Call for Papers Geopolitical Economy Stream World Association for Political Economy (WAPE)

As conflicts and crises of every kind – from Ukraine and Gaza to the Korean Peninsula, from trade to technology – proliferate, few today doubt that the international order is undergoing seismic shifts and faces stark choices. In this context, inherited frameworks in the study of international relations – realism, liberalism, globalization, U.S. Hegemony – have neither anticipated nor explained these developments and the accelerating trend towards multipolarity or, as Hugo Chavez, referring to the diversity of economic forms in the more numerous poles of the world economy, called it, pluripoliarity. The need for a new approach to understanding the international relations of our time is urgent.

Geopolitical economy is one such approach. Rooted in the classical Marxist tradition, critical of many of its current avatars, putting the understanding of capitalism and its contradictions and of imperialism and anti-imperialism at its core, giving states their rightful due, alongside classes, as key actors shaping the modern capitalist world, drawing on classical political economy and other traditions critical of neoclassical economics, geopolitical economy aims to investigate the international relations of the capitalist world in a historical materialist manner.

At the 17th World Association for Political Economy conference in Athens, in keeping with its overall theme of ‘Political Economy versus Economics in a Turbulent Multipolar World’, we launch the Geopolitical Economy stream of WAPE with this call for papers.

We invite papers on the broad theme of ‘Geopolitical Economy: globalization or imperialism? Development or war?'. We especially encourage papers that engage with – both positively and critically – the existing geopolitical economy literature and develop its many themes on a variety of topics, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Understanding imperialism in an age of advancing pluripolarity
• The sources and resources of anti-imperialism
• Classical Marxist understandings of the international relations of capitalism
• The problems with existing paradigms, including ‘globalization’ and ‘U.S. Hegemony’
• The geopolitical economy of trade, investment, finance and technology
• War, Proxy Wars and Sanctions in our times
• The uses and misuses of international law
• The UN System, its history and contemporary problems
• New forms and organizations in international governance
• Shifting trade, investment, credit, migration and technology flows