State Role in the Post-Pandemic Market of Ideas

How have pandemic and political crises affected patterns of knowledge exchange within innovation systems, within and across national borders?

We find the convergence of cross-national military, political, and health crises has forced a reconsideration of epistemic flows in the global economy. Knowledge is power, and critical for technological development. Scholarship in just the past decade has advanced from technology transfer, then to knowledge economies, and recently to innovation in cross-border value chains. Currently, policy makers have joined the conversation, crafting domestic controls over knowledge flows in global supply chains.

Our subject is the state role in territorial innovation systems in the post-pandemic world. How has knowledge embedded in technology affected the structure, content and the redirection of supply chains? How will national constraints affect information exchange within multi-national firms (MNCs) across borders, and globally among major MNCs in similar strategic sectors. Do emerging state policies on global knowledge sharing reflect return to an earlier connectivity, or a new division into politically defined spheres of influence? How will epistemic security affect the reconstruction of global or regional supply chains?

What captures our interest is the role of the state in the reconstructed global market environment, and in local socio-economic development. We welcome national or regional case studies, as well as theoretical papers with clear empirical relevance, on global value chains, epistemic security, and innovation. We invite critical assessment of epistemic networks in authoritarian or liberal capitalism, and of the role of the neo-developmental state in post-pandemic promotion of global value chains.