Supply Chains, Migration, and Social Movements

Global supply chains link production across dozens of countries, with a single product such as a smartphone typically combining components manufactured, assembled, and shipped through multiple jurisdictions before reaching consumers. This interdependence creates significant political vulnerabilities, as demonstrated when the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, disrupting an estimated ten billion dollars of trade per day, and when COVID-19-related factory shutdowns and shipping bottlenecks produced a global shortage of semiconductors that idled automobile production worldwide and drove the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, aimed at reducing dependence on overseas chip manufacturing.