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.     

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.     

马克思主义经济学的价值取向

笔者认为,各种经济学理论的根本区别就在于它们的基本价值取向不同.西方经济学的价值取向,是倡导一种以"原子"式的"经济人"为中心的极端"个人主义"的价值观;传统社会主义经济学的价值取向,是倡导一种以虚幻的、集权的"集体"为中心的绝对"集体主义"价值观.很显然,这是把个人与集体对立起来的两种极端的价值观.马克思主义经济学既肯定个人的主体地位也肯定集体的重要作用,它的基本价值取向,是倡导一种以人的自由与全面发展为中心、以"真正共同体"为目标的"个人-集体"主义的新型价值观.     

The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

ABSTRACT

The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environment through which it promotes a vision of the world and the relations between the non-human and human. The papers in this forum analyse conservation from various vantage points to draw the links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors use three themes to demonstrate these links. The first theme draws on the concept of environmentality to show the mobilization of ecological rationalities and power towards the creation of protected areas. The second pays attention to networks formed across the distance, and how they influence the location and governance of protected areas. The third focuses on the strategies the conservation lobby uses to align local identities with global conservation ideals and goals. Collectively, these themes highlight features of conservation geopolitics.     

试论里海地区的地缘政治意义

“地缘政治”是指地理上的缘由给国家带来了政治上的影响。里海的能源吸引着全世界的目光,相关大国如美国、俄罗斯、环里海国家以及印度和日本都纷纷加入了里海的能源竞争中,里海地区的地缘政治意义愈发突出。     

Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks

The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange's assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.     

The Ground without Foundation: Territory as a Social Construct

It has been commonplace to regard territory and boundaries as social constructions. It is, however, often left unclear what the social construction of territory really implies and what it explains. As several meanings can be attached to territory, the key question is not whether territory is socially constructed but how it is constructed. This article tries to systemise and sharpen constructivist claims regarding territory. I will argue that two specific constructions merit special attention and help explain the tendency to defend territory by military means. First, territory is often conceived as a (female) body. Second, it is regarded as private property. Both metaphors are interwoven in normative structures that may explain why people fight over territory although in strategic and economic sense it would not be rational to do so.     

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.     

Deus Vult: The Geopolitics of the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is a religious tradition with a highly centralised organisational structure which operates worldwide but that must adjust itself to and effectively operate in local and world-regional contexts that can often challenge and threaten to subvert its central doctrines, operational principles, and political compromises with secular authorities. The Church has long provided the source and model, with its base in the sacred origins of sovereignty, for a quintessentially Western statehood. In this context, I wish to raise three points for further discussion using the significant example of the Catholic Church that future research on the contemporary confluence between religion and geopolitics should address. The first is whether a church can have “geopolitics.” I answer in the affirmative with a number of arguments for doing so. The second is the idea, made in writing and in his practice by Pope Benedict, that Western civilisation is in crisis and that only a restoration of a historic Christendom (Europe) based on a reinvigorated Catholic Church can save it. I dispute the strategy of “hard” or coercive power and the focus on Europe he has apparently chosen as departing from what has often best served the Church in the past. Third, and finally, in the global struggle for souls, numbers matter. Somewhat akin to the struggle for primacy between states in the modern geopolitical imagination, the struggle for souls between faiths (Catholics and Protestants, Moslems and Christians, etc.) is once more in ascendance. But doesn't this quantitative emphasis risk subverting the Church's post-Vatican II emphasis on Christian practice in everyday life? The overall purpose of the article is to introduce religious organisation and associated theological claims into the problematic of geopolitics using the case of the world's largest Christian denomination.     

Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare

This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland.     

对马克思劳动价值论的再探讨

劳动价值论是马克思主义经济学体系中的重要内容。在新的时代背景下,深入研究马克思劳动价值论具有重要理论价值和现实意义。坚持和发展马克思劳动价值论需要从马克思经济学研究方法论的视角,对马克思劳动价值论作进一步的探讨和认识;需要从历史与现实的纬度,分析马克思劳动价值论中的价值及其与当代现实的关系;需要从理论本身的原创含义和现实价值出发,准确理解和认识马克思劳动价值论。     

The economic debate on power: a Marxist critique

In the economic debate on power, seemingly opposite positions have been presented. Contractualists have claimed that power relations do not exist in capitalism, and radicals have maintained that they are ubiquitous. In the middle, transaction costs and property rights economists have argued that power relations exist only within the firm. The underlying conception, however, is the same: power is an interpersonal relation caused by imperfections in the decision-making context and is incompatible with Walrasian competition. The difference among these theories involves their viewpoints on the concrete spread of imperfections in reality. The thesis of this paper is that this narrow conception of power is a consequence of neoclassical methodology. Following Marx, I analyze power as a social relation, and I discuss three problematic aspects of the neoclassical conception: its individualistic methodology, the assumption of universal rather than historical categories, and an ontology that conflates production and circulation.     

自然资源资产价值核算理论与实践——基于马克思主义价值论的延伸

目前,国内尚未建立成熟统一的自然资源资产价值核算体系,更没有把自然资源资产的经济价值和生态价值进行统筹核算,其根源在于缺少自然资源资产价值核算的理论依据及指导标准。鉴于此,文章首先对自然资源资产的概念进行了辨析,在此基础上对自然资源资产价值进行了分类,并分别讨论了每类自然资源资产价值核算的理论依据。然后,给出了自然资源资产价值核算的思路和具体范围。最后,提出了自然资源资产价值统筹核算的路径和建议。通过研究得出自然资源资产价值核算要明确区分不同的自然资源资产价值类型,不同的自然资源资产价值类型对应不同的价值核算理论基础,其相应的核算内容、范围和方法也不相同。