Descriptif d’enseignement – 2020/2021 3A

Initiation to geo-economics

Enseignant(s) : François-Joseph Fürry

Teacher’s bio: An energy infrastructures and natural resources’ specialist, M. Fürry currently serves as political advisor within French Joint Headquarters and has taken part to various missions with NATO and Franco-British Combined Joined Expeditionary Forces (CJEF). He specialises on military relationships to IOs & NGOs, Civil-Military cooperation as well as advisory on non-military levers to operations, be they of economic, social or religious. He teaches Geopolitical economics as well as Geopolitics of the Middle-East at EDHEC Paris (Executive MBA) and French War College.

Type of course : ☒Course

Syllabus: This course initiates 3A students to a relatively recent discipline born at the crossroads of geography, economics, political sciences and strategy. It is based on an original approach coupling the direct interactive study of founding research texts with the mirrored analysis of major diplomatic public speeches in the last 30 years to put university research into context of ongoing International relations.

Objectives: Discovering the importance of cross-subjects analysis and contextualizing of geopolitical research, while sharpening student’s analytical tools, that can be applied on international affairs, be they of diplomatic or economic nature.

Evaluation: 15’ weekly press reviews of freely chosen relevant events, realised in working groups in alternation, requiring 2 hours of work for the group in charge. This will be coupled with contributions to founding articles studies (1 hour per course of preparation) and critical analysis of major geopolitical speeches in class. Hence a total of 11 hours of preparation work per student across the total length of the course.

Agenda – 9 classes of 2 hours each:

1. The post cold war context of apparition of the geo-economics concept

2. The founding role of Edward Luttwak facing George Bush Sr’s “world new order”

3. The irrepressible decline of borders and emergence of non-state actors

4. The Constructivist approach and the school of Copenhagen: political biases of the geoeconomic approach ?

5. The “Geographist” approach: from emerging powers to the analysis of resource wars

6. 9/11, the violent comeback of risk and of geoeconomic theme: the “Bush doctrine” and neocons in power

7. Hard, soft and smart powers: the Obama doctrine and its underlying geoeconomic roots

8. “War by other means”: the rediscovery of Luttwak’s teachings due to China’s rising power

9. Conclusion – tentative definition and relevance of the concept at the age of global interdependence

Bibliography: - Blackwill, Robert D. and Harris, Jennifer M. 2016. War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

- Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jap de Wilde. 1997. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. 

- Cowen, Deborah and Neil Smith. 2009. ‘After Geopolitics?: From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics’. Antipode 41.1: 22–48. 

- Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books. 

- Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. ‘Why International Primacy Matters’. International Security 17.4: 68–83. 

- Käpylä, Juha and Harri Mikkola. 2016. ‘The Promise of the Geoeconomic Arctic: a Critical Analysis’. Asia Europe Journal 14.2: 203–20. 

- Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye. 1977. Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston: Little, Brown. 

- Le Billon Ph, 2001. Angola’s political economy of war: the role of oil & diamonds 1975-2000, African affairs, vol 100, n° 398, Jan 2001, pp. 55-80 

- Le Billon Ph., 2004, Geopolitics of resource wars: resource dependence, governance and violence, Geopolitics, London, Frank Cass, 277 p. 

- Edward N. Luttwak, 1990, From geopolitics to geoeconomics: logic of conflict, grammar of commerce, The national interest, Summer 1990, pp. 17-23 

- Luttwak, Edward N., 1993, The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third-World Country and How to Win the Geo-economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy. New York, Simon & Schuster. 

- Mattlin, Mikael and Mikael Wigell. 2016. ‘Geoeconomics in the Context of Restive Regional Powers’. Asia Europe Journal 14.2: 125–34. 

- Morrissey, John. 2011. ‘Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization’. Antipode 43.3: 874–900. 

- Scholvin, Sören and Peter Draper. 2012. ‘The Gateway to Africa?: Geography and South Africa’s Role as an Economic Hinge Joint Between Africa and the World’. South African Journal of International Affairs 19.3: 381–400.


El curso es una aproximación a los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) de las Naciones Unidas para estudiantes de Ciencias Políticas, así como de otras áreas afines.

El curso pretende familiarizar el estudiante con el proceso político y el marco internacional que dio lugar a los ODS, su implantación a distintas escalas y también una aproximación sustantiva a algunos de los 17 objetivos.

La lengua del curso será el español.

The Great Depression profoundly changed the way Americans saw their country and their government: how can one believe in the American Dream when 25% of the population is unemployed? In spite – or because – of the deep economic crisis, cultural production was intense during the 1930s. The federal government funded documentary projects aimed at showing the people the country as it was (and gathering support for the President’s initiatives) and the entertainment industry boomed.

The aim of this course is twofold: to familiarize students with the political and cultural transformations of the United States in the 1930s and to see how the crisis affected the image the country had of itself as a land of freedom and opportunity, a question which can echo contemporary concerns.

We will be working on political and literary texts (Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace Lumpkin, John Dos Passos…), photographs, films and songs (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Pare Lorentz, Victor Fleming, Woody Guthrie, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday…).