Cosa significa davvero interdipendenza? Concetti e strumenti per l'analisi delle dipendenze strategiche del mondo di oggi

The concept of interdependence pervades both public discourse and institutional debate, yet it is most commonly employed in an undifferentiated manner, frequently conflated with the notion of mutual connectivity between economies or with exposure to the contagion effects of geopolitical crises. This contribution reconstructs the theoretical genealogy of the concept, tracing its trajectory from the seminal works of Hirschman (1945), Keohane and Nye (1977), and Baldwin (1980) to the more recent theory of weaponized interdependence elaborated by Farrell and Newman (2019). The analysis contends that interdependence does not constitute a symmetric property of economic flows, but rather a structure of power defined by the asymmetric distribution of exit options, by the positional attributes of actors within the topology of global networks, and by the institutional capacity to translate structural centrality into an instrument of coercive leverage. The article concludes by proposing an analytical framework articulated along four dimensions - domain, directionality, topology, and reversibility - through which relations of strategic dependence in the contemporary global economy may be systematically interrogated.