“This Marvelous Symbol of Our Identity”: The Czech Republic in American Practical Geopolitics

This paper analyses the practical geopolitical representations of the Czech Republic in American presidential materials between 1989 and 2009. Using structured discourse analysis, it highlights the impact of identity construction on policymaking and draws on critical geopolitics to highlight conceptualisations and geopolitical representations connected with the Czech Republic over four American presidential administrations. The article demonstrates the power of practical geopolitics in constructing images and cementing certain preconceived notions about a given place. Five main representations are identified, presenting the Czech Republic as: interconnected with American identity, a symbol of democracy and freedom, a victim of tyranny, a loyal ally, and as interchangeable with other countries in Central Europe. The article concludes that such multifaceted conceptualisations not only define the United States’ relationship with the Czech Republic, but also have strategic value. These conceptualisations helped to justify certain American policies and to reinforce a particular interpretation of American identity.     

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 ‘West’ against the ‘Rest’: Geopolitics after the end of the cold war

With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that we had reached the ‘end of geopolitics’. Since the mid‐1990s, however, the term ‘geopolitics’ has experienced a revival, and even regional groupings which have so far abstained from any kind of power politics, such as the European Union, have started to claim geopolitical interests for themselves. But it is not clear what constitutes this kind of power politics in the 1990s and what drives ‘the West’ to pursue geopolitics, directed against what Huntington has labelled so plainly and provocatively the ‘Rest’. The article addresses this question by analysing Western capital's need for access to markets in the South and the EU's and US’ growing dependence on oil imports. The article will argue that a Western geostrategy based on Huntington's civilisational model would be counterproductive in the long run, manoeuvring the Western states into a situation where these geopolitical goals would have to be enforced by military means instead of being pursued through a strategy of political and economic support.     

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.     

Geopolitica: The ‘Geographical and Imperial Consciousness’ of Fascist Italy

Very few contributions have been published in English on the Italian geopolitical tradition of the interwar years. This is rather surprising, given the fact that, after Geopolitik, Italian geopolitics was one of the largest and most significant in Europe. This article aims to fill this void, by offering a detailed and critical investigation into this intellectual production. Although the article traces the origins of Italian geopolitics back to the 1920s, its main focus is on Geopolitica (1939–1942), the journal which, more than any others, embodied the attempts to give Italy its own geopolitics. Despite its ambitious proposal to become the ‘imperial-geographical consciousness’ of the Fascist regime, Geopolitica remained largely confined within the circle of academic geography and ultimately also failed to influence the development of Italian geographical tradition.     

Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom,Identities and Audiences

This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience interpretation, consumption and attachment. This shift in focus parallels a similar move in cultural studies made several years prior. Therefore, this paper advocates combining theories from cultural studies with empirical studies of concern to popular geopolitics to further our understanding. Specifically outlined as a possibility in this paper is the viewing of nationalism and religion as forms of fan-based identities, in that both can be understood as adherence to serial narratives. This perspective carries several corollaries regarding methodology and object of study, most notably a concern with the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The Making of New ‘Space’: Cases of Transatlantic Astropolitics

This article investigates geopolitical interactions between Europe and the United States (US) in large-scale outer space application programmes, which I term transatlantic astropolitics. Europe and the US have transcended tangible geographical constraints on terrestrial territories and extended geopolitics to outer space with advanced technologies, thereby making outer space a new ‘space’ for transatlantic interaction. Transatlantic astropolitics reveals an instrumental rationality that both sides pursue interests with respective cost-effective calculation rather than shared norms, common culture, or collective identities. This phenomenon indicates an inconsistency between the discourse of transatlantic security community and practices of European and US individual geopolitical interest satisfaction. This article provides a coupling between theories of international relations (IR) and political geography in outer space issue area, and thereby identifies the role geopolitical thoughts play in transatlantic astropolitics. This article concludes with the validity of neo-classical astropolitics in explaining outer space activities, and cost-efficient calculation as the cause of strategic variation in transatlantic astropolitics.     

Reading geopolitics beyond the state: organisational discourse in response to 11 September

This essay explores organizations in civil society as constituting an important sphere of social action in which alternative geopolitical worldviews are produced and disseminated beyond the state. The authors discuss the conceptual relationship between non-governmental organizations and the geopolitics pursued by states and also develop an appropriate methodological program to investigate organizational geopolitics. This is accomplished by employing critical discourse analysis methods in the examination of press releases made by notable civil society organizations in response to the events of 11 September. While most organizational responses condemned the attacks and expressed a shared sense of sympathy for the victims, there was considerable divergence in the preferred geopolitical and social response – ranging from restraint and tolerance to aggressive militarism. The findings suggest organizations are not only important sites of alternative geopolitical representations beyond the state, but may also serve to reproduce and re-circulate dominant statecentered geopolitical visions as well.     

US Strategy in the Pacific – Geopolitical Positioning for the Twenty-First Century

This article seeks to apply IR theory to the US presence in the Pacific. It analyses the ways in which geopolitical considerations of position are at the heart of US security strategy in the Pacific. It argues that America's long-term security position in the Pacific is a basic geopolitical matter; be it in terms of traditional geopolitics (regional position as “location”) and in terms of critical geopolitics (regional position as “power and aspirations”). In looking at US security strategy in the Pacific, three geopolitical features are noticeable: (1) Mahanian seapower tenets, (2) overlapping competitive US-China concerns focused around the two island chains in the Western Pacific, and (3) the internal balancing carried out by the US in the Pacific which is particularly focused on Guam.     

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.     

A Return to ‘Civilisational Geopolitics’ in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era

The prevalence of the discourse of ideological geopolitics during the Cold War meant that both Turkey and the EU belonged to the West by virtue of their ideological orientation. In the absence of this prevalent geopolitical discourse, both the EU and Turkey have spent the 1990s trying to locate themselves geographically. Drawing on the literature on critical approaches to political geography and international relations, this article seeks to answer the question of whether the EU's post-Cold War security discourse on the Mediterranean in general and on relations with Turkey in particular point to a return to the earlier discourse of civilisational geopolitics. The article also presents a reading of Turkish policy makers’ attempts to resist EU's representation of Turkey in ‘non-Europe’ (as with the ‘Middle East’ or the ‘Mediterranean’) as boundary-producing practices which have served to underline the boundaries between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’.     

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.     

Karl Haushofer and geopolitics — the history of a German mythos

This essay attempts to reassess the writings of Karl Haushofer, a German professor of geopolitics during the period of the Third Reich. However, this examination is not to be another historical reflection. Instead it approaches the question what different kinds of historical reflections on Karl Haushofer as a person and his geopolitics were made in Germany and how they influenced the further geopolitical research. The different interpretations of Haushofer are examined in the form of a discourse analytic study. It shows that the different judgments concerning his work are open to diverse political interpretations.     

Extraction in Four Dimensions: Time,Space and the Emerging Geo(-)politics of Deep-Sea Mining

ABSTRACT

Despite the truism that less is known about the deep-sea than outer space, deep-sea mining (DSM) is being promoted as the next frontier of resource extraction. In 2019, Nautilus Minerals hopes to become the world’s first company to mine the deep seabed in the waters off Papua New Guinea (PNG). DSM thus stands at the threshold of becoming a matter of politics; it has provoked a wide range of geopolitical imaginaries variously relating to ‘resource security’ and ‘progress’, on the one hand, and environmental disaster and precaution on the other. However, these accounts do little to address the specific ‘nature’ of the deep-sea, seabed and their extreme location and materialities, and are instead framed by classic geopolitical concerns with interstate relations. Against this background and illustrated by examples centred on PNG, this paper argues that future engagements with the geopolitics of DSM are more accurately conceptualised by an engagement with time as well as three dimensional space. This includes the multiple spatial and temporal registers through which both the geology and ecologies of seabed and seawater operate. By highlighting the importance of resource temporalities, it suggests that the geopolitics of both DSM and extraction in extreme places more generally is not only spatially complex, it is also a matter of time.     

It's Not a Laughing Matter: Critical Geopolitics,Humour and Unlaughter

This paper explores the possibilities of considering humour and laughter as a serious matter of concern for critical geopolitics and political geography more generally. While there has been some interest in this topic, there is scope to devise a more expansive research agenda. Using both laughter and Michael Billig's notion of unlaughter, the paper considers how these visceral expressions contribute, often in subtle ways, to the making of geopolitical subjectivities. The final part of the paper considers some possibilities for future research.