Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 2016), 384

Abstract

The author Robert D. Blackwill is a retired American diplomat, currently serving as Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, while his co-author Jennifer M. Harris is an academician and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in USA. In their latest publication, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, Blackwill and Harris describe the relation between geoeconomics and statecraft vis-à-vis the quest for geopolitical ambitions through the use of various economic instruments. As put, the book suggests that geoeconomics is re-emerging as a favoured form of geopolitical combat for some of the world’s most powerful states and is shaping policy outcomes across the world (p. 18). More so, the authors critically discuss the geoeconomic moves both coercive and incentivizing and the counterweighing strategies employed by various powers to influence their near and extensive neighbourhood to tackle their enemy, thus changing the nature of the ‘battlefield’ from the military to economics.