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.

Geoeconomics, a term reanimated by strategist Edward Luttwak in 1990, was said then to represent the waning of a geopolitical era and the ascent of a ‘logic of conflict with the methods of commerce’ (Luttwak, 1990: 19). In the decades since, numerous variations on his argument have enjoyed wide resonance. Geoeconomics became a popular reference point for economic power contests in the realms of commercial warfare, infrastructure expansionism and the re-sculpting of trade and military alliances. This ongoing ascent has been propelled by an increasing number of centres, initiatives and programmes of geoeconomic studies at leading American, Asian and European think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, Japan’s Asia Pacific Initiative, the International Institute for Strategic Studies or the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. Unsurprisingly, this has also elicited ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ and politicians world-wide to invoke geoeconomics in the same breath as geopolitics (e.g. Doyle, 2023; Gopinath, 2023; Lu and Du, 2013).

On the surface, explanations for the concept’s success in realist circles are relatively straight-forward. Within the meandering post-Cold War geostrategic ambit, the interrelated themes of hegemonic decline and the ‘rise’ of China became pivotal in rationalising the need for post-geopolitical frameworks. In the 2000s, geoeconomics began to serve as a useful signifier for discussing China’s growing engagements with the Global South, especially in Africa and South America. The launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, which strategically channelled Chinese labour, concrete and capital surplus into infrastructure-led trade and development megaprojects, further heightened interest in modes of economic expansionism that appeared to bypass the traditional geopolitical methods and tactics of the Washington consensus era (Beeson, 2018). Particularly in the domain of technological and resource rivalry, geoeconomic arguments were to gain traction to vindicate the increasingly confrontational modus operandi in new contested fields that appeared counterintuitive to liberal economic tenets. Beijing’s export controls on critical minerals essential for the semiconductor industry or Washington’s restrictions on TikTok and the exclusion of Huawei-supplied 5G technologies became prominent manifestations of ‘geoeconomic logic’, despite being cast in the official rhetoric of national security concerns (Vekasi, 2021).

Other interpretations of the current conjuncture have highlighted a more simultaneous interplay between geoeconomic and geopolitical logics of power, deviating from the temporality (in which geoeconomics succeeds geopolitics) set out in Luttwak’s original argument. Here, geostrategy often consists of a dialectical interplay between the two. For instance, the shifting political subjectivities and political economies in light of the putative Anthropocene have given rise to geostrategic frameworks that integrate discussions on decarbonisation, industrial policy and security. This is most legible in the US, where the Biden administration’s ‘massive stimulus – totalling some $4 trillion’, according to Anderson (2023), rested on ‘a geostrategic rationale that powers this national-investment drive, reshoring production on the US mainland, bagging lithium mines and sponsoring construction of microchip factories, in a militarised bid to outflank China’. Hence an ‘inflexion point’ that:

Viewed from the halls of power, the anti-China orientation of US industrial policy is not an unfortunate by-product of the green ‘transition’, but its motivating purpose. For its conceptors, the logic governing the new era of infrastructure spending is fundamentally geopolitical; its precedent is to be sought not in the New Deal but in the military Keynesianism of the Cold War, seen by the ‘Wise Men’ who waged it as a condition for victory in America’s struggle against the Soviet Union. (Anderson, 2023)

Now, one could infer that the ascent of geoeconomic discourses, as Ó Tuathail (1998: 107) signalled over a quarter of a century ago, is ‘extending the same realist assumptions’ which have ‘underpinned and legitimised Cold War militarism’. Or, as Potts (2023: 282) observes, the seeming separation of the ‘economic from the geopolitical’ during US hegemony was in ‘itself a (geo)political process’, enabled by a technocratic governance apparatus and depoliticising ideologies that ultimately served US strategic interests. Conversely, however, it should be noted that intellectual and political attraction to different conceptions of geoeconomics already existed during and well before the Cold War, where they catered to a plurality of political traditions and projects. Thus far, scant attention has been paid to the longer history of geoeconomics (Slobodian, 2024), as Luttwak (2024) also recently acknowledged. As Mallin and Sidaway (2024a) chart, most contemporary analysts are unaware that earlier in the 20th century, especially from the mid-1920s, explicit proposals of and references to geoeconomics circulated widely. These encompassed an astounding variety of thinkers all the way from the national-conservative and colonial revanchist spectrum to market fundamentalists, Cold War military and even Marxist renditions; at times in conversation with the geopolitical tradition, sometimes detached from it. Taken together, insights from the reading of these long-neglected texts and contexts have led us to propose that a much more sustained and critical engagement with the histories, geographies and politics entangled with the notion of geoeconomics is warranted.

This theme section therefore explores the analytical purchase and limitations of advancing a ‘critical geoeconomics’ within a broader historical and geographical context. Comprising 11 short papers, it combines timely reassessments of contemporary and past iterations of geoeconomics and explores the potentials for positing an anti-geoeconomics against the backdrop of nationalist-imperialist phantoms. Collectively, the set of exchanges represents a tactical opportunity to bring critical scholarship on geoeconomic and geopolitical traditions into closer conversations with emerging debates on ideational historical trajectories, finance, firms, sovereignty, state capitalism, networks, industrial policy and geostrategy in economic and political geography (e.g. Alami et al., 2023); critical scrutiny of deglobalisation narratives and what is being termed geopolitical decoupling and globalisation in reverse (e.g. Pavlínek, 2023; Van Meeteren and Kleibert, 2022; Woon and Sidaway, 2024); and the redeployment of geoeconomics and geopolitics around notions of ‘economic war’ (Hess, 2023) as well as longer tracks of economic diplomacy (Bayne and Woolcock, 2017).

Turning to the papers in this collection, they are thematically grouped, starting with general reflections on critical geoeconomics, followed by more specific developments and insights operationalising geoeconomic critique. Kearns (2025) sets the stage by offering an alternative genealogy to the circulation of the idea of geoeconomics, developed from conceptions such as the political economy in the tale of Robinson Crusoe and the philosophy of a racialised homeland in the writings of Martin Heidegger. Next, Sparke (2025) reflects on contemporary usages of and exhortations for critical geoeconomics, advocating for a conjunctural framing to bring together diverse approaches of geoeconomic analysis and interrogations. Understanding geoeconomics conjuncturally allows attention to be cast on geostrategic discourses representing the shifting hegemonies of uneven capitalist development as well as the everyday ideas, subjectivities and agency that are related to the landscapes impacted by the upheavals of international uneven development. Glassman (2025), in turn, offers a cautious appraisal of critical geoeconomics, contending that the real traction in a geoeconomic explanation has to be gained from contextualised approaches that are more attentive to particularities rather than seeking to capture merely abstract logics. To explore this contention, he delves into works that provide fine-grained, detailed institutional and power elite analyses of the US National Security State. Mamadouh (2025) then seeks to recentre the ‘geo’ in geoeconomics, arguing that geography is understated yet key to more critical approaches to geoeconomics. In examining the French tradition and texts espousing geoeconomics and their complex relationship to geopolitics and space, she elucidates the importance of better complementing attention to the political, the economic and the geographical.

The second group of papers constitute more empirical and topical engagements with geoeconomics. Using the case of China’s BRI investments in Fiji, Szadziewski (2025) zooms in on the everyday dimensions of geoeconomics, to underscore impacts upon the daily lives of populations and communities. Specifically, he demonstrates how a range of actors in Fiji are assessing the geoeconomic opportunities and threats of a rising China and making decisions based on those interests. Inverardi-Ferri (2025) brings climate change to the fore, illuminating how it has generated geoeconomic business opportunities for new industries, particularly in the slipstream of the energy transition. Specifically, by looking at dominant narratives floated by the photovoltaic industry, he makes a foray into an anti-geoeconomics of climate change in order to reverse the order between the positions of power where climate change is discussed and the places where it is experienced. Gonzalez-Vicente and Cheng (2025) focus on China and ‘new’ state capitalism. They show how some Anglo-American analysts have engaged in geoeconomic ‘othering’ of the Chinese economic system by normalising ‘Western’ geopolitical behaviours and neoliberal norms. In contrast, their Chinese counterparts provide discursive backing for a Sinocentric geoeconomic order. For these authors, the urgent task of a critical geoeconomics is to go beyond such reductionist and essentialist renditions of the (Chinese) state. Instead, they argue for dialectical engagements between state and corporate power.

Next, Hsu (2025) constructs an intriguing account of Taiwan’s geostrategic positioning in the international struggle over microchip development. She draws together lessons from critical approaches to both economic statecraft (e.g. the Chip 4 alliance building between the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan) and geopolitical economy (e.g. the securitised schemes to profit from bringing TSMC and vast FDI flows from Taiwan to Arizona) to flesh out the underlying tensions in global capitalism especially in the so-called ‘New Cold War’ era. Lim (2025) highlights two conjunctures to spotlight the continuities that underpin the functions of firms as geoeconomic actors – the expansion of British geoeconomic influence via the East India Company and the ongoing attempts by the US government to curtail attempts by China-based firms to develop high performance semiconductor chips. These examples in turn allow Lim to echo the need of a critical geoeconomics agenda to consider the ways in which firms enable and/or constrain geoeconomic influence and outcomes. Exploring recent China-US relations and interactions on the global stage, Poon (2025) eschews the language of deglobalisation to posit that globalisation 1.0 is being replaced by a geoeconomic model of globalisation 2.0. This shift towards globalisation 2.0, in Poon’s view, has consequently resulted in discourses of risk being replaced by narratives of transnational threats and weaponisation whereby the US has deployed a multitude of strategies to ensure the security of its borders.

The final paper by Mallin and Sidaway (2025) summarises and extends the critical scholarly spirit and interventions that are embodied by the entire set (see too the advocacy ‘for critical geoeconomics’ in Mallin and Sidaway, 2024b). It does so by proposing five theses for critical geoeconomics, related to its scope, foci, trajectories and possibilities. As discourses of geoeconomics proliferate, this and the preceding set serve as crucial reminders and invitations for further contextualisation, historicisation and critical reflections.