Modern economies depend on systems so familiar that they often recede from view until they are disrupted: a cable on the ocean floor, a bank willing to execute a payment, a licence to service a machine, or a mineral processed to a specification that few suppliers can meet. This first issue of Hegemon examines the points at which such dependence becomes unusually consequential: chokepoints.
A chokepoint matters when an activity depends on something that cannot readily be replaced. Whether that dependence becomes leverage depends on who can restrict access, through what mechanism, and at what cost. Some chokepoints create vulnerability without being controlled by a single actor. Others can be used deliberately to alter the choices available to governments, firms or societies. Disruption and coercion may overlap, but they are not the same.
This distinction is essential. Concentration is not automatically control, and dependence is not automatically leverage. A supposed chokepoint may offer less leverage than it first appears because alternatives exist, customers can adapt, or the party applying pressure would bear unacceptable costs. Another may be more powerful than its market share suggests because substitution is slow, technically difficult or dependent on the same hidden input. The task is therefore not simply to identify concentration, but to explain the mechanism through which it constrains action.
The contributions in this issue pursue that problem across maritime passages, subsea cables, financial exclusion, technology finance, industrial policy and critical-mineral traceability. These systems do not share a single ownership structure or form of control. What joins them is the practical question of how a difficult-to-replace resource, service, rule or capability changes the options available to others.
Geoeconomics is often narrated as a contest among states, but firms and institutions are not passive transmission belts. They can create dependencies, influence the rules of access, build alternatives and use public policy to secure advantage. A bank decides whether it will execute a transaction. An insurer decides whether, and on what terms, it will provide cover for a voyage. A manufacturer may redesign a product or invest in a new source of supply. These decisions can reinforce state power, blunt it or create a different form of power altogether.
Hegemon will examine these questions through original reporting, analysis, argument and interviews. Those forms need not follow one narrative template. They should, however, make their evidence visible, distinguish fact from inference and uncertainty, explain the mechanism under examination, and treat serious counterarguments fairly. Our ambition is not to fit every subject into the language of chokepoints, but to make the operation of economic power clearer without flattening its complexity.
This inaugural issue is a beginning rather than a settled map. Chokepoints move, substitutes emerge, and the exercise of leverage changes the incentives that produced it. I am grateful to the contributors and editorial team who have brought the issue together, and to the readers who will test its arguments.
Welcome to Hegemon.
Dr Jens Hillebrand Pohl
Editor-in-Chief
