Age of Geoeconomics

Why are the world’s major powers treating semiconductors as strategic assets, supply chains as vulnerabilities, and trade and investment as instruments of power? What changed – and what does it mean for the future of globalization?For decades, the global economy was shaped by the expectation that markets would become increasingly integrated and that economic interdependence would foster prosperity and cooperation. Today, that assumption is giving way to a new reality. Governments are increasingly seeking not simply to benefit from interdependence, but to shape it strategically.In The Age of Geoeconomics, Mikael Wigell and Mohammed S. Hadi explain this transformation and provide a new framework for understanding it. At its heart is a struggle over the balance of dependence: who depends on whom, for what, and with what consequences for power. States are seeking to reduce dependencies that make them vulnerable while cultivating forms of dependence that give them leverage over others. Trade, finance, technology, investment, energy and supply chains have consequently become central arenas of geopolitical competition.The authors show how governments navigate this new landscape through different geoeconomic strategies – from coercing rivals and hedging against vulnerabilities to binding partners more closely and driving wedges between competing coalitions. These strategies are reshaping relationships between states and markets and giving rise to what the book calls strategic capitalism: an economic order in which security, power and geopolitical positioning increasingly influence decisions once governed predominantly by market considerations.Drawing together international politics, economics and business, The Age of Geoeconomics offers a compelling guide to the forces transforming the global economy, and a framework for understanding the emerging world order.