Economic Warfare and Strategic Competition
Programme and Network
The Journal of Geoeconomics began its Economic Warfare and Strategic Competition programme and network in 2025. It is a long-term capacity-building effort focused on the nexus of economic statecraft and military power. It combines research, applied policy work, strategic foresight exercises, and Track 1.5 dialogues to develop the expertise, institutional capacity, and sustained relationships needed to understand, anticipate, and respond to geoeconomic contingencies.
At the centre of the programme is an integrated network that unites defence, government, and diplomatic communities with academic, research, and policy organisations, as well as practitioners across industry, law, finance, insurance, and logistics. Research feeds directly into applied outcomes to examine how economic coercion, military action, and commercial disruption interact while assessing their implications on readiness, resilience, and decision-making.
An important part of the programme is developing the next generation of talent. Young scholars, emerging leaders, and early-career practitioners take part in research, exercises, and policy engagement alongside more experienced colleagues. Mentorship is paired with practical experience, helping participants develop their knowledge, judgement, and professional relationships in this emerging domain.
Project: Economic Warfare and Strategic Competition in the Arctic - Multi-Domain Resilience for a New Era
Led by D. Matthew Millar, Edward Hunter Christie, and Mikael Wigell, and co-presented with Law & Geoeconomics, this multi-day Track 1.5 dialogue and strategic-foresight exercise mobilised more than 60 international experts, officials, and practitioners from Canada, allied countries, partner nations, and institutions. The dialogue drew on shared expertise and knowledge-transfer, while receiving key international perspectives from H.E. Toomas Lukk, Estonia’s Special Envoy to the Arctic; Edward Hunter Christie, Economic Security Forum and Journal of Geoeconomics; Nora Kürzdörfer, Senior Researcher at the Munich Security Conference; and Cordelia Buchanan Ponczek, Finnish Institute of International Affairs and Law & Geoeconomics. This project was made possible with support from Canada’s Department of National Defence through the MINDS Programme and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, and in-kind support from the Montreal Institute for Global Security.
Participants in Economic Warfare and Strategic Competition in the Arctic — Ottawa, November 2025.
The discussions started from a simple proposition: Arctic security cannot be understood only through sovereignty, military presence, and surveillance. It also turns on whether people, goods, information, and capital can continue to move when economic and military pressure is applied. Sessions considered economic coercion, strategic infrastructure, maritime access, industrial resilience, and the difficulty of maintaining allied coordination when commercial and security pressures collide.
Wargaming Geoeconomics: Strategic Foresight Tabletop Exercise
The centrepiece of the event featured an original strategic-foresight tabletop exercise that began with ambiguity around Arctic access prompted by a hostile nation, then followed the consequences as uncertainty spread through navigation, trade, insurance, finance, information, and public enviroments. The scenario put the programme’s multidomain logic to the test. It traced a crisis in which military action, disrupted shipping, insurance stress, and financial backstops converged around strategic access. In doing so, it showed how economic leverage and hard power can together constrain movement, disrupt sustainment, strain allied cohesion, and narrow governments’ room for manoeuvre.
The scenario set out a credible geoeconomic contingency whose underlying dynamics became visible months later in the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis. Participants came away with a clearer appreciation that geoeconomic contingencies do not remain within political, economic, or military silos. The exercise put the DIME framework into practice: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments converged within the same contingency, each shaping the effect of the others.
Peter Bates, Canadian Global Affairs Institute; Cordelia Buchanan Ponczek, FIIA and Law & Geoeconomics; Edward Hunter Christie, Journal of Geoeconomics and Economic Security Forum; and Dr. Bernd Althusmann, Konrad Adenaur Stiftung — Ottawa, November 2025.