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

The paper studies the influence of states' dependence on the exploitation and export of non-renewable natural resources on the development of conflicts, the so-called resource conflicts. Various authors describe the term “geopolitical economy” in a number of different ways. A major distinction between their views pertains to the role and the importance that the state has in the international political economy and also at the global level. However, drawing mainly on R. Desai's thesis that the modern world is predominantly characterized by uneven and combined development and that states have the dominant role in it (states dominate the political economy on the domestic level and the geopolitical economy on the international level), different types of conflicts will be compared and put into different “geopolitical economies.” The main research thesis is that resource conflicts can be described as geoeconomic-geopolitical conflicts, and these conflicts evolve as outcomes of the geopolitical economy.