Geopolitical Economy Research Articles

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.

AMBIVALENT HOMONATIONALISMS

Prompted by a concern with the territorial and affective governance of transnational queer migration, and with a focus on state regulations of ‘same-sex’ family class migration in Canada, this essay explores the psychic and geopolitical economies of locating ‘home’ vis-à-vis (homo)nationalized belongings. Based on research conducted in Toronto, a city in which nearly half of the residents were born outside of the country, this critical exploration is grounded in narratives created through interviews with LGBTQ migrants. The interview narratives open space to consider how discourses and representations of love and intimacy are brought into coherence with national structures of feeling. I argue that ‘same-sex’ relationship recognition in Canada's immigration system mobilizes homonational identifications and attachments given the centrality of immigration and border controls to a transnational geopolitical economy of unevenly distributed vulnerabilities.

Between abstraction and complexity

Theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices must be framed in relation to concrete explanatory and interpretive dilemmas, not ontological foundations. In engaging with the limits and possibilities of recent assemblage-based work in urban studies, our concern has been to help forge new analytical tools for deciphering emerging patterns of planetary urbanization, which have unsettled the coherence and viability of earlier intellectual frameworks. As urbanization is changing, so too must urban theory change, and it must do so in ways that provide critical purchase on emergent sociospatial divisions, conflicts, struggles and transformations at all spatial scales and across divergent places and territories. To this end, responding to several strands of the debate on assemblage urbanism that has unfolded in previous issues of City, here we clarify our meta-theoretical stance, address several methodological questions and reiterate our arguments regarding the importance of a reinvigorated geopolitical economy of planetary urbanization. We insist on the importance of abstraction as a necessary methodological moment in any reflexive approach to urban knowledge formation.

The Geo-political Economy of Global Production Networks

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) has made important contributions to our understanding of globalization, overcoming much of the state-centrism of other kinds of political economic approaches. It has also extended effectively beyond the relatively narrower focus of its predecessors, the global commodity chains and global value chains approaches, to analyze not only the direct process of production but also various social activities that are crucial to the overall process of commodity (and value) production. Yet in spite of opening a potential space for interrogating political processes as integral aspects of production, most work on GPNs has avoided the discussion of political issues that speak to the messiness, contestation, and violence that often accompanies globalization. This article shows that GPN approaches can and should encompass geo-political aspects of the production process that range from labor struggles to inter-state competition and even war. As examples from South Korea show, a geo-political economy approach to GPNs that includes examination of war and geo-politics can extend our understanding of the process of globalization.

Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory

Against the background of contemporary worldwide transformations of urbanizing spaces, this paper evaluates recent efforts to mobilize the concept of ‘assemblage’ as the foundation for contemporary critical urban theory, with particular attention to a recent paper by McFarlane (2011a) in this journal. We argue that there is no single ‘assemblage urbanism’, and therefore no coherence to arguing for or against the concept in general. Instead, we distinguish between three articulations between urban political economy and assemblage thought. While empirical and methodological applications of assemblage analysis have generated productive insights in various strands of urban studies by building on political economy, we suggest that the ontological application favored by McFarlane and several other assemblage urbanists contains significant drawbacks. In explicitly rejecting concepts of structure in favor of a ‘naïve objectivism’, it deprives itself of a key explanatory tool for understanding the sociospatial ‘context of contexts’ in which urban spaces and locally embedded social forces are positioned. Relatedly, such approaches do not adequately grasp the ways in which contemporary urbanization continues to be shaped and contested through the contradictory, hierarchical social relations and institutional forms of capitalism. Finally, the normative foundations of such approaches are based upon a decontextualized standpoint rather than an immanent, reflexive critique of actually existing social relations and institutional arrangements. These considerations suggest that assemblage‐based approaches can most effectively contribute to critical urban theory when they are linked to theories, concepts, methods and research agendas derived from a reinvigorated geopolitical economy.

Kindleberger studioso di economia internazionale. (Kindleberger and international economics)

The article is part of the special issue of the journal on Charles P. Kindleberger (CPK). The article first summarizes CPK's professional biography and his historical method. Then particular attention is devoted to the study of international relations and the international financial and economic order. The article summarizes the main policy implications of Kindleberger's studies of geopolitical economy (or global political economy) and evaluates his main contribution in terms of a toolbox for effectively distinguishing ideal models and theories from the actual developments.

Governmentality and security in the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The article examines the background to PEPFAR and its reauthorization in Washington DC in 2008 through the conceptual lens of governmentality. Building on existing work, it interprets PEPFAR as a programme for securing the welfare of populations. It also qualifies and extends this work in the following ways. Rather than representing a break with the history of geopolitics, it argues that PEPFAR emerged out of accommodations between geopolitics and governmentality. This point is developed through two takes on geopolitics, first in terms of the projection of sovereign power, and second in terms of articulations between PEPFAR and geopolitical economies of global health. The article suggests, first, that the geopolitics of sovereign power shaped the timing, scale and form of PEPFAR, and second, that PEPFAR articulated with geopolitical economies of global health through its mobilization of US-based corporations, non-governmental and faith-based organizations. The article extends existing work by examining the role of critical mobilizations in shaping PEPFAR, both in relation to questions of political economy and the contentious politics of life. Reflecting on the politics of global health, it considers the prospects for using ideas of security and the international response to HIV/AIDS as stepping stones towards the development of broad-based health systems.

Геополитическая экономия России (о книге Г.Д. Гловели "Геополитическая экономия России: от дискуссий о самобытности к глобальным моделям (XIX в.-первая треть XX в.)")

Геополитическая экономия России (о книге Г.Д. Гловели "Геополитическая экономия России: от дискуссий о самобытности к глобальным моделям (XIX в.-первая треть XX в.)")

N. P. Oganovsky’s Theory of Agrarian Evolution and Geopolitical Economy of Historical Process

The paper reconstructs and analyzes N. P. Oganovsky’s stadial theory as one оf the considerable achievements of Russian economic thought at the beginning of the XX century. Oganovsky broadened the comparative analysis into an original conception of the world historical process. He took into account geoeconomic, structural, social demografic, ecologycal and political and institutional aspects of social life. Oganovsky introduced the category of sustainable development; the article shows that in his theory the modern category of self-sustained economic growth was anticipated. Oganovsky’s stadial approach is considered in an interdisciplinary context and associated with generalized conceptions of the political economy (German historical school, Marxism), Russian historiography (V. Klyuchevsky), agrarian cooperative thought (A. Chayanov) and geoeconomics (Semenov-Tyan-Shansky)

Global 24/7 news providers

The study of international and global news to date has focused on the operation of foreign news values, the unequal flows and emergent contra-flows of transnational news as well as the phenomenology of 24/7 live broadcasts. Today these debates are often played out under opposing `global dominance' and `global public sphere' positions. Each in its own way is concerned about communications democracy — whether its discerned curtailment by processes of geo-political economy or temporal-spatial extension by increased global cultural flows. In this article we contend that there is a `democratic lacuna' at the heart of these debates. This silence concerns how exactly leading world news channels — principally CNNI and BBC World but also international competitors such as Sky and Fox News — communicatively present the voices, views and values of contending interests and identities from around the world. Elaborating a new conception of `communicative frames' based on contemporary positions of social and political theory and applying this to a large corpus of news output, we begin to evaluate generalizing theoretical claims, both critical and celebratory, about the contribution of global 24/7 news to processes of global dominance or an emergent global public sphere.

Projections for the geopolitical economy of oil after war in Iraq

How are events surrounding the latest Iraq war shaping the future global political economy of oil? The saliency of Iraq's oil resources suggests a trend towards intensified great-power competition to dominate energy-rich provinces and transportation corridors. Yet, the nature of the oil trade, Iraq's insurrection, and Sino-American economic interdependence indicate barriers to unilateral attempts to control energy supplies. Based on examination of the Iraq conflict's unintended stimulus to terrorism and to China's search for foreign oil supplies, this paper assesses three possible scenarios: ‘multiple energy insecurity’ (great-power competition and violent non-state reaction); ‘mutual energy securitisation’ (inter-state collusion against non-state resource claimants); and ‘multiple energy security’ (great-power curtailment of geographically expansive energy consumption). It finds that the increasing problems associated with the first two alternatives are inducing decision-makers to contemplate policy options consistent with the third scenario.

The New Geopolitics of Disease: Between Global Health and Global Security

This article describes the emergence of a new geopolitics of disease following the end of the Cold War and offers a framework for thinking about it. Three main questions are asked. First, why is disease now a geopolitical issue? Second, how has this new geopolitics emerged? And third, what are the implications of the emergence of disease as a geopolitical issue for the meaning and practice of global health? It is argued that disease is now seen as a geopolitical issue in terms of four main dimensions: destabilisation, sovereignty, the instrumentalisation of health, and geopolitical economy. Second, this new geopolitics has emerged in the context of larger debates about globalisation, development and security, and has emanated primarily from Northern institutions. Third, drawing on critical approaches to security, it is suggested that while the securitisation of health offers certain benefits, it also carries risks. The article identifies a number of critical tensions in the new geopolitics of disease as a way of negotiating these risks and anchoring the concept of global health security in a larger vision of health in an era of globalisation.

The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq

Beginning from recent critical work on globalisation, many critical scholars have extended the analytic vocabulary of ‘advanced’, ‘fast’ and ‘postmodern’ capitalism to explain the geopolitics of the Iraq War. This article offers a counterclaim: that current geopolitical economy can be more usefully characterised as a form of neofeudal corporatism. Using examples drawn from a 300,000 word corpus of public utterances by three political leaders — George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard — we identify and explicate defining characteristics of this system and how they are manifest in political language about the invasion of Iraq.

The Geopolitical economy of ‘resource wars’

Geopolitical concerns about so-called ‘resource wars’ have mostly focused on international resource competition, and the vulnerability of resource supply. This article presents an alternative view emphasizing the political and economic vulnerabilitites of resource-dependent states in relation to resource-linked armed conflicts. It then outlines how the geopolitics of resource competition, the history, identity formation, political economy, and characteristics of resource exploitation, as well as the financial opportunities afforded in part by businesses to belligerents can help to understand the geographies of ‘resources wars’. Finally, the study suggests that curtailing resource access by belligerents can assist in the termination of conflicts, but that long-term solutions pass through fairer and more accountable political economy of internationally traded resources at both a domestic and global level.

The Post-Soviet States: Mapping the Politics of Transition

Trials of transition From transformation to fragmentation Part I - Postcolonialism and the politics of national identities Russia identity, geopolitics and homeland The borderland states: nations, citizens and diasporas Part II - Experimenting with democracy Limits to democracy Multiculturalism, federalism and democracy Part III - Geopolitical economy, the market and privatisation The geopolitical economy of the CIS The state, economic liberalisation and the regions Geopolitical futures.

The post-Soviet states: mapping the politics of transition

Trials of transition From transformation to fragmentation Part I - Postcolonialism and the politics of national identities Russia identity, geopolitics and homeland The borderland states: nations, citizens and diasporas Part II - Experimenting with democracy Limits to democracy Multiculturalism, federalism and democracy Part III - Geopolitical economy, the market and privatisation The geopolitical economy of the CIS The state, economic liberalisation and the regions Geopolitical futures.

The New Global Command Economy

Globalization is becoming one of the most widespread catchphrases attempting to grasp the post-Cold War international reality. In this paper I argue that, although the process of globalization has brought about more liberalization and decentralization of political economies at the national level, it has also created a far more regimented and centralized economy and polity at the international level. This shift of the center of gravity of political economy from the national to the international level is what the phrase the new global command economy attempts to grasp. First, I begin with a definition of geopolitical economy as a conceptualization of the complex interaction between states and the world economy. Second, I show how a few global institutions de facto command the world economy with a level of centralization and regimentation similar to that which the centrally planned economies used to exercise at the national level during the Cold War era. Third, I analyze how the new global command economy continues to perpetuate the core-periphery divide through what the G7 economic summit has labeled a new global partnership between developing countries, developed countries, and multilateral institutions. Fourth, the nonmarket forces are introduced as an often neglected factor (in economic analysis) which strongly shapes market forces and the overall trajectory of the world economy.

'Globalization', the geopolitical economy of migration and the 'spatial vent'

Despite a rapidly expanding literature in the last decade, the question of migration remains a neglected area of research in IPE, global political economy and political geography. In addressing this deficiency, this article seeks to contribute to the growing debate over the links between 'globalization', IPE and the geopolitical economy of migration. Rather than the more 'traditional' focus of IPE, I attempt to integrate different political21 economic scales of analysis (from the regional to the international). Drawing upon an analysis of North African (Maghrebin) migrant workers in the Paris automobile industry, I argue that, first, globalization needs to be placed in historical context in terms of the international/global political economy of migration. Second, I maintain the need to understand migration as a strategic issue within international political economy. Third, I argue that the national state is still relevant as a geopolitical economic 'lens' on the contemporary globalization of migration. And fourth, I suggest the presence of what I call a 'spatial vent'. This describes the forced and/or encouraged repatriation of migrant workers to partially diffuse threats to accumulation and legitimation generated by reconciling economic imper11130 atives (industrial and labour market restructuring) with the political, social and cultural priorities of the French state (French 'republicanism' and 'universalism'). The 'spatial vent' is considered to be one means of grasping the territoriality of capitalism.

The (Geo)political economy of Iraqi‐Kuwaiti relations

This study presents a review and analysis of Iraqi‐Kuwaiti relations as they developed and changed over time. It attempts to look beyond the immediate political and legal aspects of this difficult relationship, while at the same time drawing attention to the history and potential of functional co‐operation between the two states. The wider subject of this enquiry might be defined as the politics of economic relations between the two, along with the economics of political relations. While in the context of the Kuwait crisis the elements of friction and conflict between the two countries have been at the forefront of attention, it is worth recalling the record of co‐operation between them (even if friction was never far below the surface). At the same time, one is struck by the fact that where conflict did erupt, it was more often than not rooted in economic issues and dynamics, and in functional needs.

Locating Critical Geopolitics

The authors review and locate the emerging literature of critical geopolitics, They illustrate some of the main lines of development within a rapidly expanding literature. This literature analyses geopolitics as discourse and also deconstructs policy texts to examine the use of geographical reasoning in statecraft. Critical geopolitics also links up with critical work in geopolitical economy and development studies. Areas are identified in which critical geopolitics could engage productively with research and scholarship in related fields.