Next date: | JenTower; Jena | Workshop

Fragmented Globalization: The Contested Governance of Global Capitalism

The workshop is organized by subproject B08 and will take place on November 20 and 21 at JenTower and hybrid.

Trade conflicts, sanctions, and company bans have placed questions of economic interdependence at the center of political and academic debate. The Trump administration's tariff offensive and escalating US-China rivalry, the looming climate crisis, and a growing economic nationalism are increasingly challenging the liberal vision of a unified global market. In its place emerges a geoeconomically charged “new state capitalism” that threatens to fragment the world into territorial blocs. Amid these shifts, we observe contradictory firm responses: their strategies oscillate between strategic decoupling and adaptive integration, particularly in high-tech sectors where conflicting pressures from states and markets produce contradictory incentives and fragmented pathways. All these developments have reshaped our thinking about globalization, shifting priorities from integration to fragmentation and from interdependence to strategic autonomy.

The workshop explores the driving forces and consequences of this shift with a focus on the interplay between economic, security, and geopolitical logics. It zooms in on the contested governance of global capitalism across multiple domains: the reconfiguration of global production networks and trade flows; high-tech competition and struggles over technological sovereignty; the role of financial flows and monetary hierarchies; and the politics of infrastructure and strategic connectivity. Rather than analyzing these developments in isolation, the workshop seeks to explore their entanglements and cumulative impact on the current trajectory of global capitalism.

The workshop is organized by the Project B08 “Property Conflicts and State Responses to the Internationalization of Chinese Companies in the US and the EU” as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 294 “Structural Change of Property” (funded by the German Research Foundation) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Program Draft

Thursday, November 20, 2025

6:15 pm – 7:45 pm: Book Presentation by Milan Babic: “Geoökonomie: Anatomie der neuen Weltordnung” (in German, online); comment (Jenny Simon, HWR Berlin) 

8:00 pm: Dinner 

 

Friday, November 21, 2025

9:00 am – 9:30 am: Introduction by Philipp Köncke + Stefan Schmalz (FSU Jena)

9:30 am – 11:00 am: Panel 1: Technological Competition and the Contested Governance of High-Tech Industries

  • Tobias Ten Brink (Constructor University Bremen): China’s Empire-Making and High-Tech Competition: The Case of Chinese Electric Vehicles 
  • Maximilian Meyer (University of Bonn): Technological Sovereignty and US-China Digital Fragmentation
  • Lea Schneidemesser (Goethe-University Frankfurt): The Rise of Chinese Tech-Companies: A Driver of Protectionism?

 

11:00 am – 11:30 am: Coffee break

 

11:30 am – 1:00 pm: Panel 2: Fragmented Global Production Networks? US-China Rivalry, Multiplex Orders, and Firm Competition

  • Christoph Scherrer (University of Kassel): America Second? The US, China and Shifting Power Dynamics in Global Trade 
  • Lukas Linsi (Groningen University) + Nana de Graaff (VU Amsterdam): From the Deglobalization Myth to the Rise of a Multiplex World Order
  • Gale Raj (Bard College Berlin): The Global Race in Semiconductor Industrial Policy

 

1:00 pm – 2:15 pm: Lunch break

 

2:15 pm – 3:45 pm: Panel 3: Beyond Liberal Finance: State Authority, Financial Hierarchies and the New Geopolitics of Money 

  • Johannes Petry (Goethe University Frankfurt): How China’s State-Led Capital Markets Challenge the Global Financial Order 
  • Annina Kaltenbrunner (Leeds University): Subordinate Financialization: Emerging Economies in a Dollar-Dominated World 
  • Andrea Binder (FU Berlin): Outsourcing Empire: International Monetary Power in the Age of Offshore Finance

 

3:45 pm – 4:00 pm: Coffee break

 

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm: Panel 4: The Geoeconomics of Infrastructures and Strategic Connectivity

  • Hans-Jürgen Bieling (University of Tübingen): Geoeconomic Infrastructures: Europe’s Response to the New Triad Competition 
  • Laima Eicke (RIFS, Potsdam University): Polycentric Power, Energy Infrastructure and the Governance of Decarbonization
  • Catalina Renč (Friedrich Schiller University Jena): Global Competition over Digital Infrastructures: Transnational Ownership and Dependencies