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This paper is a response to Antto Vihma’s article ‘Geoeconomic Analysis and the Limits of Critical Geopolitics: A New Engagement with Edward Luttwak’. Taking issue with Vihma’s critique of the limits of critical geopolitics, it argues that it is instead the use of economic strategies in statecraft – Vihma’s state-centric vision of geoeconomics inspired by Edward Luttwak – that is really better understood as limited. To map these limitations, it is necessary to attend to three specific limits: first, the limits of conceptualising geoeconomics in simply instrumental terms as a tool of statecraft; second, the limits of capital and specifically the ways in which the geographical limits created by the on-going tensions between spatial fixity and spatial expansion in capitalism are refracted through the on-going entanglements of geopolitics and geoeconomics; and third, the limits of personal positionality and the emotional fears, hopes, dreams and passions that influence geostrategic discourse more generally. Reflecting on Donald J. Trump’s ascendancy to the US presidency, the paper concludes that it is now more necessary than ever to address how all these force-fields intersect to overdetermine the limits of economic strategy in statecraft.
Matthew Sparke (Fri,) studied this question.