geopoliticsA title of an academic journal, a catch-all category for international violence, an orphaned sub-field of late imperial geography resurrected in neo-imperial America, and, simultaneously, the focus of diverse forms of demythologization and debunking by scholars of critical geography, this is a term that defies easy definition. As a category of news reporting, it is used in the media to describe violence relating to the division, control, and contestation of territory. The business pages of newspapers thus often feature references to “geopolitical concerns” as a way of describing the impact of international politics and violence. After terrorist attacks on commuter trains in India, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, for instance, The Financial Times review of global markets read as follows: “Gold also pushed higher on continued geopolitical concerns following bomb blasts in Mumbai and clashes around the Israel–Lebanon border” (Tassell, 2006: 26). Academically, however, geopolitics is a much more complex and contested term with a long history of formal definition and redefinition.
The original definitions of the field go back to the “classical geopolitics” of military-minded academics such as the British imperialist, Halford Mackinder, the Nazi-expansionist, Karl Haushofer, and the Dutch-American Cold War strategist, Nicholas Spykman. For them, geopolitics was all about how international relations relate to the spatial layout of oceans, continents, natural resources, military organization, political systems, and perceived territorial “threats” and “opportunities” (for an excellent overview, see Foster, 2006). In this respect, a constant geopolitical focus has been the Eurasian continental meta-region stretching from Eastern Europe through Russia to Central Asia. This was the so-called “Heartland” that Mackinder argued was key to global imperial power. It was some of this same territory that Haushofer argued the Nazi’s should seize as “lebensraum” or living-space for their self-described master-race. And after the Soviet Union established control over the region at the end of World War II, it was this same area that Americans such as George Kennan argued should be contained, an argument that underpinned US Cold War geopolitics aimed at controlling what Spykman had previously described as the “Rimlands” around the “Heartland” (Dalby, 1990). Isaiah Bowman, the US geographer and presidential advisor who early on advocated American dominance in and around the region, was once dubbed “the American Haushofer” (Smith, 2003). However, just as American imperialists have traditionally talked about an American Century rather than a geographically defined American empire, American advocates of geopolitical dominance have generally avoided talk of geopolitics because of its associations with European imperialism and fascism. This reticence amongUS strategists began to change after September 11, 2001: a shift towards unabashed imperial attitudes occurred that was also signaled by the return to influence of the old Cold War geopolitical grandee, Henry Kissinger. But whether referring explicitly to geopolitics or not, geopolitical discourse has continued to develop apace since the end of the Cold War; the transition from President Reagan’s anti-Soviet invocation of an “Evil Empire” to President Bush’s angst about an “Axis of Evil” being just one of the more imaginative and egregious attempts to remap the terrain of Mackinder’s Heartland as a way of simultaneously defining the American homeland (Coleman, 2004).
While classical geopolitics continues to inform policy-making, critical geographers have over the last two decades developed a vibrant new field of “critical geopolitics.” Under this broad umbrella, they have sought to examine the ways in which a broad range of imaginative geographiessuch as the “Evil Empire” actively shape world politics (see Agnew, 2003; Ó Tuathail, 1996; Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998). Critical geopolitics continues to grow more diverse by the year: ranging from examinations of geopolitical discourse in the history of popular culture (Sharp, 2000), to studies of the orientalismthat informs the geopolitics of both the colonial past and present (Gregory, 2004; Slater, 2004), to critique of the geopolitical justification of torture (Hannah, 2006), to reflections on the geopolitical preoccupations of revolutionary Islam (Watts, 2007). Thus, while practitioners of classical geopolitics keep producing geopolitical representations that they claim are real, the core concern for the critics is precisely this objectivist claim on reality. Critical geopolitics instead demonstrates the ideological power of geopolitical representations to “script” space – to concoct, for example, a story about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and then using that script to legitimate war. However, in debunking such geopolitical scriptings, the critical scholarship raises at least three further sorts of question about the relationships between geopolitics and the real world: the first concerns the relationship between imaginative geopolitical scripts and the far-from-imaginative death and destruction they inspire or help legitimate; the second relates to how such destructive consequences relate to the creative destruction of globalizationand neoliberalism; and the third concerns the reciprocal influence of these economic mediations on the ongoing articulation of new “neoliberal” geopolitical scripts that emphasize economic integration over Cold War containment.
Geographical scholarship on the “war on terror” has connected critical geopolitical concerns about the Bush Administration’s fear-mongering with all three questions about the ties between geopolitics and real-world relations. Derek Gregory (2004) has shown how, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the people construed by the “war on terror” script as “the enemy” have suffered lethal consequences as a result of the “godtricks” of long-distance geopolitical representations. He also has continued to argue in this way that the geopolitics has constructed spaces of exceptionand legal “vanishing points” where huge numbers of people are treated as outcasts from humanity and the tenuous protections of international law (Gregory, 2007). Focusing by contrast on the arrogance of the American exceptionalism that has helped create these spaces of exception, recent reflections on the ties between American imperialism and neoliberalism have highlighted how the relationship is also highly contradictory, with geopolitical strategies about building American dominance over the Middle East and its oil spigots existing in uneasy tension with ongoing interests in maintaining transnational business-class harmony and support for the dollar against the backcloth of rising concerns about American indebtedness to East Asian and OPEC owners of US bonds (Harvey, 2005). And these economic contexts in which geopolitical scripts are developed and implemented have further been found to be changing the nature of the scripts themselves leading to a neoliberal geopolitics (Roberts et al., 2003) which, with its distinctly economic emphases on globalization and connection over isolation and containment, has also been called geoeconomics(Sparke 2005).
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References
Agnew, J. 2003: Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics. New York: Routledge.
Coleman, M. 2004: The naming of “terrorism” and evil “outlaws”: geopolitical place-making after 11 September. Geopolitics, 8: 87–104.
Dalby, S. 1990: Creating the Second Cold War: the Discourse of Politics. New York: Guilford Press.
Foster, J. B. 2006: The new geopolitics of empire. Monthly Review 57 (8): accessed online at
Gregory, D. 2004: The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gregory, D. 2007: War culture and the vanishing points of the law. In M.Sparke, S. Young and M. Wilson, ed. Extraordinary Space: Derek Gregory on Torture, Targets, and the Terror of War. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Hannah, M. 2006: Torture and the ticking bomb: the war on terrorism as a geographical imagination of power/knowledge. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 622–640.
Harvey, D. 2004: The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. 2005: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ó Tuathail,G. 1996: Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Ó Tuathail,G. and Dalby, S., ed. 1998: Rethinking Geopolitics. New York: Routledge.
Roberts, S., Secord, A. andSparke, M. 2003: Neoliberal geopolitics.Antipode,35: 886–897.
Sharp, J. 2000: Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Slater, D. 2004: Geopolitics andthe Post-Colonial: Rethinking North–South Relations.Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Smith, N. 2003: American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization.Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sparke, M. 2005: In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tassell, T. 2006: Global overview. Financial Times, July 13, 26.
Watts, M. 2007: Revolutionary Islam: A geography of modern terror.In D. Gregory andA. Pred, ed.Geographies of Terror. New York: Routledge.