China’s Contingencies: Critical Geopolitics,Chinese Exceptionalism and the Uses of History

This paper examines the intimate relationship between narratives emanating from China and their uses of Chinese history, and how such perspectives inform China’s geopolitical positioning and practices in lieu of its purported ‘rise’. Taking inspiration from the deconstructive impetus of critical geopolitics, this article contends that these historical claims to China’s rise constitute deterministic accounts, hinging on the notion of Chinese exceptionalism to provide discursive backing for a Sinocentric geopolitical order in the coming decades. This in turn downplays ‘alternative’ historiographies that can shed light on how the nature of China’s emergence may be more dependent on and shaped by the external environment than previously acknowledged. Building on the historical-geographical expositions related to the idea of contingency, this article demonstrates how China (whether it be in the past or present) cannot be seen as operating in a vacuum but has to constantly negotiate and adjust its strategy of engagements/interactions based on the specific demands imposed by world politics. Specifically, by elucidating these dimensions through cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan, it is argued that understanding China’s contingencies can raise important questions for us to critically appreciate the contextual actors, processes and relationships that differentially impact on China’s engagements in the world.     

A Geopolitical Analysis of Popular Songs in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, 1983–2013

Based on the notions of ‘popular geopolitics’ and ‘practical geopolitics’, this article explores how China’s geopolitical strategies are represented and reproduced by the popular songs in the CCTV (China Central Television) Spring Festival Gala during the past thirty years (1983–2013). Drawing on the (con)textual and visual analysis of 539 popular songs, how geopolitical knowledges are represented and reproduced by these songs and how these songs are involved with China’s geopolitical strategies are analysed. The main argument of this article indicates that the official regulated popular songs in the annual Gala can be considered as important constitutions of China’s state apparatus which aim at propagandising and legitimating the official geopolitical strategies on both internal and international affairs. As research of the geopolitical engagements of China’s popular music, this article might also be read as a contribution to wider literatures on popular and practical geopolitics from a non-Western perspective.     

The ‘West’ against the ‘Rest’: Geopolitics after the end of the cold war

With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that we had reached the ‘end of geopolitics’. Since the mid‐1990s, however, the term ‘geopolitics’ has experienced a revival, and even regional groupings which have so far abstained from any kind of power politics, such as the European Union, have started to claim geopolitical interests for themselves. But it is not clear what constitutes this kind of power politics in the 1990s and what drives ‘the West’ to pursue geopolitics, directed against what Huntington has labelled so plainly and provocatively the ‘Rest’. The article addresses this question by analysing Western capital's need for access to markets in the South and the EU's and US’ growing dependence on oil imports. The article will argue that a Western geostrategy based on Huntington's civilisational model would be counterproductive in the long run, manoeuvring the Western states into a situation where these geopolitical goals would have to be enforced by military means instead of being pursued through a strategy of political and economic support.     

National borders,the global economy and geopolitics: A view from Yemen

The wider geographic scales of the new interdependencies called ‘globalisation’ are not new to peripheral states such as Yemen. In the colonial and post‐colonial world sensitivity to international developments has always been important in the course of local events. What is new is the particular configuration of political and economic institutions at various levels including, critically, the national level. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the new geography of economic and political ‘globalisation’ has left Yemen with distinctly ‘old’ forms of economic integration into world markets, but that, on the other hand, regional geopolitics have opened certain opportunities for Yemen's political elite to refashion itself as a strategic geopolitical player so as to maintain international flows of military and economic aid. The end result is the continued national dominance of these same elite. ‘Globalisation’ in this sense is a national political project.     

Ukraine and the Big Moral Divide: What Biased Media Coverage Means to East European Borders

ABSTRACT

Geopolitical shifts and the changing significance of borders in the EU’s neighbourhood are usually understood as a matter of international power politics. Factors that accompany geopolitical impact on borders, such as media coverage of geopolitical change, often appear as secondary or irrelevant. However the recent Ukraine conflict revealed the contrary as pro-EU attitudes were strongly supported by ‘western’ media. Therefore this paper seeks to clarify the role of news media in creating perspectives and attitudes on geopolitical shifts and the significance of European borders. Empirical evidence on the coverage of the evolving Ukraine crisis by German news sources portrays the media as promoters of biased framings and imaginaries which suggest that the EU be a potential conflict party in the newly evolving geostrategic confrontation in its eastern neighbourhood. The findings indicate that during critical periods of the Ukraine crisis media reports combined rising euphoria about Europe and ‘the West’, as defenders of the ‘good cause’, with excessive moral polarising and the discursive normalisation of a rhetoric of escalation. Imaginaries of a bipolar world (The West against Russia) and a new Cold War prepared the ground for a new understanding of European borders and neighbourhood relations as being manipulable at will.     

Swedish Geopolitics: From Rudolf Kjellén to a Swedish ‘Dual State’

Early in the twentieth century, Swedish geopolitical scholar Rudolf Kjellén wrote of the nineteenth century nation-state as a state of ‘land and people’, but he also suggested that in the twentieth century various empires would eventually force Central Europe to unify into a bloc of states under the protection of a powerful Germany. This concept of ‘state-bloc’ resembles Carl Schmitt’s idea of Grossraum and is also very similar to what later became NATO, but now with the United States, not Germany, as its central protecting power. Within the individual state, this duality of nation-state and state-bloc was fused with what Hans Morgenthau called a ‘dual state’ with a regular state hierarchy of the nation-state versus a parallel security hierarchy, now linked to the central power. After the Second World War, Sweden, despite its ‘policy of neutrality’, was placed under the US nuclear umbrella, creating a duality that typified Morgenthau’s idea of the ‘dual state’. The regular ‘democratic hierarchy’ was confronted by the US-leaning ‘security hierarchy’, with the latter intervening in the event of emergency. In the 1980s, the strength and unpredictability of the Swedish Social Democratic government became worrisome to the US security network. In a crisis situation, the ‘dual state’ – or what we might call a ‘double sovereignty’ of the ‘democratic state’ and the ‘security state’ – might prove unacceptable. In the final analysis, the Schmittian ‘sovereign’ is undivided.     

A Return to ‘Civilisational Geopolitics’ in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era

The prevalence of the discourse of ideological geopolitics during the Cold War meant that both Turkey and the EU belonged to the West by virtue of their ideological orientation. In the absence of this prevalent geopolitical discourse, both the EU and Turkey have spent the 1990s trying to locate themselves geographically. Drawing on the literature on critical approaches to political geography and international relations, this article seeks to answer the question of whether the EU's post-Cold War security discourse on the Mediterranean in general and on relations with Turkey in particular point to a return to the earlier discourse of civilisational geopolitics. The article also presents a reading of Turkish policy makers’ attempts to resist EU's representation of Turkey in ‘non-Europe’ (as with the ‘Middle East’ or the ‘Mediterranean’) as boundary-producing practices which have served to underline the boundaries between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’.     

Geopolitics and territorial issues: Relevance for South America

This paper surveys the impact of geopolitical thinking as applied to issues of territory in Latin America, with special emphasis upon its Southern Cone. The relevance of geopolitics is examined as an ideological doctrine and as a normative framework to understand territorial changes, territorial conflicts that have not escalated into fully‐fledged wars, and rare cases of actual wars fought in the twentieth century in South America. I question the changing meaning of geopolitical doctrines following the ‘third wave’ of democratization in Latin America by suggesting more ‘positive’ avenues for the former pernicious “implications of geopolitical doctrines, including economic development and regional integration. Finally, I juxtapose ‘conventional’ geopolitics with more recent ideas of ‘critical’ geopolitics and its potential implementation in the region.     

Finance,power, and the British balance of payments

ABSTRACT

The Brexit referendum marks a critical juncture in Britain’s political economy. Benjamin Cohen argues that a nation’s monetary sovereignty lies in its balance of payments (BoP) flexibility (2008, 2015). I argue that a country’s position in the global financial régime must also be accounted for when explaining its BoP dynamics. This allows us to understand why, while sterling has long lost its ‘world currency’ status, Britain’s BoP exhibits some of the same features associated with American ‘exorbitant privilege’. To appreciate the UK’s own BoP flexibilities as well as to flesh out the Anglo-American axis in the international financial order, I compare the UK’s external balance sheets with those of the US. Given the complexities and uncertainties inherent in BoP analyses, I advise against micro-analyses of the BoP in favour of a broader approach that takes into account macro-dynamics as well as the International Political Economy (IPE) concerns outlined above. Elaborating such an analysis for the UK BoP, I explore the potential implications of Brexit for Britain’s external balance sheets and its political-economic future. While Britain’s financial power has helped insulate its balance sheets from external shocks, Britain’s impending departure from the European Union heralds a period of considerable uncertainty.     

Geo-Logics of Power: Disaster Capitalism,Himalayan Materialities,and the Geopolitical Economy of Reconstruction in Post-Earthquake Nepal

ABSTRACT

The 2015 earthquakes in Nepal killed more than 9,000 people, displaced millions of people and deeply affected the economy. The earthquakes and reconstructions processes also transformed Nepal into a complex terrain of geoeconomic accumulation and geopolitical manoeuvring, including major international capital flows, the promulgation of a new constitution, an economic blockade by India and the expansion of trade corridors with China. Building on critiques of ‘disaster capitalism’, we propose and mobilize the concept of ‘geo-logics of power’ to draw further attention to the materialities of geopolitical and geoeconomic processes shaping reconstruction in post-earthquake Nepal. Focusing on two trans-Himalayan corridors connecting Nepal and China, we argue that the Nepal experienced a particular form of disaster capitalism: one in which the geo-logics of power – including trans-Himalayan discourses, practices, and materialities – came to shape political and economic transformations of a country long portrayed as a ‘buffer’ state between Indian and China. More broadly, we suggest that geo-logics of power result from a combination of geopolitical and geoeconomic power dynamics informed by geological formations and associated socio-natural processes.     

Russkiy Mir: The Geopolitics of Russian Compatriots Abroad

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the instrumental reference to Russian ‘compatriots’ in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 served as a discursive framing to justify contradictions in Russian approaches to state sovereignty to an international audience. Contrary to teleological readings of Russian foreign policy, however, the paper argues that while Russian diaspora policies have been tapped into, the iterative and partially contradictory development thereof on a governmental level suggests that these were not the blueprint for a revisionist foreign policy by design. It contextualizes the evolution of Russian diaspora policies against the background of the evolution of the wider ‘Russian World’ conception and shows how the discourse about the protection of ‘compatriots’ was contextual and has translated into geopolitical boundary-making at a time when relations between Russia and the West deteriorated.     

From Sovereignty to Imperium: Borders,Frontiers and the Specter of Neo-Imperialism

Borders are changing in myriad and multifaceted ways. After 9/11, states redoubled efforts at shoring up their perimeters and building walls. But borders are not merely increasingly securitized, they are also becoming thicker and bi-national. This new ‘zonal’ border emerging worldwide radically shifts the debate about borders and sovereignty. If sovereignty is indivisible, unitary and final, how can it be shared between states at their mutual perimeters? Is this really evidence of sovereignty waning? In this article, I suggest we are stuck at this conceptual impasse because of two conflations. The first one involves two aspects of sovereignty: authority and control. Looking at borders as thin jurisdictional lines, we observe only their legal authority (de jure); instead, by examining changing modes of control, we can see how new securitized borders actually reinforce state strength. The second conflation revolves around the conceptual linking of borders, states and sovereignty. This article argues that as borders thicken, they start to resemble frontiers, and sovereignty starts to resemble imperium – a Roman designation for political authority that is territorially unbounded. This disrupts the border/state dyad and situates borders (lines) and frontiers (zones) on a continuum. In doing so, it reveals how sovereignty is not waning, but changing shape – a worrisome geopolitical conclusion given the possibilities of neo-Imperialism due to power asymmetries between neighbouring states.     

India’s Economic and Strategic Perceptions of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative

The Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) is a part of China’s experiment in scaling up economic corridors across vast swathes of diverse economic geographies. China’s involvement in a large number of ongoing transport corridor projects has encouraged it to embark on the most ambitious of them all till date. The heterogeneity among the economic capacities and integrations of various regions constituting the MSRI, particularly in efficiency of infrastructure and ability to trade, is noticeable. This article underscores these variations as important determinants of competitiveness of the constituent regions and countries. India’s perceptions of the MSRI are significantly shaped by its lack of quality maritime infrastructure capacities that make it relatively uncompetitive vis-à-vis China, Europe and most of Southeast Asia; and the impression of the MSRI’s “China-centrality” emanating from lack of mention of non-China regional forums in the Chinese government’s vision statement; and absence of proactive measures from the Chinese leadership in establishing the MSRI’s multi-country character. The article argues that it is important for India to appreciate the geopolitical character of this unprecedented infrastructure initiative, which, while emphasizing Chinese interests, might not be inimical to India’s economic ambitions, provided India is able to address its domestic infrastructure imperatives.     

An Incorporating Geopolitics: Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border

This paper develops a critique of the emergence of the new European Border Agency, Frontex, specifically its operations along Europe's maritime borders with North Africa. Rather than account for Frontex in terms of securitising and neoliberalising processes, as has become common, I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections then set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, such an incorporating geopolitics can be shown to be replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – that between trade freedoms and security restrictions – with a more fundamental contradiction: that the more border controls address more than just borders, the more they may themselves undermine the societies they purport to protect.     

Micro-Geopolitics: Capitalising Security in Laos’s Golden Quadrangle

Enclosure, dispossession and displacement loom large in current debates about the recent boom in transnational farmland deals, and about Chinese agribusiness for export in particular. Often under-examined, however, are the ways that legacies of geopolitical conflict shape the inevitably uneven distribution of enclosure, dispossession and displacement. This paper constructs a case of these ‘micro-geopolitical’ legacies by examining a Chinese rubber planting ‘promotion’ project in northwestern Laos’s emerging ‘Golden Quadrangle’ development region. It argues that longstanding concerns about security inform the ways that local authorities deploy investment projects that are otherwise seen as examples of ‘foreign’ land grabbing. Further, it shows that while the geographical aims of foreign agribusiness mesh with state-mediated resettlement efforts (a darker spin on the narrative of ‘win-win’ cooperation), these activities often precede current land deals rather than result from them. Chinese agribusiness in Laos’s upland interior thus appears less as a driver of displacement than a means for attempting to secure in place a particular (if precarious) configuration of population and security.     

Reappraisal of outbound open innovation under the policy of China’s ‘Market for Technology’

China’s ‘Market for Technology’ policy has attracted much interest over the past decade. In light of a relative emphasis on the spillover effects of joint ventures, this study examines the transferring effects of Multinationals’ (MNCs) outbound open innovation in such a context. A survey of 2071 research and development (R&D) contract transactions between Chinese entities and MNCs indicates both internal factors (e.g. organisational capabilities) and external factors (e.g. the role of Intellectual Property protection) affect the transferring effects, which reformulate the focus of the Policy from the relational dimension of ‘Government vs. MNCs’ to the transactional dimension of ‘Domestic entities vs. MNCs’. We thus conclude that MNCs’ active initiative in the involvement of technology transfer and the success of domestic transaction partners combine to contribute to the technology progress within China’s ‘Market for Technology’ policy.     

Feeding (On) Geopolitical Anxieties: Asian Appetites,News Media Framing and the 2007–2008 Food Crisis

This paper analyses the role of news media in (re)producing geopolitical narratives of food insecurity in relation to the 2007–2008 global food price spike. News content and textual analysis suggests that the media’s representation of the food price spike is partly framed by Western geopolitical anxieties of the ‘threatening rise of Asia’, and features ‘fast growing’ Asian appetites among the main culprits of the crisis. Seeking to explain the widespread circulation of such representation, this paper analyses media-source relationship within the context of market-driven journalism, and suggests that the changing role of news media has in turn contributed to a rapid and uncritical circulation of elite-based interpretation of, and neoliberal geopolitical approach to, food security. The paper points at the importance of critical enquiries into geopolitical representations of food insecurity and of opening media space for a ‘counter-geopolitics of food security’.     

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Reducing or Increasing the World Uncertainties?

Although worldwide poverty, a basic concern of John Kenneth Galbraith, is reducing on average, I argue that poverty remains a critical issue in many countries. This led the Chinese government to propose the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. Broadly, the BRI constructs a cross-continental nexus between countries to reduce their development uncertainties by increasing their connectivity. As a result, the Chinese government has invested trillions of infrastructure dollars in projects that have been introduced to the involved countries as sovereign debt along with the participation of Chinese multinational corporations. Although evidence has shown that this initiative is gaining increasingly more support from the less-developed countries, signs of uncertainty in various forms have clearly emerged. In light of such, I propose that possible in-country political instability, political conflicts among the participating countries, national debt defaults, and competition between China and the United States of America in regional influence may have added to the underlying uncertainties that have challenged the world.     

Extraction in Four Dimensions: Time,Space and the Emerging Geo(-)politics of Deep-Sea Mining

ABSTRACT

Despite the truism that less is known about the deep-sea than outer space, deep-sea mining (DSM) is being promoted as the next frontier of resource extraction. In 2019, Nautilus Minerals hopes to become the world’s first company to mine the deep seabed in the waters off Papua New Guinea (PNG). DSM thus stands at the threshold of becoming a matter of politics; it has provoked a wide range of geopolitical imaginaries variously relating to ‘resource security’ and ‘progress’, on the one hand, and environmental disaster and precaution on the other. However, these accounts do little to address the specific ‘nature’ of the deep-sea, seabed and their extreme location and materialities, and are instead framed by classic geopolitical concerns with interstate relations. Against this background and illustrated by examples centred on PNG, this paper argues that future engagements with the geopolitics of DSM are more accurately conceptualised by an engagement with time as well as three dimensional space. This includes the multiple spatial and temporal registers through which both the geology and ecologies of seabed and seawater operate. By highlighting the importance of resource temporalities, it suggests that the geopolitics of both DSM and extraction in extreme places more generally is not only spatially complex, it is also a matter of time.     

中美新型大国关系：全球体系与力量转换理论的探究

作为新兴的全球性经济和地缘政治大国,中国对于一些大国而言,不论是在全球体系上,还是在次全球体系（区域）上都是一个政策性的困难抉择。对于如何构建与这些在中国外交总架构中居于＂关键＂地位的全球性大国的关系,中国新一代政治领导人提出了无论是在国际关系理论上,还是在近现代国际关系实践上都具有创新内容的＂新型大国关系＂的构想。这一构想在很大程度上是邓小平关于＂和平与发展是世界两大主题＂论断的逻辑性结果,也是在中国经济和地缘政治实力日益增长的情况下作出的蕴含着中国古代哲学＂和而不同＂和战略智慧的＂不战而屈人之兵＂的理性选择。这一构想有助于中国坚定和平发展的崛起新路径,同时也为其他新兴大国共同参与全球体系重塑和世界新秩序的构建打开了便捷之门。新型大国关系的构建有可能使美国在中国经济外交与外交攻势的双重作用下,接受中国的＂和平崛起＂的理念,弱化视中国为安全与战略＂威胁＂的观念,从而有利于世界力量的和平转移与全球体系的和平转型。在此层面上,新型大国关系的构想无疑有助于打破人类几千年历史上大国崛起与战争形影相随的宿命,对推动全球力量的和平转移有着深远的意义。