My research examines why global governance has become more institutionally dense yet less capable of responding to the crises that fragment it. I develop the concept of negative governance residues: durable constraints generated by unresolved crises that accumulate over time and reduce future coordination capacity across domains such as climate, trade, security, and technology. 

Through a framework I call the Crisis Cascade, I show that sequential responses to shocks—from financial meltdowns to pandemics—tend to prune connections, graft parallel institutions, and produce a topological trap based on which governance becomes increasingly fragmented. 

This work sits at the intersection of Earth System Governance, comparative political economy, and historical analysis, with a focus on how failures propagate across regimes and scales.

Empirically, I investigate these dynamics through three pillars: (1) crisis cascades and global governance topology, (2) state capitalism and emerging power strategies (especially Brazil, China, and other BRICS), and (3) food regimes and the political economy of agribusiness. 

I use comparative historical analysis, process tracing, elite interviews, and network methods to trace how governance residues constrain decarbonization pathways, digital sovereignty (AI governance), and regional cooperation. 

My future research operationalizes these insights through a Residual Fragility Index and comparative studies of buffering capacities in regional architectures such as CELAC, BRICS+, and the Pacific Alliance, with special attention to Mexico and Latin America within a fragmented global order.

A preprint outlining this framework is available as do Vale (2026), The Topological Trap in the 21st Century: How Crisis Cascades Reshape Global Governance, SocArXiv, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/g6kau_v1

I use network analysis to study how countries relate to each other through trade and geography. Instead of asking whether the world is becoming more integrated or more fragmented, I measured four specific features of the international network over time. I found that the system reorganized into three expansive, consolidated zones: a universal trade core, a vast Afro-Asian super-bloc, and a resilient European institutional fortress. This structure reflects a move away from a buffered, multi-cluster system toward a tripolar configuration where shocks are no longer dampened by small peripheral groups but are instead funneled directly between mega-blocs. For a more detailed discussion about this research, click here to be directed to the project's webpage.

These observations are based on the analysis of global networks of states and international organizations, comprising up to 201 countries and 346 international organizations (a maximum of 547 nodes). These global actors form the basis of networks containing more than 24,000 unique connections. The three network graphs below, created using Gephi 0.10.1, visualize these actors organized by clusters in 2000, 2007, and 2014. These networks effectively map the negative residues of two pivotal crises: the security-driven shifts following the War on Terror and the structural fragmentation following the 2008 Great Recession. These network nodes and edges were constructed based on two dataset of The Correlates of War Project: International Organization (v3.0), and International Trade, 1870-2014 (v4.0). Preliminary observation of the data suggest the following: 

• Regionalism is no longer a buffer: regional blocs are instruments through which vulnerability is reorganized and amplified;

• Regional blocs differ systematically in their capacity to absorb and transmit crises;

• The variety of regionalisms restructures global topology: highly cohesive blocs (e.g., EU, ASEAN) concentrate dense internal ties, while less cohesive blocs (e.g., SADC, Mercosur) remain weakly integrated and externally dependent; and

• The result is asymmetric vulnerability: some regions amplify shocks internally, whereas others are more exposed to disruptions transmitted through external hubs.