Resurgent geopolitical tensions are turning economic ties into instruments of power: financial sanctions on Russia, export controls on advanced semiconductors, and China's dominance in critical minerals all show how interdependence can be weaponised. Funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2025–2028), this project investigates the sources of geoeconomic power and vulnerability. Its starting point is that most economic exchanges, even between rivals, could be replaced at manageable cost if relations soured. A few could not. These chokepoints — economic exchanges without good alternatives — turn interdependence into power for one side and vulnerability for the other. Working at the intersection of international politics, economics, and business, the project asks why chokepoints arise, how states activate them, and how they can be governed without undermining the openness on which prosperity depends. It combines quantitative analysis of trade and production data with detailed case studies and close exchange with policymakers and business practitioners.

A central output is the book manuscript Varieties of Chokepoints: The Sources of Geoeconomic Power. The book argues that chokepoints come in four recurring varieties (platform, know-how, fixed assets, and market access), each resting on a different source of high substitution costs and each following its own lifecycle of emergence, activation, and adjustment. A chokepoint's type reveals who can wield it, who is exposed, and how, if at all, it can be escaped. The book thus aims to help governments distinguish the few dependencies that create real vulnerability from ordinary interdependence. Alongside the book, the project produces journal articles and working papers on economic sanctions and countersanctions, export controls, and Europe's economic dependencies, as well as original data collections on the use of economic coercion.

The project also examines how geoeconomics and the net-zero transition intersect. In collaboration with the Oxford Climate Policy Monitor, based at the Blavatnik School, it is developing a new domain tracking climate-related trade restrictions, such as tariffs and carbon border adjustment mechanisms, to understand how climate policy is reshaping geoeconomic competition. Across all strands, the project aims to keep geoeconomic rivalry from escalating, and to sustain the political and economic cooperation that underpins peace and prosperity.