Structured Agency and the Limits of Global South Agency in a Geoeconomic Age

Recent academic and policy debates on the geoeconomic turn in EU and international trade policy portray the Global South’s resource-rich states as pivotal actors able to leverage great-power rivalry over critical raw materials for strategic and developmental gain. Within this “age of geoeconomic competition,” non-alignment has re-emerged as a celebrated strategy for the Global South: diversifying partnerships, maximising rents, and asserting economic sovereignty. This paper questions whether such autonomy can genuinely materialise. It argues that contemporary non-alignment constitutes a form of structured agency, a constrained and relational autonomy exercised within hierarchies of global capitalism as manifested in uneven accumulation in contemporary international trade, value-chain integration, and investment partnerships, and mediated by domestic political settlements and elite coalitions. Reviving dependencia theory, the paper links EU- and IR-focused geoeconomics debates with critical development scholarship to show how the language of “economic security” and “partnerships of equals” often obscures the reproduction of structural dependence. Building on Evans’s notion of embedded autonomy, three recurrent modes of non-alignment: ideological, economic, and defensive are identified as distinct attempts to materialise autonomy under constraint. Drawing on examples from trade and investment partnerships with Chile, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the analysis demonstrates how each mode collides with the structural and domestic limits inscribed in the contemporary geoeconomic order. The paper thus reframes the geoeconomic competition for raw-material trade and investment partnerships from the perspective of the periphery: not necessarily as a new opportunity for agency, but as the present-day expression of dependency. In doing so, it bridges EU studies and IR debates on the changing relationship between trade and development with Global South political economy, turning the “rise of the rest” into a question of the possible rather than the inevitable.