The goal of this special issue is to showcase a wide range of discipline-specific and interdisciplinary methodologies for studying socio-political risks (SPRs). This issue will bring together a selection of papers that can provide a more granular understanding of methodological issues in complex and fast-changing contexts.

The socio-political environment is a major source of objective and subjective uncertainties for international business and multinational enterprise (MNE) operations (John and Lawton, 2008; Kobrin, 1979; Lawton, Doh, and Rajwani, 2014) resulting in additional transaction costs that tend to be inherently higher in more complex systems of exchange and greater competition for scarce resources (eg, North, 1991). With important megatrends changing the SPR landscape such as increased complexity of the international political environment (Teng et al. 2017), growing efficiencies of supply chains, and the tech revolution transforming these global phenomenon (Rice and Zegart, 2018), scholars have expanded their inquiry into different types of SPRs such as corruption (Karhunen and Ledyaeva, 2012; Sartor and Beamish, 2017), legal uncertainty (White et al., 2015), socio-political violence (Oh and Oetzel, 2017), military conflict (Arikan et al., 2019; Li and Vashchilko, 2010), natural disasters (Oetzel and Oh, 2014), and property rights violations (Jiang et al., 2011), while also exploring ways to mitigate exposure to SPRs (John and Lawton, 2017) and turn what would otherwise be disadvantages into advantages (Darendeli and Hill, 2016; Harvey and Novicevic, 2002) via, for example, developing political capabilities (Schnyder and Sallai, 2020; White et al., 2018).