The New Geoeconomics of Competition Law

Co-organized by Georgetown Law; The Georgetown Institute of International Economic Law (IIEL); and the UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society

About the workshop

Competition law stands at an inflection point that threatens to fundamentally redefine its purpose, methodology, and institutional character. The multilateral trade architecture and the ‘consumer welfare’ consensus, which provided the foundations for competition law and policy, anchored in predictability, non-discrimination, and welfare-oriented economic analysis, is giving way to a more fragmented landscape organized around security alliances and strategic partnerships. Where competition authorities were once conceived as quasi-judicial institutions applying economic frameworks derived from neoclassical welfare economics, insulated from the vagaries of foreign policy and national strategy, they now operate in environments that ask them to assess market structure, corporate ownership, and competitive dynamics through geoeconomic and geopolitical lenses The catalysts for this rupture are manifold: rising strategic rivalry among major powers, the exposure of critical supply chain fragilities through pandemic disruption and geopolitical conflict, and a wholesale reassessment of economic interdependence from a source of mutual prosperity to a potential weapon or vulnerability. Traditional competition analysis, centered on efficiency, consumer surplus, or the protection of the competitive process, increasingly collides with state imperatives regarding technological sovereignty, industrial resilience, and alliance cohesion.

Nowhere is this collision more visible than in defense industries, sectors producing dual-use technologies, and supply chains deemed critical to national security. Competition authorities must now grapple not with whether geoeconomic forces will transform their enterprise, but with how to navigate this transformation without sacrificing the analytical credibility, institutional independence, and economic rationality that have historically legitimized their interventions. The restructuring of national defense sectors exemplifies the tensions between traditional competition principles and the emerging geoeconomics of competition law and policy. Defense consolidation raises fundamental questions about how competition authorities should evaluate mergers that create or strengthen dominant positions in markets where national security considerations, technological sovereignty, and alliance interoperability objectives explicitly shape industrial organization. Should merger review in defense sectors prioritize preventing market concentration and ensuring competitive procurement, or should it accommodate consolidation deemed necessary to maintain strategic capabilities and achieve scale in high-technology defense systems? Market definition becomes particularly complex in defense-related industries, where products serve dual civilian-military purposes, governments constitute monopsonistic or oligopsonistic buyers, and exports face strategic controls that limit contestability. Strategic alliances and cooperation agreements between defense contractors, often encouraged by governments seeking interoperability among allied forces, present additional challenges: are these arrangements legitimate responses to the unique characteristics of defense markets, or do they constitute anticompetitive coordination that should attract competition law scrutiny? The intersection of merger control with foreign direct investment screening further complicates the analysis, as transactions may satisfy competition tests while failing security reviews, raising questions about institutional coordination and the appropriate division of labour between competition authorities and national security agencies.

The broader interaction between international relations and competition policy crystallizes fundamental choices about how competition law should position itself in an increasingly nationalist and bloc-oriented global economy. The traditional globalist approach, characterized by non-discrimination principles, convergence around international best practices, and robust cooperation through networks like the International Competition Network, assumed that competitive markets and international trade were mutually reinforcing and largely separable from geopolitical rivalry. This assumption is breaking down as governments increasingly view economic policy through security lenses, implement friend-shoring strategies that privilege allied firms, and use competition enforcement as an instrument of economic statecraft. Competition authorities must determine whether, to the extent possible, to maintain independence from geopolitical and geoeconomic considerations in their priorities and analyses, or to explicitly incorporate strategic autonomy concerns and geoeconomic considerations into enforcement priorities and analytical toolkits. This choice has profound implications: the former approach risks rendering competition policy irrelevant to policymakers focused on geoeconomic competition, while the latter threatens to fragment the international competition law regime through discriminatory enforcement, reduced cooperation, and potential races to attract strategic investments through relaxed standards.

The proliferation of foreign direct investment screening mechanisms, industrial subsidies, and national security reviews creates complex overlaps with competition policy that demand new institutional frameworks and analytical approaches. FDI screening processes increasingly evaluate acquisitions not only for traditional competition concerns but for their implications regarding technology transfer, supply chain dependencies, and alignment with industrial policy objectives. When these reviews operate independently of competition authorities, they risk generating inconsistent outcomes: transactions may be cleared from a competition law perspective but face prohibition on security grounds, and subsidies to national champions may undermine competitive markets. Industrial policy’s resurgence, manifested in substantial state aid for semiconductors, batteries, renewable energy, and other strategic sectors, directly challenges competition law principles limiting state intervention in markets. Competition authorities must determine how to assess subsidies that distort competition while serving explicitly articulated industrial strategy goals, whether to incorporate supply chain resilience and technological sovereignty considerations into state aid analysis, and how to prevent subsidy races that waste resources while failing to achieve stated policy objectives. The dual-use nature of many emerging technologies further complicates analysis, as export controls and technology screening mechanisms constrain market contestability in ways that traditional competition analysis struggles to accommodate.

The reshaping of trade and industrial policy toward national champions, techno-nationalists industrial policies in strategic sectors, and aggressive extra-territorial enforcement fundamentally challenge the competition law enterprise’s relationship with international trade. Governments increasingly pursue explicit national champion or other techno-nationalist industrial strategies, encouraging or requiring consolidation in sectors deemed strategically important, even when such consolidation creates dominant positions that would traditionally attract competition scrutiny and will affect consumers or foreign trade partners. This creates the need for competition authorities to engage with (legitimate) industrial strategy, or to develop frameworks that distinguish between productivity-enhancing consolidation and consumer welfare-reducing market power, and eventually to adopt a polycentric approach to enforcing competition law. The extra-territorial application of competition law, historically justified as necessary to protect domestic markets from foreign anticompetitive conduct, takes on new dimensions when deployed strategically to open foreign markets to domestic firms or to constrain competitors from rival nations. Some jurisdictions increasingly use competition enforcement as economic statecraft, conditioning market access on competitive openness as negotiating leverage in broader geoeconomic competitions. These developments risk fragmenting global trade and competition governance and call for a new conceptualization of comity principles.

In this transformed landscape, where economic interdependence is viewed as vulnerability and competition policy becomes entangled with strategic trade policy and industrial strategy, fundamental questions emerge about the future shape of the global competition law enterprise. Can competition authorities maintain credibility as technocratic institutions when subordinated to strategic imperatives? Will international cooperation on competition matters when jurisdictions coordinate enforcement not to combat anticompetitive conduct but to advance shared geopolitical objectives against common rivals? How will smaller jurisdictions and developing countries navigate bloc-based economic organization without the bargaining power or technological capacity of major powers? The answers will determine whether competition law evolves into an instrument of managed economic coexistence between blocs, with transparent frameworks delineating when security concerns warrant deviation from traditional analysis, or descends into ‘weaponized’ protectionism where competitive merit becomes secondary to geopolitical alignment. What emerges is not merely a technical question of adapting enforcement tools, but a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy and relevance of competition law in this new, brave world.

The workshop will explore these topics in an interactive way, bringing competition and government officials, academics, and practitioners to discuss crucial topics for the global governance of competition law.

The speakers and moderators include

• Roger Alford, University of Notre Dame
• Reiko Aoki, Japanese Fair Trade Commission
• Beth Batlzan, Atlantic Council
• Caroline Buts, Brussels School of Governance and Solvay Business School
• Cristina Caffarra, EuroStack Initiative Foundation e.V & UCL
• Benoît Cœuré, OECD Competition Committee & French Competition Authority
• Nuno Cunha Rodrigues, Portuguese Competition Authority
• Caio Mario da Silva Pereira Neto, FGV São Paulo
• Cani Fernández , CNMC (invited)
• Eleanor Fox, NYU Law School
• Gustavo Augusto Freitas de Lima (CADE, Brazil)
• Andrew Gavil, Howard University (invited)
• Gonenc Gurkaynak, ELIG & UCL Faculty of Laws
• Rob Howse, NYU Law School
• Alexey Ivanov, BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre
• Benedict Kingsbury, NYU Law School & Guarini Global Law & Tech, NYU
• Mitja Kleczka, Solve & Vrije Universiteit
• Filippo Lancieri, Georgetown Law
• Ioannis Lianos, UCL Faculty of Laws & NYU
• Barry Lynn, Open Markets
• Brody Mullins, Noosphere
• Halimah Najied-Locke, Senior Vice President of Global Public Policy for Darkhive, Inc, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Resilience at the U.S. Department of Defense
• Mario Palacios, Applied Materials
• Julian Pena, Allende & Brea & Antitrust Section, International Bar Association
• Steven Salop, Georgetown University
• Jennifer Sturiale, Delaware Law
• Spencer Weber Waller, Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies, Loyola Univesity of Chicago

Valentine Korah Laws Memorial Fund

The Valentine Korah Laws Memorial Fund honours the memory of a much loved exceptional scholar and advocate. Explore the opportunities that we believe best honour the spirit Valentine Korah embodied, and the legacy she left at UCL Laws. The new fund will:

• support the Valentine Korah Scholarship
• support an annual Valentine Korah Prize in competition law for undergraduates
• support a Valentine Korah Collaboration Space in Bentham House
• support an annual Valentine Korah Lecture
• support the creation of academic positions in competition law or policy

View full details of the opportunities available and how to donate can be found at:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/remembering-professor-valentine-korah