Call for paper: Geopolitical Trends and Their Impact on Business Management

Geopolitical Trends and Their Impact on Business Management

Dynamics of geopolitical continuities – from shifting global alliances to regional conflicts – are reshaping the business landscape at an unprecedented pace. These dynamics challenge existing management paradigms and constrain leaders to develop new capacities, tactics, and structures to navigate the uncertainty of the international system (Flint, 2006).

This special issue of Management Decision invites conceptual and empirical papers that explore how geopolitical trends (both (a) long-term geopolitical dynamics of continuity, and (b) short-term geopolitical events) influence managerial decision-making, organisational behaviour, strategic planning, and leadership across industries, national borders, and governments (Li et al., 2022; Teece, 2025). It aims to attract multi-disciplinary research drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, including mixed methods, to explicate the historical, socio-political, and geographical factors of geopolitics and its respective implications for management.

The accelerating pace of geopolitical changes of the last years has emerged as critically impacting on organisational strategy, structure, and decision-making. Increasing political volatility, protectionist policies, armed conflicts, and the reconfiguration of global economic power dynamics are actively reshaping the managerial landscape (Hartwell and Zadarozhna, 2024; Vrontis et al., 2024). This special issue aims to bring, amongst others, these key themes from current academic research, exploring how geopolitical trends impact management theory and practice.

A growing body of literature highlights how geopolitical risk – defined as a set of threats posed by political developments to corporate operations – has become central to Foreign Direct Investment (Godsell et al., 2023) and strategic planning (Kobrin, 2017). Firms increasingly integrate geopolitical forecasting into risk management practices to mitigate potential disruptions to supply chains, market access, and capital flows, as demonstrated in recent research on the effect of geopolitical risks on the economy in general (stocks, oil, inflation) (Jawadi et al., 2024).

Not only these long-term dynamics of geopolitical continuities impact management, but short-term geopolitical events such as trade wars, sanctions, transportation obstacles, and regional instability may also have critical impact (He et al., 2024), namely in global supply chains which have been increasingly disrupted. Management literature has responded with models of supply chain resilience that incorporate geopolitical risk assessments and scenario planning (Sheth & Uslay, 2023). Decoupling strategies are also receiving renewed attention as firms reevaluate dependencies on politically sensitive regions, particularly China and its global ambitions (Tse et al., 2024).

The literature provides strong evidence that geopolitical trends are deeply intertwined with management decisions across all levels – from operational risk to strategic planning and leadership development – as, for example, Pringpong et al (2023) demonstrated in their study measuring the impact of geopolitical risk on emerging markets, or Dai et al.’s (2023) analysis on the timing and mode of firm exits from host-country conflict zones.

List of topic areas

Methodological frameworks linking geopolitical trends to managerial approaches and outcomes
The impact of geopolitical risk and its analysis on strategic decision-making
The role of geopolitical literacy in dealing with global challenges from managerial viewpoint
Management direct responses to trade wars, tariffs, transportation disruption, and protectionism
Sector-specific impacts, particularly in energy, defence, cybersecurity, and tech with geopolitical relevance
Company’s leadership behaviour in politically unstable and restrictive environments
How multinational companies navigate global political dynamics and economic cooperation
Talent management and cross-border workforce challenges amid geopolitical shifts
The influence of international policy, regulation, and diplomacy on corporate strategy
Scenario planning, forecasting, and risk assessment tools in volatile environments
Transportations corridors and their vulnerabilities

Submissions Information

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Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.