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The dynamics of the economic and political transformations of the second half of the twentieth century, especially since the 1970s, deepened interdependence among countries, raised the productive restructuring movement, and intensified both international trade and finance. This new dynamics attracted the attention of many scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) and started a new academic debate. Generally, those authors characterized the international conjuncture either by the existence of an American hegemony or by the multipolar character of the present order. Nevertheless, almost none of them questioned the notions behind the so-called victory of liberalism and the apparent decreasing role of the national states. In this sense, this paper reviews those main IPE theories concerned about the 1970s' crisis and presents the theory of Global Power, drafted by José Luis Fiori. Thus, it aims at demonstrating the potential of this theory to renew the current IPE discussions from a critical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution I will test the geopolitical-economic approach as formulated by Desai (2013) in the analysis of the EU's regulatory response to the financial crisis by focusing on two relevant pieces of legislation in the post-crisis reform of banking governance: the adaptation of the Basel III agreement to the package on Capital requirements, composed of a regulation and a directive, and the ongoing legislative process concerning the structural reform of banks. As I try to show, the concept of "competing geopolitical bloc" derived from the work of Desai, but even detectable in some recent Neo-Gramscian literature, is useful in analysing the shortcomings of the European regulatory response to the 2007/8 economic and financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the influence of states' dependence on the exploitation and export of non-renewable natural resources on the development of conflicts, the so-called resource conflicts. Various authors describe the term "geopolitical economy" in a number of different ways. A major distinction between their views pertains to the role and the importance that the state has in the international political economy and also at the global level. However, drawing mainly on R. Desai's thesis that the modern world is predominantly characterized by uneven and combined development and that states have the dominant role in it (states dominate the political economy on the domestic level and the geopolitical economy on the international level), different types of conflicts will be compared and put into different "geopolitical economies." The main research thesis is that resource conflicts can be described as geoeconomic-geopolitical conflicts, and these conflicts evolve as outcomes of the geopolitical economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction contextualizes the articles that follow in a discussion of relevant elements of the critical theme of the "materiality of nations" in geopolitical economy. In particular, it focuses on the need to understand the evolution of capitalist states and their domestic and international economic roles in terms of the contradictions of capitalism; the need to unite the normally separated economic and political logics of capitalism in an overall historical understanding; the need to understand combined development as including capitalist combined development and the dialectic of uneven and combined development as the key driver of capitalist international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four recent books on competition and crisis in the 20th century have contributed to renewed interest in Marxist theory while reopening some contentious issues. While central to all four books, the role of the capitalist state is not theorised systematically, a weakness which reflects an enduring gap in Marxist theory. One of the challenges when theorising the state is that the latter must be situated within a complex set of multiscalar relationships involving accumulation and competition. The author argues that the state must be understood as having multiple, intersecting determinations and suggests that a satisfactory theory of the state may be constructed by showing how these determinations arise from the logic of capitalist competition and crisis. Conceptualised as generative mechanisms, they denote not only the main influences on state decisions and behaviour but also--and crucially--the fundamental limits on state decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]