Short Abstract

Great-power rivalry is reshaping development via geoeconomic power projection. This panel looks at how and with what consequences middle-income countries are adjusting development strategies in response.

Description

Growing great-power rivalry raises urgent questions about how geopolitics affects development strategies and trajectories. Geopolitical fragmentation has increased the use of geoeconomic instruments such as trade barriers, sanctions, export controls, ‘friendshoring’, and the ‘de-risking’ of transnational supply chains more broadly, while international trade and production networks are subject to rising uncertainty and instability. For middle income countries, a long-standing concern has been the possibility of getting ‘stuck’ in a middle income trap (Kang & Paus, 2020; Raj-Reichert, 2020), necessitating a broad set of strategic industrial policies to offset or overcome such slowdowns (Behuria & Sumner, 2025). These concerns are heightened as powerful states employ economic statecraft and increasingly naked power in pursuit of geostrategic advantage (Moisio & Paasi, 2013; Sparke, 2018).

A rich and growing literature has emerged to analyse how transnational value chains and production networks are shifting and changing under these renewed geopolitical pressures (e.g. Gong et al., 2022; Hess & Horner, 2024; Pavlínek, 2024; Yeung, 2024), but only few studies have explored these issues with the specific challenges of middle income economies in mind (e.g. Bril-Mascarenhas et al., 2025). With great powers competing to control the key technologies shaping this more geostrategic process of globalisation (Schindler & Rolf, 2025; Selwyn et al., 2025), we invite submissions that ask how, to what extent, and with what consequences middle income countries are adjusting their national development strategies and industrial policies, and, crucially, how this affects what we know about middle income growth slowdowns.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
Propose paper