Bastiaan van Apeldoorn is Professor of Global Political Economy and Geopolitics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he has been working since 2000. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn studied political science and international relations at the University of Amsterdam, obtained his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, and held a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His research centres on the interaction between corporate elite strategies and interstate rivalry, with a focus on the changing role of US global power. Building on this, his current research agenda focuses on the changing role of the state in global capitalism and the geopoliticisation of (foreign) economic policy in both the US and in Europe. 

He is the author of several books, amongst which Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration (Routledge, 2002); American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks (Routledge, 2016, co-authored with Naná de Graaff), Trump and the Remaking of American Grand Strategy (with Jasa Veselinovic and Naná de Graaff), and numerous articles in journals like European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, Global Networks, and New Political Economy. Since 2015, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn is also a member of the Dutch Senate for the Socialist Party, where he also serves as Chair of the Senate’s European Affairs Committee.