“Modeling the impact of wars and terrorism on tourism demand in Kurdistan region of Iraq”

Portuguese Economic Journal - Recent political instabilities in the Middle East have led to strong negative impacts on the tourism sector. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent and the...     

‘Geopolitics of Integration’ and the Imagination of South America

The main tenet of this article is to argue that the process of regionalisation in Latin America is entering into a new phase, where South America is consolidating an own process of regional integration. From being not more than a geographical expression, South America is rapidly becoming a political and economic entity with increasing international actorhood. One important difference to the past is that there is now a ‘core state’, Brazil, with a clear strategy directed towards deepening South American integration. Yet, Brazil is not alone; there is also an increasing convergence with other South American states and old rivalries are being substituted for increased cooperation in areas such as economy, infrastructure, energy, security or aid. As this article explains, the logic of action of the forces behind the process of integration can be understood by analysing the evolution of South American geopolitical current called ‘geopolitics of integration’.     

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.     

Trapped in the Logic of the Modern State System? European Integration in the Wake of the Financial Crisis

In the wake of the Single European Act of the mid-1980s and a series of follow-on initiatives aimed at fostering greater integration in Europe, a number of commentators began describing Europe as a truly novel political-territorial arrangement. By the middle of the 1990s, however, the adoption of a common currency came to dominate the European integration agenda. The embrace of monetary union reflected a view of European integration that was firmly embedded in the logic of the modern territorial state system. That logic led many commentators to view the success or failure of integration in terms of the degree to which powers were being transferred from state governmental and economic institutions to the central decision-making bodies of the European Union. Such an approach cast the EU as a super-state rather than as a new type of political-institutional entity. As a result, the integration project was less subversive of the state system than it might otherwise have been – bolstering the view of the European Union as a distant bureaucracy not adequately attuned to the needs of everyday Europeans and fueling nationalist sentiments: a social force with deep roots in the modernist territorial order. Moving the European integration process forward will likely require embracing conceptions of progress that are less tethered to modernist territorial ideas and assumptions.     

Return of the State? The G20, the Financial Crisis and Power in the World Economy

The Group of Twenty and the new world order it is meant to signify have prompted a wave of triumphalism around the world from those who, like French President Nicolas Sarkozy, bemoan the influences of ‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’ and from neo-Marxists, who view the economic crisis as a harbinger of the resurgence of states over markets. A little over a decade ago, however, the late doyenne of international political economists, Susan Strange, wrote eloquently about the reasons why the state was in retreat, its structural power draining away in favour of markets. Have the intervening dozen years, with their recurrent crises in markets and corporate governance, demonstrated the need for a return of the state? This analysis of the G20 London communiqué, using criteria that Strange advanced, suggests that far from asserting a return of the state, the G20 signifies its persistent weakness and concludes that the G20 leaders, at least, sense a more complex network of power relationships, and that structural power rests in the network.     

Trading Out of the Global Food Crisis? The World Trade Organization and the Geopolitics of Food Security

The geopolitics of the Global Food Crisis and international trade has received limited scholarly attention, a significant omission given the major roles of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in structuring world food production and trade flows and as a principal inter-state governing mechanism of the global agro-food system. Analysing recent international policy actions framing the WTO as a ‘fix’ to the Global Food Crisis, this article points to the value of a critical geopolitics of agro-power sensitive to the spatial reconfiguration of production and power in the global agro-food system, problematising geospatial categories such as ‘North’ and ‘South’, and that takes seriously contests for control of geopolitical agents such as the WTO.     

Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance

Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but also in how they are challenged and subverted. Furthermore, by examining how the very concepts of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are used in different contexts, and for a variety of purposes, it opens up critical questions about mobility, citizenship and the nation state. Collectively, these contributions aim to demonstrate how problematising migration and its categorisation can be a tool of enquiry into other phenomena and processes.     

‘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.     

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 Return of Geopolitics in the Era of Soft Power: Rereading Rudolf Kjellén on Geopolitical Imaginary and Competitive Identity

This paper looks at how Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) conceived of the relationship between nature and culture, between material and immaterial power as well as the role of soft power, geopolitical imaginary and competitive identity in off-setting potentially unfavourable geopolitical conditions for small and medium-sized states. It is argued that with regard to small states, Kjellén did not maintain a consistent separation between “soft” cultural resources of power and “hard” laws of nature. Rather, he placed the mutually constitutive tension between geography (nature) and politics (culture) at the centre of his politico-scientific analysis, arguing that active “biopolitics” could supplement geopolitics. In Kjellén’s conception, cultural and natural resources are instruments of an otherwise integrated notion of power which challenges the contemporary separation between hard and soft power.     

Do Price Barriers Exist in the European Carbon Market?

It is generally thought that psychological prices in markets primarily traded by professional participants should play a limited role. The authors investigate the existence of key reference points in the European Carbon Market, which can be considered as a market with highly qualified stakeholders. They document the presence of key levels and barrier bands around European Union Allowances (EUA) prices. It appears that traders tend to consider these price levels as resistances in upward movements and as supports in downward movements. Furthermore, the authors have observed that the existence of price barriers affects both return and volume dynamics. Therefore, the results indicate that there exist certain EUA prices that do, in fact, modify the behavior of European Carbon Market participants.     

Performance and the Barriers of China＇s Energy Efficiency

中国政府将加快发展能源产业、坚持节约能源和保护环境作为一项基本国策。随着我国经济的不断发展,能源消费总量虽然在逐年增加,但能源利用效率却在不断提高。在中央政府政策的推动下,能源强度虽然呈下降趋势,但近年来下降的速度明显趋于平缓,低于改革开放初期。在分析总结我国能源利用效率变化的趋势和特点的基础上,通过对能源强度系数进行分解,发现能源强度变化的技术效应和结构效应都有减弱的趋势,尤其是结构效应。在此基础上从经济发展和社会因素两方面,进一步探讨了阻碍我国能源利用效率进一步提升的原因。     

The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security

Growing anxieties over food security have recently brought sharp geopolitical overtones to debates about the agro-food sector. Contending that this ‘geopolitical moment’ highlights the mutually constitutive nature of geopolitics and political economies of food, we examine how dominant geopolitical framings of food security extend and deepen neoliberal models of agro-food provisioning, and highlight the need for further attention to these dynamics from political geographers. We develop a preliminary research agenda for further work in the field, focusing on the recent spate of global farmland acquisitions, questions of agro-food governance, the securitisation of hunger and obesity, and the environmental impacts of dominant agro-food systems. Throughout, we highlight the value of a counter-geopolitics of food security for re-situating agro-food politics outside hegemonic policies and institutions, and of the alter-geopolitics of food pursued by communities embodying concrete alternative food production and consumption systems.     

Eastern Orthodoxy,Geopolitics and the 2016 ‘Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church’

In March 2014, at the time of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, the heads of 14 Orthodox churches convened under the leadership of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based primus inter pares in Eastern Orthodoxy, and announced that a ‘Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church’ would be held in 2016. The Synod, which took place in June 2016 in Crete, was a unique ecclesiastical gathering, bringing together competing geopolitical visions of religion, state and power. This article examines the political mobilisation of Orthodox churches by contextualising the holding of the Synod in relation to Russia’s advancement of spiritual security after the end of the Cold War. It provides a textual analysis of Synodical documents and highlights the patterns of religious and political structures in the contemporary Eastern Orthodox world.     

State limits in the early twenty‐first century: Observations on form and function

It is dangerous to draw too many conclusions about the form and function of state borders in the early twenty‐first century. Marked regional differences are developing and, with a few exceptions such as Europe, there is scarcity of empirical evidence about the changes taking place. Some trends, however, seem clear. There are likely to be more states and more land and maritime boundaries in future, and states will continue to regard the establishment and protection of their territorial limits as a priority. As the power and influence of states seem to diminish in response to globalisation, the reassertion of territoriality by governments is both legitimate and is often popular with the people. While many boundaries will become more permeable, some will remain as significant barriers to people and goods, although not to ideas and information on the Internet. Attention is drawn to the emerging political and economic blocs that may create striking regional contrasts in boundary form and function by mid‐century.