Etel Solingen
  • August 19, 2025

  • Honor recognizes the UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of political science for lifetime achievements

    • -----

Etel Solingen, UC Irvine political science Distinguished Professor and Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace Studies, has received the Emerging Markets Inspiration Conference Lifetime Achievement Award from the Stockholm Business School. The top prize recognizes the UC Irvine professor for her pioneering work on global value chains (global supply chains) in the emerging field of geoeconomics.

Solingen immersed herself in this new research frontier over a decade ago, well before Covid-19 and U.S.-China relations brought the topic to the fore. By 2017, she received a $718,350 grant from UCOP’s Laboratory Fees Research Program to launch a UCI module on global value chains and geopolitics. This was UCI’s component of a Collaborative Research and Training Program with UCSD, UCB, UCLA and Lawrence Livermore Labs totaling over $3.7 million.

One product of that project was a collaborative volume with faculty and graduate students from around the UC system and international experts, Geopolitics, Supply Chains and International Relations of East Asia, published by Cambridge University Press. Several of her Ph.D. students went on to write doctoral dissertations on that topic.

Solingen was the lead author of “Rising Risks to Global Value Chains” for  the authoritative Global Value Chain Development Report: Beyond Production, published by the World Trade Organization, Asian Development Bank, Research Institute for Global Value Chains at China’s University of International Business and Economics, Japan’s Institute of Developing Economies, and China’s Development Research Foundation. She was awarded the Richard Holbrooke Prize from the American Academy in Berlin for further research on the emerging geoeconomics of the U.S.-EU-China triangle.

Solingen’s earlier work had already stood out in a different field of inquiry, pioneering the theoretical understanding of why some states acquired nuclear weapons while others renounced them. Her book Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, acclaimed as the first systematic analysis connecting political economy and nuclear choices, received the American Political Science Association's (formerly Woodrow Wilson) Award for best book across all political science fields, and separately, the Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Award. The National Academy of Sciences awarded her the 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award for her innovative basic research on the risk of nuclear war.

Solingen was president of the International Studies Association (2012-13), the largest association in this field, and the recipient of the Susan Strange Professorship at the London School of Economics; the Distinguished Scholar award in International Security at the International Studies Association; the Lim Chong Yah Professorship at the National University of Singapore; the Celia Moh Professorial Chair at Singapore Management University; the MacArthur Foundation Award on Peace and International Cooperation; the Social Science Research Council-Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship on Peace and Security; a Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Irvine's Academic Senate and an APSA Excellence in Mentorship Award, among others. Her other books include Regional Orders at Century's Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy; Comparative Regionalism; Industrial Policy, Technology, and International Bargaining; edited volumes on Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation and Scientists and the State, and many articles in leading journals. She is chief editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements Series on Globalization and Supply Chains, serves as chair of UCLA Burkle Center's Faculty Advisory Board, and previously as chair of the Steering Committee of the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

 

Related News Items

Archive

Connect with us:

© UC Irvine School of Social Sciences – 3151 Social Sciences Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697-5100 – 949.824.2766