Nikhil Kalyanpur

This course is available on the MSc in International Political Economy, MSc in International Political Economy (LSE and Sciences Po) and MSc in International Political Economy (Research). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

All International Relations (IR4) optional courses at LSE are Controlled Access and require an application via LfY. Students must include a statement in their LfY application of no more than 200 words explaining their interest in the course and its relevance to their academic and career goals.

Application deadline: 12:00 noon, Friday 26 September 2025.

Notification of outcome: by 12:00 noon, Monday 29 September 2025.

After this date, students should consult the MSc Course Availability Spreadsheet for remaining spaces on IR4-level courses. 

For further details, see the LSE Selecting Courses webpage in the first instance or contact IR.Programmes@lse.ac.uk only if necessary.

All students are required to obtain permission from the Teacher Responsible by completing the online application form linked to course selection on LSE for You. Admission is not guaranteed.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access) and demand is typically high.

It is impossible to survey today’s international order without concluding firms are defining actors. This course asks not just how global business is shaped by politics and regulation, but how firms themselves shape the rules, institutions, and power structures within which they operate. Students will leave with a set of analytical tools that can hopefully be applied to any firm, in any sector, in any political context mixing tools drawn from political economy, international relations, and management strategy.

The course is structured in two halves. The first five weeks build the conceptual foundations including theories of what a firm is and who controls it; why firms internationalise and what political resources they carry with them when they do. Then we analyze how IR expects global rules to form before examining the structural and instrumental tools the state has to influence and arguably even dictate those decisions.

The second half of the course dives into the challenges the global economy poses for firms. It starts by asking what constrains firms from using their political power. Next, we analyze the conditions under which firms are going to need to seek out political connections, not to further their ends but simply to protect themselves. Finally, the last three weeks dive into how firms can and cannot manage three defining areas of the global economy that inevitably shape their bottom lines: supply-chains, economic statecraft, and climate change. 

This is an MSc-level course, and it is taught accordingly. The readings draw on the best available scholarship across political economy, sociology, management, and economics. The cases — drawn from the Harvard Business School catalogue and from live coverage in the Financial Times — are chosen not because they are inspirational but because they are analytically demanding. We will analyze situations where the political and business logics are both visible and in tension, where there were genuine strategic choices available, and where the outcome was neither obvious nor inevitable.

Students who engage seriously with this course will finish it with a richer understanding of how the global economy actually works, and with the analytical vocabulary to contribute to both research and policy conversations that are trying to make sense of it.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

10 lectures and 10 seminars on the following topics:

1. Theories of the firm
2. Why Firms go Global
3. Global Rules of the Game
4. The Structural Power of Business
5. The Instrumental Power of Business
6. Constraints on the Firm
7. When do Firms Need Protection
8. Managing Supply-Chains
9. Managing Economic Statecraft
10. Managing the Green Transition

Students will have two formatives.

First, a Peer Critique.

Second, students can choose to outline their presentations and submit them two weeks prior to their summative presentation.

• Fairfield, T. (2015). Structural power in comparative political economy: perspectives from policy formulation in Latin America. Business and Politics, 17(3), 411-441.
• Mosley, L. "Room to move: International financial markets and national welfare states." International organization 54.4 (2000): 737-773.
• Cory, J., Lerner, M., & Osgood, I. (2021). Supply chain linkages and the extended carbon coalition. American Journal of Political Science, 65(1), 69-87.
• Ponte, S., Gereffi, G., & Raj-Reichert, G. (2019). Introduction to the handbook on global value chains. In Handbook on global value chains (pp. 1-27). Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Amengual, M., Distelhorst, G., & Tobin, D. (2020). Global purchasing as labor regulation: The missing middle. ILR review, 73(4), 817-840.
• Johns, L., & Wellhausen, R. L. (2016). Under one roof: Supply chains and the protection of foreign investment. American Political Science Review, 110(1), 31-51.
• Schmitz, L. (2026). Hierarchies of Adaptation: Corporate Power in Economic Statecraft (No. gwuce_v1). Center for Open Science.
• Farrell, H., & Newman, A. L. (2019). Weaponized interdependence: How global economic networks shape state coercion. International security, 44(1), 42-79.
• Early, B. R., & Peterson, T. M. (2022). Does punishing sanctions busters work? Sanctions enforcement and US trade with sanctioned states. Political Research Quarterly, 75(3), 782-796.
• Wellhausen, R. L., & Zhu, B. (2024). Exiting Russia. Technical report, Working Paper.
• Verdier, P. H. (2022). Sanctions overcompliance: what, why, and does it matter?. NCJ Int'l L., 48, 471.

Presentation (30%).

Case analysis / study (70%, 2000 words).