Spatial Imaginaries and the Geopolitics of Trade: A Constructivist Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Special Issue explores the spatial politics of trade through a constructivist lens. While recent debates in international trade policy have emphasised geostrategic concerns, we argue that space in trade governance is not merely a geopolitical backdrop, but a politically contested arena. The establishment, management, and contestation of trade relations are shaped by, and contribute to, social constructions of space, including the power structures that underpin them. Borrowing from political geography and the literature on spatial imaginaries, we set out the conceptual categories and guiding questions that structure this Special Issue. We examine how trade policies construct spatial imaginaries that reflect and reproduce geopolitical hierarchies, particularly between the Global South and North. With a focus on the trade politics of the European Union and the United Kingdom, we demonstrate why it is beneficial to analyse trade through a nuanced conceptualisation that understands space as contingently constructed, rather than as a neutral container.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".