Project Geotrade

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The project aims to find out what motives are driving the contemporary geopoliticization of trade policy. When do governments actually pursue security policy objectives? And when is security policy merely a pretext for achieving trade policy objectives, such as protectionism for specific domestic industries? To shed light on governments’ motives in geopoliticizing trade policy, the project will study which trade policy measures are legitimized via national security, which actors engage in lobbying on these policies, how decision-makers position themselves with respect to these policies, and how public opinion reacts to geopoliticization. A particularly innovative aspect of GEOTRADE is that the research will not be limited to individual countries. Instead, it will explicitly study variation in the geopoliticisation of trade policy across countries. After establishing patterns for all countries, the project will zoom in on six actors, namely China, the European Union, India, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States. GEOTRADE, however, will not only investigate why trade policy is geopoliticized but also to what extent this geopoliticization of trade policy contributes to the achievement of security policy goals. In this regard, the project expects that domestic actors often lead states to rely on ineffective measures. Many potentially effective measures negatively impact the economic interests of domestic actors, which is why they try to either stop them altogether or to attain loopholes that mitigate the effects of the measures.

Project website:  geotrade.sbg.ac.at
Project coordinator: Univ.-Prof. Andreas Dür, Mag. MA PhD