Intended learning outcomes
Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:
● Reconstruct a genealogy of geoeconomic thought, from the mercantilist tradition to Hirschman, up to the contemporary debate
● Analyze the interaction between markets, states, and geopolitical competition in its historical forms and current structures
● Distinguish models of political capitalism and understand their implications
● Evaluate economic security tools: foreign investment screening, export controls, sanctions, industrial policy, financial instruments
● Evaluate the role of critical technologies—artificial intelligence, semiconductors, space, digital infrastructure—in redefining power relations between states and businesses
● Operate in a professional and institutional context influenced by new perspectives on economic security
Prerequisites
There are no mandatory prerequisites, but a basic knowledge of modern and contemporary history, as well as some knowledge of the history of political economy, could be useful.
Course Contents
Geoeconomics and economic security are gaining increasing prominence in public debate. This rise reflects the decline in the belief that commercial interdependence leads to enduring peace and cooperation. In the decades following 1989, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, we experienced the belief that growing trade, the expansion of increasingly complex value chains, and financial integration could give rise to a stable structural order.
Geoeconomics—the method that studies the use of economic tools as an extension of rivalry between states and other political actors—is now back at the center of the international agenda because competition is taking place not only in traditional armed conflicts but also over control of critical technologies, data infrastructures, supply chains, and energy supplies. Its weapons are patents, export restrictions, tariffs, industrial subsidy policies, investment networks in third countries, and innovation ecosystems.
The aim of the course is to explore the categories of geoeconomics and economic security through their genealogy in the history of political thought and economics. Albert Hirschman had already shown in his first work, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945), how commercial interdependence is not neutral but produces structural asymmetries of power, and how states controlling critical trade nodes have a means of political influence that precedes and complements military force. Nicholas Mulder, in The Economic Weapon (2022), reconstructed how economic sanctions arose in the early twentieth century as a conscious alternative to total war, with mixed fortunes and an ambiguous legacy.
The course offers a genealogy of geoeconomic thought and its fundamental concepts, along with an analysis of the tools and models with which the main actors in the international system—starting with the United States and China—practice economic security today, in a context of growing entanglement between politics and economics (political capitalism).
Reference Books
● Alessandro Aresu, Le potenze del capitalismo politico. Stati Uniti e Cina, La Nave di Teseo, Milano, 2020 (choice)
● Alessandro Aresu, Geopolitica dell’intelligenza artificiale, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2024 (choice)
● Albert Hirschman, Potenza nazionale e commercio estero. Gli anni Trenta, l’Italia e la ricostruzione (1945), trad.it. il Mulino, Bologna, 1987 (choice)
● Nicholas Mulder, L’arma economica (2022), trad.it. Einaudi, Torino, 2025 (choice)
Teaching Methods
Frontal teaching, commenting texts, case studies
Assessment Method
Participation in the classroom and other assessments
Thesis assignment criteria
None
Week 1
Part I – Geoeconomics: Genealogy and Conceptual Frameworks (6 hours)
The first part of the course builds the theoretical and historical framework for interpreting contemporary geoeconomics. The assumption is that the categories used today to discuss economic security—dependence, vulnerability, autonomy, technological power—are not recent inventions but have a lineage in modern thought and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history.
Origins of Geoeconomic Thought: Mercantilism and Adam Smith
● Mercantilism as a Systematic Theory of Economic Power
● The Blurred Distinction Between Economic and Political Objectives
● Through Adam Smith, the Birth of Political Economy and the Question of National Defense and Security
Week 2
The United States: Alexander Hamilton and Alfred Mahan
● Alexander Hamilton and the Report on Manufactures (1791): The protection of the US’ industry as a political argument against British free trade, interdependence as an asymmetry
● Alfred Mahan and the perspective of American thought on commercial and military expansion, and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt
Week 3
The United States and Economic Security
● Geoeconomics as a modern category: the industrial Factor and the "Japanese Threat"
Week 4
Part II – Albert Hirschman and the Economic Weapon (6 hours)
The second part explores the connection between the structure of capitalism and economic security, discussing the work of Albert Hirschman as the central point of reference for this debate in the twentieth century. It also introduces the discussion on economic weapons and sanctions, through Nicholas Mulder's historical reconstruction.
Albert Hirschman and the Structure of Commercial Power
● The context of National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945): Hirschman wrote during World War II to understand how Nazi Germany used trade as an instrument of political domination over Central and Eastern Europe.
● Asymmetry as a principle: bilateral trade relations are never symmetrical, and the party that has the most to lose from the interruption of trade is the politically weaker party.
Week 5
Albert Hirschman and the structure of trade power
● The limits of doux commerce according to Hirschman: his reconstruction of the concept and its influence.
● Hirschman's rediscovery in the 21st century: his vocabulary—dependence, asymmetry, vulnerability, commercial leverage—has become the standard vocabulary of the debate on economic security.
Week 6
The economic weapon: the historical genesis of sanctions.
● The birth of economic sanctions as an instrument of international politics during the League of Nations period (1919–1939).
● Peacewar: the peace-war regime and its contemporary relevance
● The paradox of the economic weapon: the more effective it is as an instrument of coercion, the greater its risk of radicalizing the target country and precipitating the very conflict it was intended to avoid.
Week 7
Part III – Political Capitalism (6 hours)
The third part introduces and discusses the concept of political capitalism, assuming that there is no single logic of contemporary capitalism, but rather different logics of power, in which the relationship between state and market adapts both to growing commercial interdependence and to new national security needs.
Political Capitalism: Concepts
● The concept of political capitalism: the distinction between market-oriented capitalism, in which the state sets the rules of the game but is not a direct productive actor, and state-driven capitalism, in which private enterprise is subject to national security constraints.
● Max Weber and political capitalism: the intertwining of security and markets, bureaucracies, and the State
Week 8
Political Capitalism: Concepts
● The interplay of States and markets and the end of the Cold War.
● The entrepreneurial State: an elusive concept.
Week 9
Political Capitalism: Forms
● The United States and the National Security State.
● From Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping: the China question and the ambiguous relationship with capitalism.
Week 10
Part IV - Tools of Applied Geoeconomics (6 hours)
The fourth part analyzes some concrete tools with which states practice and justify geoeconomics: from investment screening to sanctions, from industrial policy to the control of critical technologies. The goal is to understand the operational logic of the instruments, their historical precedents, their systemic implications, and their trade-offs.
Sanctions and Export Controls
● Types of sanctions and their political function; Extraterritoriality and the US outreach
● Export controls and technology chokepoints
Week 11
Sanctions and Export Controls
● Case study: the Huawei/HSBC case and its implications
Week 12
Critical technologies and economic security: the case of semiconductors
● The semiconductor supply chain and the paradox of interdependence: value chain structure, extreme geographic concentration, strategic vulnerabilities
● Artificial intelligence as a vector of power and its industrial supply chain
● Technology in a material world. Future challenges