After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics

• Published in: Antipode 2009-01, Vol.41 (1), p.22-48
• Main Authors: Cowen, Deborah, Smith, Neil
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bgi / Prodig; Economic sociology; geoeconomics; Geopolitics; Human geography; International political economy; International relations; International security; Political and economic geography; Political geography; Ratzel; security; State-society relations; the social; the state; World economy; World order
• ISSN: 0066-4812; 1467-8330
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x

:  This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a “geopolitical social”, which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic. We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in “critical geopolitics” nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.