Making Sense of the Electrostate

Geopolitical reconfigurations accompanying energy transitions are increasingly framed as a struggle between entrenched fossil fuel incumbents and a rapidly emerging techno-political formation: the electrostate. Yet what constitutes an electrostate, and how it differs from a petrostate or other state formations, remains under-specific and under-explored. We argue that electrostate formation is best understood not as a clean break from fossil-fuelled political economies, but as an emergent process of institutional and geopolitical reconfiguration marked by continuity as much as change. Rents are redistributed rather than abolished, incumbency is rearticulated rather than disrupted, and new geopolitical dependencies are forged through electrification rather than transcended altogether. We caution against the petrostate-electrostate dichotomy, which obscures the ways states are both shaping and being reshaped by energy transitions. By examining changes both within the state and beyond the state, we examine whether electrification reorders state-capital relations or instead reallocates rents, reshapes coalitions, and reworks dependencies while preserving extractivist and rentier logics, but under new conditions.