GEOTRADE

Project description

GEOTRADE

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.

1. Geopoliticized trade measures:

We leverage data from the Global Trade Alert dataset to study which trade measures are motivated by security considerations. Moreover, we examine whether countries impose more restrictive trade measures on geopolitically distant countries. So far, we have written two papers on this topic:

a. Andreas Dür (2024) Democracies, Non‐Democracies, and the Geopoliticization of Trade Policy.

b. Young Jun Choi and Andreas Dür (2025) Trading with the Enemy? Geopolitics and the Choice of Trade Measures.

2. Business interests and the geopoliticization of trade:

How do firms and business associations respond to the geopoliticization of trade? What drives some business actors to champion a security narrative while others resist it? We address these questions through analysis of written submissions to trade consultations and in-depth interviews with business stakeholders. Again, we currently have two working papers dealing with these questions:

a. Andreas Dür, Gemma Mateo and Lorane Visart (2024) Geopolitics Meets Domestic Interests: The EU and European Economic Security.

b. Denis Anwar and Andreas Dür (2025) Geopolitics or Economics? Business Lobbying Amid Security Concerns.

3. The changing trade narrative:

Political elites increasingly frame trade policy in terms of national security. What explains this use of a security narrative in trade? We analyze a novel text corpus of government speeches and press releases from 30 countries across the globe between 2016 and 2025 and use large language models to classify these texts. We aim to expand on this text corpus, integrating also parliamentary debates, party press releases and newspaper reports. Currently, we have one working paper on this topic:

a. Andreas Dür, Gemma Mateo and Mehmet Yavuz (2025) Trade Shocks and the Security Narrative in Trade Policy.

4. The consequences of the geopoliticization of trade for trade flows:

The geopoliticization of trade should also lead to a reorientation of trade flows. For example, we might see a shift in trade away from geopolitical adversaries and toward allies. We use detailed bilateral trade data to investigate under which conditions we see such a realignment of trade flows. The details still have to be decided at this stage. We expect to start on this aspect of the project soon.

5. Public opinion and the liberal international order:

The geopoliticization of trade is one of the challenges that the liberal international order confronts. This part of the project analyses how the public responds to this challenge. It will probably focus on non-Western countries to see which aspects of the liberal international order find support and which do not. Empirically, we will rely on experiments in surveys fielded in several non-Western countries to answer these questions. The details still have to be decided at this stage. We expect to start work on this aspect of the project in the fall of 2025.

Research design

The first part of the project will assess variation in the extent of geopoliticization of trade policy across pairs of countries, types of trade policy measures used, and industries. Building on this aggregate analysis, we will then study the inputs into the policy process by exploring the stances of citizens and business associations. This part of the project will focus on six jurisdictions: China, the EU, India, Mexico, Turkey, and the U.S. In a third step, we will comparatively assess 24 cases of geopoliticization in these six jurisdictions. This will allow us to investigate which actors, if any, made security-related claims, and to analyse variation in the politics of geopoliticization across countries with distinct political institutions. Finally, we will analyse the consequences of the geopoliticization of trade policy for trade flows.

Policy relevance

While GEOTRADE’s main purpose is to contribute to scholarly debates on the linkage of trade and security, improving our knowledge of the geopoliticization of trade is also of great importance to discussions outside academia. For example, geopoliticization likely contributes to the end of the liberal international order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. The project then can help to understand what the new international order will look like, to what extent this shift will be accompanied by interstate conflicts, and what impact the shift will have on the distribution of wealth both between and within states. In this way, GEOTRADE should also enable better policy decisions in a turbulent world.

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