Critical geoeconomics: A genealogy of writing politics, economy and space | Felix Mallin, James D. Sidaway | ResearchPod

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

Alex: Welcome to another episode of ResearchPod. Today, we're looking at a paper by Felix Mallin and James Sidaway that challenges how we think about "geoeconomics."

Sam: We often treat geoeconomics as a 21st-century innovation — a modern strategy for navigating trade wars and global competition. But this paper argues it's actually a century old, rooted in anxieties from the early 1900s.

Alex: So we've been mislabeling a very old concept as something new?

Sam: Precisely. Policymakers treat it as a fresh tool, but they are repeating debates from the 1920s about resource security and national power. To show this, the authors dig through old archives — dusty texts, policy documents, academic journals — and trace how the term was actually used across different eras and countries. Think of it like uncovering a hidden layer in an old painting. The modern image is painted over a faded sketch that still shapes the final composition.

Alex: So they're tracing the word's actual history to show it isn't a modern invention?

Sam: Exactly. They analyzed old German and American texts and found what they call a "definitional struggle." That's their term for a century-long argument over what the word actually means — whether it refers to commerce, military power, or protecting national resources. Different groups kept claiming the term for different purposes, and that tug-of-war never really stopped.

Alex: If it's been used for a century, why do we keep hearing that the strategist Edward Luttwak invented it around 1990?

Sam: That's the core of the problem. Luttwak framed geoeconomics as a clean break from the past — a shift from military conflict to economic competition between nations. That framing was compelling, and his version became the standard story. But the authors show his claim to have coined the term is a myth. The word, and the thinking behind it, already existed. By ignoring that history, we fail to see that our supposedly "new" strategies are largely recycled versions of older imperial anxieties about national survival and global control.

Alex: So it's not just a debate about words. It's about how we understand the way states have always tried to control the world — and whether we're honest about that.

Sam: That is the key insight. Geoeconomics isn't a stable, modern invention. It's a recurring way of thinking that surfaces whenever states feel economically or politically insecure. The label changes, but the underlying logic — using economic tools to project national power — stays remarkably consistent.

Alex: You mentioned German texts specifically. How did that environment shape these early ideas?

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

Felix Mallin, James D. Sidaway

Jan 27, 2023·3:42·user_upload·Original Paper

GeoeconomicsCritical GenealogyGeopoliticsDefinitional StruggleGeopolitical TransitionTransnational Liberalism

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4 min

Briefing

The Myth of the Neologism

In contemporary policy and academic circles, the term 'geoeconomics' is frequently attributed to the strategist Edward N. Luttwak, who popularized it in the early 1990s to describe a post-Cold War world where the 'grammar of commerce' replaced the 'logic of war.' This paper challenges this narrative, arguing that geoeconomics is not a modern invention but a concept with a deep, largely forgotten history. By tracing the term back to the early 20th century, the authors reveal that the current 'geoeconomics boom' is merely the latest iteration of a long-standing intellectual struggle to define the relationship between space, power, and the global economy.

A Genealogical Approach

The authors employ a genealogical method to uncover how geoeconomics has been deployed across different historical contexts. They identify early uses of the term in German intellectual life, particularly during the Geopolitik era following World War I. Figures such as Arthur Dix, who authored the first book-length account of geoeconomics in 1925, viewed the concept as a way to map the terrestrial environment for economic opportunity and national utility. The study further tracks the term's reappearance in Cold War-era US military training materials, showing that it has consistently emerged during periods of intense debate regarding national destiny and strategic competition.

Dialectical Tensions

Rather than viewing geoeconomics as a simple replacement for geopolitics, the authors argue that the two are dialectically related. Throughout the 20th century, proponents and critics have used geoeconomics to either bolster state power or to critique imperialist expansion. The paper suggests that the recent surge in interest—evidenced by the creation of numerous 'geoeconomics' centers in major think tanks—reflects an ongoing, unresolved tension between market-based strategies and traditional geopolitical security concerns. By historicizing these debates, the authors provide a critical framework for understanding how contemporary global power is conceptualized and enacted.

Key Terms and Definitions

Geoeconomics — A contested concept referring to the intersection of economic strategies and geopolitical power, often used to describe the use of financial and market tools to achieve national foreign policy goals.
Geopolitik — An early 20th-century German school of thought that emphasized the influence of geography and space on the political power and expansion of the state.
Genealogy — A historical method that traces the evolution of a concept over time to reveal its shifting meanings, power dynamics, and the intellectual struggles that shaped its current usage.
Staatswissenschaften — A traditional German academic framework, meaning 'state sciences,' which historically aggregated politics, economics, and law before the disciplines became specialized.
Neologism — A newly coined word or expression, which the authors argue is an inaccurate label for 'geoeconomics' given its documented usage dating back to the early 1900s.

Abstract

Abstract Towards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and economy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining prominence 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 military 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, conceptualised 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 struggles track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions.

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