Logistics and Political Economy in Global Supply Chains

Global supply chains are shaped by the complex interplay of infrastructure, governance and market power. Logistics—the planning and execution of the movement and storage of goods—functions as both a technical system and a site of political contestation. Ports, freight corridors, warehouses and digital platforms form nodes and links that mediate flows of commodities, finance and information. State actors and private corporations negotiate access, regulation and security, often deploying public–private partnerships to construct and manage critical infrastructure. Labour and community groups contest ownership and control, framing logistics as a terrain of class struggle and social exclusion. Geopolitical tensions over chokepoints and trade routes underscore the strategic importance of resilient networks, while environmental imperatives drive innovations in decarbonisation and circular logistics. Technological advances—from containerisation and automation to drone integration and data analytics—reconfigure power relations, enabling new efficiencies but also concentrating influence among leading logistics firms. Understanding these dynamics requires attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of supply chains, the regulatory architectures that govern them and the everyday practices of diverse actors who sustain or challenge the circulation of goods on a global scale.

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Logistics and Political Economy in Global Supply Chains publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in logistics and political economy in global supply chains across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Chokepoint: A strategic geographical point where the flow of goods is highly vulnerable to disruption.

Multimodal logistics: Coordination of two or more transport modes under a single operational framework.

Apparatus of security: An ensemble of organisational and technical measures aimed at safeguarding commodity flows.

Biopower: A concept denoting the governance of populations through regulatory and disciplinary mechanisms, here applied to logistics.

Supply chain resilience: The capacity of a network to anticipate, absorb and recover from disruptions.

References

1. Drone-Assisted Multimodal Logistics: Trends and Research Issues. Drones (2024).
2. Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo, Panama. Antipode (2022).
3. Conceptualizing business logistics as an ‘apparatus of security’ and its implications for management and organizational inquiry. Human Relations (2022).