Geopolitics and economic geography: a commentary on Andy Pike’s geographical political economy

The geographical political economy (GPE) proposed by Andy Pike (2020. Coping with deindustrialization in the global North and South. International Journal of Urban Sciences, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2020.1730225) and his colleagues offers room for a better understanding of the interaction between politics and industrialization of a region. In this commentary, we argue that the political dimension of GPE should be further emphasized and geopolitics should be taken more seriously. Incorporation of geopolitics can improve GPE in two ways: First, it will help GPE capture variegated pathways and institutions of regional economies, which in turn can help reduce the Anglo-American bias in GPE and economic geography. Secondly, attention to geopolitics is a way to achieve a multi-scalar understanding of the regional economy because geopolitical actions at international scale influences what happnes at national and local scales. With examples from East Asia, where the effects of geopolitics are highly visible, we claim there are at least three ways that geopolitics influence regional industrialization. First, geopolitics change the global economy, which can subsequently predispose regional industrialization; second, a superpower’s geopolitical strategy influences its international economic policy, which can afterwards predispose other nations’ regional industrialization; lastly, a national state sets a geopolitical strategy which then determines regional policy within the nation’s territory.