A capitalising foreign policy: Regulatory geographies and transnationalised state projects

Simple item page
dc.contributor.authorChacko, P.
dc.contributor.authorJayasuriya, K.
dc.date.issued2018
dc.descriptionFirst Published March 21, 2017
dc.description.abstractProposals for regional economic integration, namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the One Belt One Road proposal, have recently been driving the security dynamics of the Asian region. To explain the growing ‘economic’ focus of states’ foreign policies, we need to go beyond the dominant approaches in International Relations and International Political Economy, which are limited in their analytical power because they often make a distinction between politics/security and economics, and prioritise one over the other, rather than seeing them as internally related. Drawing on Leon Trotsky’s theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ and Nicos Poulantzas’s notion of ‘internalised transformations’, we develop a ‘Poulantzian-uneven and combined development’ framework to argue that the increased focus on economics in foreign policymaking represents a fundamental change related to the transnationalisation of capitalist state-building projects. The paper argues that while the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflected an attempt by the Obama administration to fashion a new stage in the transnationalisation of American capital, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal reflect an emerging China-centred transnationalised state project. We characterise the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal as constituting different forms of a particular type of geoeconomic strategy called ‘regulatory geographies’ because they entail the export of distinctive modes of regulatory governance that aim to overcome key contradictions of uneven and combined capitalist development in the US and China. As the recent demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the election of Donald Trump shows, however, these transnationalised state projects generate resistance and contestation within, as well as between, states.
dc.description.statementofresponsibilityPriya Chacko, Kanishka Jayasuriya
dc.identifier.citationEuropean Journal of International Relations, 2018; 24(1):82-105
dc.identifier.doi10.1177/1354066117694702
dc.identifier.issn1354-0661
dc.identifier.issn1460-3713
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2440/104397
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherSAGE Publications
dc.rights© The Author(s) 2017
dc.source.urihttps://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117694702
dc.subjectChina; One Belt One Road; Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership; Trans- Pacific Partnership; uneven and combined development; US
dc.titleA capitalising foreign policy: Regulatory geographies and transnationalised state projects
dc.typeJournal article
pubs.publication-statusPublished

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
hdl_104397.pdf
Size:
554.07 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Accepted version
Download

Collections

Politics publications