of this new approach.
International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) certainly is a prestigious publication outlet. It is the flagship journal of the International Studies Association, the largest academic association of scholars of international studies. The association’s annual conference hosts around 10,000 scholars each year, and global membership (and thus readership of the flagship journal) is in the high hundreds of thousands.
