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.

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 networks contain more than 24,000 connections among the actors represented in the analysis. The three network graphs below, created using Gephi 0.10.1, visualize the structure of the global multiplex network and its detected communities in 2000, 2007, and 2014.

The analysis examines how the topology of the international system changed across a period marked by major systemic disruptions, particularly the security transformations associated with the War on Terror and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Rather than treating these events as direct causes of the observed network changes, the analysis investigates the structural transformations that accompanied this period and the forms of systemic vulnerability they reveal.

The networks were constructed using two datasets from the Correlates of War (COW) Project: International Organization (v3.0) and International Trade, 1870–2014 (v4.0). Bilateral trade and IGO co-membership relationships are combined to construct multiplex network snapshots for 2000, 2007, and 2014.

The analysis suggests four principal patterns:

• Regionalism does not uniformly function as a buffer against systemic shocks; instead, regional structures can reorganize the channels through which vulnerability is transmitted.

• Regional blocs differ in their structural capacity to absorb and transmit shocks.

• Different forms of regionalism contribute to changes in global network topology: internally connected blocs such as the EU and ASEAN exhibit Type I vulnerability, while Mercosur and SADC approximate Type II vulnerability, characterized by weaker internal trade intensity and greater exposure to external connections.

• The resulting structure produces asymmetric vulnerability: some regions possess dense internal channels through which shocks may propagate once introduced, whereas others are more exposed to disruptions transmitted through external hubs.

A single-authored Research Note developing this argument is forthcoming in Politics & Policy under the title “From Web to Fortress: Network Topology, Regionalism, and Systemic Vulnerability in the International System, 2000–2014."