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.     

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.     

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.     

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 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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

International Donors,NGOs, and the Geopolitics of Youth Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon

In the aftermath of 9/11, Western states have increasingly used the promotion of democracy and civil society as a means of effecting geopolitical aims in the Middle East. Democracy promotion has involved extensive financial support of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who work to instill (neo)liberal-democratic values and norms among populations that are seen to be lacking in these. This article, in examining the production of citizenship as a geopolitical practice, brings critical-geography scholarship into conversation with the critical literature on Western-funded civil society in ‘transitional’ societies. We focus on the case of Lebanon, which has been targeted by Western donors due to its strategic importance in deepening regional geopolitical rivalries. We highlight the pervasiveness of Western democracy discourses in the work of local NGOs, and especially the tendency to view sectarian politics as a source of instability that must be sublimated by new forms of societal consensus. But our account also highlights the scepticism that NGO directors feel toward their own efficacy and toward the influence of Western donors in Lebanese society. Their critical assessments of Western-funded civil society call into question the extent to which democracy promotion can secure Western geopolitical interests, much less enforce Western political supremacy.     

Pipeline Geopolitics: Subaquatic Materials and the Tactical Point

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the proposition that studies of geopolitics need to address the political significance of spaces above and below the apparently twodimensional or flat surface of the land and sea. However, we depart from the view that such spaces should be defined by their verticality or conceived as three-dimensional volumes. Instead, the argument stresses the importance of attending to the relations between physical and biological things, and the ways in which the proximity of things is both mediated and supplemented by legal, and scientific and political practice. The empirical focus of the paper is a specific geopolitical puzzle. How did a short section of the route of a transnational gas pipeline, the 3500km Southern Gas Corridor, come to be a site or ‘tactical point’ at which the construction of the pipeline could be disrupted? Our contention is that any analysis of this political question must address not only the contested relations between states, corporations and civil society, but also the potential tension and interference between the horizontal networked geopolitics of pipelines and their subaquatic and subterranean construction. The subaquatic turns out not to be volume but a space of situated encounters between disparate materials.     

Reflections on EU Geopolitics: Consolidation,Neighbourhood and Civil Society in the Reordering of European Space

Civil society observations of the EU's geopolitical impacts on its immediate neighbourhood provide a nuanced ‘ground-up’ perspective that eschews historically deterministic interpretations of the EU's role in the world. While this article is limited to Eastern Europe, it nevertheless highlights some of the challenges facing the EU's visions of ‘Neighbourhood’ as multilateral and multilayered regional co-operation. After a brief theoretical introduction, the article first characterizes the EU's geopolitics as a dual project of consolidation and ideational projection; that is as two projects of re-ordering – re-territorializing – interstate relationships. It then addresses three specific and interrelated questions with regard to civil society: 1) how do the EU and its policies affect civil society co-operation agendas and practises, 2) to what extent does civil society participate in the co-development of Neighbourhood Policy and 3) how do civil society actors perceive the role of the EU in promoting cross-border and regional co-operation within the ‘Neighbourhood’? One central issue in developing these questions is that of establishing ‘common’ European values as a condition for successful co-operation. Civil society actors must simultaneously operate within different, often competing, socio-political contexts. A balance between situational ethics and more generally accepted notions of (European) values is thus essential.     

当代中国的基督教社会服务组织与公民社会——以爱德基金会和上海基督教青年会为个案

本文试图通过两个个案,爱德基金会与上海基督教青年会对当代中国基督教社会服务组织的现状作一描述,对该类组织对中国公民社会发展的影响进行分析和探讨。作者首先对公民社会的概念在中西方语境下的讨论作一简要梳理。而后结合作者从田野调查获得的个案资料进行分析。在此基础上得出的结论是通过此类具有信仰基础的社会服务组织提供的社会服务,产生了积极的社会效应,满足了巨大的社会需求,在推动公民社会的发育过程中扮演了一个重要的角色。并让我们对民间组织和公民社会在转型期的中国社会的运作模式有了不同于西方国家的新的界定和认识：即一种“非抗争性的合作模式”（或称“伙伴关系模式”）。     

论民间组织的三维社会空间:实体、社会心理和虚拟网络

民间组织的社会空间存在实体、社会心理和虚拟网络三个维度。文章认为,在政府主导的强国家、弱社会传统体制迈向主要由国家、市场、社会构成的多元现代社会管理体制的过程中,往往是显性的民间社会组织的实体和制度空间受到关注,而对社会心理空间和虚拟网络空间及二者与实体制度空间的整合与平衡没有给予足够的重视,从而使得国家面临在自上而下层层传导中执行力下降、政策效能降低,体制认同递次减弱等多方压力。因此,一个良好的社会空间,需要调整国家—社会关系,实现实体制度、社会心理和虚拟网络等三个维度的对接、融合和集成。     

SOCIAL ECONOMY IN THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF PUBLIC POLICY

ABSTRACT:  In this paper, I focus on the contribution of the social economy to the democratization of the State and of public policy by making use of the distinction between the concepts of co-production and co-construction. In part one, I clarify the meanings given to various concepts. In particular, I pay attention to the idea of a co-production of public policy. This concept relates to the organizational dimension of policy and enables a contextualization of the participation of both civil society stakeholders and market forces in the implementation of services to the public. In part two, I discuss the concept of co-construction which relates to the institutional dimension of public policy and enables an analysis of how both civil society stakeholders and market forces are defining public policies. While the co-construction of public policy can produce various types of outcomes, I favor a solidarity-based model in which the State is open to forms of governance inclusive of the contributions of civil society stakeholders and market forces. This type of co-construction is fitting with a concern for the general interest and is ready to use the resources of the social economy. In part three, I review the housing policy case study in Canada and Quebec during the last twenty years. Three observations emerge from this case study: 1) the presence of both co-production and co-construction in public housing policy; 2) an active presence of the social economy such as co-operatives and non-profit organizations; 3) this active presence of the social economy has helped to produce a number of social innovations that have improved the democratization of public policy in the housing field.     

‘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 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.