Geopolitics and the ‘New’ State Capitalism

Abstract

We may be witnessing the emergence of a new 'state capitalist' normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of statesponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across the world economy while generating a multiplicity of geopolitical tensions. This Forum reflects upon what it means, theoretically, methodologically, and politically, to articulate a geopolitics of contemporary state capitalism. It brings together interventions which draw on various theoretical approaches, including critical political geography, historical materialism, geographical political economy, and power structure research, in order to probe into the multiple spatialities at the core of contemporary state capitalism. The contributions aim to destabilise the assumptions and taken-for-granted ideas which have largely framed the debate thus far, including problematic binaries such as liberal/illiberal, state/market, commercial/geopolitical logics, and realist narratives of interstate power-maximising behaviour. Studying the (geo)political reorganisation of global capitalism requires moving beyond the castigation of a 'rogue' state capitalism as well as narratives of a clash between rival political-economic models, and disassembling the category state capitalism.

Uneven and combined state capitalism

“…The problem with such geographical imaginaries is not only that they misleadingly reduce the question of contemporary state capitalism to a geopolitical clash between two easily identifiable protagonists -(Western) democratic free-market capitalism and its deviant state capitalist 'other' (a warlike discursive frame which we have criticised at length elsewhere). They are also poorly equipped to grasp the extent of current state transformations unfolding across the spaces of the world capitalist economy, including in states which assume liberal forms (Alami et al, 2021a).…”

Respatialising finance: power, politics and offshore renminbi market making in London

“…It asks: what are the (geo)political economic determinants and implications of the current aggregate expansion of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital across the world economy? The latter designates a research agenda dedicated to scrutinizing the sources, manifestations, and implications of developing countries' persistent subordinate positionality in the geographical organization of financial and monetary relations on a planetary scale (Alami et al 2022). Respatialising Finance is remarkable in its ability to develop a sustained and generative conversation between these two interdisciplinary fields of inquiry.…”

“…First, she carefully documents the heavy work which was required to produce an alignment of political interests between various Chinese and British state authorities as well as to enroll financial market participants (investors, asset managers, advanced business services and law firms) in the project of RMB internationalization. As she does so, Hall highlights the remarkable diversity of actors "peopling" state capitalist transformations in global financial and monetary systems (see Medby's contribution in Alami et al 2022), which significantly complicates scholarly arguments or implicit assumptions about clear-cut state/market dichotomies. She also develops a more processual and fine-grained understanding of RMB internationalization than those that dominate the international political economy literature, one that is sensitive to its fragilities, uncertainties, and uneven trajectories between the various policy schemes involved.…”

Making space for the new state capitalism, part II: Relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development

“…Contributions such as these demonstrate that scrutinizing the territorial transformations of state capitalism over longer historical arc helps us understand that a capacity to support shifting modes of capital accumulation and reproduction of class power relies on a combination of path-dependencies (in institutional, political, socio-spatial and cultural terms) and innovations (including the reinvention of spatialized forms of state intervention, institutional-regulatory experimentation and the like). Another example is the work of Lee (in Alami et al, 2022b : 1011–1014), which shows that being attentive to the production of territory allows one to rethink some of the temporalities of the new state capitalism: while East Asian state capitalism is often associated with the temporalities of ‘catch-up’ development (i.e. development ‘laggards’ attempting to close the productivity gap with more advanced capitalist economies), zoning, territorialized industrial policies and other flexible territorial arrangements in South Korea are actually geared towards making specific regions world bleaders in the digital sectors associated with the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.…”