Critical geoeconomics: A genealogy of writing politics, economy and space

Abstract

Towards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and economy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining prominence since the early 1990s has been the notion of geoeconomics, the coining of which has frequently been attributed to the strategist Edward N. Luttwak. In his interpretation, it signified a transition away from Cold War ideological and military geopolitical competition towards commerce and market‐based geo‐power. Over the past three decades, a ‘geoeconomics boom’ set in, characterised by think tanks and a varied body of politico‐economic literature making extensive use of the term. Conventionally treated as a neologism, the provenance and earlier iterations of geoeconomics, some dating back more than a century, have been largely ignored by both celebratory and critical accounts. In this paper, we trace and contextualise these earlier instances, leading us to the Geopolitik era in Germany and references to geoeconomics in the United States in the decades after WWII. We thereby offer a critical genealogy of geoeconomics, conceptualised as an object of definitional struggle. Proponents of the term sought to position it variously as a tool of national economic cohesion and competition or as a way of understanding and harnessing shifting global power relations, whilst others sought to subsume geoeconomics to geopolitics. These past struggles track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions.

History and philosophy of geography I: Heterodox progress, critical scepticism and intellectual voluminosity

“…The intellectual histories and geographies reviewed here express a drive to self-reflectivity and further normative considerations that seems also to occur in other subfields such as critical geoeconomics (Mallin and Sidaway, 2023), biogeography (Dawson et al, 2023), historical geography (Boulanger and Fassier-Boulanger, 2022) or political geography (Dodds et al, 2022; Grove and Bennett, 2023).…”

Towards critical geoeconomics?

“…This is arguably an important issue given that critical human geographers may be well positioned to reclaim the concept of geoeconomics. Mallin and Sidaway (2023) discuss the interlinked yet competing lives of the concepts of geoeconomics and geopolitics. The authors trace the explicit use of geoeconomics, 'geo-economic' or even 'geonomics' in papers and books published in Germany and the USA during the twentieth century.…”

Geoeconomics geohistoricised

“…Meanwhile, much of China's own geostrategic discourse surrounding the Belt and Road Initiative has been reworking geoeconomic visions of peaceful global integration-albeit with the Middle Kingdom in the Beijing-dominated middle-that previously provided cover for the hegemony-building geopolitics of Pax Americana (compare Flint & Zhu, 2019;Lee et al, 2017;Lin et al, 2021;Richardson, 2021;Zhang & Wen, 2022;with Essex, 2013;Morrissey, 2017;Sparke, 2005). It is in this contentious contemporary context that Felix Mallin and James Sidaway have shared with readers of Transactions their remarkable study of a much earlier appeal to geoeconomics that has previously been overlooked (Mallin & Sidaway, 2023a). Thanks to historical geographers such as Mona Domosh, we already knew that the sorts of post-Cold War geoeconomic discourse that took off after 1989 had a long pre-history tied to older rounds of globalisation in the early-twentieth century (Domosh, 2013).…”