| Summary/Abstract |
The study and practice of Australian International Relations requires a geopolitical economy agenda so that some of the key political and strategic challenges we face can be adequately understood and theorised. This includes an understanding of new forms of geopolitical contests that are reconstituting the boundaries between economic and security domains. The understanding of these security and political challenges in Australian International Relations is tethered to a terminology such as containment borrowed from the cold war conceptual arsenal. It has driven the government research agenda to security and strategic issues. Such government agendas have a deeply problematic influence—not the least of which are through research funding policies on academic research in International Relations. A comprehensive understanding of these new modes of geopolitical contestation requires an examination of the interactive relationship between geopolitical and capitalist transformations. In order to understand transformations in the global capitalist economy and the emergence of new modes of geopolitics, we require a geopolitical economy research agenda. This paper proposes a framework of uneven and combined development (UCD) as one useful framework to understand the nature of geopolitical contests in the early twentyfirst century.
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