The Geopolitics of Capitalism: New Spaces of Imperialist Rivalry - Tapa dura

Every new international crisis revives the spectre of geopolitics: but does this ubiquitous term really help us make sense of a system in which exploitation and oppression are central to war and interstate competition?

Concentrating on the post-Cold War period, The Geopolitics of Capitalism examines the way in which capitalism is permanently creating a geography of conflict in its own image, through complex linkages between territory, class constellations and international relations. The book critically reviews a wide range of geopolitical traditions, revisits the engagement between them and Marxist theory and analyses three contemporary processes which have attracted all manner of geopolitical tropes and explanations. For example, the melting Arctic as a ‘last frontier’; commercial land acquisition as a ‘new scramble for Africa’ and the ‘new Cold War’ between the US-led Western powers and Russia.

Taking distance from both the classical canon and the more recent critical turn, Gonzalo Pozo argues that geopolitics, understood as a spatial dimension of capitalist accumulation, remains a useful lens through which to understand events and transformations around us.

Gonzalo Pozo is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s College London.