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 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.     

Battle Scars: Wonder Woman,Aesthetic Geopolitics and Disfigurement in Hollywood Film

ABSTRACT

Wonder Woman (2017) has been one of the most lucrative entries in the recent superhero film canon. With a female lead and director, it has also proven a rich text for feminist analysis. Here, the film’s engagement with questions of gender, aesthetic judgment and disability is explored through the lens of feminist geopolitics, and connected to the alignment between immorality and disfigurement in Hollywood more broadly. It is suggested that aesthetic value is used in the film as a key organizing principle for spatial and geopolitical claims. Through this analysis, the paper suggests the potential for further studies of disability, including disfigurement, in popular geopolitics.     

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.     

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.     

Humour at the Model United Nations: The Role of Laughter in Constituting Geopolitical Assemblages

Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on ‘real’ issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Space and the Atom: On the Popular Geopolitics of Cold War Rocketry

This paper considers the imbricated domains of space exploration and Cold War geopolitics by following the trajectory of the ‘Corporal’, the world's first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. It examines the popular geopolitics of rocketry as both a technology of mass destruction and as a vehicle for the transcendent dreams of extra-terrestrial discovery. Avoiding both technical and statist accounts, the paper shows how these technologies of Cold War strategic advantage were activated and sustained through popular media and everyday experience. Particular attention is given to such mundane activities as children's play, citing the example of die-cast miniature toys of the Corporal. Through such apparently modest means, nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context. The paper is also situated within a wider emerging literature on geographies and geopolitics of outer space.     

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.     

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.     

‘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.     

Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe

This article uses the character of Josef ?vejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier ?vejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it. By foregrounding ?vejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency in geopolitical discourses.     

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 Good Wife’s (Geo)Politics Between Originality and Stereotypes: A New Wine or Just a New Bottle?

In the last 15 years, a new generation of TV series based on complex storytelling and frequently focused on politics has emerged. Critics and commentators have identified this as a new golden age for television, frequently emphasising the accuracy and originality of this generation of TV series, and highlighting its capacity to represent different aspects of our world in an effective and innovative manner. Peculiar and original characters in political TV series are also being recognised in academic studies; in particular, these programs have attracted diffused interest in cultural and political studies and more recently also in popular geopolitics. The aim of this article is to contribute to this debate by analysing the ambivalent geopolitical perspectives transmitted within these forms of contemporary media products. By focusing on the political and legal series The Good Wife, produced by CBS between 2009 and 2016, the paper shows how original and challenging representations of politics and society pair well with very traditional and stereotyped geopolitical representations. Consequently, the paper suggests that in many cases, the acclaimed originality in the form of TV series conceals old and stereotyped contents.     

In Pursuit of a Monster: Militarisation and (In)Security in Northern Uganda

Through a feminist geopolitical analysis, this article interrogates the role of monster narratives in producing geographic imaginaries of difference and lived experiences of insecurity in northern Uganda. Building upon theories of monsters as cultural imaginaries, I argue that state and non-state actors evoke colonial-era constructions of difference to construct Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), as a monster to support contemporary geopolitical agendas. By troubling state-based definitions of security, this article disputes the idea that security practices predicated on the defeat of a monster translate into increased security for those most directly affected by the violence of the monster. Additionally, this article discusses alternative narratives circulating in northern Uganda that offer different readings of Kony's role in the cycles of violence that have ravaged the region. These narratives, when viewed through a feminist geopolitical lens, challenge the monster imaginary and, with it, the geopolitics of militarisation.