Introduction: transnational infrastructures in geoeconomic competition

In a period of intense geoeconomic rivalry, states and corporations have moved infrastructures to the centre of strategic considerations. This Special Issue advances the notion of an infrastructure–geoeconomics nexus. As cross-border networks of logistics, energy, and communication, transnational infrastructures provide the material backbone of global competition. Geoeconomic strategies, in turn, substantially reconfigure these networks and to which ends they are used. The introduction provides a conceptual foundation for the contributions and structures a widely fragmented debate. Based on a critical review of scholarship on the contemporary (geo)economy, we unfold a critical geoeconomic perspective that links geoeconomic competition to the internal contradictions of capitalist production; opens up the state as a site of social contestation; and widens the debate to social forces beyond the US and China. Geoeconomics and geopolitics are conceptualized as dialectically related practices. Finally, we develop five central claims that guide the research agenda of this Special Issue.