Applied Geopolitics: Risk Analysis

Reg Priority: MIA Students.

As the impact of politics on markets and business has become clearer to investors, so has the dearth of systematic tools for evaluating and managing political risk. This political risk course fills this gap by providing students with a solid, interdisciplinary foundation for identifying and assessing political risks and for managing and mitigating such risks in a range of markets and sectors.

The course introduces students to political risk analysis risks by exploring key concepts and related frameworks for understanding this phenomenon at the international, country, and sectorial levels respectively: G-ZERO, J-Curve, Geo-technology and state capitalism. The course also equips students with key qualitative and quantitative techniques for doing political risk analysis, including the identification of top risks, fat tails, and red herrings, as well as the construction of political risk indices, models, and game-theory simulations. In addition, these concepts and techniques are further applied to analyzing and forecasting current, real-world problems and business concerns, such as market entry or portfolio investment allocation. These concepts and techniques are further practiced in the course practicums, which include interactive activities that invite students to grapple with the challenges of identifying and forecasting the range of outcomes of current, real-world risks as those come up at the time of the course. In the process, the course explores a range of political-risk topics on the macro- and micro-economic impacts of geopolitics—including issues of international and civil war, international trade, unconventional conflict, and a shifting global political order—as well as of politics at the national and sub-national level, including elections and political transitions, social unrest, the social and political drivers of economic and investment policies, and emerging vs developed markets dynamics.