300462 Who Governs the Sea? Ports, Logistics, and Geoeconomic Power (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

The sea as a political-economic space is constantly contested. The fact that international trade is carried out mostly through maritime routes not only turns ports into critical infrastructures for maintaining the economic security of the countries in which they are built, but also reveals the dispute over their control by major powers as well as developing countries, each of which needs them in different ways.

Likewise, ports serve to project geoeconomic power, that is, a type of power that, far from being military, reflects the weight of liquidity and overaccumulation of major powers to extend their markets, commodities, and trade routes across the world and through the seas. In this sense, it is a type of power exercised through economic means, in which the state apparatus is highly involved.

Without seeking to underestimate military power at sea, the following course focuses on the importance of maritime trade for understanding the current geopolitical landscape. In this sense, rather than using classical concepts from international relations or geopolitics, we will use some that may seem foreign to the social scientist but that are crucial to the discipline of transport and its relationship with global maritime governance, such as ports, container vessels, shipbuilders, port authorities, shipping companies, and state-owned enterprises.

These aspects of the political economy of contemporary maritime transport will allow us to see how logistical control, control of routes, and control of the most advanced maritime transport technology project geoeconomic power in global society.