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.     

Going Underground: Banal Nationalism and Subterranean Elements in Argentina’s Falklands/Malvinas Claim

ABSTRACT

This article calls for consideration of underground elements that have been typically overlooked or unseen in debates about the nation and banal nationalism. The materialities and (re)presentation of elements such as earth, sand and rock have the capacity to be affective, contentious, to embody intimate memories of conflict and to reinforce national territorial aspirations. These subterranean elements have been ‘nationalised’, bathymetrically mapped and deployed by Argentina to make claims over territories in the South Atlantic, including the Falklands/Malvinas. Rather than re-examining these technical procedures undertaken by the state and analysing what they mean for the geopolitics of the South Atlantic, this article explores how the subterranean is manifest in everyday reproductions of nationalism and national memory in Argentina. It presents insights from research undertaken in a range of different environments in Argentina, encompassing museums, veterans’ centres and public monuments, to demonstrate how the presence of the elemental in the everyday can reinforce and also disrupt banal (territorial) nationalism. Furthermore it argues for conceptualisation of the elemental as part of a relational network that links matter, national citizenries and territories together. The conclusion posits that the subterranean elements and their (re)presentation are essential to understanding the materialisation of banal nationalism as part of the everyday reproduction and rejection of claims to ‘national’ territory.     

A Cartography of the Unknowable: Technology,Territory and Subterranean Agencies in Israel’s Management of the Gaza Tunnels

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates the potential for agency exercised by the subterranean volume in geopolitical conflict. Joining recent geographical conceptualisations of territory as a volumetric assemblage with calls for an elemental geopolitics, it argues that the density of the underground layer creates a convoluted techno-political problem that obfuscates the state’s means of directly observing, visualising and knowing the topological space of territory. To illustrate this, a methodological approach based on the relational ontologies of actor-network-theory (ANT) and assemblage theory is applied to an empirical study of the geophysical sensing techniques used by Israeli engineers, scientists and military to manage cross-border tunnels built by the Palestinian militant group Hamas before and after the 2014 Gaza war. The soil conditions, settlement patterns and infrastructures in the Gaza-Western Negev region have necessitated experimentation with complex and multiple forms of scientific and political expertise in attempts to locate the invisible tunnels, alongside a shift towards increasingly oblique techniques of cartographic representation of the sub-surface. The contingency of these efforts has unsettled the State of Israel’s confidence in its ability to manage geopolitical risks through techniques of territorial control. This case raises poignant questions about the extent of the capacities and limitations of technological solutions and geopolitical practices to secure territory when confronted with the geophysical agency of the underground.     

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.     

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.     

Religeopolitics: Dissident geopolitics and the ‘fundamentalism’ of Hamas and Kach

This article highlights the close relationship of religion and geopolitics in general and within religious fundamentalist ideologies in Palestine/Israel in particular. A new concept of ‘dissident geopolitics’ is used to circumvent state‐centrism of Tuathailian critical geopolitics and, furthermore, a new theoretical framework of ‘religeopolitics’ is elaborated and utilised in the following case study to pinpoint the geopolitical core within the ideologies of the movements of Hamas and Kach. Both movements are violent, ‘fundamentalist’ and claim the Other to be the enemy and the self to be the rightful owner of the territory of Palestine/Israel. The case study also shows how violence is legitimised in relation to religion and geopolitics. Finally, suggestions are given to expound religeopolitics within other areas of IR scholarship, more related to each other than ever in the post‐11 September world.     

After Van Gogh: The Geopolitics of the Tsunami Relief Effort in the Netherlands

The paper examines the Dutch humanitarian response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake through the lens of geopolitics. It analyses the ways geopolitical representations shape non-state collective action, in this case the relief effort to help victims of the tsunami of 26 December 2004. Drawing on earlier work on geopolitical visions and national identity, the paper develops a framework to study people's geopolitics, the geopolitics of non-state collective actions. These insights are further explored through an examination of the Dutch tsunami relief effort. The paper discusses how the Dutch media framed this collective action as a national effort and articulated a sense of proximity and responsibility to mobilise people's generosity. Dutch geopolitical vision and national identity (water as a major threat to the national territory, the country's role as development aid donor, its relation to the regions affected) offer a frame to mobilise people. The tsunami is also analysed as a critical event for Dutch geopolitical representations and the tsunami relief effort as a peak experience providing a sense of recovered national identity in times when Dutch society was painfully divided between Muslims and non-Muslims after the murder of Theo van Gogh in November 2004. The concluding section discusses directions for further research into people's geopolitics.     

The Sicilian MUOS Ground Station Conflict: On US Geopolitics in the Mediterranean and Geographies of Resistance

This paper analyses the alternative territorialities that characterise the conflict on the installation of a US military MUOS ground station in Sicily (Italy). On the one hand, the proponents see territory from a techno-centric vision as a site of strategic importance for the global politics of securitisation since it serves the optimisation of the US military ‘system of systems’. On the other hand, the No-MUOS mobilisation resists this image of territory by claiming it as a place of everyday life, and opposes hegemonic territorialisation through the manipulation of an ensemble of discursive and practical mediators within different spheres of action. The local conflict around a radar infrastructure evolves into a clash between different logics of territorial organisation: a conflict mostly concerning the control over spatial borders, knowledge production, and imaginary circulation.     

Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In)Security,Animating Social Change

This piece is the introduction to a special section on Feminist Geopolitics focusing specifically on securitisation. This introduction provides an overview of the field of feminist geopolitics and situates the contributions of the articles that follow. We argue that the contributions to the section push the field in two distinct ways. First, a number of the pieces draw important connections between geopolitical and geoeconomic processes. Second, the pieces continue to excavate the complex relationship between geopolitical processes and everyday life. Taken as a whole, this special section highlights the utility of feminist geopolitical approaches for gaining analytic clarity and thinking through and enacting positive social change.     

In the Space between Exception and Integration: The Kokang Borderlands on the Periphery of China and Myanmar

In 2015, the isolated border region of Kokang in Myanmar experienced armed conflict reported around the world. Most of the estimated 100,000 refugees from the conflict crossed the border to China, while hostilities continued for six months. Unlike other ethnic minorities fighting Myanmar’s government forces all along the extensive, mountainous border with China, the Kokang is largely of Han Chinese origin with a well established and nurtured relationship with China. Based on 458 questionnaires and interviews, media reports and official government releases, this article explores the varying imaginaries of territory, security and geopolitics of distant Kokang, from refugees now in China, Chinese from adjacent Yunnan and other provinces, as well as analysts viewing the conflict from afar. The study offers a lens for border studies to view the multi-scalar and extended geopolitics of nation states and their peripheral sub-national components. Specifically, the article addresses the changing role of the border under conditions of conflict and security enhancement and the malleable definition of borderlands territory. The study reveals how borders are utilised creatively by territorial inhabitants, their neighbours and their governments, how borders work in remote places, and how cross-border culture operates even in conflict situations to mediate borders. It enlarges our understanding of evolving borders in the space between exception and integration emerging in simultaneous globalisation and localisation.     

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.     

Security and Fear: The Geopolitics of Intimate Partner Violence Policing

This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected.     

Re-Orientating Vertical Geopolitics

Geopolitics has a tradition of adopting a downward looking view-from-above, which is imbued with an imperialistic ‘god's eye’ perspective. Although acknowledged and critiqued, this paper argues that it needs to be actively re-orientated to encompass the discourses and practices of looking up. The paper analyses the practices of looking up and surveilling the sky through which air defence is achieved. It interrogates the ways in which UK air defence is represented in official documents and analyses the activities of the Royal Air Force's Air Surveillance and Control System. The paper argues that this system enacts a vertical geopolitics that goes beyond those understood in other geopolitical literatures and offers suggestions for developing our understandings of a volumetric vertical geopolitics that recognises the aerial view as generated from below as well as from above.     

The Production of Territory in North Korea: ‘Security First,Economy Next’

One of the prevalent stereotypes about North Korea is that it is the world's most isolated country. This view derives from North Korea's ruling ideology – juche – which calls for territorial isolation from external influences. For this reason, any territorial strategy like the introduction of special economic zones is generally regarded as an inevitable economic choice forced upon it. However, I argue that it is not that North Korea has no choice but to open its territory due to economic suffering but that North Korea's own territorial imperative, ‘security first, economy next,’ determines how it produces territory. To do so it deploys various territorial strategies such as de-bordering, re-bordering, and zoning. In this sense, North Korea's production of territory manifests Jean Gottmann's idea of territory first as shelter for security and next as a springboard for opportunity.     

War and Tourism: The Banal Geographies of Security in Colombia's “Retaking”

This paper explores the discourses and practices of state securitisation that Colombia underwent during the last decade. By focusing on the imaginative geographies of security resulting from the unexpected couplings of war and tourism in the country, it delves into the everyday and highly uneven spaces of (in)security forged by the Democratic Security regime. It shows how a feminist take on the geopolitics of war and peace offers a better understanding of the making and unmaking of banal spaces of security and their role in the production of hegemonic state formations in Colombia.     

International law as a moral theory of state territory?

Current states face challenges from other states and secessionist movements, and no moral theory exists to evaluate these conflicting claims. One step towards a theory is to evaluate international law on territory, specifically as articulated through decolonisation. I argue that international law does not provide a plausible moral theory of territory because the principles of territorial integrity and uti possidetis cannot coherently coexist with the principle of self‐determination. I suggest that philosophers must choose between viewing territory as an expression of national self or as a property right, or else develop a third view from sources beyond current international law.     

Film Geopolitics in Practice: Marketing The Miracle of Bern

This essay demonstrates how critical geopolitics of film can benefit from attention to behind-the-scenes practices in films' lives by examining “territorial appeals”: invocations of territorial interest or identity to justify a project or win support for a position. By tracing marketing strategies in the emergence of The Miracle of Bern, a 2003 film that celebrates West Germany's World Cup football victory over Hungary in 1954, the essay shows opportunities and limitations of territorial appeals to win production funds, find distributors, and shape discourse at home and abroad. This study of negotiations among a variety of actors and institutions reveals how marketing – in all its forms – is on the “front lines” of national identity construction and perception.     

Discourses of Demonisation: Chechens,Russians, and the Stavropol' Riots of 2007

In the summer of 2007, the geopolitics of Russo-North Caucasian relations were once again manifest in inter-ethnic violence. During the course of six weeks of rioting between ethnic Russian (russkii) and non-ethnic Russian (rossiiskii) citizens, three students were killed (one Chechen and two Russians) and pogroms were conducted widely. This article addresses these events through a focus on the nature and politics of the riots and those involved. I argue that a range of tensions came together to form a localised geopolitics, and that this contributes to an understanding of why these events took place. Ultimately, the riots are important as an event which reveals much about the complexity of power, space, and identity in contemporary Russia.     

Art,Geopolitics and Metapolitics at Tate Galleries London

Art galleries and museums have often been considered as sites at which the international and the political are both enacted and reworked. But how exactly does art ‘do’ geopolitics? Taking existing work on art and geopolitics in the gallery and museum as its departure point, this article advances a specific conceptual argument for how art does geopolitics that connects thinking in this area with broader debates in aesthetics and politics. Building on Jacques Rancière’s account of art as a dispositif, it explores the aesthetic politics – or metapolitics – through which artistic interventions have raised questions of oil within the Tate Galleries in London. Drawing out its ambiguities as well as potential critical implications, the article illustrates distinct ways in which the metapolitics of art may be activated via a discussion of The Robinson Institute, 2012, and of a series of interventions conducted since 2010 by the group Liberate Tate. In conclusion, the article draws out connections between the metapolitics of art and questions of governmentality.