The classical canon explains the structure of power; these contemporary thinkers explain its newest weapons — networks, chips, data, and regulation.
The classical canon — Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, Kennan — explains the enduring structure of power: who controls the heartland, the rimland, the sea lanes. But the conflicts of the 2020s are being fought with instruments those thinkers never imagined — financial chokepoints, semiconductor supply chains, data-localisation laws, and regulatory standards exported across borders. A new generation of scholars has mapped this terrain, and their work is shaping policy in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing in real time.
This page profiles the contemporary thinkers whose recent work is most worth reading — filtered for rigour and originality rather than media profile. They are the analysts that policymakers and serious students of strategy are actually citing.
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Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman¶
Weaponized interdependence. Farrell and Newman’s term — now standard vocabulary in Washington — for how the hubs of global networks become instruments of coercion. The same plumbing that knits the world together hands whoever sits at its centre a stranglehold: the dollar-clearing system, the SWIFT messaging network, undersea data cables. It is why cutting Russia off from SWIFT in 2022 functioned as a weapon, not merely a sanction. → Read the full profile of Farrell & Newman, the theorists of weaponized interdependence.
Rush Doshi¶
Does China actually have a master plan to displace the United States — or are we pattern-matching onto noise? Doshi answered by reading the Communist Party’s own words in the original Mandarin, and found a deliberate three-phase design — blunt, build, expand — before going on to run China policy on the US National Security Council. → Read the full profile of Rush Doshi, the man who read China’s grand strategy in its own words.
Chris Miller¶
Chips are the new oil — and Miller is the historian who proved it. He traced how the entire digital economy came to rest on a few impossibly narrow choke points: one Taiwanese company, TSMC, fabricates roughly 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and a single Dutch firm, ASML, builds the only machines capable of etching them. → Read the full profile of Chris Miller, the historian who made semiconductor geopolitics mainstream.
Anu Bradford¶
Why does a bloc with no Google, no Amazon, no TikTok still write the rules those companies live by? Bradford’s answer is the Brussels Effect: the EU market is too large to abandon, so its rules on privacy, competition, and AI harden into de facto global standards — the reason cookie-consent banners now follow you across the entire web. → Read the full profile of Anu Bradford, the theorist of regulatory power and digital sovereignty.
Nadège Rolland¶
Most coverage treats the Belt and Road as ports, railways, and debt. Rolland — reading Chinese strategic writing in the original — argues it is something far more ambitious: the scaffolding for a Sinocentric order across Eurasia, a sphere of influence laid in concrete and fibre-optic cable rather than declared outright. → Read the full profile of Nadège Rolland, who read the Belt and Road as grand strategy.
Ketian Zhang¶
Why did China freeze Norwegian salmon imports over a Nobel Prize, and gut South Korean retailers over a missile-defence radar — yet wave through provocations many times larger? Zhang shows that Beijing’s economic punishment is far more selective and calculated than the headlines suggest — a “cautious bully,” not a reflexive one. → Read the full profile of Ketian Zhang, who explained the calculus of Chinese coercion.
Mark Leonard¶
Unpeace — Leonard’s word for the grey zone where states neither make war nor keep peace, but turn the ties between them into weapons. The migrants Belarus funnelled to the EU’s border, the gas Russia switched off, the supply chains quietly throttled: connection itself, he argues, has become the arena of struggle. → Read the full profile of Mark Leonard, the diagnostician of unpeace and the strategic-autonomy debate.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens¶
How a government secures itself at home shapes how it acts abroad. Greitens follows that thread into China’s vast internal-security apparatus — Beijing has at times spent more on domestic “stability maintenance” than on its military — and shows how that machinery is now an export, sold to governments worldwide. → Read the full profile of Sheena Chestnut Greitens, who reads China as a security actor from the inside out.
Also Worth Reading¶
- Stephen Kotkin — Still producing some of the highest-quality work on Russia, authoritarianism, and great-power competition, alongside his ongoing Stalin biography.
- Hal Brands & Michael Beckley — Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China offers a sharp, evidence-based case that the most dangerous phase of US–China rivalry is a near-term window, not a distant peak — a provocative counterpoint to the Thucydides Trap framing.
- Adam Tooze — Economic historian whose work on crisis, finance, and geopolitics (and his widely-read Chartbook) makes him one of the most influential voices on the economics–security intersection.
- Quinn Slobodian — A sharp critic of neoliberal globalisation and its geopolitical consequences; Crack-Up Capitalism traces how market logic fractures and reshapes sovereignty itself.