Economic Geographies of Uncertainty and Unruliness

Multicrisis, Multipolar Entanglements, and the Spatial Politics of  Energy, Water and Food Security

In an era marked by overlapping crises: climate disruptions, geopolitical rivalries, supply chain shocks, inflation, and ecological degradation, the geographies of water, food and energy security are being reshaped in uneven and unpredictable ways. This session examines how multicrisis conditions and an emerging multipolar order produce, amplify, and redistribute uncertainty across places, infrastructures, and bodies. Bringing together perspectives from political ecology, economic geography, and global political economy, we explore how socio-material dependencies, value chain restructuring, and territorial vulnerabilities co-produce new spatial politics of insecurity.

Energy, water, and food systems are increasingly bound together through fertilizers, fuels, minerals, global value chains, and hydrological stress. Drought undermines hydropower and agricultural stability; volatility in gas markets reshapes fertilizer production and food prices; and mineral extraction for “green” technologies reinforces uneven dependencies and territorial vulnerabilities. These dynamics reveal how local insecurities are tightly woven into broader struggles over geopolitical leverage, corporate concentration, and the contested pathways of energy and agricultural transitions.

We ask: How do climatic, geopolitical, and market shocks reconfigure strategic dependencies and global hierarchies? Who absorbs the costs of volatility across these interlinked systems, and who converts uncertainty into advantage? And do multicrisis conditions catalyze structural transformation, or entrench existing inequalities, in global food, water, and energy security?