The Gambia historical capital of Banjul is located only a meter below the sea level. For the people of the Half Die and Tobacco Road, the geography of their city is not to be discussed in terms of maps, but in terms of tides.
Floods along with flash floods have become the order of the day especially during 2022, 2024 and 2025 rainy seasons due to a mix of rising water levels and an age-old colonial system of drainage. But, the fight to defend Banjul is now not merely an environmental fight anymore; it is a key stage of geo-economics and one of the classic illustrations of the weaknesses of weaponized interdependence.
Through Banjul redeveloping in the prism of International Political Economy (IPE), we will no longer be a natural disaster story. Edward Luttwak’s ideas on geo-economics and the theory of weaponized interdependence presented by Farrell and Newman help us observe a city between its physical obliteration and its strategic status as one of the most important financial centers in the world.
The Geo-economics of Climate Adaptation
The thesis of Edward Luttwak (1990) says that the post-Cold War states would pursue strategic objectives by means of commercial practices. This grammar of commerce has reminded itself in the 21 st century into climate finance. To a small state such as The Gambia, ensuring the green investment is not only a policy, but also a geo-economics survival strategy.
An excellent example of a geo-economics project is the Gambian government-sponsored project called the Banjul Resilience Plan (World Bank and the African Development Bank). The state is trying to import the technology and capital to keep its capital afloat through packaging the vulnerability of the city into bankable infrastructure projects, like the 500 million dollar expansion of the Port of Banjul and coastal defenses.
Nevertheless, the framework by Luttwak makes us remember that such capital is never a neutral one. The high dependency on foreign credit which now makes almost half of the GDP of the country implies that the ability of Banjul to survive is highly dependent upon the predatory pricing and regulatory quality of the foreign financial institutions. It is not only being rebuilt to serve the people, but to ensure it is a viable node in the global trade and tourism that is standardized.
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Weaponized Interdependence and the Debt Chokepoint
Although Luttwak makes us realize how capital is strategically used, the theory of weaponized interdependence presented by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman is what explains why Banjul was in a structural trap. According to them, global economical networks are in the form of chokepoints, the centralized locations where a centralized power can be used to coerce others.
In the case of Banjul, the international financial system is the chokepoint. The Gambia is a poor, heavily indebted country that relies on a limited number of big world actors and bilateral funding sources (such as the Saudi Fund for Development) to finance its infrastructures.
This establishes some sort of panopticon effect where the Gambian state is forced to continuously conform its domestic policies to the requirements of good governance and fiscal tightening of its creditors so as to continue to be allowed access to the networks of credit.
This interdependence is weaponized to the extent that the terms of debt become an issue so that the city cannot invest in the most vulnerable sections. As an illustration, as giant loans are taken over strategic assets such as the airport and port, the residents of Ebo Town and other outskirt communities remain in the state of “unplanned sprawl” with no basic drainage. The fact that the state is obliged to the global financial network chokes its ability to protect its citizens.
Digital Sovereignty. A New Front in Banjul
Another new geo-economics experiment is also underway in Banjul of Digital Innovation for Government Efficiency and Sector Transformation (DIGEST). Introduced at the end of 2024, this program aims to make the city more digitalized and modernized in terms of its governance.
This is an effort to be de-linked, in an IPE sense, with the inefficiencies of analog bureaucracy. Nevertheless, as Farrell and Newman caution, the new frontier of weaponized interdependence is via digital networks. In going to standardized, foreign-funded digital registers and fintechs, The Gambia runs the risk of becoming trapped in foreign technological standards. In case external forces are in charge of the “heart” of the state’s data or the city is dependent on costly foreign broadband, then the digital sovereignty of the city is as fragile as its physical outlook.
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Banjul is a city that is at the mercy of two tides, one the Atlantic Ocean and the other the global geo-economics system. The battle of capital salvaging is a game of high stakes, in which the logic of conflict is executed in the form of loan deals, climate conferences, and digital transformation policies.
As a way of resilience, The Gambia should note that Banjul is not a disaster management place alone. It is a station in a world nation. To recapture the city, the geo-economics approach must focus on a local insulation to invest in the human capital and the community-based adaptation rather than simply integrate passively into global debt patterns. Should the statehouse stay in Banjul, it needs a political economy that thinks of the lives of its citizens to be as important as the security of its creditors.
Otherwise, the city will be turned into a sinking hub, a monument of geo-economics ambitions in the era of ecological and financial instability. In the geo-economics competition, the greatest success of a small state such as The Gambia is not the mere ability to survive, but to make the soil on which it stands its own.
*The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Diplomatic Insight.
Adama Faye
Adama Faye is a Gambian scholar, a Master Fellow at the Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia. She is also an Administrator of the City Council of Banjul where she is involved in local government and administration. Her interest is of the themes of the intersection of diplomacy, governance, and international political dynamics, with a specific interest in Africa and the Muslim world. Regarded as an analytical clarity and adherence to critical inquiry, she remains a contributor to new debates in global politics and international relations. She can be reached at adama.faye@uiii.ac.id
