Matthew Sparke
6 min
Geoeconomics has become a contested term, often used by foreign policy elites and international relations experts to describe 'economic statecraft'—the use of economic tools like sanctions, tariffs, and trade deals to achieve national security goals. However, the author argues that these instrumentalist definitions often overlook the deeper, structural forces of capitalist development. As global hegemony shifts from Western dominance toward a more multipolar order, the entanglement of economic and geopolitical strategies has become more complex, necessitating a more rigorous, critical geographical perspective.
To move beyond simple, descriptive accounts of geoeconomics, the author proposes the use of 'conjunctural analysis.' Borrowing from Gramscian traditions in urban and regional geography, this method seeks to situate geostrategic discourses within the broader context of struggles over territory and hegemony. Rather than treating geopolitics and geoeconomics as independent logics, conjunctural analysis examines how they are dialectically related, reflecting the tension between the need for fixed investments in space and capitalism’s relentless drive for new expansion opportunities.
This approach allows researchers to avoid the pitfalls of 'discursive determinism'—the mistake of assuming that political rhetoric is the only thing that matters—while also avoiding a reductive materialism that ignores the power of ideas. By analyzing how geoeconomic policies (such as 'de-risking' or 'friend-shoring') are constructed and contested, critical geographers can reveal how these strategies are not just neutral economic tools, but are deeply tied to ethno-identitarian visions, imperial histories, and the everyday experiences of people living through these global upheavals. Ultimately, this framework provides a way to study the 'Second Cold War' and other contemporary shifts without losing sight of the underlying contradictions of global capitalism.
Recent shifts in global hegemony make the need for critical geographical accounts of geoeconomics and geopolitics that much more critical. They underline that we need to come to terms with their dialectical relationships and tensions, doing so in relation to both underlying struggles over international hegemony and uneven capitalist development as well as in relation to all sorts of complex overlying socio-cultural formations. Critical geographers can combine their diverse approaches more effectively to do this analytical work by adapting recent forms of conjunctural analysis in urban, economic and regional geography.
Sam: A company wants its factories to stay put to keep costs low, but the system pushes it to keep expanding.
Alex: Exactly. And if you ignore that tension, you end up with what the paper calls "discursive determinism" — the mistake of thinking that political outcomes are caused mainly by the rhetoric leaders use. The speeches matter, but if you focus only on the words, you miss the material reality underneath: the actual factories, the supply chains, the physical geography of where capital has been built and where it's trying to go.
Sam: So the goal is to connect the high-level rhetoric of politicians to the ground-level reality of how capital actually moves and builds across the globe.
Alex: That's the challenge the paper sets out. The author suggests we need to trace what he calls "relays" — the pathways through which a speech about national security actually translates into a physical change in a port, or a restructured supply chain, or a new industrial policy.
Sam: Does the paper give a concrete example of how this plays out?
Alex: Consider the current struggle over microchip manufacturing. It's not simply a trade dispute. It's a contest over who controls the most critical fixed infrastructure of the modern digital economy — the fabs, the equipment, the specialized knowledge clusters that took decades to build and can't simply be relocated. When you look at it through a conjunctural lens, you see how technological dominance, national security concerns, and the physical geography of production are all colliding at the same moment.
Sam: So rather than just labeling it a "tech war," you'd map the specific historical conditions that made that collision happen when and where it did.
Alex: Precisely. And the paper is honest about the difficulty of this. The author acknowledges that this kind of analysis is more demanding — you have to track many moving parts simultaneously — and that policymakers often prefer the simpler toolkit view because it produces clear, actionable answers.
Sam: Which raises an uncomfortable question. If the people in power prefer the simpler framing because it's easier to sell, how does a more critical approach ever gain any real traction?
Alex: The author is candid about this. The dominant narratives — the "common sense" stories that elites use to justify their decisions — are likely to persist regardless of how carefully critical researchers reframe the debate. That's a real limitation the paper doesn't shy away from.
Sam: So even if the research produces a more accurate map of the world, it might not be the map that the people steering the ship actually want to use.
Alex: That's true. But the paper's argument is that the value isn't only in changing policy overnight. It's in producing a more honest account of the forces that are actually shaping our lives — so that we're not just reacting to the storm after it hits, but understanding the atmospheric conditions that built it.
Sam: Moving from passive observer to someone who can read the pressure building in the system before it breaks.
Alex: That's the aspiration. It's a shift from reactive analysis to a more structural understanding of how the global order is being remade — one that takes seriously both the words leaders use and the material realities those words are trying to manage, or sometimes to hide.
Sam: It's a harder way to think about the world. But probably a more honest one.
Alex: The paper suggests so. Behind every policy, there is a complex, historically rooted struggle over material power — and that struggle doesn't pause just because our frameworks for understanding it are too simple to capture it. Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.