Below is an overview of my recently-concluded and on-going projects.
RESHORE
RESHORE (Political Economy of Firms’ Relocation Decisions in Europe) investigates the political dynamics driving European firms to relocate their production away from China. Against a backdrop of intensifying economic nationalism and the geopoliticization of trade and investment policies, corporations find themselves navigating an environment characterized by geopolitical tensions, evolving policy landscapes, and persistent backlash against economic globalization that affect their offshore operations. As part of a broader strategy aimed at countering China’s increasing economic dominance, policy initiatives have been put forth to incentivize firms to “de-risk” from China by relocating production. The overarching goal of these instruments is to mitigate European firms’ potential vulnerabilities across global supply chains, strengthen domestic manufacturing capacity, and address the persistent popular backlash against economic globalization.
Yet, despite the increasing number of policy instruments encouraging relocation and a growing number of European firms shifting their production activities, the political economy of firms’ relocation decisions remains inadequately understood. Moving beyond purely economic considerations, the proposed project provides a novel understanding of firms’ decisions by shedding light on the political drives of firms’ relocation decisions.Theoretically, the project proposes a novel framework that links the geopoliticization of trade and investment policies, policy initiatives, and popular backlash against globalization. It subsequently offers a fresh theoretical perspective on the political economy of relocation and results in a comprehensive understanding of the complex motivations behind firms’ strategic relocation decisions in an increasingly fragmented global economy.
NEUROPOLITICS
Neuropolitics and international relations: An interdisciplinary study to explore micro-origins of international cooperation aims to capture individuals’ neural responses to dynamics of international politics.
The field of international studies has long been interested in understanding individual drivers of political attitudes. A large and growing body of work shed light on individual preferences towards issues such as global governance, human rights and climate change cooperation. Individual-level research in this tradition has increased in the wake of globalization and the growing popular opposition to international cooperative arrangements. Researchers have long been relying on surveys and interviews to collect data on attitudes and attempt to unpack the complex dynamics of individual preferences that ultimately inform the development of policies and interventions to promote cooperation, understanding, and peace among nations. In a novel interdisciplinary study, we propose a new approach to examine individual-level drivers of political preferences by relying on insights from neuroscience and aim to answer the following questions; Under what conditions do individuals maintain their political preferences on international cooperation when presented with counter-evidence? How do they process such conflicting information? We will investigate the neural correlates of maintaining political preferences on international cooperation – in casu, support or opposition to the Paris Climate Agreement – in an EEG laboratory (Study 1; 60 participants) and in a live voting setting (Study 2; 60 participants). We aim to address the knowledge gap on the neuropsychological processes behind individual’s attitudes towards issues involving climate operation and go one step further by focusing on attitude change, and introducing neuroscience to the study of international relations. Our study will contribute to our understanding of how political information about international affairs is processed in the brain, including the cognitive mechanisms involved in decision-making and attitude change.
The project is co-led by Dr. Hanna Poikonen.
PROSPER
PROSPER (Politics of Rule-making, Orchestration of Standards and Private Economic Regulations) was a 2-year project (2019-2021) funded by the European Commission under the European Union Horizon2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship programme. The main objective of the project was to examine the politics of international trade from the perspective of multinational companies (MNCs) and global value chains (GVCs). I primarily sought to understand how and under which conditions MNCs coordinate their political activities across GVCs, how their behavior influence structures of trade governance, and the distributional consequences of international trade at the firm level. Output from the project can be found on my publications page.
Aydin Baris Yildirim 