Critical geopolitics

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In the humanities discipline of critical theory, critical geopolitics is an academic school of thought centered on the idea that intellectuals of statecraft construct ideas about places, that these ideas have influence and reinforce their political behaviors and policy choices, and that these ideas affect how people process their own notions of places and politics.[1]

Critical geopolitics sees the geopolitical as comprising four linked facets: popular geopolitics, formal geopolitics, structural geopolitics, and practical geopolitics. Critical geopolitical scholarship continues to engage critically with questions surrounding geopolitical discourses, geopolitical practice (i.e. foreign policy), and the history of geopolitics.

Key ideas and concepts

Rooted in

postcolonial scholarship, critical geopolitical inquiry is, at its core, concerned with the operation, interaction, and contestation of geopolitical discourses.[citation needed
]

This

poststructuralist orientation holds that the realities of global political space do not simply reveal themselves to detached, omniscient observers.[citation needed] Rather, geopolitical knowledges are seen as partial and situated, emergent from particular subject positions. In this context, geopolitical practices result from complex constellations of competing ideas and discourses, which they in turn modify.[2] The linkages between geographical patterns and processes, on the one hand, and various types of discourses on the other hand, are a key contribution to the geography of media and communication
. They also imply that geopolitical practice is not, therefore, unproblematically 'right' or 'natural'.

Further, since geopolitical knowledge is seen as partial, situated and embodied,

nation-states are not the only 'legitimate' unit of geopolitical analysis within critical geopolitics. Instead, geopolitical knowledge is seen as more diffuse, with 'popular' geopolitical discourse considered alongside 'formal' and 'practical' geopolitics
. These three 'strands' of geopolitical thought are outlined below:

Popular geopolitics

Popular geopolitics is one of the ways in which geopolitical knowledge is produced. It argues that geopolitical ideas are not only shaped by the state, intellectual elites and politicians. Rather, it is also shaped and communicated through popular culture and everyday practices.[3]: 208  Popular culture construct a common sense understanding of world politics through the use of movies, books, magazines, etc.[3]: 209 

Political geographers have widely studied the role of popular culture in shaping the popular understanding of politics.[3]: 209  Klaus Dodds, a political geographer, studied the conveyance of geopolitical ideas through movies.[3]: 209  While analyzing James Bond movies, he discovered a recurring message of Western states' geopolitical anxieties.[3]: 209  For example, the movie From Russia with Love conveyed United States' anxieties as a result of the Cold War and The World Is Not Enough conveyed the threats posed by Central Asia.[3]: 209 

Structural geopolitics

Structural geopolitics is defined as contemporary geopolitical tradition.

Formal geopolitics

Formal

hegemonic
, even common-sense.

Practical geopolitics

Practical geopolitics describes the actual practice of geopolitical strategy (i.e. foreign policy). Studies of practical geopolitics focus both on geopolitical action and geopolitical reasoning, and the ways in which these are linked recursively to both 'formal' and 'popular' geopolitical discourse. Because critical geopolitics is concerned with geopolitics as discourse, studies of practical geopolitics pay attention both to geopolitical actions (for example, military deployment), but also to the discursive strategies used to narrativize these actions.

The "critical" in critical geopolitics therefore relates to two (linked) aims. Firstly, it seeks to 'open up'

poststructuralist methodology.[4]

Key texts

The emergence of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics is an ongoing

Gearóid Ó Tuathail's seminal Critical Geopolitics book.[2]

Ó Tuathail
's 1996 book Critical Geopolitics defined the state of the subdiscipline at the time, and codified its methodological and intellectual underpinnings.

The historical role of Europe has been subjected to a rich tradition of critical works in geopolitics, as reflected in several book series, such as Routledge's Critical Geopolitics Archived 2020-08-06 at the Wayback Machine series, edited by Alan Ingram, Merje Kuus and Chih Yuan Woon, as well as the series on Critical European Studies (also at Routledge), edited by Yannis Stivachtis. Contributing to this area is the book entitled The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis by József Böröcz.

Critical Geopolitics texts

Critical geopolitics-based work has been published in a range of Geographical and trans-disciplinary journals, as well as in books and edited collections. Major journals in which critical geopolitics work has appeared include:

  • Annals of the Association of American Geographers
  • Antipode
  • Geopolitics
  • Political Geography

Elsewhere, critical geopolitics-derived studies have been published in journals specializing in popular culture, security studies, border studies (such as in the Journal of Borderlands Studies) and history, reflecting the breadth of subject matter subsumed under the critical geopolitics headline.

Texts in Critical Geopolitical theory

Critical geopolitics 'theory' is not fixed or homogeneous, but core features - especially a concern for discourse analysis - are fundamental.

Popular engagement with the geopolitical, as (re)presented in popular culture, is a major area of research within the critical geopolitics literature:

  • Newspapers: The framing of geopolitical events in mass circulation newspapers has been addressed by a number of authors. Thomas McFarlane and Iain Hay's (2003) article in Political Geography, 'The battle for Seattle: protest and popular geopolitics in The Australian newspaper', is a highly cited example. Further, it exemplifies how critical geopolitics research can use both qualitative and quantitative approaches to discourse analysis.
  • Magazines: Joanne Sharp's analysis of the ways in which the Reader's Digest (re)presented a sense of US national identity during the Cold War started life as a 1993 article in the journal Political Geography. Subsequently, it spurred her 2000 book Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity. Further, Sharp's methodology prompted an in-depth debate (2003) about the practice of popular geopolitics, in the pages of the journal Geopolitics (vol.8/2).
  • Cartoons and Comics: An early (1996) and frequently-cited popular geopolitics study by Klaus Dodds considers the geopolitical content and effect of cartoons by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell during the Falklands War; 'The 1982 Falklands War and a critical geopolitical eye: Steve Bell and the If cartoons' was published in Political Geography (vol. 15/6). Jason Dittmer has explored the comic book titles of Captain America as an illustration of a "nuanced and ambiguous" geopolitical script in popular culture. 'Captain America's Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics' was published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (vol.95/3).
  • Films:
    war films
    ' and 'real' wars, to those that deal more broadly with issues of identity formation and representation.
  • Radio: In more recent years, scholars of critical geopolitics have shown an increased interest in radio broadcasting as both a domestic and international form of geopolitical communication. Alasdair Pinkerton and Klaus Dodds laid out their agenda for the study of Radio Geopolitics in Progress in Human Geography (vol. 33/1) during 2009. Pinkerton has also written about the crucial role of radio during the Falklands Conflict. His paper 'Strangers in the Night': The Falklands Conflict as a Radio War was published in Twentieth Century British History (vol. 19/3) and was awarded the TCBH Essay Prize 2007.

Notable people

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-1118018699
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 9780415157018
    .
  3. ^
    ISBN 9781412901383
    .
  4. doi:10.1016/0962-6298(96)00035-2
    .
  5. ^ Various (July–September 1996). "Special issue: critical geopolitics". Political Geography. 15 (6–7): 451–665.

External links

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