"Geoeconomic and Geopolitical Conflicts: Outcomes of the Geopolitical Economy in a Contemporary World"

1. Introduction and Theoretical PerspectivesThe ever greater dependence of human societies on natural resources,1 especially non-renewable sources of energy such as fossil fuels, jeopardizes the perspectives of human civilization. Apart from endangering the future of the Earth and the society as a whole through the burning of fossil fuels that consequently causes global warming, societies that are organized in national states and national economies tend to raise the level of proneness to mutual conflicts and the incidence of conflicts because of the desire that the states have to boost the development of their economies through the use of natural resources.2 Resource conflicts mainly arise and evolve due to the fact that the randomness and unevenness in the distribution of resources found on Earth cause great inequalities in the possibility to access those resources,3 and certain states or other active participants aspire, either directly or indirectly, to gain access to resources found on the territories of other states. Resources, whether abundant or scarce,4 are proving to be responsible for heightening the possibility of an outbreak of conflict or even war. Nevertheless, the purpose of this paper is not to study different resource conflicts but to find a connection between the resource conflicts and the geopolitical economy of the present day, i.e., how resource conflicts fit into the geopolitical economy.The main hypotheses of this paper are the following:1. Resource conflicts are and will be one of the main types of conflicts in the future. Therefore, different types of conflicts also have to be compared and put into different historical contexts.2. Geoeconomic rivalries as factors of geopolitical economy are the causes of resource conflicts, making resource conflicts one of the outcomes of geopolitical economy.However, the importance of resource conflicts both today and in the future does not mean that resource conflicts can and will (especially not alone) determine the future of mankind and, furthermore, that those conflicts will be the only type of conflicts occurring in our society. Before developing a discussion about resource conflicts that are occurring today and will occur in the future, theoretical perspectives about the contemporary geopolitical economy and especially about the role of states have to be outlined briefly. In the last two-and-a-half decades, resource conflicts have been compatible with theoretical perspective understood through a geopolitical economy, discussed and used by several authors. The most prominent authors whose views were briefly analyzed and compared for the purposes of this paper are K. van der Pijl, R. Desai, H. Lefebvre, J. Agnew and S. Corbridge, and G. O Tuathail.In his analysis of the influence of transnational classes on international relations, van der Pijl (1998, 66) points out that the state/society complex sanctioned by the Glorious Revolution (that occurred in England in 1688) may be termed Lockean after the author of the Two Treatises of Government (although that book was only indirectly linked to the event; see Lasslet in Locke 1965, 60). The typical state/society complex of the countries resisting peripheralization we term Hobbesian, after the author of the Leviathan, a reference to the authoritarian prelude to Lockean liberalization.5Van der Pijl also recognizes the succession of resistances put forward by contender states to improve the terms of their integration:Just as the US had warded off British commercial penetration, and Britain resisted American preeminence after the war, so the contender states integrated into the postwar Western bloc put up resistance to it. But this, as much as the entire contender state phase leading up to it, did not signify resistance to integration per se. Such resistance rather signals an aspiration to improve the conditions on which integration is to proceed, not a real wish to remain outside (Clarke 1978, 62). …