Introduction: Explanation, critique and critics of geoeconomics

Abstract

Geoeconomics, strategist Edward Luttwak affirmed in 1990, represented the waning of a geopolitical era and the ascent of a ‘logic of conflict with the methods of commerce’. In the decades since, numerous variations on his argument have enjoyed wide resonance. Geoeconomics became a term of reference for power contests from the realms of commercial warfare and infrastructure expansionism to the sculpting of new military and economic blocs. Nonetheless, ahistorical references to geoeconomics have proliferated at the expense of critical attention to past conjunctures when geoeconomics circulated. As a result, the ideological framings and impacts of the discourse of geoeconomics and its wider relationship to geopolitics have been neglected. In this introduction, we set the backdrop to and provide a brief overview of the essays that follow. Collectively and from different vantage points, these essays discuss the analytical purchase and some limitations of advancing ‘critical geoeconomics’. Contributions combine timely reassessments of contemporary and past iterations of geoeconomics and explore the potential for positing an anti-geoeconomics in light of resurrected nationalist-imperialist phantoms.