Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy

Citing that no form of social production has generated more war and violence than capitalism, Desai puts history back into the picture. He argues that the reason we fail to understand the drivers of capitalist international relations and the role of war and economic conflict in them is that we have largely abandoned the historical approach to understanding social reality. He presents geopolitical economy as the useful tool for an examination of international tensions and promotes further development and specification of uneven and combined development as the dominant pattern in the unfolding of capitalist international relations, one that is constitutive of its component states themselves. His volume aims to contribute theoretically to this new approach. Nine essays are: the uneven and combined development of international historical sociology; the collapse of ‘the international imagination’: a critique of the transhistorical approach to uneven and combined development; locating the state: uneven and combined development, the states system and the political; expanding geopolitical economy: a critique of the theory of successive hegemonies; gross domestic power: geopolitical economy and the history of national accounts; military power and trade policy—roots of contemporary geopolitical economy; understanding Eurasian integration and contestation in the post-Soviet conjuncture: lessons from geopolitical economy and critical historicism; geographies of capital accumulation: tracing the emergence of multi-polarity, 1980-2014. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)