International economic law faces unprecedented upheaval. The immediate catalyst is the current US administration’s overt challenge to the foundations of the international trade regime, whose eventual outcome remains unpredictable. This challenge unfolds against a background of deeper shifts in international economic relations driven, in substantial part, by the rise of geopolitical competition and conflict. Policymakers and researchers have turned their attention to this phenomenon, leading to a proliferation of publications and conferences. Alongside international trade and investment, the ‘return of geopolitics’ impacts international finance (IF), a development that has also attracted growing scholarly attention. Research on this topic, however, has so far been fragmented, with scholars often working in silos without a common conceptual framework, community, or clear sense that the phenomena they research form part of an overarching trend of great relevance to international economic law.
In April 2025, the 35th Sokol Colloquium on Private International Law at the University of Virginia School of Law brought together an international group of scholars working on multiple areas at the intersection of IF and geopolitics. The event included scholars working on US–China financial relations, financial sanctions, international auditing standards, European financial regulation, environment, social, and governance standards, financial technology, sovereign debt contracts, and financial market infrastructures—areas all affected by geopolitics, but with historically specialized and distinct research communities. The group predominantly comprised legal scholars, but also representatives from political science and accounting.
Our collective goals were to advance understanding of the impact of geopolitics on the international financial system and its regulation, to overcome the prior fragmentation of research on this topic, to bridge divides across issue areas, disciplines, and regions, and to stimulate further research on this topic. This Special Issue, to be published in two parts, assembles selected papers from the Colloquium.
The rest of this Editorial will, first, frame the project by providing fundamental conceptual pointers on IF, geopolitics, and geoeconomics. It will then discuss the papers included in this Issue, highlighting their central arguments and their contributions to the overall project. Another Editorial will appear in the next issue, discussing the papers included in Part II and outlining overall conclusions.