Interpreting the Crisis,Envisioning the Future

ABSTRACT

What role do the historic identity tropes associated with being an island play in the foreign policy of contemporary Britain? To answer this underexplored question, this article utilises theories of critical geopolitics and ontological security to analyse a series of recent parliamentary debates and reveals the continuing importance of geopolitics to British foreign policy. This entails a conceptualisation of the role that discourses of island geopolitics played in the British Empire, giving rise to a set of tropes that I call island identity. Many studies emphasise the enduring pragmatism of British foreign policy; by contrast, my framework allows a foregrounding of how foreign policy-makers seek ontological security through the use of the established discursive tropes of island identity which establish Britain in subject positions of geopolitical relevance relative to novel contexts. The case studies focus in particular on globalisation and the EU –two issues of particular relevance, especially since the Brexit vote. This article allows a deeper understanding of both by contextualising them within British traditions of geopolitical discourse.     

On the Geopolitical Discourses of the Russian Yabloko Association, 1993-2001

This article draws attention to the competitive and changing nature of the discursive field of Russian geopolitics. In particular, the article focuses on the geopolitical discourses of the Yabloko Association (from 2001 the Democratic Party of Russia, Yabloko). In the discursive study of geopolitics, which is well developed in the critical geopolitics literature, the study of the geopolitical discourses of political parties has so far been neglected. Five major discourses by Yabloko are identified (1993-2001), with their significance and prominence varying according to changes in the broader geopolitical context. Yabloko's position is located within the general constellation defined by the extreme poles of Westernism (Atlanticism) and Eurasianism. Yabloko represents a third way between these extreme poles and can be situated within the new category of 'pragmatic Russian geopolitics'. Yabloko presents an interesting example of a Russian opposition party whose foreign policy thinking seems capable of both changing with the broader geopolitical context and contributing to the official Russian policy.     

‘Wiped From the Map of the World’? Zanzibar,Critical Geopolitics and Language

This essay uses the case of Zanzibar in its complicated relationship with the United Republic of Tanzania (of which it is a part) as a lens on debates in political geography on empirical and conceptual approaches to critical geopolitics. We test the veracity of a multi-faceted critical geopolitics in the contemporary public contestation of Zanzibar's place in the United Republic from 2008–2012. We analyze Tanzanian media, the speech acts of Tanzanian leaders, and the key events and processes related to what is termed the ‘Zanzibar problem’ during the selected years, to make two points about a critical geopolitics approach: to strengthen critical geopolitics by broadening the analysis of language to engage political acts and languages beyond the Global North; and taking ‘subaltern geopolitics’ more seriously via engagement with critical geopolitical voices on discourses, events and processes from the Global South.     

Geopolitics of Affect and Emotions in a Post-Conflict City

This paper aims to advance our knowledge of the relationships between emotions, affect, and geopolitics. For, among several criticisms of affect’s non-representational theories, is the claim that it has not been used to understand problems of real social and political importance. What is crucially lacking in this important body of work on the nexus between affect and politics is empirically grounded research that examines these processes, especially in situations of geopolitical instability and conflict. In this paper, I seek to address this gap by attending to the geopolitical role of feelings in the volatile political climate of a post-conflict city. Specifically, my work examines the emotional and affective landscapes of daily life in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina which, twenty years after the war officially ended, continues to experience divisions between its Croat/Catholic and Bosniak/Muslim populations.     

Capitalism,Territory and “Marxist Geopolitics”

This response traces the importance of ideas and politics versus economic determinism in developing a critical approach to geopolitics particularly in questioning the necessary relationship between territory and capitalism. From this perspective, and contra to “Marxist geopolitics,” spatial-political form does not follow from economic function. To argue so leads to an intellectual and political dead end.     

Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds,Everyday Practices,and Food Security in Mexico

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labour in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so. This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.     

Geopolitics Teaching and Worldviews: Making the Future Generation in Russia

What worldviews are passed on to students in Russian universities? This question can be approached by studying teaching in a discipline known as Geopolitics, which is offered as part of many degree programmes in Russian universities. The article makes use of observations of geopolitics lectures and geopolitics textbooks to study worldviews, understood as ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions about the geopolitical ‘reality’, the reality of geopolitics as a discipline, and how this discipline can and should be ‘discovered’ and studied. Based on the primary data, a story of the birth and development of geopolitics is constructed, and three discourses are identified. These discourses – geopolitics as a science, geopolitics as context-dependent, and geopolitics as state-centric – tell us about worldviews that espouse a positivist epistemology but vary in their degree of essentialism. Worldviews also inform us about Russia's geopolitical culture, which is, in this context, closer to the Westernisers' position than that of (Neo)Eurasianism.     

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.     

Popular Geopolitics,Audiences and Identities: Reading the ‘War on Terror’ in the Philippines

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, the Philippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond.     

Images and Imaginings of Palestine: Territory and Everyday Geopolitics for Palestinian Jordanians

In this paper, I delve into the complex ways in which Palestine is conceptualised as both a concrete and amorphous territory through an examination of the everyday practices of displaying images and imagining Palestine. Building from fieldwork conducted with Palestinian Jordanians, I analyse and contextualise images and maps of Palestine that they display in their homes and communities. I complicate what these images seem to represent with insights from interviews I conducted about how they spatially imagine Palestine. Throughout the paper I show that images and imaginings of Palestine are quite diverse and have various territorial meanings. Yet, as varied and seemingly different as these images and imaginings may be, they are nevertheless intimately linked through territorial discourses of displacement and rootedness, as well as through the everyday practices of remembering and resistance. Thus, I contribute to recent scholarship within geopolitics by highlighting (1) the value of examining images and imaginings of everyday geopolitics in tandem with one another, (2) the complex and fluid ways in which territory configures into everyday geopolitics, and (3) that amorphous notions of territory need to be integrated into work on territory more broadly.     

Empirical Verve,Conceptual Doubts: Looking from the Outside in at Critical Geopolitics

When critical geopolitics entered German political geography, its empirical verve helped crank up a discipline which had diminished into an academic backwater. Soon, however, conceptual doubts began to supersede the initial enthusiasm with which critical geopolitics had been welcomed into political geography. Critical voices in German geography highlight the conceptual heterogeneity of critical geopolitics which engenders clashes between different, partly incommensurable epistemologies. Our paper traces the empirical and conceptual trajectory of critical geopolitics and the multifarious critique of it in German geography, before venturing to take a fresh look at poststructuralist, postcolonialist and systems theoretical approaches which, in the German context, are discussed as conceptual avenues that might usefully inform the further development of critical geopolitics.     

我国区域经济发展中的问题及对策

改革开放以来 ,我国经济建设取得了举世瞩目的成就 ,同时东、中、西部地区发展差距也在拉大 ,并呈扩大趋势。如何看待区域差距拉大问题 ,如何缩小区域经济发展差距实现区域经济协调发展 ,已经成为当前人们关注的热点问题。本文将对这些问题进行简要分析 ,并在此基础上提出若干对策建议。     

Geopolitics of the Northern Dimension: A Critical View on Security Borders

The Cold War geopolitical order has crumbled. As a consequence questions related to security, borders and identity have gained momentum in European politics as well as throughout the world. This article reflects the concept of security border both in the light of critical geopolitics and ideas of 'critical security thought', i.e. post-positivist security thinking (critical and postmodern orientations). The post-Cold War era means that the capability of the state to control security political space, and new border transgressing threats, is uncertain. Security borders are therefore becoming ever harder to define and draw. The empirical dimension of the article is the policy and process of creating the European Union's Northern Dimension (ND). The ND process is analysed, and particular attention is paid to the concept and practices of security borders. Critical geopolitics and 'critical security thought' serve as a theoretical framework. They provide a theoretical context and basis for the notion of security border. In this article critical geopolitics and post-positivist security thought constitute both an ontological and epistemological foundation for the study, while the notion of security border functions as an analytical tool for studying the ND. This article claims that the ND is an ambivalent (security) process. Second, it argues that the concept of security border is a useful analytical tool for geopolitical investigation.     

The elementary economics of social dilemmas

Abstract.  A social dilemma is, in essence, a prisoners' dilemma in a continuous strategy space. I discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention, offer an elementary, diagrammatic synthesis of them, and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture, including incentives for pre‐commitment. Finally, I model pre‐commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences.     

Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe

This article uses the character of Josef ?vejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier ?vejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it. By foregrounding ?vejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency in geopolitical discourses.     

Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity,Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque in South Park

Humour and laughter have become the subject of recent geopolitical scrutiny. Scholars have explored the affirmative and liberatory possibilities of humour, and the affective bodily dimensions of laughter as tools for transformative action in critical geopolitics. Humour that is vulgar and politically ambiguous is yet to be explored as a potent geopolitical avenue of enquiry. Studies of satire have suggested that rather than contesting entrenched geopolitical beliefs, satirical shows can serve to further divide audiences both amenable and antagonistic to the satire in question. I argue that this should not involve a wholesale rejection of satirical shows, as humour that uses irony, subversion, and other discursive techniques is just one way satirical media becomes an effective commentator on political issues. I examine the show South Park and argue its satire combines bodily and scatological humour with more traditional satirical techniques to produce a comedy that ridicules contemporary issues by reducing complex politics to the most basic and crass condition possible. This is defined in a Bakhtinian sense of the body grotesque, a social inversion through reference to the common bodily functions of all human beings.     

When the light shines too much: Rational inattention and pandering

Should voters always pay attention to politics? I explore the role of endogenous costly attention allocation in politics, combining insights from the growing literature on rational inattention with a standard model of political agency. I show that when attention to the action of the politician is endogenous, voters may choose to pay too much attention in equilibrium, and this induces too much political pandering. Moreover when attention to the action and to the state of the world are both endogenous, voters may not pay enough attention the state with respect to the ex ante optimum. A reduction in the total cost of attention does not correct this inefficiency and can even reduce welfare. This model can be a demand‐driven explanation of the under‐provision of analytical contents by news channels.     

Schütz and the Rational Choice Debate in African Economics

Neo-Austrians in the USA have produced a specific interpretation of Schütz as a mediator between the Austrian school of economics and European phenomenology or phenomenological sociology. Seeing Schütz as a political and economic scientist who, moreover, could give a new orientation to African political economy is at stake in our contribution. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to filling in a gap between my interest for African development economics and Austrian-Schützian economics. By doing so, I want to contribute to the efforts of the NIE school, which aims at challenging the previous neo-classical approach of the World Bank intervention in Africa.