Spatial Imaginaries and the Geopolitics of Trade: A Constructivist Perspective
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it