![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
![Editing Services Awareness English-speaking]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110148/ED-Services-English.jpg"})
![The Armed Conflict Survey 2021. Available now.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110985/JournalAdPromotionMilitaryStudiesIM.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Geoeconomics has become highly relevant for foreign policy practices and national security strategies, wherefore it has also started to receive increasing attention from academics. Unfortunately, there is no widely shared definition of geoeconomics. The term is often only used as a catchword that generates an audience for policy-oriented, semi-scientific outlets. This article addresses this weakness of the state of the art. The authors suggest that geoeconomics, as a foreign policy strategy, refers to the application of economic means of power by states so as to realize strategic objectives. As an analytical framework, geoeconomics relates to international relations realism. Yet it transcends international relationship realism, as it is focused on geographical features that are inherent in foreign policy and international relations.
Notes
1. Hillary Clinton, “Economic Statecraft,” speech at the Economic Club of New York, 4 October 2011, https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/10/175552.htm (accessed 30 May 2017).
2. Hans Kundnani, “Germany as a Geo-Economic Power,” Washington Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2011): 31–45.
3. Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
4. Mark Leonard, ed., Connectivity Wars: Why Migration, Finance and Trade Are the Geo-Economic Battlegrounds of the Future (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2016).
5. Antto Vihma and Mikael Wigell, “Unclear and Present Danger: Russia's Geoeconomics and the North Stream II Pipeline,” Global Affairs 2, no. 4 (2016): 377–88; Mikael Wigell and Antto Vihma, “Geopolitics versus Geoeconomics: The Case of Russia's Changing Geostrategy and Its Effects on the EU,” International Affairs 92, no. 3 (2016): 605–27.
6. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest (summer 1992): 3–18.
7. Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992); Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49; Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” Atlantic Monthly 273, no. 2 (1994): 44–77.
8. Edward N. Luttwak, “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce,” National Interest (summer 1990): 17–23.
9. Edward N. Luttwak, The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third-World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
10. Luttwak, “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics,” 18.
11. Ibid., 19.
12. Ibid.
13. Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, no. 4 (1993): 72.
14. Mika Aaltola, Juha Käpylä, Harri Mikkola, and Timo Behr, “Towards the Geopolitics of Flows: Implications for Finland,” FIIA Report No. 40, 2014.
15. Vihma and Wigell, “Unclear and Present Danger;” Wigell and Vihma, “Geopolitics versus Geoeconomics.”
16. Kelly M. Greenhill, “The Weaponisation of Migration,” in Connectivity Wars, edited by Mark Leonard, 76–80.
17. Juan Zarate, Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
18. Blackwill and Harris, War by Other Means.
19. Patrick Bond, “The ANC's ‘Left Turn’ and South African Sub-Imperialism,” Review of African Political Economy 102 (2004): 599–616; Matthew Flynn, “Between Subimperialism and Globalization: A Case Study in the Internationalization of Brazilian Capital,” Latin American Perspectives 34, no. 6 (2007): 9–27; David A. McDonald, ed., Electric Capitalism, Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009).
20. Walter R. Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (2014): 69–79.
21. Valerie M. Hudson, Robert E. Ford, David Pack, and Eric R. Giordano, “Why the Third World Matters, Why Europe Probably Won't: The Geoeconomics of Circumscribed Engagement,” Journal of Strategic Studies 14, no. 3 (1991): 255–98.
22. James C. Hsiung, “The Age of Geoeconomics, China's Global Role, and Prospects of Cross-Strait Integration,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 14, no. 2 (2009): 113–33.
23. Mikael Mattlin and Mikael Wigell, “Geoeconomics in the Context of Restive Regional Powers,” Asia Europe Journal, vol. 14, no. 2 (2016): 125–34.
24. Ana C. Alves, “China and Brazil in Sub-Saharan African Fossil Fuels: A Comparative Analysis,” in A New Scramble for Africa? The Rush for Energy Resources in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Sören Scholvin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 33–51; Anniina Kärkkäinen, “Does China Have a Geoeconomic Strategy Towards Zimbabwe?: The Case of the Zimbabwean Natural Resource Sector,” Asia Europe Journal 14, no. 2 (2016): 185–202; Kundnani, “Germany as a Geo-economic Power;” Sören Scholvin and Georg Strüver, “Tying the Region Together or Tearing It Apart?: China and Transport Infrastructure Projects in the SADC Region,” in Monitoring Regional Integration in Southern Africa 2012, edited by André du Pisani, Gerhard Erasmus, and Trudi Hartzenberg (Stellenbosch: TRALAC, 2013), 175–93.
25. Stefan Andreasson, “British and US Strategies in the Competition for Energy Resources in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in A New Scramble for Africa? edited by Sören Scholvin, 13–31.
26. Blackwill and Harris, War by Other Means, 9.
27. David Scott, “The Great Power ‘Great Game’ between India and China: ‘The Logic of Geography,’” Geopolitics 13, no. 1 (2008): 1–26.
28. Tomasz G. Grosse, “Geoeconomic Relations between the EU and China: The Lessons from the EU Weapon Embargo and from Galileo,” Geopolitics 19, no. 1 (2014): 40–65.
29. Sanjaya Baru, “Geo-economics and Strategy,” Survival 54, no. 3 (2012): 47–58.
30. Ibid., 51.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 55.
33. Mark Leonard, “Introduction: Connectivity Wars,” in Connectivity Wars, edited by Mark Leonard, 22.
34. Ibid., 15.
35. Blackwill and Harris, War by Other Means, 24.
36. Ibid., 8.
37. Sören Scholvin and Peter Draper, “The Gateway to Africa?: Geography and South Africa's Role as an Economic Hinge Joint between Africa and the World,” South African Journal of International Affairs 19, no. 3 (2012): 381–400; Sören Scholvin and Andrés Malamud, “Is There a Geoeconomic Node in South America?: Geography, Politics and Brazil's Role in Regional Economic Integration,” ICS Working Paper No. 2/2014.
38. Juha Käpylä, and Harri Mikkola, “The Promise of the Geoeconomic Arctic: A Critical Arctic,” Asia Europe Journal 14, no. 2 (2016): 203–20.
39. Sören Scholvin, “Geographical Conditions and Political Outcomes,” Comparative Strategy 35, no. 4 (2016): 274–83.
40. Jonathan R. Barton, “‘Flags of Convenience’: Geoeconomics and Regulatory Minimisation,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 90, no. 2 (1999): 142–55.
41. Julien Mercille, “The Radical Geopolitics of US Foreign Policy: Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Logics of Power,” Political Geography 27, no. 5 (2008): 570–86.
42. Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith, “After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics,” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2009): 42.
43. Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2005).
44. Matthew Coleman, “US Statecraft and the US–Mexico Border as Security/Economy Nexus,” Political Geography 24, no. 2 (2005): 189–205; James D. Sidaway, “Asia–Europe–United States: The Geoeconomics of Uncertainty,” Area 37, no. 4 (2005): 373–7.
45. Richard Youngs, “Geo-economic Futures,” in Challenges for European Foreign Policy in 2012: What Kind of Geo-Economic Europe? edited by Ana Martiningui and Richard Youngs (Madrid: FRIDE, 2011), 14.
46. Sarah O'Hara and Michael Heffernan, “From Geo-Strategy to Geo-Economics: The ‘Heartland’ and British Imperialism before and after Mackinder,” Geopolitics 11, no. 1 (2006): 54–73.
47. Matthew Sparke, “Not a State, But More than a State of Mind: Cascading Cascadias and the Geoeconomics of Cross-Border Regionalism,” in Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Regions, edited by Markus Perkmann and Ngai-Ling Sum (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 212–38.
48. James Essex, Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Matthew Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,” Political Geography 25, no. 2 (2006): 151–80.
49. Mona Domosh, “Geoeconomic Imaginations and Economic Geography in the Early Twentieth Century,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 4 (2013): 945.
50. Matthew Sparke and Victoria Lawson, “Entrepreneurial Political Geographies of the Global-Local Nexus,” in A Companion to Political Geography, edited by John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gearóid O'Tuathail (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 316.
51. Colin Flint, Introduction to Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2006), 16.
52. Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics (London: Pinter, 1990), 39.
53. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, “Introduction,” in The Geopolitics Reader, edited by Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge (London: Routledge, 1998), 107.
54. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997).
55. John Morrissey, “Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization,” Antipode 43, no. 3 (2011): 874.
56. Ibid., 879.
57. Antto Vihma, “Return to Luttwak: Geoeconomic Analysis and the Limits of Critical Geopolitics,” Geopolitics. doi:10.1080/14650045.2017.1302928 (2017): 12.
58. Mikael Wigell “Conceptualizing Regional Powers’ Geoeconomic Strategies: Neo-Imperialism, Neo-Mercantilism, Hegemony, and Liberal Institutionalism,” Asia Europe Journal, vol. 14, no. 2 (2016): 137.
59. Luttwak, “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics,” 19.
60. Jeffry A. Frieden and David A. Lake, International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth (London: Routledge, 2014), 1.
61. John. G. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origin, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002).
62. Katherine Barbieri, The Liberal Illusion: Does Trade Promote Peace? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Mark Gasiorowski, “Economic Interdependence and International Conflict: Some Cross-National Evidence,” International Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1986): 23–38; Andrej Krickovic, “When Interdependence Produces Conflict: EU-Russia Energy Relations as a Security Dilemma,” Contemporary Security Policy 36, no. 1 (2015): 3–26.
63. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001); Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979).