The Three Critical Flaws of Critical Geopolitics: Towards a Neo-Classical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics is the dominant school of geopolitics in contemporary geography. Critical geopolitics is a body of radical scholarship that emerged in the 1980s that attempts to move beyond classic geopolitics. In order to resuscitate geopolitics, critical geopoliticians had to distance themselves from the imperialist, racist, and environmentally determinist geopolitics of the 1940s. In doing so, however, critical geopoliticians created a body of scholarship that omits important explanatory variables necessary to understand post–Cold War geopolitics. We argue that critical geopolitics unnecessarily limits the wider application of geopolitics because it is: 1) anti-geopolitics; 2) anti-cartographic; and 3) anti-environmental.     

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.     

The Shifting Geopolitics of Water in the Anthropocene

This forum responds to recent calls to hypothesize a geopolitics of the Anthropocene by examining how our notions of geopolitics of water may shift in the context of this new and, at times, divisive framework. The Anthropocene describes the geological epoch in which humans are the dominant actor in the global environmental system and has been a concept that is not without controversy. Taking the Anthropocene as an epistemological divergence where nature can no longer be viewed as separate from humanity, this forum asks how moving away from understanding hydraulic systems as essentially stable to understanding them as unstable and profoundly influenced by humans changes our understanding ofthe geopolitics of water. Collectively the contributions to this forum illustrate that formulating a water geopolitics of the Anthropocene requires 1) moving beyond a focus on fluvial flows to consider other forms of water; 2) broadening our understanding of the actors involved in water geopolitics; 3) examining new geopolitical tactics, particularly those grounded in law; 4) engaging critically with new and emerging forms of visualization and representation in the geopolitics of water, and; 5) examining how the notion of the Anthropocene has been used towards geopolitical ends and worked to elide different positionalities.     

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.     

‘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.     

From the Global Food Crisis to the Age of Austerity: The Anxious Geopolitics of Global Food Security

The impacts of recent food, financial, and energy crises have reinvigorated a geopolitical enframing of global food security that makes foreign development assistance a primary component of national security strategies. This centres elite fears of hunger and underdevelopment and strongly shapes policies and strategies adopted in response. Geopolitical fears of hungry and food insecure populations are compounded by the politics of austerity and cuts to foreign aid budgets and social spending. This paper examines the geopolitics of food security, fear, and austerity as expressed in the rhetoric and strategies of major aid donor governments, especially the US and UK, and proposes an alternative geopolitics that builds from the affective dimensions of hunger, food insecurity, and vulnerability as experienced by the hungry and poor. The example of farmer suicides and agrarian political mobilisation in India demonstrates how this affective alternative geopolitics may be constructed and examined.     

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.     

A Critique of Critical Geopolitics

Comparisons between classical and critical geopolitics are made with the suggestion that both versions, although different in most respects, are equally legitimate for study and perhaps may be brought closer together, at least in ways that may complement each other, after inspection of their comparative approaches. The classical version deserves consideration as a contribution to international relations theory and to foreign policy making. The critical approach provides a needed and necessary critique of the classical, exposing its weaknesses and suggesting an emancipatory alternative. Accordingly, the author has selected a variety of associated characteristics that show the primary variations between the classical and the critical, illustrated by appropriate quotations and examples, with again the conclusion that both versions of geopolitics, the classical and the critical, merit credibility, and that a possibility exists where certain connections may be located between the two that could mutually clarify and strengthen their unique contributions to geopolitics as a whole.     

Geopolitics of the Cosmopolis

Through an analysis of a speech held by Finnish Minister of Defence Jyri Häkämies at CSIS in Washington in 2007, the article scrutinizes the new emergence of “geopolitics” in international politics. Although its novelty is debatable, in this new geopolitical discourse the main focus is not related to the spatial borders of a nation state but instead to securing territory beyond these borders. It seems that “common values”, basically undefined but allegedly including such ideas like democracy, are related to this new form of “geopolitics”. In contrast to traditional geopolitics and identity politics, the global or cosmopolitical “us” defending common values seems to be a changing coalition and other countries appear only as objects of its operations. Only Russia, waking from its decade-long hibernation, emerges as a potential challenge to “us”. Curiously enough, its awakening also brings geopolitics back. The analysis of the speech reveals that the “new situation” requires choosing friends and enemies that are not clearly defined in the classical geopolitical sense. Even in the traditional sense of protecting the borders etc., the geopolitical security of Finland is best protected through acting for the geopolitical security of the whole world, no matter where or when that might require our presence. But from where does, for instance, the legitimacy of the operations of “us” derive? In the speech of minister Häkämies, many of the classical themes of political theory reappear, though in a new form. It is guided by geopolitical concerns, but the geopolitics it entails is rather different from the traditional way of thinking about it. This also creates a need to rethink some central concerns of political theory.     

The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited

This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem’s contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to “satellite neighbourhoods”, i.e. Jerusalem’s colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance of geopolitics to the study of neighbourhood planning, by which we mean not merely a discussion of international relations and conflict or of the roles of military acts and wars in producing space. Rather, geopolitics refers to the emergence of discourses and forces connected with the technologies of control, patterns of internal migrations by individuals and communities, and the flow of cultures and capital.     

Oil Prices: Governance Failures and Geopolitical Consequences

This article links two major areas of work on the geographies of oil: socially produced scarcity and the ‘new realities’ of oil, with wider geographical inquiries, mainly global energy governance. It explores how in the current context characterised by oversupply, power stands out as a key factor in the geopolitics of prices, the interactions amongst energy institutions, the role of supply and demand, and the preferences of the actors involved. Geopolitical approaches find a niche in the gaps left by the increasing complexities of global energy governance. In this regard, energy geopolitics may be thought of as ‘governance by other means’, an alternative to failed external energy governance solutions. The article then focuses on the consequences of the drop in oil prices on producer countries and how it will impact the major issues that dominate the literature on energy security. It concludes by stating that there is a need to rethink the geopolitics of energy security in order to incorporate the global governance institutions’ failure to facilitate cooperation as another cause of the re-securitisation of energy policies.     

The Renaissance of Geopolitics in Post-1989 Italy

The revival of geopolitics in post-1989 Italy is at once a rather straightforward and perplexing matter. On the one hand, the renewed appeal that geopolitical thinking has enjoyed in International Relations (IR) circles has been well documented and could hardly be downplayed. On the other hand, however, the recourse to geopolitics has often boiled down to an undifferentiated and often convoluted use of its terms, approaches and theories. In this article we argue that the rationale of such a revival has been less to import geopolitical knowledge into IR and more to confer legitimacy and respectability to the analyses put forward by scholars and practitioners. It is no chance, in fact, that the geopolitics-inspired academic discourse has been progressively recognised as a way, if not the way, to discuss international affairs in post-1989 Italy. The central puzzle to be investigated behind the revival of geopolitics in Italy is thus how such a discourse has managed to gain and retain a powerful status in Italian IR academia and, most importantly, why.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The New Geopolitics of Disease: Between Global Health and Global Security

This article describes the emergence of a new geopolitics of disease following the end of the Cold War and offers a framework for thinking about it. Three main questions are asked. First, why is disease now a geopolitical issue? Second, how has this new geopolitics emerged? And third, what are the implications of the emergence of disease as a geopolitical issue for the meaning and practice of global health? It is argued that disease is now seen as a geopolitical issue in terms of four main dimensions: destabilisation, sovereignty, the instrumentalisation of health, and geopolitical economy. Second, this new geopolitics has emerged in the context of larger debates about globalisation, development and security, and has emanated primarily from Northern institutions. Third, drawing on critical approaches to security, it is suggested that while the securitisation of health offers certain benefits, it also carries risks. The article identifies a number of critical tensions in the new geopolitics of disease as a way of negotiating these risks and anchoring the concept of global health security in a larger vision of health in an era of globalisation.     

Déjà vu Geopolitics: Marxism and the Geopolitical Undead

Undead, unkillable and uncannily, unceasingly trendy, ‘geopolitics’ strikes again. Marxist geopolitics could have been a good idea - for Marxists at least. This version doesn't work for two reasons: first, its emphasis on the inter-relationship between territory, capitalism and power makes it virtually indistinguishable from Marxism writ large; and second, it re-legitimates some of the familiar yet noxious tropes of classical geopolitics.     

A Geopolitics of the Horse in Finland

The disregard of animal subjectivity in geopolitics is challenged as outdated and arrogant in light of the growing interdisciplinary understanding of the relational, dispersed, and co-evolving nature of agency. First, the war horse is examined by joining the instrumental approach of military history with the emphasis on emotion in animal studies. Knowledge about animal subjectivity is expanded by demonstrating how the horse itself has co-produced the Finnish experience in World War II and the national narrative about this conflict. Calculable territory, biopolitical state intervention, the political ecology of war, affect, and the body build connections between the horse’s war and theory, methodology, and concepts in political geography and geopolitics. Equine labour and response to the state’s geopolitically motivated breeding exercises during peace then bridge animal studies and critical geopolitics, showing how the horse has supported the formation of Finnishness. Finally, a look at contemporary mobility, geopolitics of disease, and biometric bordering exemplifies how the horse continues to adapt to new roles in Finnish society and contribute to human institutions and governance. The examination demonstrates the importance of other-than-human beings in the making of Finland as a political space and place. Suggestions for further studies and data point to opportunity. The article serves those who question rigid categorisations and segmentation of research and pedagogy into intellectually self-contained islands.