Critical theory of weaponised interdependence

The critical theory of weaponised interdependence is the body of scholarship that interrogates the power relations, assumptions, and normative blind spots of the weaponised-interdependence literature, asking not how states weaponise networks but what the weaponisation frame conceals: who built the infrastructures, who bears the costs of their capture, and whose perspective the "chokepoint" vocabulary encodes.

Strands of critique

Three strands are prominent. The infrastructural strand, led in international political economy by de Goede and Westermeier's "infrastructural geopolitics", argues that payment systems such as SWIFT are not inert levers waiting to be pulled but lived, contested infrastructures with their own politics, maintainers, and frictions; hegemonic contestation plays out in and through them, and treating them as switches overstates state control while understating the agency of operators, banks, and users. A second strand, visible in the debate collected in Drezner, Farrell, and Newman's edited volume, contests scope conditions from within the research programme: whether the theory travels beyond finance and technology, whether it overstates hub durability, and whether state-centric framing misses firms as independent players. A third strand is normative, connecting weaponisation scholarship to questions of legitimacy and hierarchy: analysis that maps networks for coercive exploitation is not a neutral description but participates in the practice it describes. That strand shades into the harder critique treated at Imperialist anatomy of sanctions (critique).

Significance and limits

The critical literature disciplines strong claims about network control. It highlights infrastructure operators, private compliance, resistance, legitimacy and unequal exposure that a simple hub-and-spoke model may understate. Its limits are the mirror of its strengths: critique does not by itself prove operator resistance, legitimacy loss or coercive failure in a particular case. Those effects require actor-specific evidence rather than inference from the normative argument.

See also

Weaponised interdependence · Imperialist anatomy of sanctions (critique) · Chokepoint effect · Panopticon effect · Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman · SWIFT · Economic statecraft

Sources

• Marieke de Goede and Carola Westermeier, "Infrastructural Geopolitics", International Studies Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2022).
• Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, eds., *The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence* (Brookings Institution Press, 2021).
• Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, "Weaponized Interdependence", International Security 44, no. 1 (2019).
• Quinn Slobodian, *Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism* (Harvard University Press, 2018).