Join Louis W. Pauly, J. Stefan Dupré Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, for a presentation with the Political Economy Working Group.
This seminar provides a summary and extension of themes covered in his nebook, Insuring States in an Uncertain World: Towards the Collaborative Government of Complex Risks, Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Of the sectors comprising global capital markets, insurance has received relatively little attention from scholars of international politics. New social conventions and financial instruments arising from the invention of probabilistic reasoning and the discovery of risk began to spread around the world only a few centuries ago. They disciplined speculative impulses, promoted economic development and integration, and fostered political transformation and societal resilience. Over time, the logic and language of insurance proved useful in defending and expanding the state's fiscal authority, as well as in justifying the pooling of sovereignty in nascent federations. On this point, pioneering research in political sociology demonstrated that, in the modern era, the insurance industry had come to function as a key instrument of governance in industrial and post-industrial societies, effectively prioritising market-liberal values over other social values. During the twentieth century, leading states appealed to the logic of risk mutualisation and insurance as they designed some of the institutional architecture of the regional and global economic order. Limited co-insurance facilities were supplemented at points of emergency by massive ad hoc reinsurance arrangements that combined private and public interests and resources. Today, the very idea of such policy instruments attracts mounting resistance.
When the siren song of self-reliance once again re-emerges from governments overwhelmed by populist, mercantilist, and militarist pressures, the risks of systemic fragmentation grow. At the same time, the causes of fairness and sustainability appear to be in retreat worldwide. In such a context, especially at the frontier where evident global risks meet mounting uncertainty, it is worth thinking more deeply and pragmatically about how new forms of insurance might help promote global stability and distributive justice.
Speaker Bio
Louis W. Pauly is the J. Stefan Dupré Distinguished Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science of the University of Toronto, where he served as Department Chair, Director of the Centre for International Studies, and Founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011 and held the Karl W. Deutsch Professorship at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in 2014. In 2015, he received the Distinguished Scholar Award in International Political Economy from the International Studies Association. A former editor of the journal International Organization, earlier in his career he served on the staff of the International Monetary Fund and of the Royal Bank of Canada.
He is a graduate of Cornell University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, New York University, and Fordham University. His publications include Insuring States in an Uncertain World: Towards the Collaborative Government of Complex Risks (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Who Elected the Bankers? Surveillance and Control in the World Economy (Cornell University Press, 1997), and many other books, journal articles, and book chapters.
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