This theme section explores the analytical purchase and limitations of advancing a “critical geoeconomics” within a broader historical and geographical context. Comprising 11 short papers, it combines timely reassessments of contemporary and past iterations of geoeconomics and explores the potentials for positing an anti-geoeconomics against the backdrop of nationalist-imperialist phantoms. Collectively, the set of exchanges represents a tactical opportunity to bring critical scholarship on geoeconomic and geopolitical traditions into closer conversations with emerging debates on ideational historical trajectories, finance, firms, sovereignty, state capitalism, networks, industrial policy and geostrategy in economic and political geography (e.g. Alami et al., 2023); critical scrutiny of deglobalisation narratives and what is being termed geopolitical decoupling and globalisation in reverse (e.g. Pavlínek, 2023; Van Meeteren and Kleibert, 2022; Woon and Sidaway, 2024); and the redeployment of geoeconomics and geopolitics around notions of “economic war” (Hess, 2023) as well as longer tracks of economic diplomacy (Bayne and Woolcock, 2017).
