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transinstbritishgeog-2023-mallin-criticalgeoeconomicsagenealogyofwritingpoliticseconomyandspace
Journal article

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

DOKPE

  • 2023
Published in:
  • Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. - Chichester, UK : Wiley. - 2023, vol. 49, no. 1, p. 1-16
Cold War
Germany
genealogy
geopolitics
imperialism
state capitalism
English Towards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and econ- omy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining promi- nence 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 mili- tary 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, conceptu- alised 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 strug- gles track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Géosciences
Language
  • English
Classification
Geography
License
CC BY
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/329254
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