The Routledge Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 9781409423805, 9781315612874

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Foreword: Arguing about Geopolitics
Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics
Part I: Foundations
1 The Origins of Critical Geopolitics
2 Realism and Geopolitics
3 Text, Discourse, Affect and Things
4 Geopolitics and Visual Culture
5 Heteronormativity
6 Sovereignty
7 Radical Geopolitics
8 Neoliberalism
9 Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions
10 Violence and Peace
Part II: Sites
11 Borders
12 The State
13 Militarization
14 Media
15 Resources
16 Environment
17 The Global South
18 Intimacy and the Everyday
19 Spaces of Terror
Part III: Agents
20 Non-Governmental Organisations
21 International Organizations
22 Indigenous Geopolitics
23 Journalists
24 Artists
25 Evangelicals
26 Intellectuals of Statecraft
27 Women
28 Activists
Index

Citation preview

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

THE ASHGatE RESEarCH COMPaNION tO CrItICaL GEOPOLItICS

ASHGATE

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COMPANION

The Ashgate Research Companions are designed to offer scholars and graduate students a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research in a particular area. The companions’ editors bring together a team of respected and experienced experts to write chapters on the key issues in their speciality, providing a comprehensive reference to the field.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics

Edited by KLaUS DOddS Royal Holloway University of London, UK MErJE KUUS University of British Columbia, Canada JOaNNE SHarP University of Glasgow, UK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp 2013 Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Ashgate research companion to critical geopolitics. 1. Geopolitics. I. Research companion to critical geopolitics II. Dodds, Klaus. III. Kuus, Merje. IV. Sharp, Joanne P. 327.1’01-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Ashgate research companion to critical geopolitics / [edited by] Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2380-5 (hbk.) -- 1. Geopolitics. I. Dodds, Klaus. II. Kuus, Merje. III. Sharp, Joanne P. JC319.A835 2012 320.1’2--dc23 2012019645 ISBN 9781409423805 (hbk)

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Contents List of Figures   Notes on Contributors   Foreword: Arguing about Geopolitics by Gerard Toal/Gearóid Ó Tuathail   Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp

ix xi xix 1

PART I: FOUNDATiONS 1

The Origins of Critical Geopolitics John Agnew

19

2

Realism and Geopolitics Simon Dalby

33

3

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things Martin Müller

49

4

Geopolitics and Visual Culture Rachel Hughes

69

5 Heteronormativity Linda Peake

89

6

Sovereignty Fiona McConnell

109

7

Radical Geopolitics Julien Mercille

129

8

Neoliberalism Simon Springer

147

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 9

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions James D. Sidaway, Virginie Mamadouh and Marcus Power

165

10

Violence and Peace Nick Megoran

189

PART II: SiTES 11 Borders Anssi Paasi

213

12

The State Sami Moisio

231

13

Militarization Matthew Farish

247

14

Media Paul C. Adams

263

15 Resources Philippe Le Billon

281

16

Environment Shannon O’Lear

305

17

The Global South Chih Yuan Woon

323

18

Intimacy and the Everyday Deborah Cowen and Brett Story

341

19

Spaces of Terror Ulrich Oslender

359

PART III: AGENTS 20

Non-Governmental Organisations Alex Jeffrey

387

21

International Organizations Veit Bachmann

405

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Contents 22

Indigenous Geopolitics Chris Gibson

421

23

Journalists Alasdair Pinkerton

439

24

Artists Alan Ingram

461

25

Evangelicals Jason Dittmer

477

26

Intellectuals of Statecraft  Mathew Coleman

493

27

Women Jennifer L. Fluri

509

28 Activists Kye Askins

527

Index  

543

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List of Figures 3.1

The three core dimensions of the concept of discourse and its use in critical geopolitics 

4.1

North Korean soldiers march through Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 9 Sept. 2003 70

4.2

Pacata Hibernia map of Cork, 1585–1600 

72

4.3

Screenshot from the digital game America’s Army 

82

9.1

The relative number of books in English referring to geopolitics

167

9.2

The natural seats of power 

174

9.3

‘Portugal não é um pais pequeno’ (Portugal is not a small country)

176

9.4

‘Ein Kleinstaat bedroht Deutschland’ (a small state threatens Germany) 177

56

11.1 An analytic framework for forms of socio-spatial integration and distinction 

220

14.1 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc by AP photographer Nick Út (8 June 1972)

264

14.2 The conceptual relationship between communication content and geopolitical context, with mediation shown as an intermediate ring 

269

23.1 Modes of journalistic agency

451

23.2 Media–policy interaction model

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Notes on Contributors Paul C. Adams is an associate professor and Director of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founder and chair of the Communication Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. His research explores the multifaceted intersection between geography and communication. His publications include an edited volume, Textures of Place (with Steven Hoelscher and Karen Till, 2001), The Boundless Self (2005), Atlantic Reverberations (2007) and Geographies of Media and Communication (2009). John Agnew is Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is also a professor of Italian. He holds a BA from the University of Exeter and a PhD from Ohio State University. Publications relating to critical geopolitics include Mastering Space (with Stuart Corbridge, 1995), Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (1998) and Globalization and Sovereignty (2009). He has also published Berlusconi’s Italy (with Michael Shin, 2008), Place and Politics in Modern Italy (2002), and Making Political Geography (2002). In 2008­–9 Agnew was president of the Association of American Geographers. Kye Askins is a social geographer, with a pre-academic background working in homeless shelters, mental health projects and community composting. She has been learning, teaching and researching at Northumbria University in the northeast of England for six years, following a PhD that explored the use and perceptions of English national parks by people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. She is currently working with refugees, asylum seekers and local residents in a deprived area of Newcastle, figuring out the ways in which connections, similarities and differences play out in people’s everyday lives. Veit Bachmann is a lecturer in the Department of Human Geography at the GoetheUniversität Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is a political geographer with research interests in European studies and global North-South relations with a focus on the international identity and role of the EU as a global and development actor. He is currently director of the EuroGaps research group that examines external perceptions of the EU in sub-Saharan Africa and the Black Sea Region.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Mathew Coleman is an assistant professor of geography at Ohio State University. He has research and teaching interests in political and economic geography, with an emphasis on critical geopolitics and the politics of security. His current research explores local-federal immigration policing partnerships in the USA in light of the way in which immigration policing has been made central to the war on terror. He teaches graduate seminars as well as undergraduate courses on political geography, political theory, law and geography and geopolitics. He has published in Antipode, Political Geography, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, EPD: Society and Space and Geopolitics, among others. Deborah Cowen teaches in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the role of organized violence in shaping intimacy, space and citizenship. She is currently investigating the transformation of logistics from a specialized military art to a ubiquitous science of the government of circulation with a focus on the deepened entanglement between the just-in-time geographies of production and destruction. Deborah is the author of Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada (2008), co-editor of War, Citizenship, Territory (with Emily Gilbert, 2008) and co-editor of the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Simon Dalby was educated at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Victoria and holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University. He was appointed to the faculty of Carleton University in Ottawa in 1993 as Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy. He currently holds the CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is co-editor of Rethinking Geopolitics (with Gerard Toal, 1998), The Geopolitics Reader (with Gerard Toal and Paul Routledge, 1998) and the journal Geopolitics and author of Creating the Second Cold War (1990), Environmental Security (2002) and Security and Environmental Change (2009). Jason Dittmer is a reader in human geography at University College London. He is the author of Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity (2010), Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (2012), and is co-editor of Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions (with Tristan Sturm, 2010). Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He holds a PhD from the University of Bristol and previously taught at the University of Edinburgh. He has had visiting fellowships at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and St Cross College, University of Oxford. His latest books include The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction (2012), and he is co-editor of Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (with Fraser MacDonald and Rachel Hughes, 2010). He is editor of The Geographical Journal.

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Notes on Contributors Matthew Farish is an associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto. His research addresses the geographical dimensions of militarization in the twentieth-century USA. He is the author of The Contours of America’s Cold War (2010) and is writing a history of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. Jennifer L. Fluri is an associate professor in the Geography Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her research is regionally focused in South Asia with an emphasis on Afghanistan. She examines geopolitics, gender politics and the corporeal as a critical site of analysis. Her publications include topics such as feminist nationalism, transnational technologies, political resistance, gender and geopolitics, human-civilian security, the politics of international influence and ‘Western’ modernity in Afghanistan, conflict-zone sex and sex work and the spatial and social structures of international aid/development. Chris Gibson is professor in human geography at the University Wollongong, where he is also Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research. His books include Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places (2004) and the forthcoming Creativity in Peripheral Places. Rachel Hughes is a lecturer in contemporary human geography at the University of Melbourne. She is co-editor of Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (with Fraser MacDonald and Klaus Dodds 2010). Her work addresses visual culture, popular geopolitics and the contested politics of the Cambodian genocide. Alan Ingram works on critical approaches to geopolitics and security. His research currently focuses on the ways in which contemporary art-practice engages matters of geopolitics. He is a recipient of a British Academy Mid-Career Research Fellowship for the project ‘Art and War: Responses to Iraq’, which explores how artists and art spaces in the UK responded to the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation. He is co-editor of Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror (with Klaus Dodds, 2009) and co-edits the Ashgate Critical Geopolitics series. Alex Jeffrey is a university lecturer in geography and fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. His research has focused on the governance of post-conflict environments, particularly the former Yugoslavia, and the role of non-governmental organizations in fostering democracy. He collaborated with Joe Painter on Political Geography and Introduction to Space and Power (2009) and with Anoop Nayak on Geographical Thought (2011). His first monograph, The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia was published in 2012 as part of the Royal Geographical Society Book Series. From May 2011 to April 2013 he is undertaking a two-year programme of research examining the public outreach initiatives of transitional justice programmes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Merje Kuus is an associate professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on geopolitics and policy as political technologies. She is the author of Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement (2007) as well as numerous articles on geopolitical practices in contemporary Europe. She is currently working on a book, Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in an Integrating Europe, that analyzes the production of expertise inside EU institutions in Brussels. She serves as a review editor of the journal Geopolitics and a co-editor of the Ashgate Critical Geopolitics series. Philippe Le Billon is an associate professor with the Department of Geography and the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. Before joining UBC, he was a research associate with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He holds an MSc, MBA and DPhil (Oxford). Working on links between environment, development and security, he has published widely on natural resources and armed conflicts, the political economy of war and corruption, including Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts (2005), Geopolitics of Resource Wars (2005), Oil (with G. Bridge, 2012) and Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, Profits and the Politics of Resources (2012). Fiona McConnell is a junior research fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Her research engages with political geography around issues of sovereignty, state practices and the (re)pluralizing of political space. She has particular interest in the everyday construction of statehood and sovereignty in cases of tenuous territoriality and her recent focus has been on exile politics and the Tibetan community in India. She has published on issues including exile elections and democracy, citizenship and refugeehood and practices of governmentality, and has on-going projects around geographies of peace, the rehearsal of statehood, non-state diplomacy and the construction of legitimacy. Virginie Mamadouh is an associate professor of political and cultural geography at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is an associate editor of The Arab World Geographer, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (TESG) and previously of GeoJournal. She co-edited Politics: Critical Essays in Human Geography (with John Agnew, 2008). Nick Megoran is a geographer at Newcastle University who studies the political geography of state formation in Central Asia, and the geopolitics of UK foreign policy with a particular emphasis on religion and memory. In both cases, he is interested in ‘peace’ and ‘violence’ – what these concepts mean and what they look like in practice. Julien Mercille is lecturer in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. His work focuses on US foreign policy and he is currently preparing a book on the US ‘war on drugs’ in Afghanistan. In addition to his academic work, he writes for various news media on current affairs. xiv

Notes on Contributors Sami Moisio is a professor of geography at the University of Oulu, Finland. He works on the interface between geography and political science and has written on issues of political geography, European integration and state transformation. He has recently co-edited two books: International Studies, Interdisciplinary Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan) and Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study (Ashgate). Martin Müller is an assistant professor in cultures, institutions and markets at the Universität St. Gallen in Switzerland. His work engages with poststructuralist theories, particularly discourse theory and actor-network theory, often through an ethnographic lens. His current research examines the governance of the Olympic Games and the perception of the EU from the outside. His regional focus is on the post-Soviet space and Russia in particular. For further information see www. martin-muller.net. Shannon O’Lear is an associate professor at the University of Kansas. She has appointments in the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program and is affiliated with the university’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. She teaches courses on environmental policy, environmental geopolitics, the geopolitics of Russia and Eurasia, the geography of genocide and human geography. Her region of research is the South Caucasus. She has published articles on oil wealth and public perception in Azerbaijan, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, territorial conflict and genocide. She is the author of Environmental Politics: Scale and Power (2010). She is a board member on an Armenian Partnership Project with the Kansas National Guard and regularly gives briefings at the Air Force Special Operations Command Center at Hurlburt Field, Florida. She has received a Kemper Teaching Award from the University of Kansas and has served as a faculty fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. She received her BA and MA degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder and holds a PhD in geography from Syracuse University. Ulrich Oslender teaches political geography in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He is also affiliated faculty in the African and African-Diaspora Studies Program at FIU. Previously based at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, he was awarded a number of postdoctoral fellowships, including a prestigious EU-funded Marie Curie International Fellowship (2005–8) to work with political geographer John Agnew at UCLA on geopolitical discourses of terror. He has published widely on the geographies of social movements in Latin America, in particular in relation to black communities in Colombia. The Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History in Bogotá published his monograph, Comunidades negras y espacio en el Pacífico colombiano (2008).

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Anssi Paasi is a professor of geography at the University of Oulu and an academy professor (2008–12) at the Academy of Finland. He has published widely on the socio-cultural construction of political boundaries, spatial identities, new regional geography and on region/territory building. His books include Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (1996). Linda Peake is a geographer and former editor of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. She works on issues of gender, sexuality, race and class, primarily in Guyana, South America, but also in North America. Her interests are in grounded theory and transnational feminist praxis and she has worked with the Guyanese women’s organization, Red Thread, for over two decades. She is a professor in the Department of Social Science and School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. Alasdair Pinkerton is a lecturer in geography and geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on the geopolitics of public diplomacy and international broadcasting in the context of the BBC World Service and, more recently, the geopolitics of Cold War communications within and beyond the USA. His first book, which examines the geopolitics of radio, will be published next year. Marcus Power is professor in human geography at the University of Durham. He has a PhD in geography from the University of Birmingham and a masters in the geography of Third World development from Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include post-socialist transformations in Southern Africa; critical geographies and genealogies of (post)development; postcolonial geographies of Lusophone Africa; vision, visuality and geopolitics and the terms of China-Africa engagement. He is co-editor of Cinema and Popular Geo-Politics (with Andrew Crampton, 2007). Joanne Sharp is professor of geography at the University of Glasgow. She has published on critical and feminist geopolitics and, more recently, is exploring the intersections between postcolonialism and geopolitics. Her books include Condensing the Cold War (2000) and Geographies of Postcolonialism (2009). James D. Sidaway is professor of political geography at the National University of Singapore. He previously taught at the University of Amsterdam and at several English universities. He has a PhD in geography from Royal Holloway, University of London, a masters degree in international studies from the University of Reading and a bachelors degree (with a major in geography and development studies) from Bulmershe College (now part of the University of Reading). Since 2005 he has been an associate editor of Political Geography.

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Notes on Contributors Simon Springer is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada. Prior to this he was a lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Otago, New Zealand and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Simon’s research focuses primarily on the violent geographies that often attend neoliberal reforms, with a particular focus on how these interconnected processes have evolved and are continuing to unfold in post-transitional Cambodia. He is the author of Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order: Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space (2010). Brett Story is a writer, documentary filmmaker and graduate student currently pursuing a PhD in geography at the University of Toronto. She is interested in the conjunction of political economy, aesthetics and ideology in the organization of both contemporary urban life and carceral space. She is currently working on a project examining the relationship between the city and the prison in the USA after 1973, with a focus on the production of individuation and its social and spatial discontents. Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is professor of government and international affairs and director of the Government and International Affairs Program at Virginia Tech. He is author and editor of a number of books including Bosnia Remade (2011), Rethinking Geopolitics (with Simon Dalby, 1998) and Critical Geopolitics (1996). Chih Yuan Woon is a lecturer at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in the area of critical geopolitics, security studies and feminist theories. He has worked extensively with non-governmental organizations and ‘rebel’ groups in the Philippines on issues broaching the interface of terrorism, (non)violence and peace. His most recent publications have appeared in journals such as Geoforum and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

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Foreword Arguing about Geopolitics Gerard Toal/Gearóid Ó Tuathail

On a mountain top, two men gaze upon a city below. The local explains to the visitor: ‘After Turks came, after the Kosovo battle, those Serbs who didn’t accept Islam have been pushed to the mountains, out of valleys, out of good, good country …’. The visitor interjects with an interpretation: ‘So the traditional imposed geopolitics …’. To which the local responds: ‘Geopolitics, geopolitics. Exactly!’ The year is 1992, the city Sarajevo, the local Radovan Karadžić, and the visitor, Russian writer Eduard Liminov. A few minutes later, Liminov takes a turn firing a heavy machine gun with a sniper scope at civilians in the city below.1 Was Radovan Karadžić practicing a critical geopolitics when he led the establishment of a secessionist state within Bosnia–Herzegovina in 1992 and when this statelet’s army committed war crimes, including summary executions, forced displacement and genocide, against Bosnian civilians? There is little doubt but that he thought so. Karadžić’s opening defense of his actions before the International Criminal Tribune on the former Yugoslavia in The Hague described him as defending ‘the greatness of a small nation in Bosnia–Herzegovina which, for five hundred years, has had to suffer and has demonstrated a great deal of modesty and perseverance to survive in freedom’.2 As he saw it, his actions were in opposition to what empires had determined, what Communists had imposed (unfair borders), and what the great powers of the West wanted to dictate. The term ‘geopolitics’ is a covering word that over the last hundred years has diffused beyond particularly modest origins to become a popular name for a variety of forms of thought and practice. These can be classified in terms of four This scene is captured on film by Pavel Pawlikowsk in his documentary Serbian Epics (BBC films, 1992) (see ). 2 Karadžić trial (IT-95-5/18-I)  ICTY, Defense Opening Statement, 10 Mar. 2010, 1. . 1

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics overlapping themes, all of which concern the operation of power structures across space. The first concerns the earth and physical environment and is preoccupied with the influence of material geographic factors in shaping forms of power. The subject is one of many that concerned ancient Greek philosophers and finds full Enlightenment expression in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748). The second concerns the relationship of state territorial power and demography, also has ancient origins, and finds expression in ideas like Lebensraum, social Darwinism on the map (to survive states need to expand their living space), and a horrific apotheosis in the Nazi Generalplan Ost (1940), which envisaged the clearing of vast areas of Poland and other East European lands for ethnic German settlement. The third concerns less the internal territorial basis of states than their competition with each other for material resources and advantage across the earth. Like the others it too has ancient origins, with the scope of the competition increasing as larger state apparatuses formed and acquired greater technological capacities to act across greater and greater distances. This theme was the one that preoccupied Halford Mackinder and provoked his important though flawed speculations on techno-territorial complexes, namely the relationship between transportation system infrastructures, prevailing so-called ‘natural seats of power’ and the organizational ‘efficiency’ of great imperial powers. Finally, wherever there were geopolitical practices, there were varieties of resistance and interference, attempts by small-localized powers to subvert and divert imperial structures to serve their own purposes or outright opposition to the territorial schemes emanating from distant capitals. The locals also learn, and practice their own miniature forms of oppositional geopolitics. This is the tradition within which we can locate Karadžić’s geopolitical gaze, a fixing of the landscape before him as a legacy of imperial injustice. In his optic, time and space collapse into a mytho-epic present featuring imperial agents (Muslims/ Turks) and unbowed heroes (his army) in the final battle for the soil. Just as geopolitical practices long predate the coinage and later popularity of the word, so too do the practices that can be gathered up by the idea of a critical geopolitics. My first recollection of this specific term is in the review letter I received from the then editor of Political Geography Quarterly, Peter Taylor, for my article on the ‘language and nature’ of US foreign policy towards El Salvador. The year was 1984, and I was fortunate to be able to chat in person with Peter Taylor, visiting the University of Illinois at the time, about it. My initial negative reaction to the phrase was in keeping with a long tradition within political geography that sought to impose a purity line between my enterprise and the imperial work of geopolitics. That impulse to purification is still strong within political geography and has lead scholars (myself included at times) to positions that are utopian and arguably unserious. By 1996 my conceptualization at least (others were working similarly) was that critical geopolitics is not something radically new in the world. It is an intervention into the pre-existing world of geopolitical practices, is parasitic on those practices and is inevitably a form of geopolitics itself. It is already compromised, already caught up in the mess of the forces conditioning its practitioners and shaping how they act in the world in opposition to a perceived ‘uncritical’, orthodox’ or ‘classical’ geopolitics. Acknowledging this situatedness xx

Foreword: Arguing about Geopolitics (and its problems) is a necessary methodological point of departure for the research that gathers under its banner. This volume is an important moment in hoisting that banner even higher in the world. Gathered here are many of the best scholars working within the discipline of geography: thinking, writing and arguing about geopolitics as a formalized tradition, as complexes of different kinds of practice and as everyday structuring conditions and demands upon subjectivity. For this we need to thank the editors. As should become apparent, there is no shared formula for doing critical geopolitics and considerable debate about its conceptualization and blind spots. This is as it should be. Critical geopolitics is an effort to think critically about the world around us and to challenge inherited legacies of imperial practices in the name of greater emancipation. But, as the history of the man in the dock in The Hague reminds us, even these noble impulses can be subverted and turned into rationales for crimes against humanity. Practicing critical geopolitics in a morally complex world – one where the marginalized sometimes use terrorism while great powers claim to act in the name of universal human rights – is a lot harder and messier than it appears. It is the challenge of our time.

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Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp

Introduction Geopolitics, as an intellectual field, enjoys a mixed reputation. Lionized by some as an insightful guide into the geographical study of strategic relations between states, it has been castigated by others for being an accomplice of authoritarianism and fascism. For the American geographer, Richard Hartshorne, it was an intellectual poison and thus best avoided for the scholarly health of the unwary (Hartshorne 1954; Dodds and Atkinson 2000). While it possible to chart a prehistory to geopolitics, most agree that its genesis lies with a particular conflagration of social Darwinism and late nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle Europe (Parker 1985; Heffernan 2000). Coined by the Swedish legal jurist, Rudolf Kjellén, geopolitics was infused with a social Darwinist preoccupation for the survival prospects of societies and states. When combined with ongoing imperial rivalries, alongside the institutional development of geography as a university subject, geopolitical studies attracted a corpus of influential writers including Halford Mackinder, Alfred Mahan and Friedrich Ratzel. Their insights into the modern world-system, the role of geographical factors such as resources and location, and the prospects for great powers such as Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and challengers have proven remarkably durable, even if they have also attracted critics and critique alike (for recent reviews, see Kearns 2009; Dodds 2010). Before embarking on a discussion of contemporary writings on geopolitics, and specifically the literature associated with critical geopolitics, this introduction offers a brief survey of what has been termed classical geopolitics. We tease out the earliest writings, which self-consciously engage with ideas and practices later to be considered emblematic of a ‘geopolitical tradition’. As part of that initial tour d’horizon, we highlight how and why the term ‘geopolitics’ attracted opprobrium, especially in the period leading up to the Second World War and thereafter. Understanding the chequered history of geopolitics is essential for the second section of the introduction, because that explains some of the core concerns of critical geopolitics, a body of work that is overtly questioning of classical

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics geopolitics. Finally, we consider the organizational rationale for this Ashgate Companion and the tripartite division of our chapters into ‘Foundations’, ‘Sites’ and ‘Agents’. Taken together, we hope that this collection of essays will provide a state of the art introduction to a vibrant and dynamic field, which continues to attract ever-greater interest from a new generation of graduate students and earlycareer researchers.

Classical geopolitics The earliest classical geopolitical writings were informed by imperial preoccupations and social Darwinist anxieties about the survival of states and empires. Writing in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the German writer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) expressed some of the dominant trends in classical geopolitics including racial and environmental determinism. Distinguishing between settled and nomadic communities, Ratzel argued that the settled Aryan races in particular were vulnerable to the marauding and thus hyper-mobile Ural–Altaic races. As a consequence of this perceived vulnerability, the Aryan races were the earliest to develop state-like structures designed to organize defence against mobile and, in all probability, threatening others. Ratzel contended that contemporary Germany should strive to secure additional land and resources so that it was better able to secure the survival of the nation-state in the face of eastern races and their traditions of mobile existence. The term Lebensraum (living space) is particularly associated with the writings of Ratzel as a consequence of his interest in the interrelationship between environment, state and culture. While Ratzel’s writings were infused with racial and environmental indices, the British writer Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) highlighted another aspect of classical geopolitics, namely a concern for grand strategy. Mackinder, a reader in geography at Oxford University and director of the London School of Economics, was primarily worried about Britain and the British Empire (Blouet 1987; Kearns 2009). Mindful of gathering imperial competition, Mackinder warned that traditional sea powers such as Britain were under threat from new land-based powers that might, with the help of new transport technologies such as the railway, be able to mobilize their populations and resources in a decisive manner. Intrigued by the historic significance of migrant empires such as the Mongols, Mackinder divined a future possibility based on new great powers (such as the latter day Soviet Union) using what he termed the ‘heartland’ to project power over the European continent. Vast quantities of coal, oil, gas and other minerals, transported by railways, would quite literally empower those who controlled the heartland. In his famous epithet, Mackinder warned his readers that ‘who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World’ (Mackinder 1919). As a keen observer of global political machinations, Mackinder feared that either Germany or Russia might emerge as a global power in charge of a resource-rich fortress in the 2

Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics middle of the Euro-Asian landmass. This prediction was subsequently picked up by American-based Cold War observers and embedded in ‘containment’ policies and strategies (Dodds 2007). These vignettes of two classical geopolitical writers highlight the dominant strands of classical geopolitics – on the one hand, social Darwinism and environmental determinism and, on the other hand, imperial rivalries and greatpower projection. In the case of the former, the earliest geopolitical writers were overwhelmingly informed by racial and environmental determinism. Most contributors were eager to warn their political masters and the wider public about the challenges facing their societies from competitor races and states, both past and present. Geopolitics was, and for many authors still is, the study of statecraft and the divination of patterns of global politics. If geopolitics has an intellectual value, it lies in a capacity to uncover the challenges facing the state and empire and display a willingness to use force if necessary to protect vital interests. As with the earliest realist writers in the discipline of international relations (IR), there is plenty of evidence of scepticism towards the capacity of international mechanisms and bodies such as the League of Nations to cement pacific relations between states (for a review, see Brown and Ainley 2008). In an uncertain and highly competitive world, it was judged to be far better to prepare for the worst rather than hope that international law and treaties would regulate effectively the competitive instincts between states and societies.

Intellectual poison The controversial reputation inherited by geopolitics owes much to a particular moment in the inter-war period when the subject became linked with more widespread fascist and authoritarian strands of thought in Germany, Italy and Japan. With its focus on territorial and resource-related factors, geopolitical thought attracted the interest of writers such as the German military officer and professor of geography at the University of Munich, Karl Haushofer. In 1924 he founded the Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, a journal that was to explore how Germany might recover from the humiliating loss of the First World War and the sorts of geographical strategies need to stimulate revival. Geopolitics, according to Haushofer, should be an accomplice of the state and encourage an expansion of Germany, possibly leading to leadership of the Euro-Asian landmass in alliance with Russia and Japan. Combining the global strategizing of Mackinder with social Darwinist insights including the state as a living organism, a geopolitical perspective armed with maps and statistics was believed to be an indispensible part of the state and its intellectual armoury. As with Fascist Italy, this academic interest was supplemented by popularizing trends with a new generation of school children being instructed on the spatial extent of a Greater Germany and Italy (Atkinson 1995). Under this worldview, the state needed to expand into new territory and acquire new resources in order to restore itself to health.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Haushofer’s personal connection to Hitler’s trusted friend, Rudolf Hess, ensured that geopolitics became a poisoned chalice. For American-based geographers, including refugees from Nazi Germany, geopolitics was at best a ‘pseudo science’ and at worst a ‘Nazi science’. Either way it stood accused of acting as a willing accomplice to the worst excesses of territorial domination and spatial expansionism. With the onset of the Second World War, this jaundiced view of geopolitics hardened. American and European geographers such as Isaiah Bowman, Derwent Whittlesey, George Kiss and Jean Gottman warned that geographers should steer clear of the subject matter and concentrate their energies on developing a scientific political geography (as noted in Dodds 2010). While this alleged association between Hitler and geopolitical scheming was perhaps not as straightforward as implied by the critics, it did prevent the Roosevelt administration from commissioning a special study of German geopolitics in order to consider its resonance and influence amongst Hitler’s cabal. Senior geographers such as Karl Haushofer, while hardly bystanders, did not share Hitler’s preoccupation with race and hatred of Jewry. They were, however, eager to put forward proposals for Germany to restore its proper place in the world and supportive of the idea that the country needed to expand into new territories. Popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest played their part in warning international readers that the Nazis created a shadowy Institute of Geopolitics in Munich and that there were a ‘thousand scientists behind Hitler’ using charts, maps, statistics and plans to facilitate further expansion and conquest (on Reader’s Digest more generally, see Sharp 2000). Ironically, given the academic voices of disapproval, the US government considered creating a Geopolitical Institute in 1940, and established a Geopolitical Section of the Military Intelligence Service with the explicit purpose to ‘study physical, economic, political and ethnological geography in order to advise on measures of national security and assurance of continued peace in the post-war world’ (cited in Kearns 2011: 613). Accused of being an accomplice to Nazism, geopolitics became an academic field best avoided for many geographers in the USA and Europe. The end result was twofold. First, there was a general reluctance to use the term ‘geopolitics’ explicitly and, second, attention turned to seeking a new social scientific language based on modelling and testing that would replace any notion that the state was a living organism. For much of the post-1945 period, explicit references to geopolitics were limited in number and scope even if well-known figures such as George Kennan were to talk and write about continental powers, the Euro-Asian landmass and resource potential of regions. As Richard Hartshorne reminded his readers: ‘We may have produced no atom bombs in political geography, but the field is nonetheless strewn with dynamite – it is no place for sophomores to play with matches’ (cited in Kearns 2011: 614).

Cold War revival and beyond Henry Kissinger is famously credited with making geopolitics respectable again in US policy-making and academic circles (1979). In the early 1970s geopolitics 4

Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics became a short hand for highlighting great power rivalries and associated regional dimensions, especially in the Middle East and South-East Asia. As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger was well placed to survey the global political scene and ruminate on the geopolitical consequences and implications, more often than not involving military force and assertion. As Leslie Hepple reminds us, Kissinger’s geopolitics was often fuzzy and vague, even if it had as its basis an interest in superpower rivalries and the global stage (1986). Other contemporaries such as President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, also used geopolitical language to promote his view that control of the ‘heartland’ (a point of view articulated by Mackinder some 70 years earlier) was critical to the future patterns of global politics. As Brzezinski noted, ‘whoever controls Eurasia dominates the globe. If the Soviet Union captures the peripheries of this landmass … it would not only win control of vast human, economic and military resources but also gain access to the geostrategic approaches to the Western Hemisphere – the Atlantic and Pacific’ (1986: 22). For the USA to retain its global prominence, it would need, by force if necessary, to ensure that vital resource supplies and territorial access were secure. Moreover, as US covert support for anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s suggests, it would require investment in opportunities that might disrupt any attempt by the Soviet Union to project further its domination of the Eurasian landmass. The implication of this resurrection of interest in geopolitics in the 1970s was to remind us why geopolitics continues to inspire a great deal of interest and, as noted earlier, distrust. If there was a revival (acknowledging the established interest in the field in the former Soviet Union and Latin America), then it was based on a predilection for global perspectives; scepticism about international diplomacy and law; an understanding of power relations as a zero-sum game; a belief in the importance of resources such as oil, gas, coal and minerals; a stark contrast between land- and sea-based powers; and finally a willingness to urge intervention (or sometimes non-intervention) where national security interests were at stake (for a critique, see Kearns 2011). The net result is to consolidate a particular version of geopolitics in which a global view of the world is essential. Thus, the USA and its rivals such as China recognize that an interconnected and highly globalized world means that everywhere is potentially of interest to superpowers. Notwithstanding the global dimension, the world is also a dangerous place and one in which a new generation of postCold War writers such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis have warned is composed of rival civilizations and faiths that are antithetical to the Christian West (e.g. Huntington 1997). Questioning the persistence of this sort of geopolitics has become the leitmotif of critical geopolitics (Jones and Sage 2010). Recognizing that many so-called geopolitical writers were mobilizing simplistic understandings of places and their networks, critical geopolitical scholarship challenged those preoccupations, highlighting for example the resilience of earlier imperial, nationalist and racist strands of geopolitical thinking. Critics also highlighted the lack of understanding of geography in the intellectually suspect propositions of ‘inevitable’ spread of 5

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics political ideology or behaviour as a result of spatial form of proximity (falling like dominoes or spreading like disease) so that pre-emptive action could be posited as a defensive re-action. Postcolonial writers such as Edward Said became intellectually influential in critical geopolitics precisely because of his questioning of Western colonial discourses and perspectives on regions such as the Middle East and South-West Asia. Critical geopolitics is, in very substantial measure, a reaction against those geopolitical strands while acknowledging the need to carefully contextualize earlier geopolitical engagements in Europe, and elsewhere in the world. This does represent a substantial challenge because classical geopolitical writing remains in robust health in terms of its popularity and exposure in media and policy-making circles.

Critical geopolitics Sustained critique of mainstream geopolitical reasoning emerged at the end of the Cold War to challenge the strategic doctrines of that era and their legitimizing intellectual apparatus. The end of superpower rivalry, which had been the containing territorial structure of (geo)political thought for over 40 years, further fuelled interest in the spatiality of power in geography and indeed throughout the social sciences. It was in the context of the rethinking of power that this critique gained pace and gradually acquired the label ‘critical geopolitics’ (Dalby 1990; Ó Tuathail 1996). As a sub-field of human geography, critical geopolitics investigates the geographical assumptions and designations that enter into the making of world politics. It does so by examining the practices by which political actors spatialize international politics and represent it as a ‘world’ characterized by particular types of places (Agnew 2003: 2; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 190). In counterpoint to the conventional state-centred and often state-sponsored ‘strategic analysis’, this critical work approaches geopolitics not as a neutral consideration of pre-given ‘geographical’ facts, but as a deeply ideological and politicized form of analysis. It shows that geographical claims are necessarily geopolitical, as they inscribe places as particular types of places to be dealt with in a particular manner. Conversely, all international politics is also geopolitics as it necessarily involves geographical and spatial assumptions about people and places. These assumptions are not abstract images floating above political interest but form an integral part of how interests and identities come into being. The aim of critical geopolitics is not to describe the geography of politics within pre-given, commonsense places, but to examine the politics of the geographical specification of politics (Dalby 1990). In so doing, the field seeks to offer richer accounts of space and power than those allowed within mainstream geopolitical analysis. Although critical geopolitics evolved into a vibrant sub-field of human geography during the 1990s, it has never connoted a clearly delimited or internally coherent research programme. The field is distinct from other strands of political geography not by its empirical focus – although a great deal of this work does take 6

Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics international affairs as its object of analysis – but by its theoretical and methodological underpinnings. These borrow particularly from poststructuralist strands of social theory whilst eschewing any neat distinction between poststructuralism and other critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism or postcolonial theory. Critical geopolitics has no single theoretical canon or set of methods. It rather advances decidedly diverse critiques of, and alternatives to, conventional analyses of international affairs. The concerns of critical geopolitics lie not with the sources and structures of power in some general sense but with the specific sites and technologies of power relations. Its analytical focus is not on any set of territories, borders or actors – however diverse – but rather on the processes by which these categories are produced. Conceptualizing geopolitics as an interpretative cultural practice and a discursive construction of ontological claims, critical geopolitical analyses prioritize the contextual, conflictual and messy spatiality of international politics (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992; Ó Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge 2006). In this manner, critical geopolitics directly challenges the conventional demarcations of foreign and domestic, political and non-political, state and non-state.

Spatiality and subjectivity In parallel with its diversity, critical geopolitics does have a core set of concerns. In broad terms, those revolve around enriching our understanding of spatiality and subjectivity in world affairs. In terms of spatiality, the field advances the shift from primarily territorialized understandings of politics toward more nuanced understandings of the complex spatialities of power. In terms of subjectivity, critical geopolitics broadens the analysis of geopolitics from state actors located in formal institutions, such as government ministries, universities or think tanks, to non-state actors and everyday life. The two moves are linked: if the state is no longer the principal site and agent of geopolitics, then statesmen (and they are mostly men in conventional accounts) are no longer the principal practitioners of geopolitics. The field is open, then, to thinking more carefully and imaginatively about who are the practitioners of geopolitics and how their practices produce particular spatial relations. A substantial part of critical geopolitics concentrates on unpacking the rigid territorial assumptions of mainstream analyses in an effort to offer more flexible accounts, which are better attuned to the societal realities of our time: for example, dissecting the continued reliance on binary understandings of power and spatiality in geopolitical writing – East and West, security and danger, freedom and oppression – in many government agencies, think tanks, ‘strategic analysis’ and much of the mass media. While it is often claimed that this binary thinking offers a hard-nosed analyses of ‘geographical facts’, it in fact disengages from geographical complexities in favour of simplistic territorial demarcations of inside and outside – an us and them imagination. Critical geopolitics lays out why such simplifications are inadequate and how we can conceptualize and practice politics

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics differently. Through such rethinking, it seeks to establish new spaces for political debate and action. In particular, much of critical geopolitics challenges the statist conceptions of power in the social sciences. It argues that spatiality is not confined to territoriality, either historically or today. The analytical task is to investigate and explain spatial practices in their territorial as well as non-territorial forms. This broadens the analysis beyond the state, so that the state is no longer the primary or pre-given unit of analysis, without denying the substantial material power of state institutions. The key question is how state power is discursively and practically produced in territorial and non-territorial forms rather than the ‘real’ sources, meanings or limits of state sovereignty in some general or universal sense (Campbell 1998; Kuus and Agnew 2008). The investigation becomes more open-ended as a result, enabling an analysis that does merely take the state as its point of departure and can thereby offer more flexible accounts of the transnational spatial practices of our time. It also links up with border studies, development studies and various forms of critical and constructivist international relations (Dalby 2010; Larner and Walters 2004; Newman 2006; Sharp 2011; Slater 2004). Another destabilizing and de-centering move in critical geopolitics tackles the view that implicitly takes the Global North as the seemingly natural vantage point of geopolitical analysis. Critical work shows that much of what goes for mainstream geopolitical writing today involves the projection of the context and interests of a few states, most notably the USA, onto the world at large. A better analysis of world affairs requires a sustained critique of these ‘doubtful particularisms’ (Agnew 2007). True, a large part of critical geopolitics focuses empirically on the core states of the West, especially the USA – not surprising given the postwar global hegemony of US foreign policy, scholarship and popular culture. Geographers have therefore looked closely at the geo-graphs of US political elites and popular culture as well as the processes through which these are projected onto the world at large. However, their explicit effort is to contextualize US power rather than naturalize it. Their conceptual lens does not privilege the key role of the USA as somehow natural, pregiven or stable; it rather brings into focus the inherent instability of US power. Such a denaturalizing move is needed especially in the current context of militarization; that is, the social processes and ideological habits through which military solutions to political problems gain elite and popular legitimacy, throughout the Global North (Gregory and Pred 2006; Ingram and Dodds 2009; Kirch and Flint 2011). Simultaneously with countering the presumed centrality of the USA, critical geopolitics also broadens research empirically outside the core states. This is necessary both analytically and politically: if the field is to disrupt commonsense geopolitical narratives, it must first undermine the tacit assumption of US (or Western) universalism that underpins these narratives. There are now substantial literatures on key states like Britain, Germany, France and Russia as well as smaller and historically more peripheral states (see Dodds and Atkinson 2000; Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998). This work amply demonstrates both the consistency and diversity of geopolitical thought. In terms of continuity, claims of national exceptionalism or external threat, for example, are extraordinarily consistent since 8

Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics the emergence of modern nationalism. As for diversity, geopolitical practices are deeply rooted in the specific political circumstances and political cultures of particular countries. These practices involve not only the predictable right-wing tradition of geopolitical analyses but also critical and radical strands of analysis (Kuus 2010). Some claims are repeated, but their specific political functions and effects vary considerably. By highlighting such variation, critical geopolitics shows that there is no single tradition of geopolitical thought or practice. There are rather different geopolitical cultures owing to specific geographical contexts and intellectual traditions around the world. This is not simply a matter of cataloguing presumably distinct geopolitical cultures or traditions: British, Russian, Estonian or whatever. The glamorization of some predominantly local knowledge or culture would be indeed as problematic as the assumption of geopolitical universals. The effort of critical geopolitics is to examine the power relationships between places, in all their local and transnational complexities. The charge is twofold: to analyse places much beyond the capitals of northern countries and to examine sites outside state institutions in all these places. This consideration of the multiple spaces and sites of geopolitics also raises new questions about its agents. It highlights the need to investigate the practitioners of geopolitics inside and outside formal political institutions, from presidents and foreign ministers through a wide range of journalists, government officials and activists to the so-called average people. This move away from state-based accounts of ‘wise men’ to a more diverse set of practitioners is linked with subjectivity and identity across the social sciences. Critical geopolitics does not examine the identities or actions of pre-given subjects; rather, it investigates the processes by which political subjects are formed in the first place. Early on, this scholarship often focused empirically on ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ – the academics, politicians, government officials and various commentators who regularly participate in and comment on the activities of statecraft (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 193). Very soon, however, there emerged bodies of work around popular culture and everyday life. For example, there is now a diverse set of studies, loosely labelled ‘popular geopolitics’, that investigates various cultural products as well as their producers and audiences. It offers insights into a range of locations and agents outside the realm of the state – popular magazines, newspaper reporters, cartoonists, film directors and social activists of various stripes (Dittmer and Dodds 2008; Dittmer and Sturm 2010; Sharp 2000). This strand of work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of informal political practices beyond the formal politics of state institutions. It illuminates the many ways in which popular culture both subverts and reifies mainstream geopolitical narratives. A sustained effort in this scholarship is to avoid glamorizing civil society: to show the diverse entanglements of domination and resistance and the futility of looking for the ‘self-evidently good’ (Sharp et al. 2000). This too involves more than adding token ‘other’ subjects to pre-existing theoretical and theoretical frameworks. It rather involves a sustained rethinking of subject-formation and agency (capacity to act) in geopolitical environments (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2004; Pain and Smith 2008).

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Feminist theory is particularly influential in this context. Critical geopolitics as a whole and feminist geopolitics in particular take the central tenet of feminist scholarship – that the personal is also political – to posit that the personal is also geopolitical. Approaching the so-called average people as political subjects, it seeks to understand ‘how political life plays out through a multiplicity of alternative, gendered political spaces’ (Secor 2001: 199). By highlighting the geopolitical practices of those located outside the top echelons of the state apparatus, it brings into focus the institutional structure through which the illusory division between political and ‘non-political’ spheres, or the realm of ‘international’ or ‘domestic’ politics is constructed (Hyndman 2004). This goes to the heart of fundamental questions about how we define politics. The broader shift here is toward a greater sensitivity to specific geographical contexts and settings. Today, the field offers sustained analyses of a range of actors hitherto not considered sufficiently ‘geopolitical’: actors like non-governmental organizations, professionals such as journalists or artists and a host of everyday actors and activists. As a logical extension of this interest in everyday life, there has also occurred a methodological shift toward analytical tools: most notably broadly ethnographic methods, that enable more agent-centred or peopled accounts of political practice. In that too, critical geopolitics has moved much beyond the celebration of a few statesmen, intellectuals and pundits to a more inclusive consideration of a wider range of geopolitical practitioners and agents. Such contexts include the personal backgrounds, interests and identities of the individuals who actually articulate geopolitical claims. The study of those contexts is linked with similar methodological trends toward more explicitly ‘peopled’ scholarship in international relations (Kuus 2010; 2011; Megoran 2006).

The fragmented mainstream Critical geopolitics has grown from its roots in the poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial critique of traditional geopolitics to become an integral part of mainstream human geography. A body of ‘critical geopolitics’ research has developed independently of the classical form of geopolitics it initially emerged in response to, meaning that it can now be considered a field in itself. The field has retained a sustained focus on the spatiality of international politics, but it has also become a part of a broader theoretical and methodological trend within human geography toward a closer study of everyday life. As such, critical geopolitics has also retained close links with cognate fields in the academic fields of international relations (IR), cultural studies and postcolonialism. The heterogeneity of critical geopolitics is central to its vibrancy. The central effort in the field is not to produce authoritative or canonical texts but to question the assumptions that underpin such texts and their attendant practices. To discuss critical geopolitics as a distinct subfield is not to suggest internal coherence and external differentiation that it does not possess or claim. To treat critical geopolitics as a sub-field of human geography

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Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics is rather to foreground the sustained engagement in geography with the spatiality of power and politics on the global scale.

Outline of the book This collection does not simply seek to map the existing conceptual terrain of critical geopolitics. While the chapters provide a critical reflection on the tradition of critical geopolitics, this collection also considers this approach to be dynamic and changing, and so chapters also look outwards to influential ideas and theorists and forward to emerging trends. The book is divided into three parts, ‘Foundations’, ‘Sites’ and ‘Agents’.

Foundations The first part of the book, provides a series of engagements with the ways in which critical geopolitics emerged as a challenge to taken-for-granted approaches to the relationships between space and power in conventional geopolitics as outlined above. Importantly, this was not the task of one discipline: while critical geopolitics as a label is now closely associated with human geography and thus foundational theorists such as John Agnew, Simon Dalby and Gearóid Ó Tuathail, its early incarnations drew much from debate with critical international relations theory which was being produced by figures such as James Der Derain, Richard Ashley, Michael Shapiro and William Connolly (e.g. Walker 1993). The initial site of critical geopolitics was firmly within the formal spaces of politics: the speeches and writings of intellectuals of statecraft, the actions of states and regional and other supra-state institutions. However, with interventions from theorists concerned with the sociology (and geography) of knowledge production and from feminists who sought to challenge disciplining boundaries, much critical geopolitics has come to regard the sites of geopolitical knowledge as being multiple.

Sites The second part offers critical engagement with the different locations of geopolitical knowledge creation. We use ‘site’ loosely, addressing the geographical and institutional locations from which geopolitical knowledge is produced and the spaces and places considered to be most significant by geopolitical practitioners, both academic and popular. Perhaps the most common critique levelled at critical geopolitics as an approach is that it has tended to privilege geopolitical texts over wider questions of geopolitical agency. Some of the most recent developments in critical geopolitics have sought to conceptualize practices and performances in the (re)making of geopolitics. 11

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Agents Grounded in particular sites and places, agents – whether individuals or organizations; acting consciously as resistors or not – reproduce accounts of the world which reinforce or interrupt the operation of dominant geopolitical visions. Moreover, many of these challenges come from political perspectives with a commitment not only to offer critical reflection on the state of the world but also to find ways of intervening and changing it for the better. While the organization of the book would appear to impose an evolutionary structure on the brief intellectual history of critical geopolitics, we want to end this introduction with a cautionary note. While in critical academic circles, classical geopolitics have been resigned to the past, this is most certainly not the case within policy and journalistic discourse where some of the imperialistic and commonsensical forms of reasoning still dominate. Most notably, neoconservative intellectuals such as Richard Perle and David Frum were widely cited as the intellectual inspiration of the Bush administration’s (2001–2009) ‘war on terror’. Geopolitics, in this cultural–political context, becomes a way of highlighting difference and danger, especially in a world where international diplomacy and law may prove inefficacious. A warning, which echoes earlier geopolitical writers such as Mackinder and the predictions he made on behalf of his readers. Geopolitics is, thus, said to stand as a cautionary tale to idealists who would invest their faith in international conventions and diplomacy – dangerous states and peoples do not negotiate or if they do will always seek to maximize their own interests and long-term advantage. The revival of interest in geopolitics in the USA, Europe and elsewhere is also empowered by a sense of manifest destiny and exceptionalism (Dodds 2007; Jones and Sage 2010; Kearns 2011). Many writers who adopt the geopolitical mantle still want to ‘advise the prince’ and stir the passions of domestic audiences with their dramatic maps and dazzling predictions. While states need to secure their resource bases and recognize the fundamental differences between land- and seabased powers, they also have an opportunity to project their values and practices. US and UK presidents and prime ministers whether talking about Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya frequently argue that their interventions are motivated not by territorial ambition but rather by the need to project universal values such as democracy, liberty and market-led global capitalism. Geopolitics lives on in political, policy and media forms: if the future of critical geopolitics is to maintain the intellectual contribution, dynamism and relevance demonstrated in the last 20 years, then it must continue to address these themes.

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References Agnew, J., 2003. Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics. London: Routledge, 2nd edn. —— 2007. ‘Know-where: Geographies of knowledge of world politics’. International Political Sociology 1: 138–48. —— 2009. Globalization and Sovereignty. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Atkinson, D., 1995. ‘Geopolitics and the geographical imagination in Fascist Italy’. PhD Thesis, Loughborough University. Blouet, B., 1987. Halford Mackinder: A Biography. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Brown, C., and K. Ainsley, 2008. Understanding International Relations. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Brzezinski, Z., 1986. Game Plan. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. Campbell, D., 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd edn. Dalby, S., 1990. Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics. New York: Guilford. —— 2008. ‘Imperialism, domination, culture: The continued relevance of critical geopolitics’. Geopolitics 13: 413–36. —— 2010. Security and Environmental Change. Cambridge: Polity. Dittmer, J., and K. Dodds, 2008. ‘Popular geopolitics past and future: Fandom, identities and audiences’. Geopolitics 13: 437–57. —— and T. Sturm, 2010. Mapping the End Times. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dodds, K., 2007. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 2010. ‘Classical geopolitics revisited’. In R. Denemark (ed.), The International Studies Encyclopedia. Oxford: Blackwell, vol. 2, pp. 302–22. —— and D. Atkinson (eds), 2000. Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge. Dowler, L., and J. Sharp, 2001. ‘A feminist geopolitics?’ Space and Polity 5: 165–76. Gregory, D., and A. Pred, 2006. Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. New York: Routledge. Hartshorne, R., 1954. ‘Political geography’. In P. James and C. Jones (eds), American Geography. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 211–14. Heffernan, M., 2000. ‘Fin de siècle? Fin du monde? On the origins of European geopolitics, 1890–1920’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions. London: Routledge, pp. 27–51. Hepple, L., 1986. ‘The revival of geopolitics’, Political Geography. 5: S21–S36. Huntington, S., 1997. The Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hyndman, J., 2004. ‘Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics’. Political Geography 23: 307–22. Ingram, A., and K. Dodds (eds), 2009. Spaces of In/Security: New Geographies of the War on Terror. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Jones, L., and D. Sage, 2010. ‘New directions in critical geopolitics’. Geojournal 75: 315–25. Kearns, G., 2009. Geopolitics and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 2011. ‘Geopolitics’. In J. Agnew and D. Livingstone (eds), The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge. London: Sage, pp. 610–22. Kirch, S., and C. Flint, 2011. Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kissinger, H., 1979. The White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Kuus, M., 2010. ‘Critical geopolitics’. In R. Denemark (ed.), The International Studies Encyclopedia. Oxford: Blackwell, vol. 2, pp. 683–701. —— 2011. ‘Policy and geopolitics: Bounding Europe in Europe’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101: 1140–55. Kuus, M., and J. Agnew, 2008. ‘Theorizing the state geographically: Sovereignty, subjectivity, territoriality’. In K. Cox, J. Robinson and M. Low (eds), The Handbook of Political Geography. London: Sage, pp. 117–32. Larner, W., and W. Walters (eds), 2004. Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge. Mackinder, H., 1919. Democratic Ideals and Reality. London: Constable. Megoran, N., 2006. ‘For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and reimagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures’. Political Geography 25: 622–40. Newman, D., 2006. ‘The lines that continue to separate us: Borders in our “borderless” world’. Progress in Human Geography 30: 143–61. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— and J. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’. Political Geography 11: 190–204. —— and S. Dalby (eds), 1998. Rethinking Geopolitics. New York: Routledge. ——, —— and P. Routledge (eds), 2006. The Geopolitics Reader. Oxford: Routledge (2nd edn). Parker, G., 1985. Western Geopolitical Thought in the 20th Century. London: Croom Helm. Pain, R., and S. Smith (eds), 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot, Ashgate. Secor, A.J., 2001. ‘Toward a feminist counter-geopolitics: Gender, space and Islamist politics in Istanbul’. Space and Polity 5: 199–219. Sharp, J., 2000. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 2011. ‘Subaltern geopolitics: An introduction’. Geoforum 42: 263–404. —— et al. (eds.), 2000. Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance. London: Routledge. Slater, D., 2004. Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North–South Relations, Oxford: Blackwell. Walker, R., 1993. Inside/Outside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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PART I FOUNDATiONS Introduction: Geopolitical Foundations Klaus Dodds

Critical geopolitics was, in its earliest incarnations, envisaged as a critique of the taken-for-granted assumptions and approaches to the relationships between space and power in conventional or classical geopolitics and neighbouring international relations (IR). For early pioneers such as Simon Dalby and Gearóid Ó Tuathail, this was particularly important because they contended that late Cold War military and diplomatic strategy (especially under the Reagan administration in the 1980s) was too inclined to treat places and peoples in a highly simplistic manner. Such simplicities carried with them very real costs. If regions such as Central America were conceptualised as ‘vulnerable spaces’ endangered by communist intervention then it became easier for US policy makers to justify and legitimate covert and overt forms of counter-insurgency and intervention in countries such as Nicaragua. So in identifying foundations for critical geopolitics, we might reasonably point to two sources – an intellectual one and a prevailing geopolitical one. Intellectually, critical geopolitics was, as John Agnew (‘The Origins of Critical Geopolitics’) reminds us, empowered by a new engagement with social theory as geopolitics was conceptualised as a discourse and practice. Along with a generation of geographers schooled in the ‘crisis of representation’, critical geopolitical writers considered how and with what consequences geographical space was actively imagined and reproduced by intellectuals of statecraft acting on behalf of states, institutions and publics. Geopolitically, as noted above, the late Cold War and the intensification of US–Soviet tension played an important part in reviving academic interest in geopolitics, leading to a series of papers and books sketching out how the world was being redefined and retargeted for both military intervention in the Global South, and in the worst case scenario global Armageddon. As Simon Dalby (‘Realism and Geopolitics’) observes, critical geopolitics also allied itself to critical international relations and its critique of realism, the dominant form of thinking about international politics, especially in the USA. Writing on the subject again, some 20 years since he made his earliest critiques of realist geopolitics in the

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics late Cold War, Dalby’s message is uncompromising – future critical geopolitical scholarship will need to get grips with the profound challenges facing humanity in an era of anthropocentric climate change and enduring inequality between and within the Global North and South. While the earliest chapters examine those original contexts crucial to the emergence of critical geopolitics in the mid 1980s and its subsequent development, a new generation of scholars have worked with and beyond its original discourse/ textual focus. Martin Müller (‘Text, Discourse, Affect and Things’) provides an overview of the critique that has been made against some of the initial foundational labour of critical geopolitics. While sympathetic to the critical geopolitics project, he outlines a case for taking more seriously other factors that help make sense of geopolitical power and representations. Mirroring a broader development within human geography, attention is drawn to the role of the ‘more than representational’ (affect and emotion), practices (raising the flag) and things (documents) in helping to make sense of the way in which discourses are always entangled in relationships and networks rather than free-floating. Recognising the power of the visual in geopolitical power was fundamental to some of the earliest critical geopolitical writing. Rachel Hughes (‘Geopolitics and Visual Culture’) provides a tour d’horizon of that interest and shows how critical geopolitical writers shifted from an interest in modes of representation to an interrogation of various observant practices and the manner in which the visual is connected to embodied experiences, as her own work has shown with reference to video games and film. An interest in embodiment is a reminder that geopolitics is never divorced from relations of power that are bifurcated by gender, sexuality, class, race and geographical locale. Linda Peake (‘Heteronormativity’) considers how heterosexuality functions as a touchstone for mobilising understandings of the domestic, the familiar and even the national. In the process, some bodies are considered more desirable while others are excluded, marginalised and perhaps even terrorised on the basis of gender, race and sexuality. She throws down the gauntlet to critical geopolitical scholars – it is time to take queer theory seriously and shake lose those heteronormative foundations which shape so much of modern social and political life. Critical geopolitics is also characterised by what one might term foundational concerns. Fiona McConnell (‘Sovereignty’) writes about how we might further interrogate this fundamental discourse and practice so relevant to the behaviour of states, the operation of international law and workings of the inter-state system. But, as she suggests, traditional readings of sovereignty (with a focus on statelevel behaviour including diplomacy and foreign policy) are being challenged by a new generation of feminist and postcolonial scholarship that draws attention to how sovereignty is embodied but also worked through in everyday and mundane contexts, rather than just through elite and formal geopolitical settings. Julien Mercille’s chapter (‘Radical Geopolitics’) offers a trenchant critique of neoliberal geopolitics and an appeal for the more explicitly political-economic approach that once challenged some of the earliest renditions of classical geopolitics. Even in the heyday of Halford Mackinder, at the turn of the twentieth century, there 16

Part I: Foundations were those who were critical of imperial geopolitics and the inequalities between imperial centres and peripheral colonies. Mercille’s chapter is also a reminder to critical geopolitical writers that they must be willing to take their critiques of contemporary capitalism and foreign economic policies to wider audiences beyond the academy in an intelligent and accessible manner. This interest in the everyday and the mundane is also of concern to Simon Springer (‘Neoliberalism’) who demonstrates that this powerful ideology and associated practices (such as cutting state spending and promoting private enterprise) is enacted and embodied in different places and contexts. Neoliberalism, despite the financial crises of recent years, remains intellectually dominant, and critical geopolitical scholarship can usefully highlight how it is imposed, resisted and in the longer term changed by people and societies around the world. Finally, James Sidaway, Virginie Mamadouh and Marcus Power (‘Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions’) remind us that there have been many ways of engaging with the geopolitical and as such one can only really ever consider geopolitical traditions in the plural rather than the singular. Critical geopolitics, while wary of much classical geopolitical writings, cannot ignore the fact that contemporary interest in the term ‘geopolitics’ is more likely to be rooted in Mackinder-era interests in resources, territory and strategic advantage. The challenge for a critical geopolitics is not to become yet another academic fad with limited remit beyond geographical courses taught in universities and colleges. Critical geopolitics not only needs to tackle those taken-for-granted foundations of modern political life but also to impress upon others how it offers a hopeful and insightful guide to ‘global geopolitics’ by taking in the mundane, the banal and the everyday alongside the geopolitical practices operating at state, regional and global levels. As Nick Megoran (‘Violence and Peace’) notes, critical geopolitics must be about peace and not just a critique of domination, inequality and violence – however important they are. Each of these chapters addresses certain foundational ideas and/or practices that engage critical geopolitics. They are not comprehensive, but they are certainly suggestive and should, we hope, inspire further studies and political engagement beyond the academy. In the subsequent sections, we consider how some of these foundational interests (as expressed through discourses, practices and performances) are made and re-made by various agents and sites.

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The Origins of Critical Geopolitics John Agnew

What is important are the significant breaks – where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. (Hall 1986: 33) It is not merely coincidental that studies later labeled ‘critical geopolitics’ were first introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The origins of this general perspective lay not so much with either the personalities involved, authorship reflects the time and places more than individual genius, or the cresting of intellectual fashions, as with the geopolitical context of the period (Agnew 2002). The late 1970s and 1980s was a watershed period in recent intellectual history, particularly in the USA but also more generally (Rodgers 2011). It is an example of the significant transformational periods alluded to in the quotation from Stuart Hall at the beginning of this chapter. The USA is particularly important in this context because of its dominant role in both world politics and in its study. The domestic consensus in the USA over foreign policy had dissipated in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement had called into question complacency over the country’s status as an inclusive democracy, and the economic stagnation and high inflation that had replaced the steady growth of the postwar years undermined the model of managed capitalism upon which that growth had been based. Beginning with the Nixon presidency, much of the conventional wisdom of the Cold War era about US interests and the bipolar character of world politics was increasingly called into question in centres of power, such as the White House, as much as on the political margins, in the universities and emerging constellation of think tanks, where new ‘dangers’ and ‘opportunities’ were flagged for a coming generation of more openly ideological and combative politicians, particularly those of a selfdefined conservative ilk. Critical geopolitics can be defined in a broad way as the critical sense that world politics is underpinned by a myriad of assumptions and schemas about the ways in which geographical divisions of the world, strategic plans, global images and the disposition of the continents and oceans enter into the making of foreign policy and into the popular legitimation of those policies. Rather than accepted as natural

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics facts, though, these assumptions and schemas are seen as socially constructed by particular people in different historical–geographical circumstances and as thereby providing the basis for geopolitical rationales to social and political purposes that are anything but simple reflections of a natural geopolitical order. The classical or conventional geopolitics that had come to fruition in universities and in popular Western culture in the early twentieth century was seen as a specific, if formalized, example of the more general genre: as providing a geographical mask or shroud based in claims about the causal effects of location for imperialism, hegemony or some other raison d’état. US universities were much more openly politicized in the 1970s and 1980s than they had been hitherto or have been since. They provided the heft on the political left that the think tanks on the right, funded by conservative billionaires, then arose to counter. The recruitment of students from social and geographical backgrounds outside the elite circles that has traditionally dominated the study of ‘foreign relations’ and international politics played a contributory role. For example, some people have noted how dominant Irish, Scottish and Finnish scholars have been in founding much of what was later labeled ‘critical geopolitics’. Of course, many others with impeccably establishment credentials also went over to the ‘dark side’. But the collapse of the political consensus outside the university had important effects within it as well. The old theories of international politics that had arisen during and after World War II no longer seemed to offer the purchase on the world that they once had. Within the USA, the role of the country in the world was no longer seen as invariably benign but more often as malevolent or pernicious. Revisionist historiography pinned responsibility for the Cold War on the USA as much as, or more than, on the Soviet Union. The conflation of science and national interest with objectivist theories that both purported to explain the world as if from the outside and yet offer predictive advice to US policy-makers was called into question. The word ‘geopolitics’, long banished from the US corridors of power as much as from the most prestigious universities because of its historic association with the excesses of Nazi and Japanese militarism, was now spoken quite freely. President Nixon and his éminence grise Henry Kissinger did much to rehabilitate the term (Hepple 1986). Their exploits in officially recognizing China; attempting, however fitfully, to end the war in Vietnam; and intervening covertly in Chile and elsewhere were all justified explicitly in terms of ‘geopolitical’ objectives. These ranged from resource-based arguments relating to the Middle East and political–military intentions relating to splitting China from any possible renovated alliance with the Soviet Union to redefining the Monroe doctrine by associating any sort of left-wing political ascendancy in Latin America with external forces (Soviet influence) hostile to the USA. The term, then, served as a convenient sign under which to classify disparate policies and give a holistic cast to the US place in the world. The manly, hard-nosed approach to international politics Nixon and Kissinger patented as theirs needed a word that put their policies beyond volition and into the world of nature. Adding geo- to politics can do that for you. Destiny beckoned.

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The Origins of Critical Geopolitics

From geopolitics to critical geopolitics In this atmosphere of new usage being given to an older concept and the breakdown of wider political consensus a re-evaluation of older usage of the term was not long in coming. A confluence of three specific questions about what revival of the term ‘geopolitics’ might entail produced the context in which ‘critical geopolitics’ arose as a term that at least in some quarters acquired significance as a new intellectual trend. First of all, if the word ‘geopolitics’ could be expropriated for the apparently looser sort of meaning given to it by Kissinger, where did that leave the usage that had lived on, if only somewhat sub rosa, in geography textbooks where it was associated with the formal geopolitical model of Halford Mackinder and Karl Haushofer’s cartographic application of ideas about imperial pan-regions and German Lebensraum? Did such ideas have any explanatory capacity whatsoever, or were they crippled by crucial (but hidden) assumptions about the nature of history as repetition or geographical determinism and the lack of a role for perception and action on the part of elites and publics alike (e.g. Henrikson 1980)? In the 1950s and 1960s scholars such as Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout at Princeton University and Donald Meinig then at the University of Utah raised doubts about a direct causal arrow running from global physical features to political outcomes (e.g. Agnew 2009a; Sprout and Sprout 1962). Unfortunately, their message did not fit well with the times. Classical geopolitics, on the one hand, and the ideological obsession with ‘democracy versus communism’ as the mantra of US foreign policy, on the other, thus set limits to any alternative discussion of how geography might enter into world politics. In the wider public sphere in the USA, Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and early 1970s, the term ‘geopolitics’ was not widely used by specialists in world politics or international relations. Indeed, they had all been quite happy to expunge it from their vocabulary in the context of a world that they saw mostly as divided ideologically between two competing political–economic systems whose geographical qualities were largely incidental or derivative of the overriding existential conflict. But what if, in fact, this was far from the case, and the Cold War itself had involved a sort of geopolitics distinctive from that of previous eras but nonetheless real despite never being named as such? All sorts of geographical assumptions and an overarching geopolitical imagination lay at the heart of Cold War geopolitics. From this viewpoint, simply avoiding the signifier could not eliminate what was potentially signified (e.g. Cohen 1973; Williams 1969). Finally, those international relations specialists so agnostic about the geographical attributes of the world they studied were also facing a crisis of their own. Increasingly, many of their assumptions about international anarchy, competitive states engaged in utility maximization or status enhancement, and states as entities as equivalent to persons in classical political theory were subject to robust and rude critique. A new generation of scholars of a behavioral cast of mind were more interested in how foreign-policy decisions were actually made than presuming some inherent realism or rationality to them. They tended to focus on the assumptions politicians brought to bear in practice rather than simply projecting 21

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics their own. This provided an opening for perspectives that saw perceptions of the world and discourses about how the world works as the prime focus of analysis rather than the old style projection of objectivist models onto the world (e.g. Ashley 1984; Campbell 1992; Shapiro 1989). Geopolitics, then, could involve the study of all those regional divisions of the world, cartographic devices and geopolitical claims that politicians and their soothsayers repeatedly invoked in relation to this or that foreign policy. Appending the word ‘critical’ would make it clear that this was not the second coming of the Mackinderian approach or an endorsement of Kissinger’s mot just but something else entirely: analysis of how geographical configurations and assumptions about the world figure into the calculi of ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ (politicians and experts) and the related images that animate popular worldviews, global regional divisions, and group and national positions within them.

Making critical geopolitics In the early 1980s various radical perspectives on international politics had come into vogue in disciplinary geography and to a certain extent also in adjacent fields such as international studies, political science and sociology. Perhaps the most influential but also one of the most controversial was the impact of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, which posited a geopolitical dynamic to modern world politics involving a process of hegemonic succession between the most powerful states in the core of a modern world-system based on the systematic economic exploitation of a global periphery by a global core. Peter Taylor, founding editor of the journal Political Geography Quarterly (later Political Geography), was the most important proponent of this theoretical perspective in disciplinary geography. Looking back, I think that this innovation was a crucial precursor to the later development of critical geopolitics. In emphasizing the growth of a world economy in which world politics had to be situated, the world-system perspective abandoned the peculiar combination of assuming an anarchic world order and presuming my-state exceptionalism that had characterized traditional geopolitical thinking (and so-called realist international relations theory). It thus provided an opening for thinking about geopolitics in a new manner. My first tentative excursion into challenging conventional geopolitical thinking drew on this inspiration (Agnew 1983), even as I also became convinced that it had significant limits, not least in terms of its ascription of causality to spatial categories such as core and periphery without paying any attention to how dominant states brought their own particular political economies to bear in making the system as a whole work (Agnew 1982; 1983). A few years later, Leslie Hepple noted both the revival of the term ‘geopolitics’ among prominent policy-makers such as Kissinger and the development of novel and radical takes on the term by geographers and others from Saul Cohen and Yves Lacoste to David Harvey and Peter Taylor (Hepple 1986). He warned of a number of dangers in this ‘revival’ for all sides, including ‘innocence’ about the word’s prior 22

The Origins of Critical Geopolitics history, the reinstatement of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (that permanent ‘geographical factors’ direct policy), and the continuing use of the term as a slander (rather like popular use of the term ‘fascist’) to associate any use of it, however distinctive, with a presumably Nazi past. Mark Bassin and others quickly showed that geopolitics was itself more innocent of many of the historic charges against it than had hitherto been thought to be the case (Bassin 1987). In particular, Nazi racism had been much more important than any great geopolitical design borrowed from Haushofer or others in German expansionism. But it was Hepple’s second point that was to prove particularly telling. Could you really have ‘geopolitics’ without the ascription of causality to physical features of the world such as the disposition of continents and oceans and the sense of natural destiny that this entailed? In a brief article in the same year that Hepple’s review article appeared, Gearóid Ó Tuathail argued that the relationship between the USA and El Salvador, at that time the scene of a bloody civil war with one side openly backed by the US government, could be best understood in terms of the ‘present US government’s perception of its own spheres of influence’ and the attempt at arresting ‘its declining global hegemony’ (1986: 73) rather than the conventional geopolitical ‘domino theory’ or the competing economic explanation of protecting US business investment. Ó Tuathail saw the ‘cultural’ imperative to ‘perpetuate, secure and reaffirm the American way of life’ as central to the geopolitical practice that informed US foreign policy in Central America at the time of the Reagan presidency (1986: 83). So, on this understanding, geopolitics is a fusion between the economic–military capability to impose one’s will and the geopolitical vision that inspired this action. In the final analysis, however, and this point was made even more emphatically in Ó Tuathail’s doctoral dissertation (1989) and by Simon Dalby (1988; 1990a; 1990b), ‘Geopolitics is about [the] ideological process of constructing spatial, political and cultural boundaries to demarcate the domestic space as separate from the threatening Other; to exclude Otherness and simultaneously discipline and control the domestic political sphere’ (Dalby 1990a: 173). Perhaps the ur-text circulating in and around these early statements of a still inchoate ‘critical geopolitics’ was a paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Meeting in Washington DC in April 1987. This paper, later published as ‘Geopolitics and discourse’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992), made the argument that geopolitics is about story telling in which protagonists play roles as parts in geopolitical scripts that they tell about the world ‘out there’ as a way of securing what they hold dear ‘over here’. Drawing from Foucault’s idea of discourse as a form of power/knowledge (1980), geopolitics was ‘re-conceptualized as a discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft ‘spatialize’ international politics in such a way as to represent it as a ‘world’ characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 192). Much of the article was taken up with expanding on these claims. Perhaps the most important were the definition of discourse as being the rules of performance and the resources to realize them rather than simply words or text, the emphasis on the practice of foreign policy and not on formal geopolitical models as the source of knowledge about the geographical content of geopolitics, the centrality of a caste or class of 23

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics leaders and advisers (the ‘intellectuals of statecraft’) to geopolitical discourse, and the historicizing of the argument to the modern world-system (in Wallersteinian terms) as the necessary context for understanding the rise and fall of hegemonic states and their relative capacities to bring their discursive representations to bear in a given time and place. Foundational as this article might now appear, there was a tension inherent in it between the constitutive role of discourse in geopolitics, as adumbrated in its more Foucauldian moments, and the framing in terms of a class of agents embedded in a modern world-system that came from Gramscian (‘organic intellectuals’) and Wallersteinian (‘modern world-system’) ontologies that saw historically and geographically sedimented social practices as having an existence outside any sort of practical discourse of geopolitics, even though they themselves were clearly parts of distinctive theoretical discourses. To a degree this tension represented the different backgrounds and theoretical predilections of the co-authors. If one (Ò Tuathail) was suspicious of radical social ontologies and took the linguistic turn in the social sciences very seriously indeed, the other (Agnew) had trouble ditching ontology not least because of the need to account for the material basis of who got to write the scripts of global geopolitics during any specific era. In other words, from this viewpoint, the powers of representation do not account for the power to engage in what become dominant geopolitical representations. Yet, you would seem to need both for an adequate theory of geopolitics as a discursive practice. The representations are much more than the ‘ideological’ decoration on an economic cake that orthodox or Althusserian Marxism (a particularly bold ‘scientific’ version of Marxism) would allege. Representations animate rather than obfuscate. Yet, the cake has still to be baked. In hindsight, later divergent theoretical emphases, as they began to appear in the 1990s and after, between various practitioners of ‘critical geopolitics’ are incipient in the earliest papers. In the broadest sense it came down to a question of privileging the representational versus emphasizing the socio-economic resources that made some representations more powerful than others. It is fair to say that everyone involved was well aware of this dilemma from the outset and has struggled in different ways to resolve the difficulty. If I (and others) have tried to map the conjunction of material ‘geopolitical orders’ and representational ‘geopolitical discourses’ in a broadly historicist vein (e.g. Agnew 2003; Agnew and Corbridge 1995), Ó Tuathail has attempted to avoid the Derridean injunction that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ by adopting the ‘messy history’ conception of historical– geographical context argued by the sociologist Michael Mann (Ó Tuathail 1996). Yet differences have remained. In particular, critical geopolitics has tended to become associated in some quarters largely with the constitutive role of discourse when, as I would claim, it is precisely its rhetorical and communicative aspects that are more fundamental to geopolitical usage (Agnew 2001: 10; 2009a). The theoretical roots of what was becoming critical geopolitics can be seen as preordaining this outcome. The major so-called poststructuralist sources, such as Foucault and Derrida, provided much of the take on what was meant by discourse and the emphasis on geopolitical representations. But these sources were filtered 24

The Origins of Critical Geopolitics very much through the lens of dissident international relations theory that was itself more theoretically eclectic than might appear at first sight. The strong influence on Simon Dalby’s writing of Rob Walker, for example, a product of Walker’s tenure at the University of Victoria where Dalby had been a student, was much more in the tradition of a critical political theory that objected to the ossified view of the modern state system as the end of history and examined the conventional wisdom about ‘international relations’ from this perspective (e.g. Walker 1993). Gearóid Ó Tuathail, in contrast, in part through the influence of David Sylvan at Syracuse University and Tim Luke at Virginia Tech, had a more direct encounter with writers attempting to move entirely beyond conventional modernist thinking such as Foucault and Paul Virilio (1994). He thus envisaged, at least initially, a more complete break between critical geopolitics and what had previously counted as geopolitics than did the others involved (see esp. Ó Tuathail 1994). In my own case, I valued many of Foucault’s insights about power but remained in thrall to a historicist rendering of geopolitics that was uncomfortable with the idea that international danger, for example, was simply invented for cultural purposes rather than having at least some sort of actual materiality to it (Agnew 2003). In other words, geopolitics was not simply made up. I saw that as a problem in at least some elements of dissident international relations theory at the time, notwithstanding its other many virtues (e.g. Shapiro 1989). Be this as it may, in the 1990s a literature began to emerge based to one degree or another on the notion of using geopolitical reasoning and related ideas to examine world politics. A special issue of the journal Society and Space (1994) was important in both introducing some new authors and labeling ‘critical geopolitics’ as a distinctive if mainly representational approach to geopolitics (e.g. Dodds and Sidaway 1994; Ò Tuathail and Dalby 1994; Weber 1994). Quickly, three different currents emerged and have remained somewhat separate from one another ever since. The first, focusing on practical geopolitical reasoning by elites tended to have a heavy US bias built into it irrespective of the provenance of the authors in question (e.g. Agnew and Corbridge 1995; Dalby 1990b). This is not surprising given both the centrality of the USA to world politics and the location of most of the early writers about critical geopolitics in the USA and Canada. But a number of scholars challenged this bias and showed the broader relevance of the approach to understanding such phenomena as border delimitation and disputation (Paasi 1995), the geopolitical content of national identities (Dijkink 1996), the geopolitical structuring of the European Union (Moisio 2002), the global ‘war on terror’ (Coleman 2003), the history of various forms of global Weltpolitik (world-policy) overcoming local cosmologies (e.g. Agnew, 2003; Postel-Vinay 2005), and the post-Cold War interventions of the USA and Israel in the Middle East (Gregory 2004). A significant recent development of the overall perspective applied to the US case during the early Cold War can be found in Matthew Farish’s The Contours of America’s Cold War (2010). The second current essentially began with Joanne Sharp’s innovative empirical research on the American magazine Reader’s Digest and the way it developed and circulated a ‘popular geopolitics’ among its readership, particularly relating to geopolitical images of the USA, on the one hand, and of the Soviet Union, 25

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics on the other, and how these figured historically in the evolving conflict between the two sides (1993; 2000). This theme has become ever more important under the broad rubric of critical geopolitics (Dittmer and Dodds 2008). It covers analysis of a wide range of geopolitical representations in film, newspapers, cartoons and comic strips (e.g. Debrix 2007; Dell’Agnese 2009; Dittmer 2005; Dodds 2003; Falah et al. 2006). Finally, many studies have applied a ‘critical’ eye to the historical roots and continuity of formal geopolitical models and thinking and how these can still affect the usage and political ‘image’ of the term within and beyond academia (e.g. Dodds and Atkinson 2000; Kearns 2009; Ó Tuathail 1996) and examined the historical intellectual fate of analogous terminology from the geopolitical tradition such as land, territory and sovereignty (e.g. Agnew 1994; 2009b; Elden 2010; Taylor 1996). The complex meanings of the term ‘geopolitics’ as it has been expropriated for new usages yet has still maintained its old ones has raised some anxiety because of the potential for definitional confusion among both students and the general public alike (Murphy et al. 2004). Initially, then, ‘critical geopolitics’ was but a minor intellectual movement within a sub-field of Anglo-American geography. This has changed, however, as exchanges with the broader fields of international studies, political sociology and political theory have both expanded and complicated its theoretical base and attracted a wider range of scholars interested in how the geographical figures into the making of world politics (see e.g. the journals Alternatives and International Political Sociology). The journal Geopolitics, though open to all schools of geopolitical thinking, has had an important role in this diffusion. To start with critical geopolitics was also largely Anglo-American, but with time this too has changed to include scholars from a wide range of countries around the world (e.g. Reuber and Wolkersdorfer (2002) in Germany and Moisio and Harle (2010) in Finland). In France use of the term ‘geopolitics’ is extensive but remains wedded to a cartographic objectivism that is thought of as more ‘analytical’ than critical geopolitics’ investment in surveying the global impacts of the ‘modern geopolitical imagination’ (Claval 2010) and largely without much Foucauldian influence (Fall 2005). As of 2010, however, the Spanish-speaking world had acquired its own journal of critical geopolitics, Geopolitica(s), edited by Heriberto Cairo of Complutense University in Madrid, with an editorial board heavily weighted to Latin America. The plural of the title here is important as a counterweight to the tradition in Latin America particularly of seeing Geopolitica (as in the title of a much older journal) in singularly naturalistic terms. Cairo has made a number of interesting points with respect to his understanding of critical geopolitics (2005). For one thing, he locates it within a stream of thinking that extends at least back to the French radical geographer Yves Lacoste, and his critique of geography as a field that has long been involved in imperial preparations for warfare, and Peter Taylor’s adaptation of world-systems theory. He also interestingly suggests that critical geopolitics has an implicit view of places as human-experiential settings that then informs its critique of conventional geopolitics (both practical and formal) as involving a reification and commodification of places as mere ‘sites’ for domination and control. Ó Tuathail and Agnew have made much the same point (Agnew 2003; Ó Tuathail 26

The Origins of Critical Geopolitics 1996). Finally, Cairo sees critical geopolitics as putting into question the dominant vision of global space as entirely territorial. In this respect, it brings into focus alternative spatial modalities of power involved in place-making and the operation of networked flows across space (see also Agnew 2005). Ironically, therefore, Cairo sees in critical geopolitics a humanism and a critique of colonialism that would seem to be explicitly excluded from any rigid adherence to the poststructuralist adages of Foucault.

Naming critical geopolitics How important is the qualifier ‘critical’ in front of geopolitics? I must admit to not being particularly fond of it. In most of my publications I have avoided using it. I would like to claim the term geopolitics for a new implicitly critical usage (Agnew 2004). In my view, adding the word ‘critical’ before ever using the dreaded term ‘geopolitics’ makes this expropriation harder. The phrase does, however, have the merit of pointing away from the historical meaning of ‘geopolitics’ and thus of interrupting the genealogy of the original term with its overtones of naturalism and exceptionalism. Apocryphally, Peter Taylor has been given credit for naming the sub-field in advising Géaroid Ó Tuathail to use the phrase in the title of his dissertation. I was away from Syracuse University in Italy at the time when the title was adopted and the dissertation first submitted, so I cannot personally verify its accuracy. What is clear is that the 1989 dissertation uses the phrase for the first time. It also crops up the next year in an article by Simon Dalby. I could well be mistaken, but I do not recall the phrase being used in the defense of Simon Dalby’s doctoral dissertation at Simon Fraser University also in 1989, where I was the external examiner. Whatever its actual genesis as a phrase, by the mid-1990s ‘critical geopolitics’ had come into fairly wide use for describing a type of writing that aspired to critically inquire into the geopolitical claims and arguments implicit in the making and communicating of foreign-policy decisions. I do not think that trying to connect use of the term ‘critical’ to, say, Frankfurt School critical theory or to critical inquiry in literary studies is worth much effort. In my opinion, the appending of the qualifier was innocent of such a link. Notwithstanding Taylor’s possible role in coining the phrase, it very quickly became associated with a much more poststructuralist turn of analysis than he could have envisaged or endorsed. Indeed, I have used the phrase to represent what I call the most ‘constructionist’ version of the various strands of what now seems to be included under its rubric (Agnew 2001). Others seem to have adopted the same view and want to see the term restricted to entirely poststructuralist approaches to geopolitics (e.g. Müller and Reuber 2008; Reuber 2004), but, on reflection, I think that it is too late now to narrow its use in this way. The genie is out of the bottle. There are continuing disputes over the limits of critique as the final goal of the sub-field versus offering ‘advice’ on real-world geopolitical situations, whether the term ‘radical’ should be subsumed under or is distinctive 27

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics from what is labeled as ‘critical’, the proposal of a ‘progressive’ geopolitics, and the historicist versus textualist emphasis I have referred to previously. What seems clear to me, however, is that giving the phrase some restrictive epistemological definition is probably a lost cause. It has now taken on something of a life of its own. The subsequent chapters in this book will of course attest to how much this has been the case.

Unfinished business This brings us to a final point relating to the origins of ‘critical geopolitics’. All sorts of issues were left unresolved by the initial efforts to move away from the conventional meaning of geopolitics. I would like to address some of these briefly so as to make explicit my view that there was no creation of a theoretical apparatus out of ‘whole cloth’, so to speak, that was established and has simply been reproduced intact ever since. What I wish to emphasize is that critical geopolitics was from the start an open-ended work. It is mistaken in my view to define it too narrowly. Certainly this would do no justice to its actual origins. Perhaps the most important issue concerned the implicit state-centrism that characterized much early critical geopolitics, in much the same way as it had the traditional variety (Agnew 1994; 2010a). Yet, of course, at precisely the time when the critique of classical geopolitics and mainstream international relations theory was developing there was also much writing about globalization, both historic and recent, and the importance of actors in world politics other than the quintessential states/empires of classical geopolitics and contemporary international relations theory (Agnew 2009b). There was no good reason for this other than perhaps too great an obsession with directly countering classical geopolitical thinking on its own ground, so to speak. The word ‘geopolitics’ was also open to myriad interpretations given the history of its usage (Murphy et al. 2004). From one viewpoint, the danger has been that the old classical usage will always trump more recent attempts at redefinition/ expropriation and thus lead back into a constant re-engagement with old-school writers (such as Mackinder) and the formal usage of the term rather than move in a more analytic direction that accepts that one can redefine words rather than simply use the old definition as if it were the one true signifier. The focus on and the precise meaning given to ‘discourse’ has also periodically become a point of contention (e.g. Müller and Reuber 2008). In this regard, much of the debate entails the relationship between discourse, text and representation, on the one hand, and conceptions of practice and action, on the other. This issue is obviously central, yet remains unresolved as far as gaining any sort of intellectual consensus is concerned. One charge against critical geopolitics in its initial manifestations – and in some of its continuing assumptions about the contemporary world order – has an ironic quality. This is the tendency to a US-centric account of the world since World 28

The Origins of Critical Geopolitics War II. This reflects the reality of the hierarchical nature of world politics but it also evidences a certain tendency to see the USA as somehow the singular source of its geopolitical scripting (Agnew 2010b). Other potential actors thus receive short shrift. A similarly totalistic but now negative American exceptionalism thus substitutes for the older celebratory one. This is one drawback of various socalled radical and progressive variants of critical geopolitics (e.g. Kearns 2009; Mercille 2008). This relates I think to the tendency of critical geopolitics to claim to take the side of the presumably subordinate in global political contests. Quite who these might be, however, is not always clear. Nasty Third World dictators often present themselves as heroes in global struggles against imperialism. But such figures as Gaddafi in Libya or Mugabe in Zimbabwe often seem to have a powerful stake in keeping things exactly as they are. Recent rounds of so-called humanitarian interventions by the USA and other countries, putatively to aid democratic movements or to prevent genocide against ethnic minorities, have brought this issue into focus. In this latter regard, Russian military action in the Caucasus region raises difficult ethical questions about the ‘rights and wrongs’ of local conflicts when the outsiders have often support persecuted minorities as well as engaged in their own persecutions. More generally, the normative commitments of critical geopolitics to, for example, non-violence and a preference for diplomacy over military action, were never spelled out (Megoran 2008). If some have been attracted to critical geopolitics largely on these grounds, it is clear that it is by no means a requirement of ‘signing up for the program’. Yet, it must be said that the original impulses behind the subfield in the 1980s and early 1990s were clearly connected to opposition to the specter of nuclear Armageddon, US missile deployments in Europe, and the first Iraq War. It is a mistake to drain critical geopolitics of what has always been a strongly ethical critique of how world politics is constituted and practiced.

Conclusion I would not expect the sub-field of ‘critical geopolitics’ to ever give rise to a singular approach about which everyone could agree. As I hope I have shown, its origins are too disparate for that. It has also developed in a number of distinctive ways as you can gather by comparing, say, Reuber (2004) with Dalby (2008) and Kearns (2009). What then, broadly speaking, does the sub-field have to offer? The first thing is a conceptual matrix for a geographical analysis of world politics based in ideas about geographical representations and socio-economic resources. Another is an emphasis on the role of vision (even in the mind’s eye) in how the world is structured and acted on by political agents of various sorts. A third would be how important the fusion between territory and identity is in modern nationalism and how it still plays a role in dividing up the world. A fourth would be its stress on the elite-based statecraft that has long lain at the heart of geopolitical reasoning and its 29

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics necessary denial of the multidimensional qualities of different places in pursuit of an overriding Weltpolitik. From this perspective, then, there will be a need for critical geopolitics of some sort as long as the established nostrums of how the world is spatialized and divided up for political purposes remain in effect. I do not envisage intellectual unemployment for the practitioners of critical geopolitics any time soon.

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The Origins of Critical Geopolitics Dalby, S., 1988. ‘Geopolitical discourse: The Soviet Union as Other’. Alternatives 13: 415–42. —— 1990a. ‘American security discourse: The persistence of geopolitics’. Political Geography Quarterly 9: 171–88. —— 1990b. Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics. London: Pinter. —— 2008. ‘Imperialism, domination, culture: The continued relevance of critical geopolitics’. Geopolitics 13: 413–36. Debrix, F., 2007. Tabloid Terror. London: Routledge. Dell’Agnese, E., 2009. Paesaggi ed eroi: cinema, nazione, geopolitica. Turin: UTET. Dijkink, G., 1996. National Identity and Geopolitical Visions. London: Routledge. Dittmer, J., 2005. ‘Captain America’s empire: Reflections on identity, popular culture and post 9/11 geopolitics’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 626–43. —— and K. Dodds, 2008. ‘Popular geopolitics past and future: Fandom, identities and audiences’. Geopolitics 13: 437–57. Dodds, K., 2003. ‘Cold War geopolitics’. In J. Agnew et al. (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 204–18. —— and J. Sidaway, 1994. ‘Locating critical geopolitics’. Society and Space 12: 515– 24. —— and D. Atkinson (eds), 2000. Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge. Elden, S., 2010. ‘Land, terrain, territory’. Progress in Human Geography 34: 799–817. Falah, G., et al., 2006. ‘Just war and extra-territoriality: The popular geopolitics of the United States’ war on Iraq as reflected in newspapers of the Arab world’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96: 142–64. Fall, J., 2005. ‘Michel Foucault and francophone geography’. Espaces Temps.net, . Farish, M., 2010. The Contours of America’s Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M., 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Gregory, D., 2004. The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, S., 1986. ‘Cultural studies: Two paradigms’. In R. Collins et al. (eds.), Media, Culture, Society: A Critical Reader. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 33–48. Henrikson, A.K., 1980. ‘America’s changing place in the world: From “periphery” to “centre”?’ In J. Gottmann (ed.), Centre and Periphery: Spatial Variation in Politics. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 73–100. Hepple, L.W., 1986. ‘The revival of geopolitics’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: S21– S36. Kearns, G., 2009. Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Megoran, N., 2008. ‘Militarism, realism, just war, or nonviolence? Critical geopolitics and the problem of normativity’. Geopolitics 13: 473–97. Mercille, J., 2008. ‘Critical geopolitics and the bomber gap’. Geopolitics 13: 498–518. Moisio, S., 2002. ‘EU eligibility, central Europe and the invention of the supplicant state narrative’. Geopolitics 7: 89–116. 31

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics —— and V. Harle, 2010. ‘On the interface: The Finnish geopolitical tradition in human geography and in IR’. Cooperation and Conflict 45: 449–67. Müller, M., and P. Reuber, 2008. ‘Empirical verve, conceptual doubts: Looking from the outside in at critical geopolitics’. Geopolitics 13: 458–72. Murphy, A.B., et al., 2004. ‘Is there a politics to geopolitics?’ Progress in Human Geography 28: 619–40. Ó Tuathail, G., 1986. ‘The language and nature of the “new geopolitics”: The case of US–El Salvador relations’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: 73–85. —— 1989. ‘Critical geopolitics: The social construction of place and space in the practice of statecraft’. PhD thesis, Syracuse University. —— 1994. ‘(Dis)placing geopolitics: Writing on the maps of global politics’. Society and Space 12: 525–46. —— 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— and J. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning and American foreign policy’. Political Geography 11: 190–204. —— and S. Dalby, 1994. ‘Critical geopolitics: Unfolding spaces for thought in geography and global politics’. Society and Space 12: 513–14. Paasi, A., 1995. Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish–Russian Border. Chichester: Wiley. Postel-Vinay, K., 2005. L’Occident et sa bonne parole: nos representations du monde, de l’Europe coloniale à l’Amérique hégémonique. Paris: Flammarion. Reuber, P., 2004. ‘The political representation of space after the Cold War and in the new millennium’. Progress in Human Geography 28: 630–34. —— and G. Wolkersdorfer, 2002. ‘The transformation of Europe and the German contribution: Critical geopolitics and geopolitical representations’. Geopolitics 7: 39–60. Rodgers, D.T., 2011. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Shapiro, M.J., 1989. ‘Textualizing global politics’. In J. Der Derian and M.J. Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, pp. 69–96. Sharp, J., 1993. ‘Publishing American identity: Popular geopolitics, myth and the Reader’s Digest’. Political Geography 12: 491–503. —— 2000. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sprout, H., and M. Sprout, 1962. Foundations of International Politics. New York: Van Nostrand. Taylor, P.J., 1996. ‘Embedded statism and the social sciences: Opening up to new spaces’. Environment and Planning A 28: 1917–28. Virilio, P., 1994. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walker, R.B.J., 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, C., 1994. ‘Shoring up a sea of signs: How the Caribbean Basin Initiative framed the US invasion of Grenada’. Society and Space 12: 547–58. Williams, W.A., 1969. The Roots of the Modern American Empire. New York: Vintage. 32

2

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Realism and Geopolitics Simon Dalby

Geopolitics: then and now The term geopolitics has many contested meanings. Its historical concerns with living space, the invocation of global equilibrium and the balance of power in Henry Kissinger’s political rhetoric, the assumptions of given contexts as the terrain of great-power rivalry, the geography of choke points and shatter-belts in geostrategy are all linked to the term in various ways. The reinvention of ‘Victorian’ approaches (Grygiel, 2006) and specifically the invocation of Halford Mackinder (1904; 1919) and his ideas of an Asian heartland as key to the patterns of world power, in such texts as the travel writer Robert Kaplan’s high-profile ‘Revenge of geography’ (2009), poses the questions of what the past teaches us and how the notion of geopolitics is now being re-imagined. ‘Victorian’ formulations suggest the contextual givens for humanity: the determinist invocation of limited environmental opportunities linked to an imperial optic where rivalries are inevitable and war the consequence of political ambition tied to inherently expansionist politics. The key ‘realist’ assumption of the inevitability of clashing great powers inscribes rivalry among elites as the defining political condition of humanity (Mearsheimer 2001). War is seen as the ultimate arbiter. While the literature of realism usually claims a tradition stretching back to Thucydides and his analysis of the Peloponnesian War (see Frankel 1996a; 1996b), the discussion of realism was emphasized in post-war US political science following Hans Morgenthau’s germinal text Politics Among Nations (1948). Much of this is directly related to discussions of the presupposition of international anarchy as a situation in which military power acted as the ultimate provider of order given the absence of an over-arching authority (Booth 2010; Waltz 1979). It fed directly into questions of national security, the dominant formulation justifying military action through the Cold War period (Buzan 1983). As the rest of this chapter makes clear, much of this ‘realist’ discussion does not explicitly engage the geographic arrangements of international affairs; contrary to the use of geopolitics in the such publications as Saul Cohen’s geography of international affairs (2009). Frequently the context for power politics is simply taken for granted.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics The invocation of a given although frequently unexamined context provides ‘realist’ authors with a backdrop, a supposedly objective contextualization of human affairs within which the drama of power politics plays out. In Shakespeare’s terms, all the world may be a stage, but assumptions about the arrangement of stage furniture and the location of the various props are not shared by many writers who invoke geographical verities as the basis for their supposedly realist analyses. As some of the examples invoked below suggest, the ability to establish the geographical context for discussion of matters of international politics conveys very considerable analytical and political advantages: it was key to strategic thinking for most of the twentieth century (Dalby 2009a). In the aftermath of the Cold War there has not been widespread agreement on the contours of contemporary geopolitics. Indeed much of the policy discussion over the last two decades has been about claims concerning the geographical specification of contemporary transformations. The sheer speed of transformation is part of the difficulty. As this chapter emphasizes the historical analogies that they invoke may be of considerable use, but the crucial point is that now, to a much greater extent than in the past, humanity has taken its fate into its own hands. Technological innovations, the urbanization of humanity and the possibilities for literally building new environments dwarf the capabilities of the great powers of a century ago and now also offer very different possibilities for warfare. In the case of nuclear weapons the twentieth century presented the prospect of a prompt obliteration of civilization. Now the innovations in satellite technology, computer systems infrastructure and robotic warfare have once again changed the terms of military competition, just as the rapidly changing processes of the global economy cause endless shifts in patterns of production and power. The specification of the appropriate context is crucial to the politics of all this, and a focus on geopolitics makes this especially clear. How politicians invoke the supposed verities of context to frame policy matters greatly. Insofar as geopolitics is understood to be about the discursive figures of the world used by political elites (N. Parker 2010), then the scholarly task of examining these imaginative geographies remains of pressing importance. The task for critical geopolitics scholars remains precisely to challenge these taken-for-granted contexts in political discourse. Contrasting traditional political realism with its focus on inevitable rivalries with new ecological understandings of how the planet works is but one way of undertaking this critical task, but one that does powerfully challenge the basic tenets of realism by tackling its implicit geographical premises or lack thereof. To illustrate this argument this chapter first looks back to the invocation of earlier texts and the implied historical analogies that so frequently structure geopolitical discourse. It then revisits some of the now-forgotten discussions at the end of the Cold War concerning the appropriate contextualization of US foreign policy in a world without the Soviet Union. Discussions of contemporary globalization and the potential for future conflicts are then examined briefly for their invocations of context. Finally the chapter looks at the larger ecological context of humanity and suggests that the most important contextualization is now the changing environment. Not only do the new geological circumstances of the Anthropocene 34

Realism and Geopolitics era pose new challenges, they also undercut the determinist premises of classical geopolitics by forcing a recognition that the new world we live in is of our own making, not a given context within which traditional realist rivalries are played out.

Looking back: historical analogues While the geographical literature has frequently looked back a century to Halford Mackinder (Kearns 2009), and indeed Robert Kaplan explicitly cited Mackinder as the key to understanding the future in Asia (2009), recent commentaries on China in particular have also invoked both Norman Angell, author most famously of The Great Illusion (1912), and many of A.T. Mahan’s historical volumes, including the Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), to think through what lessons might be learned from the past and how current circumstances can be interpreted in light of previous events (Holmes and Yoshihara, 2006). These themes are explicitly discussed in the 4 December 2010 special issue of the Economist magazine suggesting that this matter is far from only an American preoccupation. Jakub Grygiel looks back to Mackinder too, in part, but he is much more concerned that the failure of the USA to shift its geostrategic focus to China may lead to its decline if it fails to understand the priorities in its new strategic context (2006). Where Angell warned of the irrationalities of great-power warfare in an already interconnected world, his warnings were ignored and the tragic consequences played out over the following three decades. Now the invocations of great-power rivalries in the face of common dangers once again focus attention on matters that might indeed become selffulfilling prophesies. In contrast Thomas Barnett, who might indeed be read as an extreme re-invention of liberal internationalism, sees China as America’s potential ally in the world of the future, rather than a potential rival (2009). His map of the world suggests the need to incorporate the peripheral parts of the world polity into the global economy. Fareed Zakaria’s much commented upon discussion of The Post American World (2009) implies that national rivalries will persist, but while the possibilities of cooperation are open America will continue to be the source of leadership and inspiration. Fear of China will not be a serious matter if Americans undertake a revival of their dreams of a better world, built on their traditional cultural strengths of technological innovation and economic change. But which geographical arrangements are implicit in these texts matters greatly; how the world is specified is an inescapable part of these differing claims as to what is important (Dalby 2011a). All this is partly a matter of methodological nationalism, of a focus on the world through Westphalian lenses, despite the fact that the great powers are much better understood as empires than nation states. The policy discourse is dramatically enhanced by the persistence of nationalist tropes as the terms within which media reportage of the world is written. In the process the complex circumstances of contemporary environmental and economic interdependence are always in danger of being pushed aside in the narratives of 35

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics winners and losers, how our side is doing, and what a particular ‘we’ gains in the process. When security and danger is invoked, the specifications of the arena of contest are frequently overlaid with moral judgement and the insistence on certainties in the face of supposed external threats (Debrix 2008). Political realists will no doubt argue that politics is about who is in charge first and foremost in a world of inevitable faction and power struggle. Being a superpower supposedly means, in terms attributed to Michael Ledeen, that ‘every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business’ (Goldburg 2002). It is apparently about deciding who gets to decide long before it focuses on what needs to be decided. George W. Bush famously called himself ‘the decider’ much to the delight of social theorists who looked to Carl Schmitt for theoretical inspiration. But of course who gets to decide what depends on how the context is specified and hence how things that might need to be decided are prioritized so that specific deciders are deemed appropriate by, well, those who decide who should decide! The specification of a given context as the arena for the human drama is a very powerful discursive move: it literally is geopolitics. The Victorian view which specifies the world in terms of the inevitability of clashing spatial entities in an eternal struggle for dominance is the geopolitical contextualization for discussing ‘realist’ politics. Gerry Kearns invokes Peter Kropotkin’s discussion of mutual aid and cooperative ventures in both the animal and human world in contrast to the Mackinderian assumption of an inevitably social Darwinian world (2009). The logics of neoliberalism and of competition and the market enforced by state action to write rules favorable to an increasingly globalized capitalism emphasize this ethos of competition. Unrestricted competition was supposedly the Victorian way. Grabbing peripheral real estate certainly was, as were inter-imperial rivalries, although much of the potential difficulty this gave rise to for Europeans in Africa were sorted out in Berlin in the 1880s. For Africans the result was altogether different: slaughter and starvation was the lot of the people who lived under Belgian domination in particular (Hochschild 1998). The imperial violence of Victorian conquest, of the appropriation of Africa in particular, but substantial parts of Asia too in the nineteenth century suggested the inevitability of rivalry and the geographic appropriation of territory as key to increased power. The extraordinary expansion of the USA, arguably the most successful of the European empires in the Victorian period, in terms of territory conquered and population growth and subsequently its rapid growth in international reach, only emphasizes this point (Smith 2003). The assumption of rivalry and priority given to political dominance and control is key. Imperial rulers in the period were concerned primarily with control, not with the fate of their subject peoples, many of whom were designated as less than civilized, and hence as not requiring modes of conduct that ostensibly applied to the rulers. In the imperial logic it followed that, if the miserable fate of imperial subjects could be blamed on their stingy or fickle nature, then so much the better (Davis 2001). Victorian forces were mostly involved in small wars on the periphery of empire, wars of conquest and policing actions where the local populations resisted, as they 36

Realism and Geopolitics frequently did, and met their fate in the face of much superior firepower (Boot 2002). Nonetheless the arms races in Europe and the eventual catastrophic clashes of arms in what are not very helpfully called the two world wars, both exhausted the European empires and removed the legitimacy of their claims to rule in Africa and much of Asia. Viewed through Asian lenses the warfare of the twentieth century started earlier with the Chinese civil wars then the violence of the Japanese expansion and really only stopped temporarily in 1953 when hostilities came to a halt in Korea. The long struggles of decolonization, ‘the forgotten wars’ of the mid-twentieth century (Bayly and Harper 2008), are the military struggles that matter when viewed through many Asian lenses. The Vietnamese war, first with the French and subsequently with the Americans, stretched on till 1975. The focus on the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the USA that overshadowed the second half of the twentieth century, the transformation of destructive power coupled with missile technology that required a consideration of ‘whole earth security’ (Deudney 1983), is only part of the key geopolitical changes of the twentieth century. Understanding the global transformations that came about in these terms emphasizes the point that wars seen as peripheral through European lenses were key to Asian developments. The corollary is that imperial wars are not unusual, and that the pattern of American interventions in numerous places is not new either, discussions of a New World Order after the Gulf War in 1991 notwithstanding.

After the Cold War At the end of the Cold War some academic commentators specifically suggested policy options based on the themes of classical geopolitics and made explicit reference to Spykman in particular to raise concerns about the possibility of new hegemons emerging in Eurasia. As O’Loughlin and Heske noted at the time, five major tenets of postwar American global strategic thinking were derived from Spykman’s writings in the early 1940s (O’Loughlin and Heske 1991; Spykman 1942; 1944). These are, first, the assumption that the USA should behave like all other great powers in assuming that events all over the globe have a direct influence on its interests. Second is the assumption that if these events are to be dealt with accordingly the USA must adopt an interventionist stance and be prepared to involve itself in international political life and be prepared to defend its interests. Third, because of the shrinking of the globe in political and military terms this involvement would necessarily involve actions all over the globe and in particular on the fringes of the ‘world island’. Fourth, in adherence to the anti-hegemonic role it had played in thwarting the Japanese and German ambitions the USA would have to continue to assure that no power dominated the ‘world island’. Finally Spykman’s work anticipated the doctrine, if not the term, of containment that was formulated by the Truman administration and formed the basis, despite dramatic political changes in the interim, for US foreign policy until the late 1980s. 37

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics But geopolitics is about more than just these themes, important though they are in US foreign policy. Geopolitics was also understood during the Cold War period as the bipolar rivalry for world power in which the danger of Soviet control of the world island remained a persistent theme. In a world understood as two players in a struggle for influence and territory all the political spaces available were scripted in terms of how they related to the overarching superpower struggle (Gray 1977; 1988; Jay 1979). Prestige, willpower and determination to prevail all counted in this understanding. Crucial tokens in this rivalry included the possession of weapons systems, the technological ability to monitor the other’s activities and the military capability to threaten enormous destruction through nuclear warfare. The pursuit of control over territory was also essential. Land provided for military bases and the control over the economic and other resources necessary for the continued militarization of international politics. But how was all this to play out after the Cold War rivalry no longer determined the overarching structure of geopolitics? One debate from this period is especially germane in terms of the geographical imagination used to structure the discussion of the appropriate American strategy. Stephen Van Evera’s cogently argued case for drastically reduced US military capabilities started with a review of the geopolitical logic of containment, drawing heavily on Kennan’s arguments about the USA ensuring the independence of the major industrial regions of the globe (Kennan 1947; Van Evera 1990). Van Evera’s text is interesting precisely because he made the case for the obsolescence of Cold War geopolitical thinking as a useful basis for US security thinking. Specifically he argued that the introduction of nuclear weapons had made the military conquest of North America by any Eurasian hegemon virtually impossible due to the difficulty of an effective first strike. Second, the growth of ‘knowledge based forms of production’ reduces the ability of a hegemon to extract militarily useful resources from its conquests. Third, he argued, that the Soviet Union, as it then still was, was no longer a ‘plausible aspirant’ to Eurasian hegemony. Van Evera also argued that the Third World is effectively irrelevant to US security because its industrial potential is too small to present a military threat, and the US is not dependent on its resources. In light of 9/11 and subsequent American military activities in south-west Asia, this geopolitical framing is richly ironic but the crucial point here is that such geographical framings are key to ‘realist’ reasoning. In sum these arguments suggest that the bipolar geopolitical logic of the Cold War years offered no guidance for assessing US strategic priorities after the Cold War. One potential danger that might threaten US prosperity is a major European war and hence the logic for maintaining a US presence there. Van Evera’s argument led to one response that argued that the traditional US focus on the North Atlantic as the most important arena of foreign policy is outdated (Hudson et al. 1991). They argued that in part this geopolitical preoccupation is a legacy of Mahan, Mackinder, Bowman, Spykman, deSeversky and others (see G. Parker 1985). In light of the then-current economic growth in both Japan and the German-led European Community they argued that the USA should concentrate its military, trade and foreign policy on areas of immediate concern for its own economic interests. Recognizing the perils of ‘imperial overstretch’ expounded 38

Realism and Geopolitics on at length in Paul Kennedy’s earlier Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987), these authors suggested prioritizing American commitments in an explicitly geographic formulation. These areas, they argued, should be constructed as an American ‘zone of cooperation’ focused on the Pacific, including Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Siberia. They continued that the decline of the north eastern USA and the rise of the south and the west should encourage a shift away from the traditional Atlantic focus. With this new strategic focus on the Pacific and Latin America, US military power could be reconstituted and its long-term strategic future assured. The geographical premises in these contrasting interpretations of power politics are key to what divides them, but rarely are such geographical premises the focus of sustained critique in ‘realist’ discussions of world politics. In the 1990s such discussions of geostrategic priorities were trumped by the more general enthusiasm for globalization and the related argument that the world needed to be remade in America’s image. An altogether more ambitious agenda for the extension of US power emerged as discussions such as Krauthammer’s ‘The unipolar moment’ suggested the opportunity to shape much of the world to the liking of American elites (1992). The exuberant celebrations of globalization were encapsulated in the Clinton administration’s foreign policy agenda of democratic ‘enlargement’ in the 1990s. Liberal internationalism was supposedly triumphant and rivalry was subsumed into an expansionist logic that assumed that ‘democracy’ would vanquish all potential foes to a world order understood as peaceful once modernity had spread. In this regard the more explicitly military formulations of the Bush doctrine, the plan to use all means necessary including military force to end tyranny on earth, follows the same enlargement geopolitical logic (Barnett 2004). But the imbroglios in Iraq and Afghanistan proved that distant wars in Eurasia were not the panacea that their advocates thought. By early 2011 one ‘realist’ was arguing that such liberal imperialism had badly damaged American national interests precisely because it had caused a serious case of imperial overstretch (Mearsheimer 2011).

Globalization The relentless saber rattling on the part of neoconservatives concerning Iranian threats since 9/11 perpetuated the pattern. Everyone involved has long understood that regime change in Tehran is the avowed aim of the policy (Ritter 2006). But assuming that either Arab rulers or many of the rest of the political elites elsewhere will applaud and welcome the removal of the regime and the Revolutionary Guards, is an assumption that might well prove a major miscalculation. So far after 30 years of refusing to recognize the regime and rejecting political overtures to deal with outstanding issues, Washington seemed happy to assert its dominance. Resistance in the long run apparently has to be demonstrated to be unsustainable if ‘Imperium’ is to be asserted (Lipschutz 2009).

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics But elsewhere, the assumption that Washington should rule and have its foreign policy in the region run by militarist factions in Israel is not necessarily accepted. In the event of an attack on Tehran, it is not clear why the rest of the world should allow the USA to effectively suspend international law once again and proceed with its plans. Debate about Iran crystallizes the issues facing the scholar of geopolitics not only in matters of arms control and nuclear technology (Dalby 2011b). The possibilities of the end of US imperial dominance coming quickly (Ferguson 2010), might indeed be a result of much of the rest of the world deciding that rather than cooperation with the USA in yet further attempts to use military force to rule the Middle East opposition to these efforts is necessary (Dalby 2009a). What kind of world we will live in later in the twenty-first century in part depends on political assumptions as to whether the USA is to be a unipolar hegemon using force or a multilateral leader in tackling common problems. The latter formulation is anathema to many Washington-based observers of the global scene, but the shift in China from a developing country to a potential partner in global matters, exemplified by the shifting dynamics of the Copenhagen climatechange negotiations in 2009, marks a change in emphasis that is noteworthy, not least because it suggests that ‘First World’ solutions to global problems are not any longer the only obvious frameworks for policy. The necessity of coordinating at least some policy matters with the G20 leaders has become clear. Authority over many things is not so obviously resident in Washington even if the US navy still rules the waves in most of the world’s oceans. What is much less remarked upon is that power in the last half century became a matter much more of technology than territory: capital now matters very much more than rural real estate (Nitzan and Bichler 2009). This is the case in terms of economic capabilities and military matters too where high-technology weapons systems require attributes very different from the conscript armies of the early twentieth century and the supplies of rural manpower, both in the metropolitan states and in their colonies, that allowed such military mobilizations (Singer 2009). Similarly global corporations are part and parcel of struggles over cyberspace, and, while states are trying to impose many national controls over how the infrastructure is built and who uses it, online matters frequently do not fit into state attempts at political administration (Deibert and Rohozinski 2010). The impetus to territorial expansion has, not surprisingly, diminished, as humanity has become an urban and industrial species; but the desire to control distant supplies of important substances, one of the logics of empire has, as the current violence in the Middle East attests, not disappeared, despite the supposed end of formal territorial– imperial modes of rule. Nonetheless at least the fiction that sovereignty resides in local rulers and that territorial rule applies, has become the norm (Elden 2009). With that has come a recognition that the rules that apply in various places are not necessarily congruent with the Westphalian model: regimes of sovereignty apply in geographically diverse ways that reflect the uneven development of the global economy and the differentiated human experience in the circuits of that economic system (Agnew 2009).

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Realism and Geopolitics The emergence of complex governance structures, the United Nations only most obviously, is also related to this transformation. The nuclear revolution has made the necessity of ‘bounding power’ (Deudney 2007) unavoidable, even if political elites are reluctant to deal with the matter as seriously as many of us wish they would. But the logics of rivalry and struggles for power and influence in political matters persist, despite the grudging admission that overarching matters of civilizational survival trump rivalry as the priority in terms of what quickly if imprecisely became ‘global’ security. The expansion of US power in the Middle East of late looks remarkably like further imperial adventures in the periphery, although now of course petroleum is a key additional factor given its peculiar importance in the global economy (Harvey 2003). Indeed, some of the immediate political crises of our times, and in particular the manufactured crisis over the supposed Iranian threat, replay some of the worst imperial adventures of the Victorian era. Like 1914 the possibilities of unforeseen escalation should the shooting, or perhaps more accurately the bombing, start, are what make commentators on that particular crisis so nervous about cavalier claims. More ominously the refusal of the US government in particular to recognize the regime three decades after the overthrow of the revolution perpetuates political games of dominance, epitomized in the Ledeen doctrine, where cooperation would be so much more efficacious. The construction of US interests in the region in terms of a global war on terror added to the difficulty. But empires have, as in the case of the British one, ruled at least as much by financial power and periodic military interventions as they have by direct territorial control. Endless invocation of the dangers of al-Qaeda everywhere political violence erupts has lead to formulations of numerous opposition movements as part of a global war. In David Kilcullen’s terms, ‘accidental guerrillas’ (2009) have been made into part of an international terrorist movement and all sorts of policy mistakes made by misreading this political terrain. Once again the simplistic verities of militarization that legitimize violent policy are antithetical to the appropriate designation of distant dangers if anything other than mobilizing ‘us’ to fight ‘them’ is involved. The assumption that disorder comes from the peripheries, where rogue regimes reside and people breed irresponsibly feeds into the contemporary US geopolitical imaginary (Barnett 2004). Lumping all opposition into such a single category makes for simple exposition and a reassertion of realist assumptions that power is about violent struggle between clashing geographical entities but hopelessly inadequate policy if the oversimplifications become the basis for action. It does, as Derek Gregory makes clear, reprise numerous imperial tropes in contemporary articulations of the architecture of enmity (2004). It may even yet lead to further extensions of classical geopolitics and discussions of an Anglosphere that perpetuates claims to English-speaking superiority in the Middle East (Megoran 2010). Robert Fisk, in his compendium of 30 years’ reflections on politics in the region, explicitly poses matters as conquest, suggesting that the old pattern of European, and by extension now American, imperial power operating to subdue economically important peripheries, continues with the Arab world merely being the latest region to come under external military 41

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics domination (2006). Realist claims are, it turns out, intertwined with highly contested geographical framings of the arena of international politics.

Anthropocene geopolitics But while the moral case against imperial activities is clear (Gregory 2010), the changing ecological circumstances of humanity in the Anthropocene add compelling material reasons for challenging misleading colonial formulations of contemporary global security. The Anthropocene refers to the recognition by earth system scientists that humanity has transformed its circumstances to the extent that we now live in a new geological era, one that may have many profound effects on the human condition in coming decades (The Economist made this a cover story too, on 28 May 2011). One of the great dangers of the current moment, to borrow Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill’s formulation, at the end of what they term the Great Acceleration – a period that followed on from the first period of the Anthropocene, the nineteenth-century coal-powered industrial era – is precisely that traditional geopolitical mappings of events will be invoked in futile but very violent attempts to control the coming disruptions caused by ecological changes already set in motion by carboniferous capitalism (2007). The Victorian formulations of metropolitan virtue threatened by peripheral danger reverse the causal processes actually in motion if the scientific analyses of the Anthropocene are taken seriously (Dalby 2009b). Urban cores of the global economy disrupt peripheral places directly by extracting resources and remaking rural (and maritime) ecologies and indirectly disrupt ecologies by changing the atmosphere and causing climate change. The necessity of tackling these new ecological circumstances of the human condition require abandoning of Victorian thinking about both empire and elite rivalry. In that sense, Deudney’s hope that what he terms ‘negarchial’ structures of mutual restraint will effectively constrain nuclear weapons in future (2007), now needs to be extended to matters of biospheric governance too. If we are to weather the storms that are coming and effectively become the stewards of the earth system in a third phase of the Anthropocene, as Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill suggest may yet happen (2007), then abandoning Victorian notions of hierarchical governance and assumptions of inevitable violent rivalries will clearly be necessary. Understanding ourselves as a part of a dynamic biosphere, rather than on a planet whose surface we can divide and rule with military force, is an essential ontological shift for any geopolitics that makes sense in the new context of the twenty-first century after the Great Acceleration (Dalby 2009a). What is inadequately understood as globalization makes much more of a difference than is usually recognized and does so because to a very substantial extent the whole discussion of globalization still takes place either through an explicitly Westphalian set of lenses or through an imperial set where the struggle for dominance in world politics is assumed to be what ultimately matters in terms of the potential threats or opportunities that something called globalization offers. 42

Realism and Geopolitics Where environmental threats to this are acknowledged, they frequently are either collapsed into problems and limits on development or ignored because predictions are impossible in the long term. That globalization is the process of ecological change is rarely countenanced, but even a quick look at the contemporary literature on earth system science suggests that globalization is actually a biophysical process quite as much as it is about trade, border crossings, internet connectivities, global culture or threats to the contemporary order (Dalby 2009b). Understanding globalization as ‘actually existing carboniferous capitalism’ means focusing on the changing material context for humanity. In material terms humanity is transforming the biosphere and introducing new ‘forcing mechanisms’ into the earth system. We have taken our fate into our own hands, and how we choose to make things in the next generation or two will present the ‘environmental’ context within which decision-makers in the latter part of this century will make their policies, specify priorities and try to rule. In the process environmental determinist arguments should finally be finished off. As climate change accelerates in the coming decades, how elites respond to the inevitable disruptions will matter. Painting these coming dislocations as matters of national security for which fences and machine guns to keep refugees out are policy priorities remains a real danger, as Bangladeshis watching the construction of fences by Indian authorities along their borders are increasingly realizing (Jones 2009). The siege mentality and the invocation of ‘security first’ is counterproductive, not only because such policies deal solely with local expressions of some of the symptoms of climate change, but also because they are likely to generate precisely the political and violent action to which they are ostensibly a reaction. But this may be precisely what happens if ‘realism’ is invoked. Assuming that desperate refugees are a security threat rather than fellow humans in need of assistance is a political choice likely to be made by Victorians: the nineteenth-century mentality of class and racial prejudices in imperial times suggests both that this is tragically likely and hugely destructive (Davis 2001). This all may happen if the political elites fall back on careless or, more likely, convenient thinking and draw misleading analogies from the past to determine their priorities in the coming decades. We may get Robert Kaplan’s ‘coming anarchy’ (1994) and, if we do get it, then it will in part be because political elites have bought into simplistic invocations of the ‘revenge of geography’ (Kaplan 2009) or, at least, some very Victorian assumptions about empires and the inevitability of their rivalries. If they do this they will continue to ignore what geographers of many political stripes have been trying to tell them for the last generation at least. They will certainly preclude learning the lessons of globalization and fail to understand the new geological realities that face humanity. The largest potential geopolitical danger that looms now is a failure to understand that the geographies that the Victorians assumed were verities are being changed by human action. That is the key point that needs emphasis from all who work on geopolitical topics. We are making the future context for humanity, literally deciding on such things as whether the planet will have ice caps on the poles in coming centuries. If the changes we have already 43

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics wrought cause rapid ecological changes then it is clear that global institutions are not in place to facilitate adaptation. Crisis managers may well invoke Victorian verities and the violent logics of national security if this happens. While Mahan’s concerns with sea lanes and choke points and the importance of a blue water navy in protecting commerce are certainly appropriate, given rising concerns about piracy, keeping the Straits of Hormuz open and maintaining globalized commodity chains intact, naval strategy is not helpful in dealing with rising sea levels and the possibilities of other climate-change disruptions. Ironically, if the political elites fail to deal with these disruptions then navies may be called in to try deal with the consequences, either evacuating people from disasters or making sure they do not become migrants, depending on which geopolitical frame their political masters use to view the situation. But there is nothing inevitable about this. It is a matter of how politics plays out in the coming decades and how the geopolitical framings of the future are constituted to provide the discursive context for political action. If as Grygiel suggests, great powers fall when they allow themselves to be distracted from their core security priorities (2006), it seems that the current US elites may be in considerable danger of failing, precisely because neither the Victorian distractions in the Middle East, nor great-power fears of a rising China are their core security concern. If one takes the Anthropocene as the context for contemporary geopolitical thinking then focusing on the processes needed to perpetuate a fairly stable biosphere, de-carbonizing the global economy and constructing the appropriate cooperative governance arrangements that this will require are now much more important than military adventures in the Middle East. How to build sustainable urban communities that require much less energy than twentieth-century suburban automobile mode does is now a pressing priority (Davis 2010) even if such thinking has yet to penetrate either security studies or the think tanks that produce geopolitical punditry. A shared biosphere, in which humanity is destabilizing the conditions that gave rise to civilization in the first place, requires a very different set of policies from those of a century ago. What environmental change is making clear is that the context is changing and doing so as a result of human actions, mostly on the part of the rich and powerful, not the poor and the marginal who frequently get blamed for all sorts of things that are not their doing. Making this point clear undercuts the determinist logic of Victorian geopolitics and should force us all to recognize the crucial importance of the invocation of context in geopolitical reasoning. The consequences of doing so are becoming ever more important as the earth system analyses continue to document the seriousness of the accelerating transformation of the biosphere that is the only context that ultimately matters to humanity.

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References Agnew, J., 2009. Globalization and Sovereignty. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Angell, N., 1912. The Great Illusion. London: William Heinemann. Barnett, T., 2004. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty First Century. New York: Putnam. —— Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. New York: Putnam. Bayly, C., and T. Harper, 2008. Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire. London: Penguin. Boot, M., 2002. The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books. Booth, K., (ed.), 2010. Realism and World Politics. London: Routledge. Buzan, B., 1983. People States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations. Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Cohen, S.B., 2009. Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dalby, S., 2009a. ‘Geopolitics, the revolution in military affairs and the Bush doctrine’. International Politics 46: 234–52. —— 2009b. Security and Environmental Change. Cambridge: Polity. —— 2011a. ‘Geographies of the international system: Globalisation, empire and the Anthropocene’. In P. Aalto, S. Moisio and V. Harle (eds), International Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–48. —— 2011b. ‘Critical geopolitics and the control of arms in the twenty first century’. Contemporary Security Policy 32: 40–56. Davis, M., 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. —— 2010. ‘Who will build the ark?’ New Left Review 61: 29–46. Debrix, F., 2008. Tabloid Terror: War Culture and Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Deibert, R.J., and R. Rohozinski, 2010. ‘Risking security: Policies and paradoxes of cyberspace security’. International Political Sociology 4: 15–32. Deudney, D., 1983. Whole Earth Security: Towards a Geopolitics of Peace. Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute. —— 2007. Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Elden, S., 2009. Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferguson, N., 2010. ‘Complexity and collapse: Empires on the edge of chaos’. Foreign Affairs 89: 18–32. Fisk, R., 2006. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Harper Perennial. Frankel, B., 1996a. Roots of Realism. London: Frank Cass. —— 1996b. Realism: Restatements and Renewal. London: Frank Cass. Goldberg, J., 2002. ‘Baghdad delenda est: Part 2’. National Review, .

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Gray, C.S., 1977. The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands and the Technological Revolution. New York: Crane Russak. —— 1988. The Geopolitics of Superpower. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Gregory, D., 2004. The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. —— 2010. ‘War and peace’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 154–86. Grygiel, J.J., 2006. Great Powers and Geopolitical Change. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, D., 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hochschild, A., 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Holmes, J.R., and T. Yoshihara, 2006. ‘China and the commons: Angell or Mahan?’ World Affairs 168(4): 172–91. Hudson, V.M., et al., 1991. ‘Why the Third World matters, why Europe probably won’t: The geoeconomics of circumscribed engagement’. Journal of Strategic Studies 14: 255–98. Jay, P., 1979. ‘Regionalism as geopolitics’. Foreign Affairs 58: 485–514. Jones, R., 2009. ‘Geopolitical boundary narratives, the global war on terror and border fencing in India’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers ns 34: 290–304. Kaplan, R., 1994. ‘The coming anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’. Atlantic Monthly 273(2): 44–76. —— 2009. ‘The revenge of geography’. Foreign Policy, May–June: 96–105. Kearns, G., 2009. Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennan, G. [Mr. X], 1947. ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’. Foreign Affairs 25: 566–82. Kennedy, P., 1987. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. Kilcullen, D., 2009. The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. New York: Oxford University Press. Krauthammer, C., 1992. ‘The unipolar moment’. In G. Allison and G.F. Treverton (eds), Rethinking America’s Security: Beyond the Cold War to a New World Order. New York: Norton, pp. 295–306. Lipschutz, R., 2009. The Constitution of Imperium. New York: Paradigm. Mackinder, H.J., 1904. ‘The geographical pivot of history’. Geographical Journal 23: 421–37. —— 1919. Geographical Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction. London: Constable. Mahan, A.T., 1890. The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. Mearsheimer, J.J., 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton. —— 2011. ‘Imperial by design’. National Interest 111: 16–34. Megoran, N., 2010. ‘Neoclassical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 187–9. Morgentau, H., 1948. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf. 46

Realism and Geopolitics Nitzan, J., and S. Bichler, 2009. Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder. London: Routledge. O’Loughlin, J., and H. Heske, 1991. ‘From “geopolitik” to “geopolitique”: Converting a discipline for war to a discipline for peace’. In N. Kliot and S. Waterman (eds), The Political Geography of War and Peace. London: Pinter, pp. 37–59. Parker, G., 1985. Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century. London: Croom Helm. Parker, N., 2010. ‘Empire as a geopolitical figure’. Geopolitics 15: 109–132. Ritter, S., 2006. Target Iran: The Truth about the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. Washington DC: Nation Books. Singer, P.W., 2009. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin. Smith, N., 2003. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Steffen, W., P. Crutzen and J.R. O’Neill, 2007. ‘The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature?’ Ambio 36: 614–21. Spykman, N., 1942. America’s Strategy in World Politics. New York: Harcourt Brace. —— 1944. The Geography of the Peace. Hamdon, CT: Archon. Van Evera, S., 1990. ‘Why Europe matters, why the Third World doesn’t: American grand strategy after the Cold War’. Journal of Strategic Studies 13: 1–51. Waltz, K., 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Zakaria, F., 2009. The Post-American World. New York: Norton.

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3

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things Martin Müller

Introduction Texts are at the heart of the critical geopolitics enterprise. Critical geopolitics hinges on the assumption that we can read global politics off textual evidence. More than that, it argues that texts are not mimetic but productive of the political world: texts construct geopolitics. This premise sparked most of the thrust for the engagement with the written and spoken word and the analysis of texts became the bread-and-butter business of critical geopolitics. So much so that in 2000, in a short commentary in an edited collection on geopolitical traditions, Nigel Thrift expressed apprehension of the ‘mesmerized attention to texts and images’ and the ‘interpretation of hyperbolic written and drawn rhetoric … often read by only a few and taken in by even fewer’ (Thrift 2000: 381, 385). As a parallel agenda, Thrift outlined a path for critical geopolitics that would see it becoming more sensitive to what he called ‘the little things’ – the mundane details of life – however without jettisoning the concern with language and text. The present contribution charts the engagement with text and discourse in critical geopolitics. It starts from the staple of textual analysis, tracing the outlines of existing bodies of work in formal, practical and popular geopolitics and introducing deconstruction as a principal reading strategy. Staking out the difference between text and discourse, it reviews approaches to discourse analysis in critical geopolitics and points to a number of methodological lacunae that remain to be addressed. The final section takes up the challenge posed by Thrift and explores perspectives of integrating text with other categories (‘Texts and …’) in considering practices, affect and things as central components of a broader notion of discourse.

Geopolitics as text The cardinal role of texts for critical geopolitics is manifest in metaphors such as ‘writing global space’ (Ó Tuathail 1996), ‘geopolitical scripts’ (Ó Tuathail 1992), or ‘geo-graphing’ as ‘earth-writing/describing’ (Dalby 1991; Ó Tuathail 1994a).

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics The meaning … of geopolitics takes place within the play that is the web of language and (con)text. As such, geopolitical discourse in global politics is understood to be the result of perpetual ‘geo-graphing’: the production and dissemination of strategic texts and maps. (Dodds and Sidaway 1994: 518) In placing an emphasis on the construction of meaning in texts, critical geopolitics distinguishes itself from classical geopolitics. Studying location and resources as sources of political power over territory, classical geopolitics considers itself an objective science of how geography influences world politics (Dodds 2010). Phrased in the words of a classical geopolitician: ‘geography does not argue. It simply is’ (Spykman 1938: 236). It is this purported objectivity and the apologetic justification of power politics and interstate rivalry that comes with it that critical geopolitics protests. Understanding geopolitics as text opens an avenue to see global space as a malleable creation with political purpose and potentially multiple meanings. It does not just exist, set in stone, somewhere ‘out there’ for us to discover, but is a product of our own making. After all, ‘it is humans that decide how to represent things, and not the things themselves’ (Barnes and Duncan 1992: 2). The fascination with texts as the encapsulation of geopolitics must be understood within the disciplinary trajectory of human geography and the social sciences at large. A major source of inspiration, the works of poststructuralist philosophers, generated attention to all matters linguistic in social science research in the 1980s, bringing about what is often called a ‘linguistic turn’ (Dear 1988). Seminal ideas such as Jean-François Lyotard’s claim about the end of meta-narratives (1984), Richard Rorty’s plea for a linguistic philosophy (1967), or Jacques Derrida’s provocative dictum that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ helped propel academic interest in texts. Under the impression of poststructuralist philosophy, human geography started to become more aware of the constructive effect of texts and language towards the end of the 1980s (Dear 1988). At that time, taking a critical stance towards texts-as-objects research was something of a lacuna, as Barnes and Duncan observed: ‘very little attention is paid to writing in human geography’ (1992: 1). The early concern with writing and texts in critical geopolitics can therefore be traced back to the budding interest in texts and language around the time of its birth at the end of the 1980s. And critical geopolitics was not alone. In international relations, too, viewing world politics through a textual lens had sparked attention (Campbell 1992; Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Shapiro 1989; 1992). The texts that construct global space and are the objects of analysis in critical geopolitics come in a multitude of forms. A broad variety of them is assembled in the Geopolitics Reader (Ó Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge 2006). A classic genre are the geopolitical doctrines or academic treatises of classical geopolitics. Halford Mackinder with his theory of the Eurasian heartland (Mackinder 1904; Dodds and Sidaway 2004) and Karl Haushofer and his ideology of Lebensraum (Wolkersdorfer 1999) are perhaps among the best-known exponents of intellectuals of statecraft. Yet, one could expand this list of éminences grises without effort, adding names such as that of American geographer and presidential adviser Isaiah Bowman (Ó Tuathail 1994b), American military strategist Edward Luttwak (Ó Tuathail 1996; Sparke 50

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things 1998), American political scientist Samuel Huntington (Ó Tuathail 1996) or the Russian self-styled philosopher and geopolitician Aleksandr Dugin (Ingram 2001). Another source of texts for critical geopolitics are speeches and policy documents as well as government records of various sorts, emerging from what Ó Tuathail and Dalby call ‘practical geopolitics’ (1998: 5). Dalby, for example, draws on documents by the Committee on the Present Danger to trace the construction of a Cold War narrative of security and danger in the United States (1990b). Policy documents and speeches by then US President George Bush form the basis of an analysis of the representation of the end of the Cold War in American foreign policy (Ó Tuathail 1992). Dodds reconstructs British representations of Argentina from government records and shows how they legitimise the adoption of particular foreign policies (1994). The underlying rationale is that studying official texts can tell us something about what geopolitical visions underpin political decision-making and how political leaders make sense of geopolitical events and form a coherent storyline. Texts also afford a view of geopolitics beyond the arena of statecraft by giving access to perceptions of ordinary people, so-called ‘popular geopolitics’. In an early formative intervention, Sharp makes the case that ‘geopolitics does not simply “trickle down” from elite texts to popular ones’ (1993: 493). Rather, popular understandings are tied up in an intricate interplay with elite ones and provide the foundation on which elite texts can draw in order to assert their authority and gain acceptance. The texts of popular geopolitics comprise newspapers and magazines (Bernazzoli 2010; Sharp 2000a), cartoons (Dodds 2007), films (Dodds 2006), evangelical texts (Dittmer and Sturm 2010), comic books (Dittmer 2005), maps (Culcasi 2006), images (Strüver 2007) and so on. What becomes apparent from this list is the rather broad understanding of text as also encompassing still and motion pictures of various sorts. This falls into the broader definition of text as representation – as something that constructs meaning valued as reality (Barnes and Duncan 1992).

Critical geopolitics as textual deconstruction Understanding geopolitics as text opens an important avenue for a critical geopolitics through deconstruction. Although often used as a catch-all term for challenging taken-for-granted assumptions of all sorts (Barnett 1999), deconstruction here refers to the particular practice of reading texts pioneered by Derrida. At its core, it posits that meaning-construction in texts is contingent: it represents one of many possible meanings, in other words, texts are polysemic. When critical geopolitics speaks of the textuality of geopolitics, it is referring to the multiple meanings that the term can have – meanings that are actualised in concrete contexts and with reference to other texts. From this poststructuralist perspective, a text is therefore ‘no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces’ (Derrida 1979: 84). Correspondingly, geopolitics51

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics as-text is only one of many possibilities of representing world politics. The task of a critical geopolitics-as-deconstruction, then, is to uncover alternative meanings and provide alternative readings of geopolitical texts, so as to expose the contingency of geopolitics and challenge its knowledge claims (Ó Tuathail 1994a). In so doing, critical geopolitics, it is hoped, can mobilise its ‘emancipatory potential’ (Dalby 1991: 276) and provide alternative visions. Derrida’s deconstruction has been a key source of inspiration for the project of critical geopolitics. Its main idea relies on the identification of binary meaning structures in texts, thus foregrounding the absences in a text and the undecidability of meaning. This aims to show how ‘text functions against its own explicit (metaphysical) assertions … by inscribing a systematic “other message” behind or through what is being said’ (Derrida 1981: xiii). If, for example, a text’s primary message is ‘Russia is a strong state’, deconstruction argues that the opposite, ‘Russia is a weak state’, is an equally possible meaning that is always present within the text. Every hegemonic meaning contains within it the possibility of deconstruction. By bringing the opposite into being, by subverting and contesting the primary meaning, by showing that the opposite is also possible, the primary meaning is revealed to be arbitrary, because it relies on the exclusion of the opposite. Critique of geopolitical texts, in this sense, ‘is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. … Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult’ (Foucault 1988: 154–5). As a critique of Western metaphysics, deconstruction reads back from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself. (Derrida 1981: xv) Echoing Derrida’s concern, Albert argued that it is part of the deconstructionist enterprise to study how the continuous use of space and territory in language is not somehow natural but rather a specific way of producing objective meaning (1999). ‘Territory talk’ taking the form of geopolitics has become so completely naturalised in the social world that it is not recognised as contingent any more. More than that, anchoring meaning in the seeming objectivity of geographical space provides a sense of certainty, a feeling of location in a world that is otherwise characterised by recurrent change (Campbell 1996). For Dalby, geopolitics ‘is about that ideological process of constructing spatial, political and cultural boundaries to demarcate the domestic space as separate from the threatening other’ (1990a: 173). In their studies of US foreign policy, both Dalby and Campbell (1992), for example, demonstrate how the world was mapped into binaries and divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Nato and the Warsaw Pact, the USA and the Soviet Union, or in cartographic representations, blue and red. This spatial division and the concomitant creation of a threatening Other served to justify the need for security policies. 52

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things Taking apart this kind of fixation on spatial meaning through deconstruction is a key concern of critical geopolitics. Ó Tuathail envisions a displacement and reversion of the conceptual infrastructure of critical geopolitics and for that purpose develops the playful metaphor of sighting/siting/citing: One means of doing this [reversing and displacing the conceptual infrastructure of geopolitics] is to subvert the centrality of sight by emphasizing how sight in the geopolitical tradition (just as elsewhere) is a socially sanctioned form of siting places (mapping them into pre-established conceptual landscapes) and also a socially authorized form of citing places (emplacing them within authoritative sets of discourses such as ‘Orientalism’ or ‘development studies’. (Ó Tuathail 1994b: 330) Highlighting the interconnection between space and meaning requires deterritorialising but, according to Albert, also re-territorialising at the same time (1999). This, of course, is the fundamental contradiction in which every form of deconstruction is caught: deconstruction can only take place through reapplying the very form of meaning-construction that is deconstructed. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (Derrida 1976: 24) Critical geopolitics therefore is but another form of meaning construction, no more and no less valid or true than that of geopolitics. One critique of textual deconstruction in critical geopolitics is levelled at the fact that this situatedness of knowledge claims is not reflected, that critical geopolitics falls into the very trap it seeks to avoid: ‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1991: 189). As Neil Smith states in a clear provocation, ‘reduced to formulaic propositions, it is ironic that poststructuralism [in critical geopolitics] actually attempts a reformed positivism’ (2000: 368). Feminist critics in particular argue that instead of contextualising the position of the academic author as the interpreting eye/I, we are often enough presented with a disembodied, seemingly objective critique from a position of superior knowledge (Sharp 2000b; Sparke 2000). If critical geopolitics recognises that there can be no one truth, no one valid knowledge, it also has to apply this insight to its own analysis and reflexively situate the researcher and her interpretations, so as to make clear the partiality and positionality of academic knowledge claims (Hyndman 2004). The researcher, then, ‘is not Hermes who interprets the reasoning of the gods for the recipients of his message’ (Nonhoff 2006, 246). Textual deconstruction in critical geopolitics also has an uneasy relationship with notions of agency. A key proposition of the poststructuralist turn to textuality is that the meanings of texts escape the author’s control. Texts are not wielded as a 53

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics manipulative instrument of persuasion, since the inherent multiplicity of meaning undermines a single purpose. This ‘death of the author’ (Barthes 1977) has not been taken on board in much critical scholarship on formal and practical geopolitics (Müller 2008). Rather, many studies are characterised by the implicit or explicit assumption that the production of geopolitical texts is undertaken with certain intentions and which the researcher – almost like Hermes – needs to unravel (Reuber 2000). In particular, in its focus on how elites exercise power by depicting and representing places in certain ways to further their interests, critical geopolitics assumes the ‘social inscription of global space by intellectuals of statecraft’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 61; see also Dodds and Sidaway 1994: 519). Texts then become ‘political resources which can be mobilized and used to justify particular political arrangements in the world’ (Dalby 1990a: 174). Such a stance of seeing texts as potentially manipulative instruments and the interpreter as the critical decoder sits somewhat uneasily with the general poststructuralist thrust of the field.

Text and discourse: marking the difference Besides ‘text’, ‘discourse’ acts as a conceptual linchpin in critical geopolitics analysis. Perhaps the most obvious distinction between the two concepts is that discourse connects texts to politics. It says something about the social effects of texts and therefore is always more than text (see ‘Texts and …’ below). For Foucault, who is the main reference for the concept of discourse, discourses establish truth regimes. They define what can count as true, what remains hidden and what can be seen. Discourses encircle the field of the speakable and determine who can speak and, as a consequence, who has authority. At the same time, discourses produce publics, audiences who identify with one or the other discourse. What results by implication is a disqualification and marginalisation of other modes of categorising and making sense of the world (Milliken 1999). In short, discourses do not just describe, but ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972 [1969]: 49). They set the rules of the game, as it were. The foundational premise of critical geopolitics is the contention that discourse has power: it is productive of space and therefore bound up with questions of politics and ideology (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992). Place writing becomes place righting (Ó Tuathail 1994a). Critical geopolitics takes its inspiration from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which could be justly regarded as the first work of critical geopolitics. In it, Said examines how the Western discourse of Orientalism produced and managed the Orient, constructing it as exotic and inferior. Gregory, picking up on this argument, considers the appropriation of Egypt through detailed descriptions and en-visionings of scholars, explorers, the military and so on that create maps of meaning through which territories become knowable and therefore governable (1995). Spaces are mapped, surveyed, compartmentalised and governed on the basis of maps, explorers’ descriptions, academic accounts or travel writing. This tradition of producing regional geographies results in elaborate 54

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things spatial accountancies ‘a tallying up of the world’s regions, an individualizing of them according to classificatory systems of climate, degrees of freedom, inventories of resources and hierarchies of race’ (Ó Tuathail 1994a: 537). Discourse therefore makes space knowable and meaning-full. Geopolitical discourse has a disciplining effect in that it demarcates what counts as the right and therefore valid knowledge on the spatial aspects of global politics. Foucault coined the concept of power/knowledge, which in its French original as pouvoir/savoir expresses aptly the connotation of pouvoir as ‘being able to do something’/‘power’ and savoir as ‘knowing how to do something’/‘knowledge’, since both are infinitive verbs and nouns at the same time. Unravelling the power/ knowledge nexus is seen as one of the main tasks of critical geopolitics. This becomes possible because no discourse is ever able to completely structure the social. It is always dependent on an Other, a threat, that needs to be excluded in order to stabilise the discourse. While this threat is the condition of possibility of a hegemonic discourse, it also is its condition of impossibility at the same time, since it harbours the potential to disrupt it (Laclau 1990). The power of discourse to structure global politics is therefore precarious, opening the possibility for new, different articulations.

Doing discourse research In critical geopolitics, the concept of discourse has found ubiquitous application in a wide range of studies. Examples include the rhetorical production of marginality and Otherness through geopolitical discourses (e.g. Kuus 2004), the constitutive and disciplining power of geopolitical discourses as truth regimes (e.g. Gilbert 2005; Ó Tuathail 1996), the gendering of geopolitics (e.g. Dalby 1994), the formation of geopolitical identities and subjects (e.g. Müller 2011; Newman 2000) as well as geopolitical imaginaries (G. Smith 1999) or the constitution of geographical knowledge and its political implications (e.g. Häkli 1998). Yet, beyond the basic set of assumptions outlined in the previous section, what exactly is meant by discourse and what literature authors refer to varies tremendously (Müller 2010; Ó Tuathail 2002). At a general level, discourse research in critical geopolitics can be classified along three axes as in Figure 3.1: context, analytic form and political stance. Traditionally, critical geopolitics has combined a position of distance with an interpretive–explanatory framework and a critical stance of analysis. Distance here means that it has tended to target the grand, global questions of world politics such as war and peace, security, power politics and so on. It understands discourses as embedded in the gamut of historical experiences, geopolitical traditions, national identities, state institutions and networks of power (Ó Tuathail 2004). In this, critical geopolitics echoes Foucault’s concern with the genealogies of discourse and its interaction with society (e.g. Foucault 1973). The field has seen less immersion, by contrast, in specific contexts – close-up, detailed studies of the workings of discourse in a limited setting. 55

Figure 3.1 The three core dimensions of the concept of discourse and its use in critical geopolitics (adapted from Müller 2010)

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things In most cases, the analysis of discourse also adopts an interpretive–explanatory position, which is the mainstay of qualitative text analysis. Interpretive–explanatory research tries ‘to reconstruct the tacit rules, the shared experience and the collective knowledge of social actors’ (Angermüller 2005: 4). It acknowledges discourses as super-subjective structures which both enable and constrain human agency but in its analysis often tends to be concerned with the agency of individuals in meaning creation, ‘telling the right kind of stories to the right audiences at the right moment’ (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000: 1132). Such an understanding of discourse is evident in the conceptualisation of discourse as ‘sets of capabilities people have … sets of socio-cultural resources used by people in the construction of meaning about their world and their activities’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 192–3). Within this perspective, a critical stance implies that the critical geopolitics scholar is not an innocent bystander, describing the properties of a discourse, but an active contributor to challenging the commonsense understandings and ideologies of hegemonic discourses. This resonates with Van Dijk’s appeal to critical discourse analysts, who should be primarily interested and motivated by pressing social issues, which [they hope] to better understand through discourse analysis. … Their hope … is change through critical understanding. … Their critical targets are the power elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and injustice. … Their critique of discourse implies a political critique of those responsible for its perversion in the reproduction of dominance and inequality. (Van Dijk 1993: 252–3) Instead of adopting an interpretive–explanatory stance, discourse research in critical geopolitics can also be concerned with structural properties of a text. In fact, Van Dijk argues that ‘attention to “structure”, “form”, “organization”, “order”, or “patterns”, is characteristic of virtually all contemporary approaches to discourse. … In other words, all comments on fragments of text/talk should be framed in terms of theoretically based categories of structure’ (van Dijk 2011). More than reconstructing and comprehending meaning, a structural understanding of discourse concentrates on the systematic features of the material to be analysed – it identifies recurring patterns and regularities in discourses. Such systematic features may include hegemonic and antagonistic relationships, dislocations and their filling, contradictions and ambiguities, shifts and breaks. Such a perspective recognises that discourse presents a corpus of statements whose organisation is systematic and subject to certain regularities (Foucault 1972 [1969]). Critique here also takes a somewhat different tack from Van Dijk’s vision of the engaged critic above. It is about laying bare the contingencies of discourse and examining its conditions of possibility and social effects.

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Discursive methodologies One crucial silence in discourse research in critical geopolitics concerns the question of methodology. Discourse analyses which spell out their conceptual and methodological foundations and are transparent about the process of constructing a methodology are still comparatively rare. This lacuna is all the more surprising, since discourse analysis does not have a shared, established methodology as in the case of content analysis, for example. There is, therefore, considerable potential for methodological sharpening and differentiation and ‘discussion of how to formally undertake a discourse analysis of geopolitical reasoning and foreign policy practice is long overdue’ (Ó Tuathail 2002: 606). To be sure, it would be counter-productive to elaborate one methodology for discourse analysis in critical geopolitics, for such a universal recipe does not exist and should not be developed (Torfing 1999: 292). Every discourse analysis needs to be tailored to both the empirical material and the theoretical assumptions underpinning the research project: Method is not synonymous with a free-standing and neutral set of rules and techniques that can be applied mechanically to all empirical objects. Instead, while discourse theorists ought to reflect upon and theorize the ways they conduct research, these questions are always understood within a wider set of ontological and epistemological postulates, and in relation to particular problems. (Howarth 2004: 317) Yet, being clear about our conceptual foundations and translating them into a methodological framework can only add to analytical rigour and precision. More than that, it helps us contribute to general theory-building and the refinement of methodologies of discourse analysis. Having an explicit and rigorous methodological framework also helps steer clear of some of the key problems that Antaki et al. pinpoint in the analysis of discourse (2003). Of particular relevance are three of them, each of which can be found in one or the other piece of writing in critical geopolitics. First, under-analysis through summary cautions against merely providing a résumé of the content of a text. Providing summaries necessarily simplifies, often smoothes over inconsistencies and draws attention to some elements of the text while ignoring others. At worst, it risks distorting the object of analysis if beliefs, policies, political orientations and so on are imputed. Second, under-analysis through taking sides has the analyst positioning herself vis-à-vis the data by expressing support or disapproval of a certain text. This is not to say that the critical geopolitics scholar should remain neutral towards discourses of warmongering, marginalisation and so on, but rather that these discourses need to be analysed for the systematic regularities they exhibit. Discourse analysis therefore cannot only be a critical manifesto that sides with the disenfranchised for critique’s sake, but needs to demonstrate how effects of exclusion or closure are achieved. Third, under-analysis through spotting features sees the analyst pointing out details of the text without analysing how they contribute to the overall discourse. For example, pointing out that a text contains a 58

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things spatial metaphor is not enough to qualify as analysis. It would have to be examined what this spatial metaphor does, how it is used and what it is used for. A number of general works provide useful overviews of rather different understandings of discourse analysis that can serve as starting point for a more sustained discussion of methodologies of discourse analysis (Phillips and Hardy 2002). The studies of Ó Tuathail and Glasze present two rather different approaches to employing discourse analysis in critical geopolitics. Ó Tuathail presents a framework for narrative analysis of practical geopolitical reasoning that focuses on the ‘grammar of geopolitics’ (2002). Drawing our attention to the role of analogies and metaphors for categorising geopolitical events, he conceives of geopolitics as a theatrical drama in which statespersons act out roles and have to piece together a credible storyline and performance in front of an audience. The analysis of the building blocks of such a storyline, according to Ó Tuathail, should examine location specifications, situation descriptions and protagonist typologies of a storyline as well as the imputations of causality or blame strategies contained within them. It also needs to attend to interest enunciations, that is the strategic significance assigned to the events in the storyline. Glasze, on the other hand, combines methods from corpus linguistics and narratology to analyse large digitaltext corpora that cover several decades (2007). He draws on a quantitative technique to chart the relations between lexical elements and thus isolate the regularity of relations between signifiers and trace the frequency and co-occurrence of signifiers across time. Because this quantitative technique does not allow the capture of the meaning of texts, he supplements it with narrative analysis of selected text extracts. Though rather different, both studies present equally valid approaches to discourse analysis that build a methodology for analysis that fits the empirical material and the conceptual framework.

Texts and … While concerns about specifying an adequate methodology address the problem of how to analyse texts and discourse, critical geopolitics has experienced a recent push to supplement the textual focus that has been its hallmark for most of its existence. This can partly be seen as a response to ethnographic and feminist strands of research challenging discourse studies for erasing people’s everyday experiences and taking a distant, sometimes even ironic stance towards geopolitics (Megoran 2006). Critical geopolitics has been taken to task for representing a ‘disembodied critical practice’ (Hyndman 2004: 310) that failed to situate both the researcher and research subjects. In much the same vein, Nigel Thrift urged the sub-field to become more attuned to what he calls ‘the little things’: ‘“mundane” objects like files, “mundane” people like clerks and “mundane” words like “the” – which are crucial to how the geopolitical is translated into being’ (Thrift 2000: 380). This concern is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s observation in Ecce Homo that in the preoccupation with grand concepts ‘all questions of politics, the ordering 59

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of society, education have been falsified down to their foundations … because contempt has been taught for the “little” things, which is to say for the fundamental affairs of life’ (Nietzsche 2006: 28). Shifting attention to these little things does not mean abandoning the analysis of texts altogether, but rather to supplement textual analysis with a number of other aspects of the social.

… practices One prospective avenue is to develop a heightened sensitivity to how texts and discourses are bound up with social practices. Attention to practices, in particular everyday practices, has been founding wanting in critical geopolitics for some time (Dodds 2001; Dowler and Sharp 2001; Megoran 2006; Paasi 2000). Recently, however, the contours of an approach that is more concerned with proximate contexts and people’s experiences have started to emerge (see the dotted area in Figure 3.1), in contradistinction to what is sometimes called ‘geopolitical remotesensing’ (Paasi 2000: 283) based on representations. In fact, a closer reading of poststructuralist authors such as Laclau and Mouffe suggests that the concept of discourse should reach beyond text and ‘pierce the entire material density of the multifarious institutions, rituals and practices’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 109). Foucault, too, examines the power of discourse as embedded in institutions such as the hospital or the prison and insists that a reduction of discourse to text is not permissible (Foucault 1972 [1969]: 49). Discourses in this broader sense encompass social practices and call for an agenda that combines the analysis of texts and practices (Müller 2008; Thrift 2000). With its concern with the subjects of geopolitics, feminist geopolitics in particular advocates a perspective that examines how ‘discourses actually work in everyday life and how they make subjects of people: how they are articulated and performed in different contexts to make subjects of their identities and geopolitical visions’ (Dowler and Sharp 2001: 174). Becoming attuned to everyday practices does not have to mean surrendering the occupation with high politics and the ‘big’ questions of geopolitics. On the contrary, exploring the practices that underpin meaning-making in high politics can add much to textual studies by placing policy professionals and intellectuals of statecraft in their social contexts (Kuus 2010; 2011). Inevitably, such an approach calls for methodologies that are able to adequately capture social practices. Ethnography holds particular potential here, but also raises a number of issues around research ethics, access and data representation (Megoran 2006).

… affect A second path to expand and perhaps strengthen textual studies of discourse could lead critical geopolitics towards taking affect more seriously – a direction that has become increasingly popular in human geography with the spread of non60

Text, Discourse, Affect and Things representational theory (Pile 2010). This would take the cue from initial explorations of the importance of affect for a critical geopolitics (e.g. Carter and McCormack 2006; Ó Tuathail 2003; Pain and Smith 2008) and ask how pre-cognitive, libidinal ‘gut-feelings’ interfere and interact with geopolitical representations. Once again, such a move would not mean jettisoning text and defecting to affect but exploring the ways in which hegemonic meaning-making is always imbued with affective investment. Engaging with affect could help us make serious headway in explaining the grip of discourse: why do subjects sometimes desire to identify with a discourse, to be subjected, even though they might realise the contingency of discourse? The answer, Alcorn suggests, is that ‘some modes of discourse, because they are libidinally invested, repeatedly and predictably function to constitute the subject’s sense of identity’ (2002: 17). Bringing together affect and discourse could open more-than-symbolic ways of understanding why certain geopolitical discourses become hegemonic, while others do not. If we follow the argument of psychoanalysis, discourses are able to assert their hegemony because they promise enjoyment to subjects. Consider this statement by Žižek on nationalism as a hegemonic discourse: To emphasize in a ‘deconstructionist’ mode that Nation is not a biological or transhistorical fact but a contingent discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices, is thus misleading: such an emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive-entity effect to achieve its ontological consistency. (Žižek 1993: 202) The absence of this enjoyment is why, according to Stavrakakis, the project of constructing a coherent European identity has foundered: Europe has not been capable of winning ‘“the hearts” and the “guts” of the peoples of Europe’ (2007: 226). American patriotism, by contrast, is alive and kicking, not least because it is linked to the enjoyment of consumerism: watching baseball matches, eating hot dogs, driving SUVs and so on (Kingsbury 2008). Exploring the affective underpinnings of geopolitical discourse – whether it is aggression, consumerism, the sexual libido, fear or others – therefore could tell us much about the social effectiveness of discourse that an exclusively symbolic approach would miss.

… things A final promising way forward would encourage us to intertwine meaning and materiality, texts and things. On a rather basic level, such an approach could start from the recognition that texts are material. In order to exist they need to be inscribed into or onto something: paper, a banner, a hard drive or any other carrier medium. In this physical form, texts can circulate easily: books can be printed millions of times, electronic files can be easily copied and distributed. Their material inscription turns texts into immutable mobiles: things that can easily travel from 61

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics one place to the other and do not suffer any physical mutation through the distance travelled (Latour 1987). As they travel, texts become actors in their own right, circulating between people and places and in the process of circulation extending the geopolitical network, enrolling new actants (Barnes 2002). One promising avenue for critical geopolitics therefore would involve following the paper trail and tracing the lives and paths of texts such as new geopolitical doctrines, images of war or maps of migration flows as they circulate among politicians, experts and news media and establish relationships. Going one step further, such a stance could recognise that discourses are not merely symbolic but socio-material entities: geo-power depends not only on texts but on mobilising things and making them work on one’s behalf. Foucault made this argument in a number of his analyses, for example when he considers in Discipline and Punish how power emerges from enclosing, partitioning and monitoring individuals and how the architecture of the Panopticon provides the material form conducive to this (1979). Actor-network theory has taken up this point, arguing that power arises from relating humans and things in a network (Latour 2005). Consider Law’s account of the building of the Portuguese sea empire in the sixteenth century (1986; see also Kendall 2004). He argues that three elements were crucial for establishing safe naval routes and enabling long-distance control: devices, documents and drilled people – or things, texts and humans. A crucial device was the quadrant, an instrument that allowed the calculation of latitude from the declination of the sun or a star. The quadrant alone would have been useless, however, had it not been for the tables and maps which allowed the measurements to be translated into meaningful coordinates for navigation. This translation, in turn, became possible only through adequately trained and drilled navigators and sailors who knew how to operate such instruments and how to work the ship. While techniques of control in modern empires might be more complex, Law makes a convincing argument that instead of assuming that texts are powerful eo ipso, we need to re-assemble discourses from the bottom up and examine how they gain their power from weaving a far-flung socio-material network of texts, people and things. The radical impetus of critical geopolitics would then not focus on disrupting the meaning of texts as such, but on picking apart the infrastructure, as it were, that upholds and disseminates this meaning, providing the foundation for the power of subjectivation. What are the socio-material underpinnings that allow certain geopolitical images to become powerful while others do not? Through what arrangements do particular texts circulate more easily than others and establish alliances? Through what materials are networks made durable and hold together? In tracing such movements and the forging of associations, actor-network theory demands critical proximity. But a critical geopolitics that tries to live up to a more emancipatory agenda of affecting change might want to go one step further and consider what Paul Routledge termed ‘critical engagement’ (2008: 201): tracing the network, but at the same time acting inside it to create a different geopolitics (Koopman 2011).

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Conclusion Critical geopolitics emerged from the assumption that texts and discourses can tell us something about the social construction of world politics. The analysis of texts thus is the bread and butter of the field and is still going strong after more than 20 years. Having started from a deconstruction of geopolitical accounts of intellectuals of statecraft, the texts of critical geopolitics have branched out to encompass popular constructions of world politics, ranging from cartoons to films and comic books. This development sometimes makes it difficult to draw the line between what is still (critical) geopolitics and what is a critical interrogation of the relationship between power and territory, but perhaps not critical geopolitics. Despite this welcome broadening of perspective, the core business of engaging with texts produced in the realms of formal and practical geopolitics will remain a cornerstone of critical geopolitics: ‘if critical geopolitics loses sight of classical geopolitics, or if it becomes disinterested in, say, military geostrategies, or the latest speech by Dick Cheney, then it risks becoming an academic fad’ (MacDonald 2010: 318). To maintain the vigour of critical geopolitics for the next 20 years, however, the analysis of texts requires strengthening. This contribution has argued that linking the analysis of text with methodologies of discourse analysis is an important step to construct a transparent, coherent and systematic analysis that avoids the pitfalls of selective reading and under-analysis through merely providing a summary, taking sides or spotting features (Antaki et al. 2003). But taking texts seriously also means embedding them in ‘con-text’, and not understanding them as isolated, freefloating containers that somehow, somewhere have an impact. Texts impinge on the political and social world because of their entanglement with social practices, affect or material objects. If we want to understand, critique and challenge the power of texts to shape world politics and geopolitical subjectivities, our analysis must be attentive to the linguistic dimension of discourse, but reach beyond it at the same time. This does not mean abandoning the analysis of texts, but rather recognising that texts are merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a question of commenting on the text … it is a question of seeing what use it has in the extra-textual practice that prolongs the text. (Deleuze 1973: 186–7; trans. in D.W. Smith 1998: xvi).

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ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Geopolitics and Visual Culture1 Rachel Hughes

At first glance, ‘geopolitics and visual culture’ might seem an odd title. The two terms invoke quite different associations: ‘geopolitics’ conjures up the sombre arena of international politics, populated by diplomats and world leaders and taken up with the conduct of international agreements, sanctions and conflicts; ‘visual culture’ suggests all manner of images – personal photographs, maps, art and advertising – as well as popular media forms like film and television that we use by virtue of a sense of sight. But recognition of the global and political nature of the major image producers of our time and of the visual nature of various forms of social control and resistance requires serious examination of geopolitics and visual cultures as related fields. A brief example: as I write, newsmedia sources report the memorial services that have followed the death of Kim Jong-il, former Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). News footage sequences show, alternately, large formations of military personnel in silent and rigid attendance at the funeral procession and grieving citizens, their bodies and voices swaying, rising and falling, expressing their grief and anguish. So much is going on here. The footage of choice for global newsmedia groups’ coverage of events in North Korea is that of large political-cum-military parades. It seems that the vast scale of these events – and the difficulty of getting other sorts of footage from within the DPRK – conspires to bring images of disciplined formations of high-kicking, uniformed personnel onto global screens and newspaper pages in each and every instance (see Figure 4.1). (One is tempted to imagine it has been the same sequence of parade footage, year after year, rolled out no matter what the apparent content of the news story.) But with the death of Kim Jong-il and the ascension of Kim Jongun new footage has emerged, though it cannot escape being very much like the old footage, which says something, perhaps, about dynastic political continuity in North Korea or, perhaps more likely, about the message global newsmedia groups are most comfortable telling: new leader, same tired old leadership. 1

The majority of this chapter was published as a review article in Geography Compass in 2007. I would like to thank Fraser MacDonald, Don Mitchell and Joanne Sharp for their insightful comments on that earlier article.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics

Figure 4.1 North Korean soldiers march through Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 9 Sept. 2003 (AAP / AP)

What was different about the footage of the 2011 funeral procession and memorial services was the visual interruption of snow and the visual effect of the comportment of the thousands of individuals in attendance. While those parading remained erect, mourners sidelining the parade bowed forward, as did, or so it seemed from the footage, the entire citizenry, when a minute of stoppage was observed as part of the 11 days of mourning. A photograph of Kim Jong-il’s funeral procession has made additional headlines, being eventually subjected to a newsmedia ‘kill order’ (see Goodman and Furst 2011). This photograph was apparently digitally manipulated by North Korea’s central news agency before its global release. Six figures, their tracks in the snow and what appears to be a video camera and tripod have been erased from a corner of the image. Media commentators have suggested the aim was ‘totalitarian aesthetics’: ‘With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight’ (Goodman and Furst 2011). In this way, the regime became (further) suspected and ridiculed, not only for its politics, but for its political aesthetics and visual practices: the unspoken moral position being ‘“we” would never do such a thing, while “they” so blatantly and stupidly have’ (but see Campbell 2003). To my mind, it is not the aesthetics of the image that the errant figures are unforgivably disrupting, it is the aesthetics of the event that they are failing to uphold. In an undoctored image used to ‘out’ the doctored one, it appears that these six figures are not adopting the physical comportment proper to the event. Their bodies are not bent towards 70

Geopolitics and Visual Culture the procession, that is, towards the dead body in the passing coffin. Or were they seeing and recording, through their video camera, views of the events they were not meant to? Coverage of the DPRK exemplifies the ways in which newsmedia companies profit from the drawing power of spectacular images even as they barely conceal an ideological derision for the politics that produce such astounding visual events. Images themselves become news stories, and a ‘kill-order’ comes not from a dictator but a news director. As this brief example suggests, ways of seeing (‘televisual seeing’, ‘photographic seeing’) and political geographies are in part constituted in and through each other. The term ‘visuality’ is used to denote vision as something that is always culturally mediated. ‘Visuality’ encompasses things that are visible to us as well as the visual technologies and viewing positions that enable us to see things in the ways that we do. It is possible to speak of different visualities arising from, and helping to produce, different places and times. The relationship between geopolitics and visual culture has also been the subject of a significant body of work by critical scholars located in international relations, political science, cultural studies, media studies and critical journalism. Such scholarship examines how the otherwise taken-for-granted ‘realities’ of geopolitical intervention, cooperation, resistance and discord are made and known (if unevenly) through visual images and practices. In this chapter, I first discuss the emergence of debate about the role of vision in the conduct (and critique) of geopolitics initiated by the publication of Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (1996a). Following this, I turn to studies of the intersection of popular images and geopolitical imperatives, considering representations found on screen and in print. In the final section I discuss more recent work that attempts to move away from an emphasis on images themselves and towards accounts of visual practices that license and also undermine geopolitical power.

Panoramic geopolitics Explicit attention to the role of vision in geopolitics emerged with the publication of Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics. Studies of specific global visualisations were, however, nascent in political geography before this time: Denis Cosgrove’s study of the iconographic and geopolitical significance of photographs of planet Earth from space is one example of such work (Cosgrove 1994). But Critical Geopolitics sets out a number of different instances – within British imperial, American wartime and American postwar periods – in which particular ways of seeing have enabled particular global actions. Ó Tuathail is concerned to introduce the notion of ‘ocularcentrism’, referring to the privileging of vision at the expense of all other sensory modes in Western modernity. More specifically, Ó Tuathail is concerned with the ways in which a particular form of ocularcentrism – a ‘perspectivalist’ vision of space – was essential to the territorial and governmental expansion of European powers. This visuality began in the sixteenth century when ‘space was 71

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Figure 4.2 Pacata Hibernia map of Cork, 1585–1600. This map was first published in Pacata Hibernia (London, 1633) but is thought to date from around 1600. Pacata Hibernia deals with the Elizabethan wars in Ireland and the panoramic perspectives provided by maps like this one were significant to the successes of such military campaigns (Cork City Libraries, Cork, Republic of Ireland) 72

Geopolitics and Visual Culture homogenized … and measured from a central point, which was normally the seat of government or royal authority. This central point constituted the fixed spectatorial position from which panoramic visions of official state territory were constructed’ (Ó Tuathail 1996a: 12). Ó Tuathail’s opening example is a cartographic rendering of just such a panoramic vision: a map of Ulster drawn in 1602 as part of the British subjugation of Irish peoples and lands. By virtue of the ‘vision’ provided by this map, Ulster was made into a province for the purposes and profit of the colonising power. Resistance to this vision was swift: the cartographer was killed by some of the inhabitants of the territory he had depicted. For Ó Tuathail, this violent moment occurs at a threshold of modernity in which religious ordering and viewing of space ‘gave way to an early modern horizontal organization of space associated with ideas of state sovereignty and the emerging state system’ (Ó Tuathail 1996a: 3; Figure 4.2). Indeed, from this early modern era, we inherit the ‘modern geopolitical imagination’: a vision of world political space as a unitary whole subsequently divided into territorial units of sovereign statehood (Agnew 1997; see also Strandsbjerg 2008). Such a ‘chess-board’ vision of global space made it possible to authorise and strategise new campaigns of geopolitical pre-eminence. Late modernity’s visual technologies and geopolitics must also be thought through simultaneously. As well as providing a view of space as a stage for geopolitical action, late modern visual technologies (particularly the camera) were quickly enlisted by state power in the control of both peoples and territories. John Berger speaks of this when he notes: Within a mere 30 years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopaedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied by genocide), sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing … new reporting and formal portraiture. (Berger 2001: 286) If the visual technologies of late modernity held out the promise of witnessing the world, they also gave cause for concern. Photography guaranteed a (visual) recollection of the past that was far more exacting, (apparently) objective, transmissible and manipulable than private remembrance. Photographic images proved to be troubling things, and photography an art that could be propagandist. The intimate violence of photography lay in its ability to confer great authority on the one moment or scene that had been recorded in the photographic image, such that that moment or scene comes to violently dominate all others (McQuire 1998: 8). Photography as the purveyor of authoritative scenes of the world gave rise to twentieth-century photojournalism. While some photojournalists worked to expose otherwise under-examined places, conflicts and suffering, much photojournalism suffered the same ‘fixed spectatorial position’ as earlier visual technologies in its readiness to show the world back to a select audience within dominant nationstates in ways that conformed with extant geopolitical scripts.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics In the postmodern geopolitical world, new visual orders have challenged, and arguably superseded, panoramic geopolitics. Ó Tuathail proposes that there are two main ways in which the visuality of geopolitics is significantly changed under postmodernity. The first of these concerns the representation of space and territory. In the contemporary period, cartographic visualisations like maps have been superseded by telemetrical visualisations (telemetry being the capturing and recording of data from a significant distance), most notably through geographical information system (GIS) technologies. The second transformation pertains to the way that the drama of geopolitics is imagined. While geopolitics was once imagined as a ‘theatre’ – involving the components of stage, setting, actors and viewing perspectives (the audience views the drama from a distance, from on-high) – this has been replaced with the drama of simulations that are ‘post-perspectivist’ Ó Tuathail 1998: 28). A simulation is a modelling of reality, which nominally assists in training or understanding, a construction of a ‘like world’ based on detailed knowledge of situations, relations and objects. Leaving the question of simulation aside, it is true that contemporary visual renderings of global political events often offer a ‘participant’s-eye view’: a view that serves to collapse the distance between the viewer and the things seen. Neil Smith observes in relation to the Gulf War of 1990–91 that GIS technologies have altered the way in which modern warfare is fought and ‘the way it is consumed by a global public transformed into video voyeurs’ (Smith 1991: 257). Representationally, GIS returns us to absolute (not relational) space and promises an orgiastic fusion of geographical knowledge and territorial control, a situation Smith refers to as the reinstatement of ‘a mordant Newtonianism of space’ (Smith 1991: 263). Finally, charges of panoptic gazing have been brought against the same authors who have been concerned to critique the masterful gaze of formal geopolitical figures. Ó Tuathail’s book was the subject of an author-meets-critics panel at the 1997 Association of American Geographers conference. The comments of panel respondents, and Ó Tuathail’s reply, were subsequently gathered together in the journal Political Geography (Ó Tuathail 2000). While praising Ó Tuathail’s analysis, panellists drew attention to a contradiction that lay, as they saw it, at the heart of the book’s claims. Several argued that the text itself presented a masterful view-fromabove in order to critique just these same tendencies in geopolitical (and particular geopoliticians’) scriptings of the world. Joanne Sharp suggested there was no sense of the author as an embodied critic, ‘only a relentless unveiling and revealing of all geopolitical texts that he encounters’, adding that ‘simply to describe a foreign policy is to engage in geopolitics and so normalise particular world views’ (2000b: 362). Neil Smith expressed discomfort with what he saw as the ‘ahistorical aura’ of the charge of ocularcentrism in Critical Geopolitics: if all hegemonic geopolitical gazes and practices are resolutely perspectivalist, then ‘what might take the place of this “visionism”?’ (2000: 368; see also Heffernan 2000). On this issue, a third commentator, Martin Sparke, suggested that the key task is not to find an outside to or replacement for vision but to

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Geopolitics and Visual Culture re-vision vision as an enabling power/knowledge medium that critics cannot not have. … In this way it can become understood as an embodied medium of knowledge production which precisely because of its critical but partial perspective calls out for a new kind of self-situating responsibility. (Sparke 2000: 375) For Sparke and Sharp, the philosopher of science Donna Haraway provides some direction on why vision cannot be dismissed and must be engaged with politically. Haraway has argued that, far from being irredeemably panoptic, ‘vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. … I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere’ (Haraway 1991: 188). In responding to his critics, Ó Tuathail affirmed that his project was not simply to show that geopolitics has a visuality but to contend that one might ‘(ab)use geopolitics by turning geopolitical vision against itself in order “to reveal the unseen of seeing”’ (2000: 391; see also Ó Tuathail 1996b: 72). This is a model of vigilance against any simple acceptance of the visual representations and envisioning practices of key actors, institutions, political movements and ourselves as critical geopoliticians. But the question of whether the project of ‘turning geopolitical vision against itself ’ is possible, or even meaningful, remains open.

Imaging popular geopolitics A number of critical scholars of geopolitics have turned to popular culture texts as a means to understanding geopolitics. Such work considers geopolitics to be a social and cultural process by which leaders and ordinary citizens make sense of the world (Toal [Ó Tuathail] and Agnew 2003: 457). Periodicals such as Reader’s Digest and Time, photojournalism, political cartoons and patriotic ‘blockbuster’ films have tracked and contributed to international affairs from Cold War geopolitical antagonisms to the rise of ‘New World Order’ geopolitical visions (Dalby 2008; Dodds 1998; 2003; 2005; Ó Tuathail 2005; Sharp 1998; 2000a; Sidaway 1998). Two forms of popular visual representations and their effects are considered below in more detail: the lens imagery of television, photography and film and the drawn imagery of cartoons.

Scenes and screens Televised events are arguably the dominant geopolitical visual form of our time. In 1994 President Clinton gave a CNN-televised question-and-answer session on global affairs. This event was ‘watched by an audience of millions in more than two hundred countries and territories’ and enlisted ‘160 international journalists 75

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics from eighty countries and additional journalists in four remote television locations (Sarajevo, Jerusalem, Johannesburg and Seoul)’ (Ó Tuathail 1996a: 187). Ó Tuathail writes that, at the time, the event ‘was indicative of the new conditions of space and time shaping the conduct of US foreign policy, conditions where particular events in remote corners of the world are experienced immediately and instantaneously across the globe in real time’ (1996a: 187; see also D’Arcus 2006: 167–170), but the level of orchestration of this geopolitical event – the way in which it selfconsciously ushers the geopolitician into ‘screen’ spaces, like a spotlight upturned on a tightrope walker – seems oddly old-fashioned in the context of post-2001 global media order. As many have noted, the events of 11 September 2001 – and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the USA and its allies – have greatly altered the relationships between geopolitical practices and figures, global media networks and various political collectives (see Dalby 2004; Gregory 2004b; Kirsch 2003; Ó Tuathail 2003). For one thing, global media networks have been radically (re)enlisted in the promulgation of reactionary geopolitical visions. In both old and new ways, the camera is again at war. Photographs and photoopportunities have proved indivisible from performances of US foreign policy over the last decade. From Secretary of State Colin Powell’s powerpoint presentation to the United Nations Security Council of intelligence images as ‘proof’ of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (thus legitimising a new foreign policy of ‘pre-emption’), to President George W. Bush’s 2003 ‘Top Gun’ appearance aboard an American missile carrier off the San Diego coast to announce ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq, seeing into (other states) and being seen (to be victorious) have been strategies heavily used in recent warfare (see MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010: 7–12). Of course, the spatial and imaginative circumscription of those who produce images of war has a significant history. David Campbell reminds us that ‘at no stage in the post-World War II period has the US or UK military operated without detailed media management procedures designed to influence the information (specifically the pictorial) outcomes’ (Campbell 2003: 102). Beyond the everyday nature of televised war, geopolitical violence also works through iconic (visual) forms. The idea that iconic images can work to normalise and neutralise geopolitical violence is by no means new: it is a claim that is still debated in both academic and popular responses to Holocaust and other ‘atrocity’ photographs (see Campbell 2002a; 2002b; Hughes 2003). The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse photographs are a key case in point. Despite provoking wide outrage and condemnation, these photographs – generally encountered through televisual medias – have not prevented the absolution of individuals and institutions responsible for the abuse (Gregory 2004a: 318). Derek Gregory is careful to note the dangers of reducing those already objectified in the photographs to ‘objects of Theory’. However, the ‘theatricalised “scene-setting” that involved practices known to be illegal’ (Gregory 2004a: 322) is only part of the politics of this case. The photographs are not simply ‘scenes recorded’, but images constructed precisely for further visual use: enabling the enhancement, broadcasting, sharing and memorialisation of the abuse. Questions of how pornographic visual cultures were being referenced in these images or of how digital cameras and websites 76

Geopolitics and Visual Culture capable of hosting personal photographs and videos are increasingly used by military personnel should be raised in accounts of how these events came to pass. Visual (geopolitical) cultures do not simply record war crimes, they also structure such crimes as visual experiences and use the authority ceded to images to further additional political ends. As Judith Butler argues of the Abu Ghraib case, it is crucial to understand that a ‘forcible frame’ is at work, and that this photographic frame has ushered in a ‘not-seeing in the midst of seeing’, a ‘visual norm [that is] a national norm [of failure] to see, to feel, to maintain a moral perception of persons as persons’ (Butler 2010: 63; see also Dauphinée 2007). It is precisely because vision is not innocent and because images command authority and are commanded by authority, that questions of ethics and truth become superheated in the exertions of newsmedia. Campbell reveals a central contradiction of the envisioning of war when he juxtaposes two (visual) media events that occurred simultaneously in 2003. In the first case, the Los Angeles Times published an image of a British soldier in Basra that had been doctored by the photographer (two similar images had been combined to improve the composition of the published image). The controversy that subsequently arose in regard to the fabrication of this image damaged the paper’s reputation and caused the photojournalist responsible to be sacked (Campbell 2003: 103). In the second case, the US military’s own video footage of their ‘rescue’ of a young American soldier, Private Jessica Lynch, was fed to journalists covering the Iraq War from the Coalition Media Center at the US Central Command headquarters in Qatar. Widely circulated images from the footage – depicting an injured Lynch prone on a stretcher and draped in a US flag – were part of ‘an account that was staged, insofar as the particular narrative that was attached to and derived from the military footage of her release was constructed by the Pentagon’s media operation to convey a heroic and redemptive meaning’ (Campbell 2003: 104–5). As Campbell argues in regard to these two visual incidents, the manipulation of news images after the ‘shutter’ of the camera has ‘frozen reality’ is considered highly unethical, but the fabrication of war-related events in front of cameras is accepted as a patriotic norm that is beyond contestation and beneath public notice. As Campbell argues further – in the case of newsmedia photographs of violence and displacement in Darfur –we, as scholars, are concerned less with questions of accuracy or inaccuracy and more with the way in which sites (and people in those sites) are enacted through sight, because this visual enactment is itself geopolitical (Campbell 2007: 380). While still photography and photojournalism have long been popular geopolitical sources, and televised footage has been central to the conduct of conflict particularly since the Vietnam War, documentary and feature films have also been significant sources in the writing of global space. Marcus Power and Andrew Crampton observe that film, amid the geopolitical struggles and ideological shifts of the postwar period, helped the USA reinvent itself as a benevolent defender of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ worldwide (Power and Crampton 2005: 195). During the Cold War period,

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Hollywood’s cinematic geographies … became a crucial ideological battleground. … Thus cinema was not some sort of crude and unwieldy foreign policy tool but rather an important site of contestation around geopolitical meanings and scriptings. (Power and Crampton 2005: 195) Opportunities to capitalise on popular perceptions of the Soviet ‘Evil Empire’ were, moreover, rarely passed up by Hollywood. As Klaus Dodds has noted, the early James Bond film series – funded by both Hollywood and British film industries – selfconsciously mimicked and exaggerated the diplomatic and intelligence intercourse of the postwar world, helping define the Cold War zeitgeist (Dodds 2005: 271, 278). At a time of declining British influence in a post-colonial world, the figure of James Bond emerged to cement ‘a sense of imperial continuity’ as well as to (re)introduce ‘various racial geographies of danger’ in its portrayal of Anglo-American ‘friends and adversaries’ (Dodds 2005: 271–82). Drawing significant popular audiences, these films reflected and anticipated Cold War political allegiances and dangers. They also spoke of the changing domestic and international profile of Britain (Dodds 2005: 284). In the films, fantasy was anchored to political detail and geographical background, which added an air of realism to Bond’s missions and encounters [and the inclusion of] places such as Turkey and the Caribbean played a significant role in conveying Cold War intrigue and providing a stage for the evolving Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ personified by Bond and [Felix] Leiter. (Dodds 2005: 285) More recent American films – as representations that have been cut adrift from the co-constitutive dualisms of the Cold War – necessarily renegotiate masculine identity, particularly patriotism (Sharp 1998: 153). The rewriting of American (geopolitical) masculinity in the ‘reel geographies’ of the new world order occurs both through the exclusion of women characters from heroic scripts in such films and the structuring of narratives around heroic individuals’ attempts to beat a feminised bureaucratic state structure (Sharp 1998: 159–60). Ó Tuathail has also examined the project of the ‘remasculinisation’ of American geopolitical culture, pointing to the ways in which the 2001 blockbuster Behind Enemy Lines is ‘yet another parable about the liberation of a war-fighting masculinity from the constraints of multilateralism and diplomacy in order to get the job done’ (Ó Tuathail 2005: 361). According to Ó Tuathail, this particular film – one of the few American financed productions dealing with the Bosnian conflict – articulates an ‘everyman’ frustration with the confusion of the post-Cold War era, delivering to its audience a Manichean world of clarity and moral certainty in which the US military is the instrument of moral righteousness and international justice (Ó Tuathail 2005: 370), but as Gregory notes in the context of the ‘war on terror’: ‘Manichean geography is not only black and white; it requires a vast grey area within which America’s enemies can be represented and reduced to something less than fully human’ (Gregory 2004a: 320). The ‘greyscale’ of bloodless images 78

Geopolitics and Visual Culture of war is one such ‘grey area’ that extends well beyond cinematic fictions (see also Campbell 2003; Graham 2005; Gregory 2004b; Griffin 2004).

Geopolitics drawn in But what of other-shaded interventions? The subtle tonalities of political comment are also the purview of visual artists who prefer to draw rather than ‘shoot’ their worldview. Cartoonists draw new relations between geopolitical subjects and various situations. Cartoonists produce visual parody and satire in ways that are impossible for photography. Dodds has considered ‘the selection, siting and arrangement of visual themes’ in the work of British cartoonist Steve Bell (Dodds 1998). Bell’s cartoons accompanied reports in The Guardian of events in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Bell drew the Bosnia of external states’ imaginings – to show how geopolitical self-interest and ignorance were creating a wasteland where lives were at stake and crimes being committed with impunity. Some of his more provocative drawings were those that depicted Britain and Bosnia as neighbouring geographical and social spaces. Such cartoons comprise, ‘a powerful iconographic critique of ethnic cleansing, Western inaction and the lack of recognition of the social proximity of Bosnia’ (Dodds 1998: 175). Steve Bell, among many other political cartoonists, remains an articulate commentator on current world events and, more reflexively, on visual media’s own role in these events. More recently, occurrences of ‘cartoon crises’ have tempted analyses of the role of irony in geopolitical cultures. Juha Ridanpää observes of the 2005 publication of 12 cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed in the Danish newspaper JyllandsPosten, ‘how easily the categorial distinctions of “serious” and “comical” can overlap and merge together, and [thus] how geopolitically charged … humour [can] be’ (Ridanpää 2009: 729). There is, of course, always something at stake in humour. Mary Thomas and Matt Coleman have drawn attention to the common academic gag of showing comic images of George W. Bush’s face. They caution that this ‘too easy’ visual presentation becomes a problematic practice in as much as it ‘reduces the need to [critique] complex subjectivities of racism and nationalism, terrorism, war, capitalism, consumption and liberalism’ (Thomas and Coleman 2009: 17). This cheap gag proves intellectually expensive when it ‘flattens the geography of power into the narrow question of one man’s legitimacy or illegitimacy as the guy in control’ (Thomas and Coleman 2009: 20). Visual fantasies of a good guy in control have long been present in our domiciles. Jason Dittmer reads the constitution of American geopolitical identity of the postwar and more recent periods through the immensely popular ‘Captain America’ comic books (2005; 2010). Dittmer argues that the post-9/11 Captain America presents an ambiguity around geopolitical supremacy in staging a ‘divergence between American ideals and American practice’ (2005: 641–2). However, as an embodiment of an idealised America who fights anonymous and placeless terrorist Others, the successful adventures of Captain America reiterate 79

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics ‘the dominance of statebased power over nonstate actors by delegitimising those who are voiceless in the territorially based state system’ (Dittmer 2005: 642). One of the most intriguing elements of Dittmer’s analysis is the observation that this ‘super-soldier serum’ induced hero informs ‘the meaning of an idealized America’ in part by ‘rescaling’ the territorial symbols of such an America to the individual reader (2005: 641). As such the reader, usually a child or young adult, might ‘fantasize about being Captain America, connecting themselves to the nation in their imaginations’ (Dittmer 2005: 627), their (imaginative) embodiment performing (Captain) America’s supremacy. What then of emotional, habitual and virtual geopolitics? Recent work considers how geopolitics might be thought about as a visual practice involving emotion, habit and virtuality, and not simply as a projection-room of popular, if contested, images.

The observant practice of geopolitics Acts of enframing, supervising, surveying, hiding, reporting and demarcating are everyday practices routed through ‘the visual’ that are used to produce and bolster geopolitical power. These visual and more-than-visual activities are part of ‘the constant hum of practices and their attendant territorialisations within which geopower ferments and sometimes boils over’ (Thrift 2000: 385). Even the most banal talk that couches discussion of geopolitical ‘realities’ in the public domain – statements like ‘so you see’ and ‘it must be seen that’ – lend legitimacy to the idea that, for a chosen few, the world is transparent and awaits their moral action. Such phrases rely on the subtle coercion of the visual – in what ‘we see there’ – when situations are far from transparent or inevitable (see Kearnes 2000). Fraser MacDonald points to the limits of thinking about the ‘ocularcentrism’ of geopolitics, whereby the significance of vision is reduced to the philosophical model of Cartesian perspectivalism (2006). Looking, he argues, is not just a metaphor for geopolitical power: the practice of looking (gazing, glancing, peeking, gawking, looking away) can itself be an expression of geopolitical power. Drawing on Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), he argues that something as simple as looking at an object is to situate oneself in relation to it. He asks that we take seriously ‘the active character of observant practice’ as a ‘looking-and-listening’, a watching that is ‘situated, embodied and connective with other sensory registers’. MacDonald regards Britain and America’s first nuclear missile through the story of a young space-enthusiast’s trespass on the site of a missile test-fire in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in 1959. For MacDonald, the ‘strategic vision’ of postwar Britain, the ‘monumental visibility’ of nuclear weapons as deterrents to war, and teenager Duncan Lunan’s experience of watching the firing of the Corporal missile must all be considered part of a larger visuality of postwar geopolitics. If we are to take seriously the notion of a more-than-visual geopolitics, analysis of a greater variety of subjects, events, sites and forms of geopolitical agency is necessary (see Campbell and Shapiro 2007; MacDonald 2008; MacDonald, Hughes 80

Geopolitics and Visual Culture and Dodds 2010). Sean Carter and Derek McCormack have argued for an analysis of film, for example, that understands it to be more than a way of scripting and seeing the world. They suggest that while scripting and seeing involves representation, films and film images also work beyond representational logics as ways of feeling. The authors’ particular interest is in cinematic and geopolitical ‘intervention’: the case of US ‘intervention’ in Somalia in 1993 and the cinematic ‘intervention’ of the 2002 blockbuster Black Hawk Down (a film that refers to events in Somalia in 1993) in the wider social field. They argue that cinematic intervention amplifies and modulates the affect of geopolitical intervention and vice versa (Carter and McCormack 2006: 230). Affect, being that which is ‘by no means reducible to personal emotion, but designates something both more and less’ and, following Brian Massumi, can be thought of as a ‘register of sensible intensity’ emerging from relations between things (Carter and McCormack 2006: 234). Continuing their discussion of the affective life of film within geopolitical cultures and attempting to add to existing critical vocabularies, Carter and McCormack argue for an understanding of ‘images as participants in the contagion of affectivity’ and, attendant to such contagion, processes of amplification and ‘mutually reinforcing relay’ or resonance (Carter and McCormack 2010: 116–17). Resonance can be found, for example, in ‘the intensification of political passion in which people with very different interests are linked together by feelings aroused and organized to saturate the most public, even global issues’ (Linda Kintz in Carter and McCormack 2010: 117). The challenge is clear: to examine the movement of various visualisations in and through wider processes of affective contagion, amplification and resonance and their relation to, or enactment of, particular geopolitical cultures. Digital games, arguably the pop-culture form most closely associated with ‘real’ war and surveillance technologies, also make new geopolitical practices possible. In the most immediate sense, war-themed games assist in constructing particular places and types of spaces (cities, desert landscapes) ‘as little more than receiving points for US military ordnance’ (Derek Gregory in Graham 2005, 6). Stephen Graham’s observation regarding the US military’s purpose-built ‘Islamic’ cities is also true of much urban space seen in war games: This shadow urban system works like some bastard child of Disney. It simulates, of course, not the complex cultural, social or physical realities of Middle Eastern urbanism, but the imaginative geographies of the military and theme-park designers who are brought in to design and construct it. (Graham 2005: 6) But it is the looking of (as well as the look of) such digital games that builds and expresses geopolitical power. This is the looking of the tactical, ‘first-person shooter’ ‘citizen-soldier’ (Stahl 2006) and, later and less playfully, of the foot soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq (see Power 2007: 271).2 The incessant opening of space-upon2

The politics and effects of such viewing are by no means fixed or predetermined. While it could be argued that game-play vision elides material and social complexity and rewards 81

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics space (generic Islamic city upon generic Islamic city, desert battleground upon desert battleground) afforded by game-play views produces not so much a condition or affect of geopolitical ‘vertigo’ (Ó Tuathail 1996a) as one of ‘horizontigo’:3 a sort of unbounded, self-generating field that both stimulates and exhausts geopolitical action (see Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 Screenshot from the digital game America’s Army (author) Such games may also promote a view of the world in which the true role of the state is to conduct secret missions out of sight and out of mind (Stahl 2006: 119). Digital games allow players to occupy positions in which – in terms of the militarisation of domestic space and in terms of popular ‘secret mission’ narratives – they perform the state’s ‘out of sight’ work. Games ‘refigure the experience of history by way of an anticipatory impulse’, providing a way of ‘inhabiting history as “game time”’ (Patrick Crogan in Stahl 2006: 119). The idea that ‘gametime collapses the temporal space between real-world events and the ability to “play”

3

rapid and pre-emptive (see-it-shoot-it) violence, the messy realities of soldiers’ service captured on personal imaging devices (perhaps with game-play vision in mind) might also be understood in terms of the ‘anti-geopolitical eye’. Ó Tuathail identifies the ‘antigeopolitical eye’ as belonging to ‘dissident diplomats and courageous reporters’ whose ‘ground-level travelling eye’ allowed Bosnia to remain ‘morally visible’ in an otherwise evacuated political space (Ó Tuathail 1996a: 220–21; see also Ó Tuathail 1996b). Corinne Berry, personal communication, 2007. 82

Geopolitics and Visual Culture them’ (Stahl 2006: 119) brings us closer to an awareness ofgames as cultural forms that measure out the interactive nature of contemporary geopolitics. The CNN ‘I-Report’ and BBC World ‘your pictures’ services – whereby viewers may submit their own ‘eyewitness’ images – are further examples of an interactive visual geopolitics. Accessible from global media outlet websites, these services allow individuals to upload images from personal communication devices for potential use in news reports. The CNN ‘Breaking News I-Report’ site reads: ‘What’s happening where you are? Is news happening in front of your eyes? Pull out your camera and I-Report it for CNN.’4 Viewers become more than news consumers: they are also news makers, news players, so-called ‘citizen journalists’. This is a minor example of a larger cultural transformation from ‘the sedative of the spectacle [to] the stimulant of game time’ (Stahl 2006: 120). Digital games return us to a consideration not only of what images or visions show of the world, but also to what images or visions do in the world. War-related digital games do not simply represent ‘disdain for diplomacy and preference for force’ (Stahl 2006: 118), they provide for the embodied repetition (and arguably amplification) of such feelings. We might usefully think about how ‘game space’ – a space of simulation that allows ‘interactivity’ with particular types of events and places – is changing the ways that geopolitics is practised and understood. In his recent reading of America’s Army – the hugely successful multiplayer game developed by the US military as a ‘recruitment and outreach tool’ – Marcus Power argues for attention to games ‘as affective assemblages through which geopolitical sensibilities emerge’ (Power 2007: 284). Games provide ‘a space of cyberdeterrence’ in which it is possible to ‘play through the anxieties that attend uncertain times and new configurations of power’ (Power 2007: 271). In my own work, I explore the ‘gameworld geopolitics’ co-constituted between popular action adventure games (not only war-themed games) and contemporary geopolitical situations (such as the work of the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq). The genre of the quest is integral to the visuality of gameworld geopolitics, a visuality in which non-state agents are looked to as heroes as they set forth to look for talismanic, potentially world-transforming objects (Hughes 2010). Working back from digital gaming, it appears that constant affective stimulation – which may temporarily become qualified in anger, sympathy, horror and (unspeakable) enjoyment – suffuses the state of (geopolitical) exception as the norm. Put another way, where once international accord was threatened by a 4

The fine-print terms for ‘I-Report’ read in part: ‘By submitting your material … you hereby grant to CNN and its affiliates a nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of their programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party.’ The use of the term ‘edit’ but not ‘change’ or ‘manipulate’ concurs with Campbell’s observation regarding the sanctity of the digital image that has no ‘material’ referent (not, at least, in the traditional sense of the photographic ‘negative’) (2003). 83

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics passing crisis or conflict, it now seems that crisis is only ever apparently threatened by the end of such stimulation, or ‘game over’. Tracking US military expansionism and its implications for capital from the nineteenth century to the present, the Retort collective recently identified this situation as one of ‘permanent war’: ‘The repeated use of military force, to whatever immediate end, serves … to normalize itself, and to keep the machine running’ (Retort 2005: 82, emphasis in original). The imperial machine spoken of in this quotation is in no small way a vision machine: questions of image and imagery are explicit in Retort’s reworking of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The continued salience of Debord’s critique as redeployed by Retort remains the subject of some debate (see Campbell and Shapiro 2007; Jeffrey, McFarlane and Vasudevan 2008).

Looking on . . . Scholars of critical geopolitics have long drawn attention to geopolitical ‘visions’, ‘images’, international political ‘scenes’ and ‘imaginative geographies’ to show how these representations and constructions are integral to the functioning of geopolitical orders. While not all such studies have been explicitly framed as enquiries into situated visualities, others have worked with the understanding that vision ‘as a representational practice which affirms certain worlds and not others . . . is something which social and political critics cannot not want’ (Ó Tuathail 2000: 391). Diverse forms of visual culture and an array of visual practices are enlisted in the development, deployment and resistance of geo-power, not least those of domestic state practices of surveillance and securitization (see Amoore 2007; Coleman 2005, Cowan and Gilbert 2008; Sparke 2006). These variously scaled geopolitical cultures produce and disseminate ways of seeing the world. Such vision is never spent – it is continually re-elected and adapted to new geopolitical and geo-economic circumstances. Recognition of different types of agents, embodied ‘visions’ and relations of affect so far left out of the frame of critical geopolitics analyses might go some way towards redressing this imbalance. By recognising that vision works within a larger perceptual field – and as such remains worthy of consideration – attention may be focused on other geopolitical visions that matter, critically, to many.

References Agnew, J., 1997. Geopolitics: Revisioning World Politics. London: Routledge. Amoore, L., 2007. ‘Vigilant visualities: The watchful politics of the war on terror’. Security Dialogue 38: 215–32. Berger, J., 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin. —— 2001. Selected Essays. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 84

Geopolitics and Visual Culture Butler, J., 2010. ‘Torture and the ethics of photography’. In F. MacDonald, R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 41–64. Campbell, D., 2002a. ‘Atrocity, memory, photography: Imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia: The case of ITN versus Living Marxism, part 1’. Journal of Human Rights 1: 1–33. —— 2002b. ‘Atrocity, memory, photography: Imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia: The case of ITN versus Living Marxism, part 2’. Journal of Human Rights 1: 143–72. —— 2003. ‘Representing contemporary war’. Ethics and International Affairs 17: 99–108. —— 2007. ‘Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict’.  Political Geography 26: 357–82. Campbell, D., and M. Shapiro (eds), 2007. Securitisation, Militarization and Visual Culture in the Worlds of Post–9/11. Special Issue of Security Dialogue 38(2). Carter, S., and D.P. McCormack, 2006. ‘Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention’. Political Geography 25: 228–45. —— and —— 2010. ‘Affectivity and geopolitical images’. In F. MacDonald, R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 103–22. Coleman, M., 2005. ‘US statecraft and the US–Mexico border as security/economy nexus’. Political Geography 24: 189–205. Cosgrove, D., 1994. ‘Contested global visions: One-World, Whole Earth and the Apollo space photographs’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84: 270–94. Cowan, D., and E. Gilbert, 2008. War, Citizenship, Territory. London: Routledge. D’Arcus, B., 2006. Boundaries of Dissent: Protest and State Power in the Media Age. London: Routledge. Dalby, S., 2004. ‘Calling 911: Geopolitics, security and America’s new war’. In S. Brunn (ed.), 11 September and Its Aftermath: The Geopolitics of Terror. London: Frank Cass, pp. 61–86. —— 2008. ‘Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven’. Political Geography 27: 439–55. Dauphinée, E., 2007. ‘The politics of the body in pain: Reading the ethics of imagery’. Security Dialogue 38: 139–55. Dittmer, J., 2005. ‘Captain America’s empire: Reflections on identity, popular culture, and post-9/11 geopolitics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 626–43. —— 2010. Popular Culture, Geopolitics and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dodds, K., 1998. Geopolitics in a Changing World. London: Prentice Hall. —— 2003. ‘Licensed to stereotype: Popular geopolitics, James Bond and the spectre of Balkanism’. Geopolitics 8: 125–56. —— 2005. ‘Screening geopolitics: James Bond and the early Cold War films (1962– 1967)’. Geopolitics 10: 266–89. 85

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Goodman, D., and D. Furst, 2011. ‘From North Korea, an altered procession’. New York Times, 28 Dec. . Graham, S., 2005. ‘Remember Fallujah: Demonising place, constructing atrocity’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 1–10. Gregory, D., 2004a. ‘The angel of Iraq’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 317–324. —— 2004b. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Griffin, M., 2004. ‘Picturing America’s “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan and Iraq’. Journalism 5: 381–402. Haraway, D., 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Heffernan, M., 2000. ‘Balancing visions: Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’. Political Geography 19: 347–52. Hughes, R., 2003. ‘The abject artefacts of memory: Photographs from Cambodia’s genocide’. Media, Culture and Society 25: 23–44. —— 2007. ‘Through the looking blast: Geopolitics and visual culture’. Geography Compass 1: 976–94. —— 2010. ‘Gameworld geopolitics and the genre of the quest’. In F. MacDonald, R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 123–42. Jeffrey, A., C. McFarlane and A. Vasudevan (eds), 2008. ‘Dossier on Retort’s Afflicted Powers’. Public Culture 20(3): 531–93. Kearnes, M., 2000. ‘Seeing is believing is knowing: Towards a critique of pure vision’. Australian Geographical Studies 38: 332–40. Kirsch, S., 2003. ‘Empire and the Bush doctrine’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 1–6. MacDonald, F., 2006. ‘Geopolitics and “the vision thing”: Regarding Britain and America’s first nuclear missile’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31: 53–71. —— 2008. ‘Space and the atom: On the popular geopolitics of Cold War rocketry’. Geopolitics 13: 611–34. —— R. Hughes and K. Dodds, 2010. ‘Introduction’. In F. MacDonald, R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1–19. McQuire, S., 1998. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera. London: Sage. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996a. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1996b. ‘An anti-geopolitical eye? Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992–1994’. Gender, Place and Culture 3: 171–85. —— 1998. ‘Postmodern geopolitics?’ In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 16–38. —— 2000. ‘Dis/placing the geopolitics which one cannot not want’. Political Geography 19: 345–96. 86

Geopolitics and Visual Culture —— 2003. ‘“Just out looking for a fight”: American affect and the invasion of Iraq’. Antipode 35: 856–70. —— 2005. ‘The frustrations of geopolitics and the pleasures of war: Behind Enemy Lines and American geopolitical culture’. Geopolitics 10: 356–77. Power, M., 2007. ‘Digitized virtuosity: Video war games and post-9/11 cyberdeterrence’. Security Dialogue 38: 271–88. —— and A. Crampton, 2005. ‘Reel geopolitics: Cinemato-graphing political space’. Geopolitics 10: 193–203. Ridanpää, J., 2009. ‘Geopolitics of humour: The Muhammed cartoon crisis and the Kaltio comic strip episode in Finland’. Geopolitics 14: 729–49. Retort, 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London: Verso. Sharp, J., 1998. ‘Reel geographies of the new world order: Patriotism, masculinity and geopolitics in post-Cold War American movies’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. New York: Routledge, pp. 152–69. —— 2000a. Condensing the Cold War: The Reader’s Digest and American Identity, 1922– 1994. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 2000b. ‘Remasculinising geo-politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’. Political Geography 19: 361–4. Sidaway, J., 1998. ‘What is in a gulf? From the “arc of crisis” to the Gulf War’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. New York: Routledge, pp. 224–39. Smith, N., 1991. ‘History and philosophy of geography: Real wars, theory wars’. Progress in Human Geography 16: 257–71. —— 2000. ‘Is a critical geopolitics possible? Foucault, class and the vision thing’. Political Geography 19: 365–71. Strandsbjerg, J., 2008. ‘The cartographic production of territorial space: Mapping and state formation in early modern Denmark’. Geopolitics 13: 335–58. Sparke, M., 2000. ‘Graphing the geo in geo-political: Critical Geopolitics and the re-visioning of responsibility’. Political Geography 19: 373–80. —— 2006. ‘A neoliberal nexus: Citizenship, security and the future of the border’. Political Geography 19: 151–80. Stahl, R., 2006. ‘Have you played the war on terror?’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 23: 112–30. Thomas, M., and M. Coleman, 2009. ‘The performativity of Bush’s mug’. Antipode 41: 15–21. Thrift, N., 2000. ‘It’s the little things’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 380–87. Toal, G., [G. Ó Tuathail] and J. Agnew, 2003. ‘Introduction: political geographies, geopolitics and culture’. In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage, pp. 455–61.

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5

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heteronormativity Linda Peake

Terrorist Assemblages foregrounds the proliferation, occupation and suppression of queernesses in relation to patriotism, war, torture, security, death, terror, terrorism, detention, and deportation, themes usually imagined as devoid of connection to sexual politics in general and queer politics in particular. (Puar 2007: xii) What are the heteronormative assumptions still binding the fields and discourses of security and surveillance analyses, peace and conflict studies, terrorism research, public policy, transnational finance networks, human rights and human security blueprints, and international peacekeeping organisations such as the United Nations? (Puar 2007: xiii)

Introduction The quotations from Jasbir Puar’s recent book Terrorist Assemblages highlight not only that queer politics address themes at the heart of critical geopolitics but also hint at how these connections have been prevented from being made by the field’s heteronormative underpinnings. Yet, the prominent political geography scholar, David Slater, among others, contends that critical geopolitics ‘is best seen as an open signifier, connected to the relations between space, power and politics but ever changing in its modality of being’ (2009). Such an open-ended definition is one that does not close off what at first sight might appear to be irrelevant to the study of critical geopolitics; rather, it allows for a putting together of avenues of investigation that have been parcelled off and studied separately from this field. At first blush sexualities and more specifically heteronormativity, an ideology whereby heterosexuality is naturalized and seen as a fixed and stable sexual identity, may seem to have little to do with the discourses that underpin current spatializations of international politics. I hope to show however that heteronormativity is inherent to such discourses and is vital to their deconstruction. Indeed, within sexuality and queer studies, and closer to home, queer geography and feminist political

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics geography, it is well known and understood that heteronormativity is deeply embedded in the ways we know ourselves and in the worlds in which we live (Peake 2009; Richardson 1998). Yet it is an understanding that has hardly permeated the study of critical geopolitics. Why, in a purportedly critical field, have queer analytics been so slow to filter through and be taken up for serious consideration? In this chapter I aim to investigate the consequences of the reluctance to examine sexuality more generally and heteronormativity specifically, suggesting ways in which a queer sensibility can shed light on the deep-seated relations between space, power and politics. I start by interrogating the ‘critical’ in critical geopolitics and suggest that its hesitation in taking on board queer concerns is a legacy of its origins in political geography and its leitmotif of the nation-state. Notwithstanding critical geopolitics attempts to deconstruct hegemonic discourses of statecraft, tightly wrapped up in its analytic object of the nation-state, it has failed to interrogate the phallogocentric nature of such investigations and its preoccupation with them. Ironically, as the development of nation-states has hinged on the socio-spatial practices of the production of difference, most pertinently through the construction of a public– private divide, it has been a preoccupation solely with the public at the expense of the private and the subsequent lack of a systematic interrogation of difference that has allowed practitioners in the field to ignore their own positionalities and the impact that such an absent presence imposes on the limits of knowledge production. The absence of the private has served to treat vast swathes of human life and lives as irrelevant to the study of critical geopolitics. Sexuality especially, commonly understood as a marker of the individual body, has been relegated to the private realm, naturalized and is rarely even acknowledged as a marker of identity. Just as importantly, a lack of consideration of the private has hidden from view the relational connectedness of the two spheres, rendering the public as bounded, containable, knowable and apparently sexless. To counteract such a portrayal – a sexualized private and a non-sexualized public – I turn to a discussion of the concept of heteronormativity and queer theory to critique the assumptions underlying traditional norms related to sex, sexuality and gender identity and to investigate how queer theorists have deconstructed the normative boundaries of sexualities and genders. I conclude by suggesting a queering of critical geopolitics to encompass a socio-sexual logic that addresses not only the co-constitution of the public and private spheres, and hence of the social and the sexual, but also the deepseated constitution of the national and the sexual. The increasing impossibility of the geo-alignment of the social and the national moreover, necessitates moving beyond fixity in relation to conceptualizations of both sexualities and territorial categorizations. Such a reconsideration may allow for the opening up of a critical geopolitical imaginary, as O’Tuathail desires, less burdened by the phallogocentrism of ‘nationalism and chauvinistic universals’ (2010: 316).

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Heteronormativity

Phallogocentrism: The elephant in the room of critical geopolitics Whereas geopolitics is concerned with investigating the impacts of geography, both physical and human, on international relations and the resultant territories of nation-states, critical geopolitics refers to an understanding that the arenas of the geopolitical are not just ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. Rather, they are socially constructed through human geopolitical praxis, as constellations of political interests put their imaginaries to work in the carving up of the earth’s surface and its peoples into (primarily) states and nations. The ‘laws’ of geographical power that geopolitics claims to have unearthed (such as Mackinder’s Heartland of the World Island, Mahan’s theory of Sea Power, Ratzel’s Lebensraum) have been exposed as both intention – the politics of writing the geography of global space – and effect – the violence inflicted through the spatial metaphors that litter the fields of political geography and geopolitical discourse more broadly (core/periphery, buffer states and torn states, East/West, First, Second and Third Worlds, the Iron Curtain, the Eastern bloc, the Islamic world, the Middle East – also coined by Mahan – the axis of evil and so on) and that ‘expunge historical specificity, internal dynamics, and embodied experience from entire territories and landscapes and collapse these sites into highly abstracted, predetermined and often culturally essentialist storylines’ (Bhungalia 2010: 348). Critical geopolitics has thus been useful, as Cowen and Smith note, in bringing into view the nationalist, masculinist, chauvinistic and racist ideologies that underlie the myriad violent conflicts that divide and conquer, resulting in the drawing up of the world of nation-states that today dominate the global map (2009). The move to a critical geopolitics, informed by a poststructural analytic, implies shifting from a supposedly objective and determinate account of the relationship between geographic territory and global political interests to one in which knowledge of this relationship is conceded to be partial and situated, the product of the knower’s social, political and geographical locations. The critical geopolitical gaze however has rarely turned in on itself (Hyndman 2010). Feminist geographers in particular have produced trenchant critiques of the ways in which the predominantly white, male practitioners of critical geopolitics have produced an unembodied critique (Dowler and Sharp 2001), although this tendency is now much less pronounced (Sharp 2009). This reluctance to fully question its own processes of knowledge production, reveals critical geopolitics as still firmly based in a phallogocentric mind frame, privileging a determinateness (of hierarchical binary oppositions) in the construction of meaning that has been genderized as masculine (the phallic) (Derrida 1976). As Dodds suggests, critical geopolitics still demonstrates a rigid (and Western) understanding of the political whereby the public sphere is imbued with value and privileged over the private, rationality is given resonance over emotions, as are men’s activities over women’s, and studying up takes place at the expense of studying down, leading to an impasse, an insistence on the ‘geo’ of critical 91

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics geopolitics to be synonymous with the nation-state as the arena in which issues of statecraft are determined (2001). Phallogocentrism is exhibited then not only by a determinateness in terms of how the political is defined but also through the ‘geo’, that is the territories and territorializations through which politics are played out. Critical geopolitics is centred and organized by explicit recourse to the nation-state, both as its supposed ground (its logos) and as its prime signifier and source of power. The dominant spatial arena of the public, of authority, of rationality and of men’s activities par excellence is the nation-state, with its technologies of violence, surveillance and control, in conjunction with its territorial demarcations, steeped in masculinist practices. While Delaney reminds us that territoriality is inescapable (territories can be created around people, for example, by virtue of restraining orders) (2009), it is the concept of territory as a bounded national space and of territoriality as pertaining only to states that steers the course of critical geopolitics, albeit that there are those who recognize that the practices of critical geopolitics are multiscalar (Jones and Sage 2010) and cannot be limited to the global space of nation-states. The hierarchical binary oppositions of phallogocentric thinking, deep-rooted and naturalized not only in human relations and the social, also characterize heteronormativity. Queer geographers recognize, for example, that heterosexuality is a code for the way everyday life is lived out identifies the socio-spatial order as a heteronormative one in which both public and private spaces are inscribed with disciplinary discourses that normalize and fix heterosexual gendered and sexual behaviours and practices while rendering invisible non-heteronormative bodies (Dowler and Sharp 2001). Questioning these binary oppositions shines light on the epistemological exclusion of sexuality from the public sphere, the notion of sexualities and territories as fixed and knowable and the marginalization of queer folk in the geopolitical imaginary. Indeed, queer theory requires us to rethink the critical, the geo and the politics of critical geopolitics. In order to start doing so I now turn to queering heteronormativity.

Queering heteronormativity Heteronormativity, a shorthand term for normative heterosexuality, is a powerful and pervasive ideology whereby being heterosexual – such that an individual is attracted, physically, emotionally, only to a person of the opposite sex – is assumed to be a natural and thus universal norm or way of being human. Heteronormativity contains within it the basic assumptions of heterosexuality, namely beliefs in sexual difference as dimorphic, there are only two types, male and female, of distinct and complementary sexes; biological essentialism, such that male and female sexual functions are essentially different; and a mimetic sex/gender relationship, whereby gendered and self identities and desires, can be read off from an anatomical base (Weiss 2008). Hence, men and women’s physical sexes, their respective gendered identities of masculinity and femininity and gendered desires, are assumed 92

Heteronormativity to align with each other, an alignment widely referred to as the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1993). Female sexuality then is defined as different from and complementary to male sexuality, and this difference is understood as natural and necessary: heteronormativity thus inscribes difference. As Richardson claims, ‘it is a construction of “otherness” in gendered terms’ (1998: 6) and is made manifest through its institutionalization via a range of socio-spatial practices, that operate at a variety of spatial scales from the bodily to the global. The raison d’être of this ideological stance of a hierarchical dichotomy – either/ or – view of sexuality is the belief that the sexual act of intercourse – in which a male’s penis is inserted into a female’s vagina – is a mandatory act of biological and social reproduction that serves to reinforce the power interests of social groupings, whether these be families, religions, classes, racialized ethnic groups or national citizens. In institutionalizing this belief, those individuals whose desires are not for the opposite gender but for the same gender or for both or neither or who desire to change their sex/gender or who are intersexed and who may engage in sexual intercourse, but if they do so it is not for the purpose of reproduction, fall outside of what is deemed natural as do their sexual desires, which may be based on a range of factors and not simply a desire for the opposite gender. Their failure to reproduce the social group – whether this is for reasons, among others, such as ‘control over resources, efficiency or convenience, stability or security’ (Delaney 2009: 198) – causes them to be valued differently and to be subject to a range of (homophobic) disciplinary practices. Assumptions as to the mental or moral inferiority or abnormality of those who deviate from the heterosexual norms of desire for a gendered other and sexual intercourse for reproduction, are used to justify sanctions, ranging through incorporation, stigmatization and discrimination, through the use of tactics that reinstate hierarchies of difference, through tolerance to violence (Bell 2009). But hegemonic control over non-normative sexualities is constantly in a state of slippage as those who fail to subscribe to the rules of heteronormativity rework the gendered and sexualized boundaries of social groups. In bids to maintain and reproduce normativity they may be subject to processes of being brought into or being kept outside the matrix of heteronormativity, and simultaneously may themselves work to be incorporated or to deliberately stand outside it, where some will thrive and yet others be policed back inside (Browne 2009). In other words, hegemony does not operate only through exclusion but also by making visible failed attempts to attain normative status through inclusion (Cooper 1995). Despite being subject to regulation, all sexualities can protest such regimes, revealing that it is though spatial practices in specific sites and locales that sexualities are produced and reproduced (Howell 2009) and that space becomes heterosexualized (or not) and normalized. The almost, but not quite, hegemonic appeal of heteronormativity is linked to its conflation with the desire to have children. It is moreover the association of this desire with the physical act of sexual intercourse that allows for a man to be a father and for a woman to be a mother and is in many places in the world today still what makes a man and a woman human. It confers on them a distinction of being worthy and of having a place in the world. Even those who argue against 93

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the gendered identities of male and female being predicated upon an a priori sexual base may speak, for example, of the ticking of a ‘biological clock’ when referring to women who feel a bodily urge to have a child (just one indication of how difficult it is to understand how flesh and discourse mingle). Yet even if one were to argue the biological fixity of this desire, the act of sexual intercourse has never been the only route to parenthood: adoption, formal or otherwise, surrogacy and various technologies of reproduction have all existed alongside sexual intercourse. Moreover, the large and complex range of genderqueer sexual articulations (Browne and Nash 2009) that occur alongside those heterosexual (also known as cisgendered) men and women who have no desire to engage in sex to have children, and indeed asexual folk who have no desire to engage in sex, open up for question the supposed innateness of heterosexual desire and its mantle of heteronormativity. Notwithstanding the challenge such a range of sexual articulations presents to the naturalization of heterosexuality the power of the heteronormative matrix is evident in the legitimacy and privileging it lends (to varying degrees) to other supposedly natural signifiers with which it is associated, namely monogamy and marriage. In other words heteronormativity is understood as most completely performed when played out in a family setting in which a man and a woman, or more than one woman, are legally bound to remain faithful to each other for life. Yet these signifiers – monogamy, marriage, family – are best understood not as universals but as party to a variety of institutionalized but changeable and often unmarked practices, contextual to places and times, and underpinned in part by religious dictats and other epistemological viewpoints. Hence, political, social and economic developments, both large-scale and small, protracted and one-off, can be seen to be altering the permeability of the boundaries of the heteronormative matrix. In many places (and for multiple reasons), for example, so-called standard family forms – the nuclear family and the extended family – are declining in numbers and being replaced by a range of different types including single parent families, step families, ‘families of choice’ and queer families. The institution of marriage is also being challenged by gays and lesbians dissatisfied with civil ceremonies and common-law partnerships. And monogamous relationships stand alongside nonmonogamous (e.g. polyamorous) and serial monogamous relationships in which partners can be linked by a variety of ceremonies recognized in law (or not). Nor are these signifiers necessarily undesired by some non-heteronormative individuals. The assimilation of heteronormative ideals into queer lives, referred to as homonormativity (Duggan 2002; 2003), is indicative of the divisions and fractures among queer folk about the extent to which they emulate heteronormativity in desires to be married, to form long term monogamous couples and to have children. Such heteronormative desires it has been argued have created a ‘sex hierarchy’ (Rubin 1975) leaving those not desirous of such a lifestyle at the bottom of a divide between those who practice ‘good’ sex – that is, sex for reproductive purposes in a committed long-term monogamous relationship – and those who by default do not and thus practice ‘bad’ sex. ‘Deviant’ sexual practices, such as reading or engaging in pornography or having sex in public places thus come to 94

Heteronormativity be associated with non-heterosexual individuals, whereas they are often practised by heterosexuals (Bell 2009). Questioning such a hierarchical divide, in addition to rendering certain heterosexual practices, bodies, identities and lives queer also brings into doubt the assumed anti-normativity of particular homosexualities and the extent to which they disrupt conservative discourses of who is worthy and who is not – nationalism, neoliberalism – or rather lend them support (Griffin 2007). This is not to deny however that conceptualizations of homonormativity take a number of divergent forms and that the universalizing tendencies of the dualistic theoretical positions of heteronormativity and homonormativity are themselves coming into question (Hubbard 2008). If heteronormativity is still a useful concept for investigating the rules linking together gender, sex, sexuality and desire, then queer theory’s mission is to deconstruct and disrupt it, along with its counterpart of homonormativity and the identities of lesbian and gay. But in doing so, as Browne among others, points out, queer theory is caught on the horns of a dilemma (2009). As is widely recorded the term ‘queer’, first coined by the theorist Teresa de Lauretis in 1991, was very shortly after denied by her as ‘conceptually vacuous’ (de Lauretis 1994). She felt its cooptation into mainstream academic usage and its use by those who saw it merely as one more theoretical stance for their intellectual lexicon robbed it of its disruptive capabilities and separatist politics. Its entry into the academy divorced it from its roots in racialized working-class radical queer practice of the 1970s and also from lesbians and gays of the same period who emphasized sexuality as a political choice and non-essential (Richardson 1998). Such groups mostly had, and still have, little overlap with ‘respectable’ lesbian and gay identities, dominant representations of which are predominantly white and middle-class (Erel et al. 2011). Browne thus refers to queer ‘as an anti-normative impulse that is mobilized to consider the world in anti-normative ways, as such to describe queer, can be construed as normalizing it, “in this way and not that” and for some this is antiqueer’ (2009: 39). In other words to name queer is to fix it in time and space (most commonly queer theory is now associated with the humanities tradition in the USA of the 1990s), delimiting its operations and reining it in, denying it its mercurial nature and transformative abilities. Queerness for many though is both positionality and identity, albeit a non-essential one, as well as a deconstructive practice (Sullivan 2003). Queer theorists, following Foucault, showed it was possible to recognize ‘sexuality not as a natural biological essence but as a historically changing social construct which emerges from and in turn channels and produces social power relations’ (Phillips 2006: 6; see Foucault 1976). This understanding led to a critique of straight ideologies focusing on the fluidity of non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices and then challenging the Othering of homosexuality and the oppositional binaries of heterosexuality–homosexuality, showing that both are constituted through performativity, that is they are understood neither as merely social constructions nor innate traits. In particular the work of Eve Sedgwick (1990) and a key text Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1990) have been seminal in queer theorizing of gender and sexualities. Integral to the understanding of normative sexual orientations and genders as produced through performativity is that 95

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics they are constantly being played out or reproduced, thus producing the effect of being natural. Hence, Butler defines gender as the ‘stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance’ (Butler 1990: 33). Gendered and sexualized identities are thus regulatory fictions inscribed upon the body in myriad ways. Yet performativity cannot totally reproduce bodies in their own image as repetitions are constituted in and through relations with others and through various spatialities, potentially making space for queer articulations and desires. In denying any stable or dichotomous notion of gender Butler effectively queers the heteronormative model of identity (in which desire follows from gender and gender follows from sex) whereby the subject is understood as an effect and not the cause of action in the sense that performativity is not something the subject does but is the process through which it is constituted (Sullivan 2003). Notwithstanding its path-breaking theorizing, queer has also been open to critique for its link to past practices, from replicating liberation calls by gays and lesbians to risking being dominated by phallogocentric gay theorizing. Yet simultaneously queer is seen as a category that is so broad as to defy commonality: it can only be fragmentary and risk the inclusion of those whose politics are less than progressive. Queer theory as a radical epistemology has been criticized for not dealing with its own racism and transphobia (Erel et al. 2011; Puar 2007; Oswin 2008) and as being a utopian space divorced from and obscuring material considerations. There is however a current move in queer theory to go beyond the last decade’s focus on subversive performance as political to a concern with the materialities of everyday queer lives (Ahmed 2004; Cohen 1997; Richardson 1998). Theorists of race, class and disability are also using queer theory to explore the racialization, classing and abling of queer and non-queer bodies, as well as the racist, classist and able-bodied assumptions inherent to heteronormativity (Ahmed 2004; Taylor, Hines and Casey 2011). A queer positionality is also being used to investigate how both heteronormative and non-heteronormative sexual orientations are far from solidified and fixed but fragmentary, defying a categorization that names one component at the expense of all others. At the same time, recognizing that certain non-heteronormative sexual identities, such as gay and lesbian, are privileged for their tendency towards coherence and stabilization, queer theory has resisted the tradition of identity politics of recognition, celebrating instead a range of nonheteronormative ways of being. The critique of identity that emerged from the poststructuralist theory of the 1970s at the same time as the emergence of sexuality as a new theoretical object, led to sexual identity being understood not as a fixed attribute but rather as fluid, fragmented and negotiated through adulthood. Queer theory’s work on the limits of theorizing identities has opened up a number of avenues of investigation. Puar has advocated moving from studies of identity via intersectionality to a more complex, shifting and contested map of sexual articulations that understand queerness as an ‘assemblage [that] deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not queer subject, and, instead … underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations’ (2007: 122). The Eurocentric nature of queer theory 96

Heteronormativity and queer politics has also come into question with the realization that modern sexual identity politics do not necessarily travel well. As urban queer identities in the global north have and still are gaining acceptance and visibility they are now defined by some as constricting, as where homonormativity is most advanced. And in the global south, while some are proudly proclaiming their queerness, in other places they exist under the heteronormative radar as the political space for queerness does not exist and may still be punishable by death. Recognition moreover of the gaps that exist between same-sex sexual practices and same-sex identities has also opened up for scrutiny the idea that the gender of one’s sexual partner(s) is not necessarily the defining feature of one’s sexual identity (Mort 2000) and that manifestations of same sex desire cannot be equated with identity politics (nor seen as necessarily progressive). Given that in queer formations it is white, gay and lesbian bodies that have had a greater tendency towards coherence, identity politics have also been exhorted as operating under a white paradigm (Oza 2010). Queerness then is neither necessarily liberating nor progressive, its contingency to national formations resulting in it being used in the service of scripts both radical – when it critiques sexualities in relation to class, race and gender dimensions – and hegemonic – when it does not (Erel et al. 2011; Oswin 2008).

Heteronormativity and critical geopolitics The above discussion may make it plain that heteronormativity is a key term in geographies of sexualities, but what are the implications for critical geopolitics of an investigation of heteronormativity and its queering? In this section I explore the threading of heteronormativity through socio-spatial orderings of power, drawing primarily on the interplay of the work of queer/feminist scholars, using the terms ‘queer’ and ‘feminist’ as already problematic and belying any monolithic meaning. As asserted earlier, assumptions about sexuality, heteronormative or otherwise, are spatially produced. In other words, heteronormativity, as all other ideologies, has geographic expressions that speak not only to cause but also effect. It is both expressed by and productive of spatialities and there are multitudinous ways in which the naturalization of the oppositional hierarchies of heteronormativity gives rise to spatial negotiations, from the banal to the daunting to the horrific. Indeed, questions of sex and desire infuse all manner of spaces. Queer geographers have also highlighted how heteronormative spatialities and bodies undergird the constitution of the social. Norms, for example, regarding the form of family life – husband, wife, children – and its immediate spatial expression of the home, arguably the most concentrated space of heteronormativity (Bell 2009), saturate the spatialization of everyday life, such that space is simply already assumed to be heterosexual. So naturalized is the day in, day out repetition of heterosexual relations that they become invizibilized, taken for granted. Yet geographers have shown how it is problematic and theoretically unproductive to demarcate space as already heterosexual or homosexual. Rather space is brought into being as 97

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics heterosexualized or homosexualized through the repetitive performativity of bodies and sexualized practices and norms. And while some of these spaces may have a formality and longevity, such as suburbs or gay villages, others are ephemeral, either by necessity, such as queer venues in countries where homosexuality is still illegal or gay pride parades, or simply by the passage of time as particular ways of being sexualized and the meanings inscribed upon their associated spaces fall out of favour. Such temporalities complicate the notion of queer space as ‘an abstract calculation of heterosexual domination and homosexual resistance’, reinforcing instead a ‘queer approach to space’ (Oswin 2008: 91). The heterosexualization of space is further reinforced by the values attributed to such territorializations, such that attempts may be made to keep ‘good’ forms of heterosexuality spatially separate from ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ forms, either overtly through state planning that may, for example, exclude areas of commercial sex work from residential areas or more informally through unspoken rules of exclusion (Hubbard 2008). Such rules also serve to make those whose sexual identities do not conform to the heteronormative matrix feel out of place and not belonging. In a number of countries, as the relation between the public and private in terms of sexuality is legalized, the queer body can be understood as a geopolitical site as it becomes marked in struggles over territory, belonging / not belonging and spatial transgression. The co-constitution of the sexual and the social and the privileging of heteronormatized bodies and their heterosexually encoded sex acts as the bedrock of social relations (Richardson 1998) has consequences for both heteronormative and non-heteronormative individuals and the ways in which they are incorporated into the national social. That heteronormativity is given meaning in both public and private spheres illustrates the impossibility of assuming a sexless public sphere. If both public and private are inherently sexualized then the social ground on which national space is founded cannot be considered apart from the sexualized identities and bodies that it comprises. And if the body can no longer be equated solely with the realm of the emotional and the private, and the queer body can no longer be relegated to the closet (Brown 2000), then what role does the body, and specifically the queer body, play in constituting the social and the national? How are social and political belonging contingent upon the inclusion and exclusion of certain queer bodies and practices? An eye on the queer in the early twenty-first century highlights the socio-sexual logic of the nation-state in relation to the ‘proliferating bodies of geopolitics’ (Dixon and Marston 2011: 445) and particularly to queer bodies, but also to queer theory’s task of deconstructing ‘sexual normativities and non-normativities’ (Oswin 2008: 96), and to the understanding that critical geopolitics cannot ever go back to a heteronormative future.

The socio-sexual logic of the nation-state The regulation of gender and sexuality by the nation-state can be so overwhelming that it feels ‘queer’ that it has not been of concern to critical geopolitics. In particular, 98

Heteronormativity as a number of scholars have outlined, the nation is deeply implicated in regulatory regimes that define the contours of heteronormativity. Feminists have long pointed out, for example, the connections between representations of the nation as feminine and calls to war based on the protection of women (Staeheli, Kofman and Peake 2004). Indeed, from one’s entry into life such regimes are at work: it is national governments that adopt problematic heteronormative systems to classify its citizens (It’s a boy! It’s a girl!), with male and female genders commonly being the only ‘choices’ available. Nowhere is this more so than in the basic building block of the nation, the family, with the nation commonly portrayed as a family and the state as a supporter of family values (Bell 2009). It is in the family that we start to gain some sense of who we are and our sexual desires and identities and where many queer children start to feel their lack of belonging. It is also through the family that the state regulates sexuality through the heteronormative matrix, including such factors as age of marriage, social welfare and taxation policies that influence the kind of families that are state supported – usually those headed by a heterosexual couple – and those that are not. As Richardson states: The tendency to treat heterosexuality as universal, unitary and monolithic should not obscure the fact that the ‘heterosexual other’ has a long history and that heterosexuality per se is no guarantee of the attribution of good citizenship status. The ‘prostitute’, the ‘promiscuous woman’, the ‘young single mother’, those defined as ‘high risk’ through their unsafe sexual practices, are all examples of categories of bad hetero/sexual citizenship. (2004: 398) There are also calls for queer theory to examine not just homosexualities but all non-normative sexualities (Cohen 1997). It is however at times of national and geopolitical tension that the intertwining of national interests and sexualities is highlighted with non-heteronormative sexualities more likely to be pathologized, labelled as deviant and promiscuous and their failure to engage in the heteronormative matrix interpreted as failure to express their loyalty to the nation and thus as a potential threat to national defence and the nation-state. Historians have shown, for example, how the formation of the modern European state was imbued with an anti-sodomy orthodoxy that consolidated at the height of the feudal era in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which led to the prevailing Christian moral tradition of sex and marriage entering into the formation of nation-states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Boswell 1980). This socio-sexual logic was consolidated by the understanding that sexual normalcy was defined by relations with the opposite sex and the Othering of nonheterosexual relations as deviant. The regulation of sexuality was also an important conduit for relations of power in colonial eras. Richard Philips’ investigation (2006), building on Foucault’s work (1978), of the material and metaphorical spatialities of imperial sexual politics in the late nineteenth century in the British Empire reveals the stark relations between (hetero)sexuality and the business of empire in terms of the links between sex, intimacy and governance: deciding who could or could 99

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics not marry and who could have sex with whom, where and when were important preoccupations of colonial administrators and companies (see also Oswin 2010b, on the ‘colonial trace’ of heteronormativity in Singapore). Critical geopolitics’ lack of engagement with issues of heteronormativity is even more surprising given the increasing politicization of sex in the twentieth century, during which sexuality was a vehicle for broader conflict between states and within states evident in such reactionary forces as Nazism and McCarthyism (see also Weber 1999). The sexuality scholar Jeffrey Weeks (2003) points out that in the 1950s during the Cold War period in the USA there was a searching out of ‘sexual degenerates’, especially homosexuals who were assumed to be particularly susceptible to treachery, whereas the emphasis of the New Right in 1980s USA and Europe – the sanctity of family life, hostility to sex education and to homosexuality – created new political constituencies for conservative politics. Globally, since the 1980s, fundamentalists, whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish or Hindu ‘have placed the body and its pleasures at the centre of their efforts to draw the curtain on the failures of the present and to go back to the future by reconstructing neo-traditional societies, marked by rigid distinctions between men and women, the harsh punishment of transgressors, and a bitter rejection of Western secularism’ (Weeks 2003: 2). But by the late twentieth century despite the fundamentalisms that still flourished, rapid social and cultural change was giving rise to claims for sexual citizenship. In many Western countries, particularly, and, to an unusual extent, sexuality has become one of the central issues of the contemporary polity (Weeks 2003). As Bell and Binnie have noted it is the figure of the citizen in late modern societies as a particular kind of subject, one balancing rights claims against responsibilities, that provides the context for discussions of sexual citizenship (2006). Richardson argues that since the 1990s lesbian and gay issues have entered the public sphere in the Anglo-American world in a variety of unparalleled ways: culturally through the media, economically through the growth of markets for identity-based consumption among lesbians and gay men, and politically through legislation and the establishment of both international and national lesbian and gay press and social movements (2004). Non-heterosexual individuals and unions are being increasingly, if unevenly, incorporated into the national social body in terms of the decriminalization of certain sexual practices (such as sodomy), increasing rights to sexual privacy; and sexual citizenship, as civil partnerships and in some places marriages are increasingly recognized, is bringing state-defined benefits among other rights to non-heterosexuals. The norm, however, is still that male homosexual sexual behaviour in public is still illegal, reinforcing the public as the realm of heterosexuality (Richardson 1998). Nor have non-heteronormative folks sat easily in the private sphere, as they have been historically excluded from family life (Hubbard 2008). Citizenship as a site of heteronormativity is also being questioned in debates over who can be included in the nation’s military. Those who play a role defending the nation or attacking others have mostly been required to be heterosexual, but this has recently been changing. In 2000 Britain’s armed forces admitted gays and lesbians (Cowen 2010) and in the USA, the problematic inclusion of queer folk into 100

Heteronormativity the military, under the infamous ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was only rescinded in September 2011. National identity, defence and reproduction of the nation then is no longer only equated with a naturalized heterosexuality associated with marriage and the family (Richardson 1998). The increasing acceptance of certain gays and lesbians as national citizens through a number of key sites, particularly the military, the market, the family and marriage, suggests that the boundaries of the public/private are breaking down (Richardson 2004), but also that those whose queer bodies do not claim assimilation or whose identity is less coherent remain outside the national social body. Richardson points out moreover that these activities have played out in a gay and lesbian rights-orientated assimilationist agenda, the primary goal of which is normalization with sexual citizenship as the goal (2004). In this sense the demands of the ‘new homonormativity’ (Duggan 2002) to be considered ‘normal’ can be seen as converging with the now dominant neoliberal agenda with its emphasis on individual rights and freedoms and selfsurveillance. Moreover it is an agenda that focuses less on sexual conduct with a move to identity and relationship-based rights claims, suggesting being gay and lesbian is increasingly constructed as a social identity as opposed to a sexual one and a social identity moreover based on being a couple.

Homonationalism It is also an agenda that came to the fore in the global geopolitical crises preceding and subsequent to 11 September 2001. In attempts to deconstruct the USA’s ‘war on terror’ with Iraq the queer scholars Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar have illustrated how queer folk in LBGTIQ (Lesbian Bisexual Gay Trans Intersex Questioning) movements have been implicated in nationalist discourses (Butler 2008; Puar 2007). Puar argues that just as nationalism has increasingly infused LGBTIQ movements and identities, contemporary US nationalism relies on claims to progressive sexuality, a stance marked foremost by decriminalization of buggery in the USA in 2003 and the more recent lifting of the ban on gays and lesbians in the US military. The moral claims to freedom and enlightenment of the USA require not only being underlaid by supposed feminist imperatives that wars are being fought to secure the liberation of women, but also the engagement of queer folk. Moreover, she argues, both the rise of nationalist sentiment – ‘If you are not for us you are against us’ – through the incorporation of progressive sexuality, and the transformation of LGBTIQ politics, through increasing engagement in nationalism and militarism, are defined by racism, and specifically Islamaphobia. Puar adeptly marks out the uneven nature of such processes and how the ‘turn to life’ for some queer subjects, enabled through their economic productivity, such as the market valorance of the pink pound, and their gender and kinship normativity, evidenced through their desire for children and family life, is racially demarcated ‘and paralleled by a rise in the targeting of queerly raced bodies for dying’ (2007: xii) and of the ‘queered darkening of terrorists’ (2007: xiii). 101

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Puar has convincingly shown how heteronormativity, racism and the nationstate in the post 9/11 period need to be understood in terms of their interconnectivity. Building on the concept of homonormativity, she outlines its geopolitical equivalent of homonationalism, a normative, racialized and sexualized ideology of nation that marks arrangements of US sexual exceptionalism, regulatory queerness and whiteness where ‘multiculturalism is the accomplice of white ascendancy’ (2007: 27). National homosexuality or homonationalism, is a regulatory script through which collusion is generated between some homosexual subjects and racial norms (read predominantly white and middle-class gays and lesbians) and US nationalism through the ‘normalising impulses of patriotism after September 11th, 2001’ (Puar 2007: xxiv–xxv). The weaving in of a narrow band of national homonormativity into national heteronormativity serves to reinforce the latter in the national imaginary further excluding sexual–racial Others (see Oswin 2010a). She labels the homonormative politics of white, middle-class gays and lesbians and their neoliberal desire for incorporation into the heterosexual matrix in terms of their rights to be married as a distinct form of US sexual exceptionalism that speaks to their role as patriots, their right to be American. She adds ‘further, a more pernicious inhabitation of homosexual sexual exceptionalism occurs through stagings of US nationalism via a praxis of sexual Othering, one that exceptionalizes the identities of US homosexualities vis-à-vis Orientalist constructions of “Muslim sexuality”’ (2007: 4), what Erel et al. refer to as the new hyper-visibility of gay Muslims (2011) and that has come to define the struggles of an imperial state that nevertheless frames itself as multicultural. The national social thus awakens us not only to the terror within – terror of the unruly sexualities, genders and racialized ethnicities that lie within threatening the happy family story of the nation – and its harnessing to the legitimization of US foreign policy but also the race and class privileges of homo- and heteronormativity. Others have also illustrated how Muslim identities are increasingly viewed as antithetical to a range of Western values, including democracy and sexual diversity. Although most debates have centred on the supposed incompatibility of Muslim communities to democratic values in terms of gender equality (Razack 2008), research also reveals a supposed incompatibility of sexual diversity and Muslim culture, such that Muslims are characterized as non-modern and culturally unaccepting of homosexuality and thus threatening to European and American values. Rahman points out how discourses of sexual freedom and democracy have provided the basis for anti-immigrant political organizing in Europe (2010). In the Netherlands, for example, the right-wing gay professor, Pim Fortuyn, led a movement to restrict Muslim immigration on the grounds that Muslim attitudes were a threat to Dutch sexual freedoms and cultural values (Modood and Ahmad 2007). Extending her analysis beyond the USA, Puar also argues that Western queer movements are increasingly defining themselves through explicitly Orientalist discourses and that Islamophobia has been accepted ‘wholesale’ by the global gay left (2007: xi). Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens, however, argue that while problematic the relationship between gay politics and Islam offers opportunities for new alliances and forms of citizenship (2010). What is clear is that whether 102

Heteronormativity in relation to European debates on multiculturalism, Orientalist discourses on Islam, or legitimations of US foreign policy, ‘sexual freedom has come to stand, metonymically, for secularism and rational, liberal subjectivity’ (Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010: 964). While it is unclear the extent to which Puar’s argument holds outside of the context of urban centres in the USA and Europe, that the very real struggles over same-sex rights are part of national projects is evidenced in the activities of groups at the intersection of queer politics and anti-racist and anti-imperialist practice such as No-one is Illegal and Define America (established by the gay journalist Jose Antonio Vargas). The embodiment of queer subjects and the violence to which they can be subject across a range of spaces is directly connected to the ability of the nation-state to assert control over global space. In this sense individual queered bodies are territorialized as geopolitical units revealing how the scale of the bodily, the national and the global are interfused and raising questions for critical geopolitics on the nature of belonging. How can we understand the desire to belong? What are the costs of belonging, and who can refuse to belong? Who gets to determine the framework for belonging? What does resistance look like under these conditions? These are questions made more urgent in the early twenty-first century with the realm of the social no longer contiguous with the nation-state and its territorial borders as the ‘geopolitical social – the assemblage of territory, economy and social forms that was both a foundation and effect of modern geopolitics’ has been reconfigured ‘in ways that make the containment of the social an impossibility’ (Cowen and Smith 2009: 23). With the dislocating effects of war, environmental disasters, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS and economic globalization, voluntary transnational migrations and enforced resettlements have resulted in the growth in numbers of refugees and diasporas and the emergence of transnational family forms, such that the political economy of sexual life has taken on new rhythms (Altman 2001). In a globalizing world in which questions of sexual politics lie at the forefront, critical geopolitics has to ask more than how states have the ability to decide who belongs in relation to its formal borders. Socio-spatial applications of power also apply to families and other territories that spill across and between national borders where the meanings attached to belonging and not belonging may ‘align with more formal propositional or prescriptive meanings, but they may also be in tension with [them]. These kinds of “meanings” and their connections to space and power through territoriality are no less important to understanding how territory works’ (Delaney 2009: 204). Such queer – uncontainable, unknowable – territorializations and the ‘untidy politics’ (Wright 2010) to which they give rise serve to highlight the anachronism of a critical geopolitics with a fixation on the nation-state undergirded by heteronormative assumptions.

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Conclusion Heteronormativity is a useful concept for critiquing the assumptions underlying traditional norms related to sex, sexuality and gender identity, and queer theorists have done most in deconstructing the normative boundaries of sexualities and genders, turning on its head the accepted belief that sex determines gender, which determines desire. That the subject is brought into being through performativity belies any notion of a pre-determined subject that is the cause of action and breaks the supposed connection between sexed bodies forming gendered subjectivities. Queer theory has thus gone where critical geopolitics has yet to go in its interrogation of identity formation and its refusal to engage in determinate ways of knowing. Denying fixity it emphasizes fluidity, mobility and contestations. Its assertion of the sexual as the bedrock of the social makes visible the naturalized, normative status of heterosexuality as an organizing principle of social organization and personal identity. In analysing the queer subject in relation to state formations and homonationalism, the queer theorist Jasbir Puar has gone beyond queer geographers’ concerns with revealing a socio-sexual logic that is deeply sexualized as heterosexual. She has illustrated how a queer sensibility in the twenty-first century is not only necessary but essential for understanding a wide range of concerns central to critical geopolitics. The implications for critical geopolitics is that an engagement with queer theory is crucial to developing an analytical framing that understands the ways in which the national and the global are contested and reproduced through sexualized practices and identities. This is not just to argue for the need to write queer folks into critical geopolitics (or to question their current absence) but for seeing critical geopolitics through a queer eye in terms of how the social and the sexual are coconstitutive and how this socio-sexual logic is played out in maintaining and reproducing (national and other) boundaries, identities and interests. A serious engagement with heteronormativity and queerness proffers a significantly different future for critical geopolitics. Its non-phallogocentric nature provides a fruitful way in which to engage new trajectories, ones that are not based on unembodied claims to knowledge, nor on the exclusion of some bodies at the expense of others, nor dependent upon determinate accounts of power or fixed notions of territories and identities and a preoccupation with the nation-state at the expense of other territorializations and geopolitical scripts, but rather a critical geopolitics based on a geographical imaginary accepting of a range of embodied differences – sexualized, racialized, classed, gendered – spatialities and practices and open to exploring the contradictory logics of national and sexual belongings.

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Heteronormativity Rahman, M., 2010. ‘Queer as intersectionality: Theorizing gay Muslim identities’. Sociology 44: 944–61. Razack, S., 2008. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. London: Routledge. Richardson, D., 1998. ‘Heterosexuality and social theory’. In D. Richardson (ed.), Theorising Heterosexuality. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. 1–20. —— 2004. ‘Locating sexualities: From here to normality’. Sexualities 7: 391–411. Rubin, G., 1975. ‘The traffic in women: Notes on the “political eceonomy” of sex’. In R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210. Sedgwick, E.K., 1990. Epistemology of the Closet, London: Prentice-Hall. Sharp, J., 2009. ‘Critical geopolitics’. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), The International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier, pp. 358–62. Slater, D., 2009. ‘Interview by Leonhardt van Efferink’. Exploring Geopolitics. . Staeheli, L., E. Kofman and L. Peake (eds), 2004. Mapping Women, Making Politics; Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography. New York: Routledge. Sullivan, N., 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press. Taylor, Y., S. Hines and M. Casey (eds), 2011. Theorising Sexuality and Intersectionality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Warner, M., 1991. ‘Introduction: Fear of a queer planet’. Social Text 29(4): 3–17. Weber, C., 1999. Faking It: US Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weeks, J., 2003. Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn. Weiss, J.T., 2008.’Heteronormativity’. In D.L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2nd edn, vol. 3, p. 430. Wright, M., 2010. ‘Gender and geography II: Bridging the gap: Feminist, queer, and the geographical imaginary’. Progress in Human Geography 34: 56–66.

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6

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Sovereignty Fiona McConnell

Introduction In an international political environment dominated by state intervention in the name of the ‘war on terror’, extra-territorial sites of detention, and states being bailed out by the IMF, sovereignty is an increasingly important and contested issue. From the introduction of ‘sovereignty bills’ in European states to violations of sovereign airspace in Iraq, and the secession and recognition of the Republic of South Sudan, it is a principle invoked to defend national interests, justify violence in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and claim independence. Revealing sovereignty as an enduringly powerful yet inherently amorphous and elusive concept, such geopolitical events and discourses both raise doubts about a number of conventional assumptions regarding sovereign power and foreground a series of questions: who and what is sovereign and where does sovereignty lie? Through what mechanisms is sovereign authority constructed and enacted? What is the future of the concept and institution of sovereignty? With its raison d’être of asking ‘fundamental questions of how power works and might be challenged’ (Dalby 1991: 266), critical geopolitics is in an ideal position to grapple with such questions. With increasing consensus on moving beyond debates regarding the irrelevance of sovereignty in the face of accelerating globalisation (Camilleri and Falk 1992), there has been ‘a virtual explosion of scholarly interest in sovereignty’ (Biersteker and Weber 1996: 1) across cognate disciplines of critical international relations, political anthropology and international law. As this chapter explores, these reinvigorated debates can be traced to interrelated political and intellectual trends. First, with the ‘war on terror’ demonstrating that ‘territorial sovereignty still remains the hard kernel of modern states’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 1), we are arguably witnessing a return to unilateralism and power politics whereby the concept of sovereignty and its often aggressive enactment is firmly back on the geopolitical agenda. Second, and simultaneously, the continuing trends towards a post-Westphalian international system premised on the increasing political clout of non-state actors has rendered sovereignty a vital lens through which to view the operation of political power at a range of scales. Finally, in responding to such trends, the expansion of a critical theory toolkit – to include

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics conceptual and methodological innovations from feminist, postcolonial and sociolegal perspectives – has seen a growing range of insightful explorations of how sovereignty is evolving and being constituted in unexpected locations. As explored below, this ranges from the extra-territorial reach of sovereignty, as in the case of the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, to analyses of aerial sovereignty and the body as a site of sovereign authority. In tracing these developments, this chapter begins by sketching out the broad theoretical context for critical geopolitics approaches to sovereignty by tracing the shift from realist and statist approaches to critical reinterpretations within international relations and political geography. Taking Agnew’s delineation of three assumptions which underpin conventional readings of sovereignty as a loose framework (2005), the chapter then foregrounds an array of theoretical and empirical re-workings of sovereignty within critical geopolitics. First, in challenging the supposition that sovereignty is absolute and indivisible, scholarship which engages with the social construction of this concept will be outlined, including the distinction between de jure and de facto sovereignty and an innovative range of studies which examine multiple, overlapping and fragmented sovereignties. Second, through contesting the assumption that sovereignty is invariably territorial, attention turns to reconceptualisations of the spatiality of sovereignty, intersections between law and geography and scholarship on the volumetric nature of sovereign space. Finally, exposing the ingrained inequality between states claiming sovereignty, attention turns to emerging research which investigates the paradoxical nature of contingent sovereignty, postcolonial approaches which challenge hierarchical binaries of strong/weak and positive/negative sovereignty and feminist perspectives which foreground gendered and embodied articulations of sovereign authority. The chapter concludes by sketching out possible future directions for the investigation of sovereignty within critical geopolitics.

Re-thinking sovereignty: From realist approaches to critical engagement Though there are antecedents in the work of Jean Gottman (1973) and more recent historical analysis by Alec Murphy (1996), as Kuus and Agnew note, ‘despite the varied and sophisticated work on the state in political geography, relatively few studies focus explicitly on the principle of sovereignty’ (2008: 96). Within international relations (IR), however, sovereignty has been of prime concern, with the dominant realist tradition defining sovereignty as the ultimate law-making authority within given territorial boundaries and thus conceived as fixed, final and absolute (Morgenthau 1948). While some (neo)realist scholars have interrogated this taking-for-granted nature of sovereignty (see Krasner 1999), sovereignty is still seen in such accounts as inherently linked to territory and residing solely with the state. Meanwhile, though turning attention to the idea of an ‘international society’ 110

Sovereignty and eschewing materialist interpretations of international politics, the English school of IR also foregrounds the mutual recognition of sovereignty by states as the primary rule underpinning interstate relations and central to the constitution of statehood itself (see Bull 1977; James 1984; Wight 1977). With the introduction of constructivist, poststructuralist and critical social theory approaches to IR in the 1980s and 1990s, such conventional perspectives have been challenged and this foundational concept of sovereignty has been the focus of considerable critical reconceptualisation (Ashley 1988; Wendt 1999). Paralleling and complementing this rethinking of the principle of sovereignty within critical IR has been a similar theoretical agenda within critical geopolitics. Inspired and influenced in particular by Rob Walker’s analysis of the self-reinforcing binary oppositions inherent within practices of sovereignty (1993), critical geopolitics scholars have persuasively demonstrated that that sovereign power is not necessarily only state power (Dalby 1991) nor necessarily territorially constituted (Agnew 2005). Central to this agenda, and again paralleling work in critical IR, has been an engagement with philosophers and political theorists – notably Foucault, Schmitt and Agamben – whose work on sovereignty goes ‘against the grain of conventional canonical definitions of Western political discourse where the sovereign state is defined as the bedrock of a “civilised” international order’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 18). Scholars within critical geopolitics have increasingly sought to put these theorists ‘to work’ by bringing their theoretical insights into the concept of sovereignty to bear on contemporary geopolitical situations. In bringing sovereignty productively into dialogue with the idea of power over life, the notion of the exception and Agamben’s analysis of the camp in particular has ‘become an especially sharp political concept that is being used to characterise and critique the contentious political practices undertaken since 9/11’ (Neal 2004: 374; see Gregory 2004; Minca 2007). Underpinning critical scholarship on sovereignty more generally has been an important conceptual unpacking of its constituent elements – territory, authority and statehood – which are so often conflated in political analysis (see Anderson 1996; Ruggie 1993). Adeptly critiqued as a ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew 1994) which has ‘co-opted our spatial imaginations’ (Murphy 1996: 107), teasing apart these aspects of sovereignty brings the sovereign articulations of a range of non-state actors into view and offers plural perspectives for examining overlapping authority and multiple loyalties (discussed below). Once thereby ‘freed’ from the constraints of territorial statehood, sovereignty emerges as a heterogeneous and complex array of processes. Within critical IR a now well-established strand of scholarship approaches the concept of sovereignty as socially constructed (Biersteker and Weber 1996) and as a historically specific concept in contrast to its rendition as a universal and foundational principle in realist writings (Bartelson 1995). Not only has critical geopolitics developed this line of argument in examining how the effects of sovereign authority vary across space but, in mirroring critical IR’s ‘multiplicity of theoretical perspectives’ (Dalby 1991: 261), a diverse range of approaches to the concept of sovereignty have emerged. In briefly charting scholarship that has attended to the discursive, performative and corporeal articulations of sovereignty, the rest of this section both flags ongoing interconnections between critical IR, 111

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics critical geopolitics and, to a lesser extent, political anthropology, and notes the parallels between approaches to the concept of sovereignty and wider intellectual shifts within the field of critical geopolitics. Drawing on constructionist approaches and speaking directly to critical geopolitics’ remit of exposing intertwined relations between power and knowledge, such scholarship views sovereignty as a contested mode of representation. Not only does this expose how ‘claims to sovereignty presuppose, or prescribe … a way of confidently thinking about truth and knowledge’ (Constantinou 1998: 28; see Sidaway 2003) but, in delineating ‘us’ from ‘them’, representational practices arguably underpin the inside/outside binary of sovereign power. Such modes of representation have been discussed in terms of a state ‘writing’ its security (Campbell 1992) and in the deployment of visuality, with Amoore making the persuasive case for vision being ‘uniquely implicated in the representational practices that make state sovereignty possible’ (2007: 218). Related to issues of representation, and central to getting a handle on how sovereignty is socially constructed and continually in process, has been the employment of the lens of subjectivity (see Edkins and Pin-Fat 1999). Taking the poststructuralist stance that sovereignty has no ontological status beyond the performances which constitute it, scholars across critical IR, critical geopolitics and anthropology have productively employed Butler’s formulation of performativity to suggest that sovereignty is (re)constructed through the effects of citational practices (see Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Weber 1995; 1998). In terms of fleshing out these ideas, attention has turned to the actions and performances through which an image of stable sovereignty is created and affirmed with, for example, Biersteker and Weber’s seminal text State Sovereignty as Social Construct illustrating empirically how practices such as authority claims, intervention and the drawing of boundaries constitute sovereign power. Focusing on similar practices but innovatively bringing semiotics and literary and art theories to bear on the concepts of sovereignty and statecraft, Sidaway employs metaphors of drama in order to investigate how states ‘are magicked into existence’ (2002: xi). Alongside the spectacular and dramatic performances of sovereignty claims such as delivering foreign-policy speeches, planting flags on the ocean floor (Dodds 2010) and building walls (Brown 2010) are equally revealing mundane acts of, for example, conducting a census, collecting taxes and validating identity documents. In response to critiques from feminist geographers and others that critical geopolitics was focusing on the discursive, the macro-scale and elite politics at the expense of the material, the everyday and politics from below (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2004), this field has seen a shift towards focusing on such ‘little things’ of geopolitics (Thrift 2000) and engaging with ethnographic approaches (Megoran 2006). Offering the ‘potential to counter disembodied theories by recording dispersed sovereign powers in daily practice’ (Mountz 2010: xxiii), ethnographic methodologies have proved particularly productive in focusing on the sites and moments where sovereign power relations are laid bare (e.g. Secor 2001). In a related strand of research, the body has emerged ‘as a key site at which to examine the performance of sovereignty’ (Mountz 2010: 153). Taking Foucault’s work on 112

Sovereignty disciplinary power and biopolitics as a launch-pad, such an embodied approach to sovereignty shifts attention to ‘issues of internal constitution of sovereign power within states’ through ‘the inscription of sovereign power upon bodies of subjects’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 2, 20). In summary, having set out the broad theoretical context for critical approaches to sovereignty in critical IR and critical geopolitics, this concept can be seen to be increasingly investigated as a complex set of practices, discourses, embodiments and everyday materialities. Such approaches to the concept of sovereignty differ from realist engagements not only in refusing to take sovereign authority for granted but also in interrogating how political configurations came to be and questioning where and with whom sovereignty lies. In exploring how paying attention to the assembling of sovereignty through performances, practices and affective engagements opens up productive lines of enquiry, the following sections turn to particular strategies critical geopolitics has used to challenge and re-work three core assumptions regarding sovereignty: that it is absolute, that it is invariably territorial and that there is equality between states claiming sovereignty (Agnew 2005).

Sovereignty as relative and divisible Underpinning the first of these assumptions – that sovereignty is absolute – is the practice of state recognition which, as the legal mechanism by which states ‘come into being’, is conventionally understood as a conferral of de jure sovereignty over a demarcated territory. With recognition thus creating a zero-sum game with respect to territory, this practice excludes a host of non-state geopolitical actors and arguably results in the ‘closing down’ of the concept of sovereignty. However, if, as outlined above, the constituent elements of sovereignty are teased apart and problematised, then the concept of sovereignty can be effectively prised open and rendered multiple, overlapping and relative. Following Agnew in thereby conceiving sovereignty as divisible and incremental (2005), the line between the sovereign and the non-sovereign is blurred and questions of who and what is sovereign and where sovereignty lies are opened up for analysis. An initial strategy through which such plural understandings of sovereignty can be reached is by delineating two routes to sovereignty. The first is the dominant discourse of de jure sovereignty based on the exercising of legal powers over bounded territory and formal recognition from other sovereign states. Secondly, in widening the notion of sovereignty ‘to include other forms of power that are not strictly juridical’ (Ong 1999: 216) is the idea of de facto sovereignty: the ability and capacity to exercise power. Applicable beyond conventional statehood, de facto sovereignty can be disentangled from the notion of bounded territory and refutes both the assumption that a polity not recognised is not sovereign and the idea of sovereignty as absolute. The nature of such de facto sovereignty can be investigated in different ways. One strategy posited by Berg and Kuusk (2010) is to quantify such ‘empirical’ sovereignty through measuring indicators of efficiency 113

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of governance in order to compare and contrast degrees of ‘being sovereign’. An alternative approach is to attend to the practices of de facto sovereignty through an ethnographic focus at the scale of the everyday. For, in contrast to de jure sovereignty being ‘examined at the level of state interactions and through legal discourses’ (McConnell 2010: 764), de facto sovereignty can be produced by achieving quotidian compliance through, for example, management of societal pressure and cultivation of moral authority (see McConnell 2009). Where this disentangling of de facto and de jure aspects of sovereignty becomes particularly useful is in examining the sovereign articulations of unrecognised polities. For, though it is conventionally believed that a polity requires both de jure and de facto sovereignty, there are important empirical cases where these forms of sovereignty have diverged. As Jackson argues, the post-colonial ‘new sovereignty game’ whereby ‘rulers can acquire independence solely by virtue of being successors of colonial governments’ (1990: 34) has seen the establishment of both quasi-states, which are ‘internationally recognised as full juridical equals, yet which manifestly lack all but the most rudimentary empirical capabilities’, and de facto states, which exercise state capabilities but lack recognition (Pegg 1998: 3). In light of this paradox and broader economic transformations, Austin and Kumar assert that the ‘existence of sovereignty (in a legal sense) is no longer a useful indicator of a state’s actual capacity to carry out its will’ (1998: 53). Agnew takes this further and, challenging the very assumption ‘that there actually is a pure de jure sovereignty from which de facto sovereignty is a lapse or anomaly’, asserts instead that ‘de facto sovereignty is all there is’ (2005: 437). However, it can be argued that eschewing the legal underpinnings of sovereignty and focusing solely on its everyday enactments can stretch the concept too far, thereby potentially compromising our ability to analyse its power and influence. One strategy for reining the concept of sovereignty back in without losing the valuable leverage of critical analysis is to follow the line of argument that traditional legal readings of sovereignty have important ideological purchase. In an influential piece looking at the role of nationalism and territorial consolidation in legitimising the sovereign state system, Murphy argues that de jure sovereignty over bounded territory should be seen not only as an assumption underpinning the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew 1994), but also as the dominant ‘sovereign-territorial ideal’: a rigid order which, although never fully realised, retains ideological and practical significance (Murphy 1996). Therefore, although it can be argued that ‘sovereignty is often more myth than reality’ (Benton 2010: 279), it is a potent fiction nonetheless, with the ‘gold standard’ of sovereign-territorial statehood remaining a powerful promise, reward and goal, particularly for those conventionally excluded from statehood (McConnell 2010). Returning to the conceptual unpacking of sovereignty, this both challenges the assumption that states are the sole proprietors of sovereignty (Agnew 2005) and opens up valuable space for examining multi-sovereign arrangements which in diverse ways challenge, disrupt or reconfigure relations between sovereignty and territory. Jostling for position on the global stage, such non-state actors range from dependencies and leased territories to city-regions, social movements and 114

Sovereignty transnational corporations. Indicating ‘how widespread exceptions to the rule of absolute, indivisible sovereignty … can be’ (Agnew 2005: 441), such polities provide an empirical basis from which to posit sovereignty as labile and divisible and raise questions of how sovereignties can overlap and co-exist. A key area of research in this regard has been the issue of shared sovereignties. These negotiated situations of extraterritoriality include international territories such as Antarctica (Dodds 1997) and international oceans (Steinberg 2001), enclaves (Jones 2009), binational territories and condominiums (Jeffrey 2006) and leased territories (ReidHenry 2007). In addition, and drawing directly on ideas of multilayered sovereignty emerging from discussions of ‘new-medievalism’ (Anderson 1996) are notions of pooled sovereignty in cases of supra-state governance, such as the EU (Murphy 1996), and debates around post-sovereign configurations such as autonomous or confederal arrangements (see Keating 2001). Attending to relationships between sovereign actors more specifically, ideas of graduated, hybrid and tacit sovereignty have also been advanced. Based on empirical research in South East Asia, and exploring the flexibility and fragmentation of sovereignty, Ong’s notion of ‘graduated sovereignty’ describes the zoning of multilayered governance in which states relinquish sovereignty, or share sovereign rights with foreign institutions. Elaborating on such ideas, Lawson focuses on the differential effects of economic globalisation on national belonging in Ecuador (2002), while Hudson turns attention to overlapping sovereignty in the context of offshore financial centres (1998). Meanwhile, Fregonese uses the term ‘hybrid sovereignty’ (2012) to describe heterogeneous webs of relations between state and non-state actors (see also Randeria 2007) while McConnell suggests the idea of ‘tacit sovereignty’ to depict situations where sovereignty is not declared or sanctioned but rather based on implicit understandings and assumed through everyday interactions (2009). This growing body of research on sovereignty in the so-called margins of geopolitics both illustrates the failure of realist IR to keep pace with changing geopolitical realities and provides a valuable window on the contingency of political power in ‘normal’ states. Moreover, the persistence of such multi-sovereign arrangements gives empirical grounding to important speculative questions of ‘what if the core political unit was not a nation-state and what if sovereignty did not have to be tied to territory?’ (McConnell 2010: 766). As such, constituting a shift towards ‘thinking of the state, sovereignty and territory in the plural rather than the singular’ (Anderson 1996: 135), the literature sketched out above has the potential to contribute to broader debates on the diversification of international society. This is not necessarily a utopian vision of a stateless world as envisioned by proponents of hyper-globalisation. Rather, it is a geographical imagination based on a complex political order with multiple sites of sovereign authority displaying varying degrees of stateness (Clapham 1998) and where the boundaries of the existing international legal regime are stretched and reconfigured. Though there is potentially the danger of compromising the leverage of critical analysis, this proliferation of adjectives to describe sovereignty – hybrid, tacit, graduated and more – productively seeks to repluralise our understanding of political space and analyse alternative geopolitical 115

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics futures. Such a research agenda thus has the potential both to counter critiques that critical geopolitics has ‘been too often restricted to unpacking discourses while stopping short of a concern for transformation’ (Power and Campbell 2010: 244) and to provide a focus for a more ‘progressive geopolitics’ (Kearns 2009). The following two sections point to further ways in which such an agenda can be fostered, first in terms of attending to how sovereignty is imperfectly linked to territory and second to how it is intrinsically contingent.

Sovereignty as problematically territorial A key premise which underlies the critical investigation of divided, partial and mixed sovereignties is a challenging of the relationship between sovereignty and territory. As a noted above, implicit in the dominant Westphalian model is an assumption that sovereignty is ‘invariably and inevitably territorial’ (Agnew 2005: 437). Premised on territory understood as exclusive, continuous and contiguous (Elkins 1995), sovereignty is thus taken to be a ‘political fact within an already given and demarcated territory, simultaneously signifying sovereignty over the same territory’ (Bartelson 1995: 29). However, if we acknowledge that, on an empirical level, ‘sovereignty has always exceeded and diverted from a territorial space’ (Shah 2010: 352), then how is the relationship between sovereignty and territory being re-conceptualised by critical theorists? A flippant response might be that it is not being thought about much at all, as it is arguable that, though considerable critical attention has been given to connections between sovereignty and political authority, the relationship between sovereignty and territory has been somewhat under-theorised (Agnew 2005). However, as sketched out here, there is an emerging strand of research within critical geopolitics which is grappling with such issues and, moreover, it is precisely the relationship between sovereignty and territory which this field is best placed to offer critical insights into (Eudaily and Smith 2008). A first step in interrogating this relationship is to raise the fundamental question of where sovereignty is located, or, as Biersteker and Weber put it, ‘where does sovereignty ultimately reside: in an apparently homogenous people … among the residents of a territorially bounded entity … or elsewhere?’ (1996: 2). While the ‘elsewhere’ points to controversies over tracing supreme authority to the people or to a ‘divine right’ of rulers, it is distinctions between territory and population in the context of the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle (R2P, see McGregor 2010) and broader intersections of security and development agendas (Duffield 2005), which have engaged critical thinkers. In terms of the relationship between territory and sovereignty, it is the adherence to or rejection of a statist ontology which underpins divergent interpretations, and debate regarding the global spatiality of power has increasingly polarised around two positions. One school of thought is centred on a model of ‘conventional’ territorial sovereignty whereby power is centralised, territorialised and contained within state units. Challenging such a perspective is 116

Sovereignty a body of scholarship which perceives power as decentred, networked and postterritorial whereby the ‘modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 187–8; see Allen 2003; Venn 2004). Perhaps the most enlightening work in this area has been that which, in seeking to move beyond such dualistic modes of thinking, has turned attention to a ‘third position which asks how the spatiality of state power is being multiplied, reactivated and transformed in new and differently sovereign spaces’ and focuses on the emergence of a ‘sovereign spatiality of power which is neither neatly territorial nor post-territorial’ (Coleman 2008: 356). As such, this modality of power is posited as an intensely spatial concept (Agnew and Corbridge 1995), and how we define and interpret territory and territoriality is critically scrutinised. This has entailed eschewing the supposition that there is a zero-sum game with regards to territory and sovereignty and, in understanding sovereign statehood as only one particular mode of territorial practice, being sensitive to the possibility of different forms of political territoriality (Forsberg 1996). The distinction outlined above between de jure and de facto sovereignty illustrates this idea of different forms of sovereignty having different geographies as, while de jure sovereignty is conventionally presented as packaged at the level of the nation-state, de facto sovereignty is ‘not necessarily so neatly territorialized’ (Agnew 2005: 437), with its practice varying according to scale such that ‘what counts and/or functions as sovereign is not the same in all times and places’ (Weber 1995: 2). Returning to the spatiality of sovereignty, Derek Gregory’s examination of British and US geopolitics in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine offers a key example of the spatial reformulation of sovereign power in the ‘colonial present’ which rejects both state territorial sovereignty and ideas of global placelessness (2004). Also addressing this sovereign-territorial ‘paradox’ head-on is Wendy Brown’s engaging text on the recent series of state wall-building projects in the context of ‘waning’ nation-state sovereignty (2010). Focusing on Israel’s ‘security fence’ and the USA’s ‘border fence’, Brown argues that such walls ‘harken back to a modality and ontology of power that is sovereign, spatially bounded and territorial’ (2010: 81) at the same time as their frequent breaching by transnational practices renders them little more than theatrical props. Finally, drawing on Foucault’s analytics of power, John Agnew’s notion of ‘sovereignty regimes’ offers another tool for investigating the spatiality of sovereign authority. Focusing on ‘effective sovereignty’ and using the geography of currencies to empirically illustrate his argument, Agnew outlines the historical and geographical incidence of four spatial systems of rule – classic, globalist, integrative, imperialist – which are articulated in geographically diverse ways (2005). However, though such approaches productively challenge the territorial imperative of this mode of power, it has been argued that reading territory primarily as the physical extent of sovereignty neglects important legal dimensions (Shah 2010). Instead, focusing on the intersections of law, geography and sovereign power not only foregrounds crucial early work on sovereignty which defined it in purely juridical terms (e.g. Bodin 1992), but also offers an insightful route into 117

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the mechanisms through which sovereign authority is claimed and maintained. A fascinating example of such an approach is Lauren Benton’s historical analysis of European imperial practices. In detailing the uneven geographies of imperial power, Benton argues that, although control of territory formed an important part of early modern sovereignty, it ‘was exercised mainly over … corridors, and over enclaves and irregular zones around them’ (2010: 2). With imperial sovereignty thereby ‘spatially elastic’ and the ‘tie between sovereign and subject … defined as a legal relationship’, central to its foundations was ‘the portability of subjecthood and the delegation of legal authority’ (Benton 2010: 228, 3). Central to critical analyses of juridical aspects of sovereignty has been engagement with the work of Giorgio Agamben. As noted above, Agamben posits sovereign power as a threshold concept which ‘opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law’ (1998: 64), and, in the context of extra-legal tactics enacted under the auspices of the ‘war on terror’, critical scholars have increasingly turned to the intersections of biopolitics with geopolitics and sovereignty with governmentality (Hyndman 2010: 247; see Gregory 2006; Hannah 2006). Attending to the particular geographies of the state of exception has seen a series of engaging studies in critical geopolitics. In addition to work which focuses on the literal and metaphorical space of the camp where the suspension of law takes on a fixed spatial arrangement (see Giacarria and Minca 2011; Ramadan 2009; ReidHenry 2007), have been studies which explore the extension of sovereign power outward to those it excludes through dispersed ‘sites where sovereign power and bio-power coincide’ (Gregory 2006: 206; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007). Two sites in particular have been the focus of recent attention: the body (Hansen and Stepputat 2005) and the border (Coleman 2007; Salter 2004). Innovatively bringing these together in an investigation of the strategies that refugee-receiving states employ to control migration, Mountz (2010) provides a welcome ethnographic grounding of Agamben’s ideas and makes the persuasive case for attending to how states manipulate the relationship between geography and law. Focusing on a series of legally ambiguous sites along the margins of sovereign territory, Mountz illustrates how states extend ‘their reach beyond sovereign territory, creating zones that render migrants stateless by geographical design’ (2010: xxxiii). This de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation of sovereignty through the exported border (see also Sparke 2006) therefore aptly demonstrates the need for a ‘remapping of the boundaries of sovereign territory’ (Mountz 2010: 125). Taking this remapping of sovereignty in, literally, a new direction, has been scholarship seeking to ‘conceptualise sovereign territory as a three-dimensional volumetric space encompassing the land, maritime and air spaces of a state’ (Williams 2010: 51–2). Drawing on Graham’s and Weizman’s work on the vertical dimension of geopolitics (Graham 2004; Weizman 2007), an emerging area of research has focused on issues of aerial sovereignty (see Williams 2007; 2010) and security issues pertaining to the geopolitics of outer space (MacDonald 2007; Sage 2008). In summary, therefore, with the ‘redefinition of political authority in geographically complex ways suggest[ing] the need to change the terms of debate about sovereignty’ (Agnew 2005: 438), such scholarship on variously territorialised 118

Sovereignty forms of sovereignty points to a healthy future for critical geopolitics’ engagement with the spatiality of sovereign power. However, while the productive interweaving of legal, territorial and conceptual issues reveals hitherto hidden locations of sovereignty, the question of what mechanisms sovereign authority is constructed and enacted through requires that attention is also paid to the unequal power relations inherent within declarations and recognitions of sovereign power, and it is to such issues that the next section turns.

Sovereignty as contingent and hierarchical Under international law, sovereign states are deemed equal, and it is this principle which, in theory, guarantees equality of participation in international relations. In challenging this third assumption underpinning sovereignty, critical theorists have asked: are all states equally sovereign or are some more sovereign than others? An increasingly significant area of research in this vein is that exploring the contingency of sovereignty. Again turning to the intersection of geography and law, work by Stuart Elden in particular has highlighted the misleadingly partial use of the term ‘territorial integrity’ to justify military interventions, rendition flights and ‘indefinite detention’ (2005; 2006; see also El Ouali 2006). Teasing apart the notion of territorial integrity to reveal its constituent elements of territorial sovereignty – the right to act as sovereign within defined borders – and territorial preservation – the responsibilities of states to maintain existing borders – Elden and Williams argue that such state actions have violated territorial sovereignty at the same time that territorial preservation is being invoked (2009). As such, this reveals a ‘paradoxical spatialization of sovereignty within current Western foreign policies: namely, the right to adjudicate and intervene in global affairs while simultaneously identifying the state as the pre-eminent container of political power’ (Jeffrey 2009: 46). Such paradoxical sovereignty may have been at its rhetorical height with neoconservative justifications for the ‘war on terror’, but its antecedents have been the focus of previous critical attention. This includes Weber’s analysis of the contested boundary between sovereignty and intervention (1995), Duffield’s work on the coalescing of security and development concerns in the 1990s (2005) and analysis of sovereignty as responsibility within the R2P principle (Bellamy 2009). Coming to prominence in policy pronouncements made by the Bush administration after 9/11 and adding a wider set of demands to the idea of sovereignty as responsibility, ‘contingent sovereignty’ is based on the idea that, in circumstances such as seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, harbouring terrorists or the inability to control state borders, the norms of sovereignty do not apply (Elden 2006). The failure to meet these ‘obligations’ of behaving like a ‘real’ state is thus used as justification for military intervention, as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq (Elden and Williams 2009). As such, sovereignty in this reading is understood not as an absolute concept which is simply present or not, but as a contingent entity that can be ‘lost’ or removed. A key mechanisms through which 119

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics sovereignty has thus been taken away and indeed violated is through the use of air power including aerial incursions and attacks and the establishment of no-fly zones (Weizman 2002; Williams 2010). If states can thus effectively ‘lose’ sovereignty, it has been suggested that can they can also gain it through ‘earned’ sovereignty ‘where new states can enjoy transitional paths to independence or secession’ by having sovereignty incrementally ‘transferred from another state, held in trust by the United Nations [or] returned after occupation’ (Elden 2006: 11, 19). Promoted as a ‘concept that seeks to reconcile the principles of self-determination and humanitarian intervention with the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity’ (Scharf 2003: 374), a notable performance of such earned sovereignty was the ‘handing over’ of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the US appointed Iraqi Governing Council on 28 June 2004. Implicit in this action is the ‘notion that the US occupies a privileged moral position in identifying and correcting failed state sovereignty’ (Jeffrey 2009: 61). This normative categorising of states’ sovereign capabilities, while certainly not a new phenomenon, has taken on added significance in security discourses around levels of threat to the global order and several productive lines of enquiry have emerged from a critique of such public adjudications on state sovereignty. First, a quintessentially deconstructionist approach has been to expose the ideological framings, political interests and moral assumptions which underpin such declarations of sovereign failure and to critique the hierarchical binaries of failed/non-failed, strong/weak and positive/negative sovereignty upon which these adjudications are premised (Sidaway 2003; Weber 1998). Second, with critical geopolitics seeking to analyse the impact of representational practices of geopolitics which distinguish between a domestic self and external Other (Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998), attention has also turned to the situated political perspectives from which such binaries emerge (Jeffrey 2009). As Anghie reminds us, international law is premised on a version of sovereignty which is implicitly European, and, ‘perfected’ in the West, this model of sovereignty is conceived as transferred to the non-European world (2002). Attending to the ‘social construction of Western understandings of non-Western states’ (Strang 1996: 25) therefore reveals how deviations from this ideal are seen to ‘lack’ sovereign statehood and are ‘actively delegitimated in the eyes of the West’ (Biersteker and Weber 1996: 15). As critical re-interpretations have thus highlighted, ‘the very attempt to treat sovereignty as a matter of definition and legal principle encourages a certain amnesia about its historical and culturally specific character’ (Walker 1993: 166) and obscures the fact that the ostensibly Western concept of sovereignty carries with it ‘specific assumptions about order, the secular and the sacred’ (Sidaway et al. 2004: 1046). However, although there is increasing acknowledgement that the traditional ‘geopolitical gaze triangulates the world political map from a Western imperialist vantage point … and records it in order to bring it within the scope of Western imaginings’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 53), empirical attention within critical geopolitics remains somewhat fixed on examples from North America and Western Europe (see critiques by Dodds 2001; Dowler and Sharp 2001). While studies which 120

Sovereignty seek to interrogate sovereignty as a ‘context-specific discourse’ (Kuus 2002: 394) should certainly be encouraged, a more general awareness of the situated nature of sovereignty claims and incorporation of non-Western sovereign configurations into our analyses points to the need for a critical stance of postcoloniality vis-à-vis sovereignty. A key example of how such an approach might be applied is Sidaway’s postcolonial analysis of how African sovereignty is represented as failed and weak (2003). Arguing that we should think of a global geography of sovereignty ‘beyond the presence or absence of undifferentiated sovereign power, towards a contextual understanding of different regimes, apparatus, expressions and representations of sovereignty’ (Sidaway 2003: 174), Sidaway displaces dominant binaries of sovereignty by arguing that the supposed ‘weakness’ of certain African states might be interpreted as arising less from a lack of authority, but rather as an excess of certain modes of sovereignty. Two further ways in which such a situated and postcolonial critique of sovereignty might be developed can be traced. The first is a dialogue with indigenous studies which, in facilitating a ‘decolonisation of our spatial imaginations to reveal forms of political space that cannot simply be mapped onto the boundary lines of the international state system’ (Bruyneel 2007: 222) draws critical attention to varying degrees of sovereignty (Cassidy 1998), contested boundaries of judicial authority (S. Smith 2008) and ‘third-spaces’ of sovereignty (Bruyneel 2007). Not only do such readings of sovereignty productively interweave legal, spatial and political concerns, but their intersection with critical geopolitics scholarship offers an insightfully ambivalent relationship to state sovereignty which acknowledges its continued salience but refuses to be dictated by its boundaries. A second and interrelated approach is a sustained engagement with intersections between sovereignty and class, race and gender based power relations. To date, valuable insights have been offered into intersections between sovereignty and neoliberalism (see Lawson 2002; Ong 1999), the geographies of racism and dispossession which result from various sovereign practices (Sidaway 2010), and the foregrounding of gender issues vis-à-vis articulations of sovereign authority. With regards to the latter, the growing contribution of feminist approaches in critical geopolitics has opened up a number of productive lines of enquiry, from historical analysis of the importance of marriage and the embodied gendered construction of sovereignty (Saco 1997), to contemporary scholarship on love and desire as factors in geopolitical strategy (S.H. Smith 2011) and the discursive framing of women’s bodies as sites for orchestrating sovereign claims (Fluri 2012). With such work extending the empirical boundaries of critical geopolitics and foregrounding conventionally marginal voices, it adds much needed grounding to Constantinou’s assertion that ‘whether sovereignty effects expression or repression, power or disempowerment, radically depends on “who” and “where” one is’ (1998: 35).

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Conclusion In describing critical geopolitics as ‘a general gathering place for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that characterize modernity’, Ó Tuathail outlines how this field re-imagines geopolitics as inescapably cultural, inescapably plural and inescapably traversed by relations of power and gender (in Jones and Sage 2009: 316). As a core concept of geopolitics, the subjecting of sovereignty to a range of critical interrogations as outlined above aptly illustrates each of these reconceptualisations. Through the lens of constructionist, poststructuralist and feminist approaches, sovereignty has been posited as constituted through discourses, performances, embodiments and everyday materialities. In displacing state-centric readings of geopolitics and conceptually disentangling sovereignty and territory, it has been rendered partial, plural and divisible and enacted by a range of geopolitical actors. Finally, in beginning to postcolonise this concept and attending to the geopolitical imaginaries that underpin it, sovereignty has been exposed as an inherently normative concept and geographically as well as historically contingent. A core theme emerging from the above discussion is that sovereignty is a contested and elusive concept. The more we try to pin it down, the more it seems to evade definition. Such unravelling and deconstruction of the concept of sovereignty could, on the one hand, be critiqued for finding sovereign practices both everywhere and nowhere and for contributing to an identity crisis within critical geopolitics whereby ‘original concerns have been diluted into the variety of meanings attributed to it’ (Power and Campbell 2010: 244). However, on the other hand, sovereignty is and should remain central to the agenda of critical geopolitics, both theoretically and politically. Extending explorations of the diverse and complex articulations of sovereign power can, moreover, offer a route back to the ‘big questions’ of formal and practical geopolitics which, Dalby argues, have been side-lined in recent years (2010). In addition, bringing heterodox re-readings of sovereignty into dialogue is not only analytically productive, but it is an approach and strategy which marks the distinctive contribution of critical geopolitics itself. Echoing the approach of political geography, and indeed human geography more generally, the integrating of diverse theoretical perspectives and methodologies should be welcomed and promoted. Two particular areas for future engagement emerge from this chapter. The first is further exploration of how sovereignty, in all its manifestations, works through the everyday. Ethnographically attending to the ‘microgeographies of sovereignty’ (Mountz 2010: 140) and continually expanding our empirical gaze, there is a strong case to make for fostering engaged dialogue with scholarship on quotidian sovereign practices in political anthropology (see Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002). The second is a more focused and sustained engagement with legal aspects of sovereignty. As noted above, intersections between geography and law have proved expedient in grounding the performances of sovereign power, and the application of such an approach to issues of indigenous sovereignty, the political implications of the state of exception and sovereignty disputes over natural 122

Sovereignty resource ownership and management (see Alam, Dione and Jeffrey 2009; De Sartre and Taravella 2009), point to important avenues for future research. Sovereignty is a crucial and contested contemporary issue and, with a track record of examining, critiquing and challenging how articulations of sovereign authority shape our legal, political and everyday lives, we can be sure that politically important and theoretically enriching research agendas within critical geopolitics lie ahead.

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Sovereignty Power, M., and D. Campbell, 2010. ‘The state of critical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 243–6. Rajaram, P.K., and C. Grundy-Warr (eds), 2007. Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ramadan, A., 2009. ‘Destroying Nahr el-Bared: Sovereignty and urbicide in the space of exception’. Political Geography 28: 153–63. Randeria, S., 2007. ‘The state of globalisation: Legal plurality, overlapping sovereignties and ambiguous alliances between civil society and the cunning state in India’. Theory, Culture and Society 24: 1–33. Reid-Henry, S., 2007. ‘Exceptional sovereignty? Guantanamo Bay and the recolonial present’. Antipode 39: 627–48. Ruggie, J., 1993. ‘Territoriality and beyond: Problematising modernity in international relations’. International Organisation 47: 139–74. Saco, D., 1997. ‘Gendering sovereignty: Marriage and international relations in Elizabethan times’. European Journal of International Relations 3: 291–318. Sage, D., 2008. ‘Framing space: A popular geopolitics of American manifest destiny in outer space’. Geopolitics 13: 27–53. Salter, M., 2004. ‘Passports, mobility and security: How smart can the border be?’ International Studies Perspectives 5: 71–91. Scharf, M.P., 2003. ‘Earned sovereignty: Juridical underpinnings’. Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 31: 373–87. Secor, A.J., 2001. ‘Towards a feminist counter-geopolitics: Gender, space and Islamist politics in Istanbul’. Space and Polity 5: 199–219. Shah, N., 2010. ‘Review essay: Terra infirma’. Political Geography 29: 352–5. Sidaway, J.D., 2002. Imagined Regional Communities: Integration and Sovereignty in the Global South. London: Routledge. —— 2003. ‘Sovereign excesses? Portraying postcolonial sovereigntyscapes’. Political Geography 22: 157–78. —— 2010. ‘“One island, one team, one mission”: Geopolitics, sovereignty, “race” and rendition’. Geopolitics 15: 667–83. —— et al., 2004. ‘Translating political geography’. Political Geography 23: 1037–49. Smith, S., 2008. ‘Hemp for sovereignty: Scale, territory and the struggle for Native American sovereignty’. Space and Polity 12: 231–49. Smith, S.H., 2011. ‘“She says herself, ‘I have no future’”: Love, fate, and territory in Leh District, India’. Gender, Place and Culture 18: 455–76. Sparke, M., 2006. ‘A neoliberal nexus: Economy, security and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border’. Political Geography 25: 151–80. Steinberg, P.E., 2001. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strang, D., 1996. ‘Contested sovereignty: The social construction of colonial imperialism’. In T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22–49. Thrift, N., 2000. ‘It’s the little things’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkins (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 380–87.

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ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Radical Geopolitics Julien Mercille

Introduction In the late 1960s ‘a small group of geographers, radicalized by opposition to the Vietnam War, began discussing the transformation of their discipline’ (Peet 2000: 951). Mainly through Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, first published in 1969, they started disseminating ideas that challenged many of the research topics and approaches that were then dominant. Since then, issues related to poverty, underdevelopment, the environment, gender, social justice and international conflict have been seen by many as more important than, say, the gravity model and central place theory. From the 1990s onwards postmodern approaches have meshed with radical geographies, giving rise to a more eclectic field. This chapter surveys and discusses radical geopolitics, a subfield of radical geography mostly concerned with international relations. First, the origins of radical geopolitics and how they have led to the main trends in the field today are discussed. Radical geopolitics is then situated within the critical geopolitics literature by discussing its similarities and differences with it. Thirdly, the chapter suggests that critical and radical geopolitics would benefit from deeper engagements with politics and activism and discusses some of the ways in which this could be accomplished. Overall, radical geopolitics highlights the importance of a political-economic approach to the study of political events and sees political-economic factors and structures as the driving forces behind international relations and domestic politics. It is contrasted to critical geopolitics’ emphasis on poststructuralist approaches and argues that the latter neglect to identify the causes of political events and their crucial political-economic aspects.

Forerunners It is difficult to identify precisely radical geopolitics’ historical antecedents since the field has been influenced by a broad range of thinkers, many of whom could

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics have belonged to several of today’s academic disciplines. Political economy is the most important starting point, although the term can be interpreted in more than one way. This chapter will adopt Andrew Sayer’s conceptualization of political economy as simply referring to ‘approaches which view the economy as socially and politically embedded and as structured by power relations’ (1995: ix). Many scholars can be included under the (radical) political economy heading, such as neo-Ricardians, left-Keynesians and left-Weberians; moreover, the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic liberals like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill did not ignore power and should thus be considered. Current journals like the Review of Radical Political Economics also include feminist economics and institutional economics under their banner. Nevertheless, radical geopolitics as it stands today in geography and within critical geopolitics has probably been most influenced by Marxism and anarchism/ left libertarianism. In particular, the work of David Harvey has been seminal in describing how Marxism can be applied to geography and geopolitics (1982; 1985; see also Harvey 2006; N. Smith 2003; 2005). One of his important contributions has been to identify two logics of power, one capitalist and one territorial, to make sense of US foreign policy. Harvey’s capitalist logic is associated with ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ (2003: 26). It may be understood through the concept of the ‘spatial fix’, which asserts that capitalism has a tendency to expand geographically, through opening up new markets, expanding trade or investing surplus capital to build production facilities in new places. Consequently, capitalists seek policies which will help them expand their economic activities overseas. The territorial logic refers to ‘the political, diplomatic, and military strategies invoked and used by a state’ (Harvey 2003: 26). It is the interactions and relationship between those two logics which determine policy outcomes. Harvey’s two logics have been well-received in and outside geography (e.g. Ashman and Callinicos 2006), but his territorial component has remained underdeveloped, leading Castree to argue that it ‘is given none of the attention it deserves’ in The New Imperialism (2003), for example (Castree 2006: 43). Using a world-system theory perspective, Arrighi (1994; 2005) has presented two similar logics, although they both refer to state policies (i.e. modes of rule), whereas Harvey separates activities of the state and those of capitalists. In geography, Peter Taylor and Colin Flint have reformulated political geography in terms of worldsystem theory by drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s writings (Flint and Radil 2009; Flint and Taylor 2007; Taylor 1985; 1996; see also Bichler and Nitzan 2004). World-system theory has tended to be nomothetic at times and underplay the agency of political actors as when Flint and Taylor use a paired Kondratieff model ‘to conceptualize the timing and meaning of al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaign against the United States within the temporal dynamics of hegemonic cycles’ (2007: 65–7). It seems implausible to attribute 9/11 to cyclical variations in worldwide prices and production levels, especially since there have been acts of terrorism/resistance on American ‘national interests’ around the world throughout the twentieth century, that is, at various points along the cycles. It would be more accurate to link 9/11 to specific American foreign policies in the Middle East such as the establishment 130

Radical Geopolitics of military bases in Saudi Arabia some years earlier. Attributing responsibility for governmental policies to long-waves can result in abstract explanations that neglect the agency of policy-makers and make it more difficult to ascribe responsibility to officials of statecraft. Finally, claims that history is cyclical have been disputed, as has the empirical evidence behind Kondratieff waves (McCormick 2004). The influence of anarchism, simultaneously Marxism’s historical rival and partner, has also percolated into contemporary radical geopolitics. Although they are not the most cited figures in today’s geographical scholarship, two major anarchist thinkers, Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, were also established geographers in the early twentieth century. Gerry Kearns (2004; 2006; 2009) has contrasted Halford Mackinder’s and Kropotkin’s geopolitics and showed that the latter provided alternative worldviews to British imperialism. For instance, Kropotkin’s views ‘promoted international federation and cooperation instead of civilizational conflict’ and ‘undermined the far more common argument that capitalism, imperialism, and private property were somehow natural imperatives’. In short, Kropotkin and Reclus ‘articulated elements of an alternative world view, a geopolitical imaginary that paid attention to questions of social justice’ (Kearns 2009: 89, 265). Anarchist principles have been integrated into geopolitics to its fullest extent by French geographer Yves Lacoste and his colleagues through the journal Hérodote, founded in 1976. In 1981 and 2005 special issues of Hérodote were dedicated to Élisée Reclus, the ‘libertarian geographer outraged by all forms of oppression’ and ‘militant anarchist’, discussing his views on colonialism, the environment, geography and geopolitics. Such influence has led to the development of Lacoste/ Hérodote’s radical, or ‘subversive’, approach to geopolitics, which has addressed numerous themes both historical and contemporary. Sadly, perhaps for reasons of language and disciplinary traditions, few engagements with Lacoste/Hérodote have appeared in the Anglophone geographical and geopolitical communities (Claval 2000; Fall 2007; Girot and Kofman 1987; Hepple 2000; Mamadouh 1998; Ó Tuathail 1994; 1996). It is difficult to evaluate succinctly the output of an almost four-decade old journal in addition to that of Lacoste himself, but perhaps one could say that they have covered an impressive range of international, global and intra-state issues from a less theoretical and more empirical angle than Anglophone geopolitics, as noted by Hepple (2000) and Claval (2000). Curiously, political and military issues have been very much emphasized relative to economic ones, somewhat surprisingly given Lacoste’s direct intellectual links with radical political economy, although there are exceptions (Joxe 2003). For instance, Lacoste has interpreted the Cold War mostly as a political and military event, without describing the geoeconomic stakes and reasons involved in its emergence and continuation (Lacoste 2006: 55–67). Nevertheless, this has not prevented Hérodote and Lacoste from presenting critical views on geography and world events, embodied in the phrase ‘La Géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre’ (Lacoste 1985). More recently, Mercille and Jones have presented an updated version of radical geopolitics that borrows from some of the above approaches and from revisionist Cold War scholarship from the discipline of history (Mercille 2008; 2010; Mercille 131

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics and Jones 2009). It conceives of US foreign policy as driven by a geo-economic logic and a geopolitical logic, the former referring to the broad political-economic aspects of capitalist expansion (Agnew and Corbridge 1989), while the latter captures the USA’s need to maintain international credibility, a symbolic process whereby US officials of statecraft signal to others that challenging US hegemony will not be tolerated. Failing to respond decisively even to isolated instances of defiance could embolden challenges elsewhere. The diplomatic record (declassified and public) of postwar US foreign policy contains many references to such concerns on the part of policy-makers, articulated in terms of ‘falling dominos’, ‘apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one’ or a growing ‘cancer’ – all referring to the potential for spreading ‘instability’ if place-specific defiance is not checked effectively (McMahon 1991). The recent popular protests associated with the ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East have confirmed how acts of resistance directed at authoritarian governments in one place can quickly encourage similar actions in other locales by providing concrete, successful and encouraging examples of resistance to myriad groups who struggle for progressive change in the region and beyond. Recently, the journal Geopolitics has presented a forum on ‘Marxist geopolitics’. Composed of brief commentaries, it discusses a number of issues mentioned in this chapter. For example, Colás and Pozo claim that ‘“critical geopolitics” is neither sufficiently critical nor analytical, and falls short of exhausting the potential of geopolitics’ and call for more attention to political economy and the valorization of territory by capitalism and the effects this has on international relations (2011: 211). Although brief, the contributions present a different approach to radical geopolitics than that presented by Mercille and Jones above. Radical geopolitics also draws from the emerging literature on geo-economics. The term ‘geo-economics’ has been used to describe the alleged dominance of economics over politics in interstate relations in recent years (Luttwak 1993), the unevenness of the global economy (Dicken 2003) and European integration (Pollard and Sidaway 2002). In general, geographers have conceived of geo-economics in at least three ways: first, as referring to the natural resources contained within a region and the politics of controlling and exploiting such resources (O’Hara and Heffernan 2006); second, as discourse closely linked to the economic imperatives of the global economy (A. Smith 2002; Sparke 2002: 217; 2007; Ó Tuathail 1997); and third, to point to the flows of trade, finance and capital over global space and across borders, taking into consideration the political aspects behind such movements (Agnew and Corbridge 1989; Coleman 2005; Corbridge and Agnew 1991; Sidaway 2005; N. Smith 2003). Radical geopolitics could potentially engage with all three uses of the term. One last corpus of critical or radical geopolitical writing should be mentioned, although it has received too little engagement on the part of political geographers: authors who write outside the formal discipline of geography and often outside academia but who nevertheless address similar topics to critical geopoliticians. To name a few, Michael Klare has written extensively on ‘resource geopolitics’, the competition among big powers for diminishing natural resources (2001; 2008), Naomi Klein penned an influential book on the ‘shock doctrine’ and ‘disaster 132

Radical Geopolitics capitalism’ (2007), while Tariq Ali has subverted geopolitical metaphors in his Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (2006) and Noam Chomsky has written extensively on US hegemony and foreign policy (2010). As will be seen below, more engagement with such public intellectuals could enable critical and radical geopolitics to reach out to other disciplines and to address more directly popular struggles. Some geographers have already called for or taken steps in that direction (e.g. Ó Tuathail, Dalby and  Routledge 2006; David Harvey’s popular online lectures on ‘Reading Marx’s Capital’1).

Radical geopolitics versus critical geopolitics Where does radical geopolitics fit in the field of critical geopolitics and how are they related? In particular, in what ways would radical scholars argue that their approach improves on others within critical geopolitics? There is a broad range of formal geopolitical traditions (Atkinson and Dodds 2000) and radical geopolitics and critical geopolitics are two diverse schools of thought, difficult to characterize in bold terms, and composed of a variety of approaches, as this Companion volume makes clear (see also Kuus 2010). Keeping in mind that the following critical statements cannot do justice to the full complexity of the fields, this section surveys some of the key issues that differentiate radical from critical geopolitics in order to identify points of contention and debate that will define more precisely what radical geopolitics is about and encourage fruitful discussions and exchanges between the two approaches. One important difference, from the point of view of radical geopolitics, is that critical geopolitics has neglected to identify and examine the causes of government policy, wars and political events, having been more concerned with the task of describing how they unfold and the ways in which they are represented through various discursive strategies. This comes in part from critical geopolitics’ rejection of ‘scientific’ approaches and ‘explanation’ in its study of the human world. However, causal mechanisms are very much part of political affairs, although of a different nature than in the natural world. Radical geopolitics argues that international events and politics in general are to a large extent driven by political economic factors, whose identification and understanding is a valuable exercise – in fact, it will be advanced in this chapter’s last section that critical geopolitics’ neglect of causality partly accounts for its lack of engagement in public debates, policy and activism. Some critical geopolitics work has focused heavily on the analysis of discourses and representations instead of political economic dynamics (as noted early on by Dodds and Sidaway 1994; see also N. Smith 2000) (e.g. Dalby 1990; 1996; Dittmer 2005; Dodds 1996; 2005; Ó Tuathail 2002; 2003; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992; Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998). Others have included political economy but not from 1 . 133

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics a radical standpoint: either it is the institutional affiliation of elite groups that is discussed – stopping short of examining the workings of the political economic system which shapes policy-making – or not enough emphasis is put on the geoeconomic factors behind policy (e.g. Campbell 1992; 2007; Dalby 2007; 2008b; Ó Tuathail 1992; 1993; 1996; 2005; Ó Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge 2006; Sharp 1996). Some versions of critical geopolitics adopt an explicitly political economic angle to the study of ‘geopolitical world orders’ (Agnew 2003; 2005; Agnew and Corbridge 1995). This is methodologically closer to a radical approach, but still conceives of representations (discourses) and political economic processes as ‘dialectically related’ and argues that ‘no one concept can be given causal primacy’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 7). Radical scholarship does not deny that both discourses and political economic processes are implicated in the production of each other but asserts that the direction of influence is mostly from political economy (see also Agnew 2009; Ó Tuathail 1997). Feminist geopolitics has also criticized critical geopolitics’ heavy reliance on texts and representations and argued that it should be more embodied, for instance by rewriting the actions of men and women into geopolitical thought (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Hyndman 2004; Kofman 1996; Secor 2001; Sharp 2000a). Feminist work has shown that if geopolitical discourses are to be analyzed, their gendered nature should be exposed, showing that they ‘often draw on and reinforce stereotypical readings of gender’ (F. Smith 2001: 215; see Dalby 1994; Ó Tuathail 1993; Weber 1994). Those valuable contributions can complement radical political economy, which has neglected gender issues. Conversely, feminist geopolitics has restricted its investigation of the causes of foreign policy, in particular political economic ones, although some have argued that patriarchal social structures provide a general climate conducive to militarism (Hannah 2005). Those respective strengths could thus be combined as they constitute a promising area of collaboration. However, radical political economists would maintain that gender plays an incidental role in explaining foreign policy, as opposed to, say, oil or the quest for overseas markets and investment opportunities, although those competing claims are not mutually exclusive. More recently, geographers have pursued interesting avenues investigating popular culture and the geopolitical dimensions of affect by examining military geographies and terror (Anderson 2010; Ó Tuathail 2003), fear (Pain 2009; Pain and Smith 2008) and film (Carter and McCormack 2006), while MacDonald has focused on visual culture and the American ‘Corporal’ nuclear missile (2006) and Sidaway has examined affect and place (2009). Work on popular geopolitical representations has been carried out using a variety of media, like cartoons (Dittmer 2007; Dodds 2007), radio (Pinkerton 2009), film (Crampton and Power 2005; Dittmer and Dodds 2008; Dodds 2010; Shapiro 2008) magazines (Sharp 2000b) and video games (Power 2007), in line with the development of a larger literature on geopolitics, visuality and visual culture (MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010). Geopoliticians have also reacted energetically to the events surrounding 9/11 and US military expeditions around the globe in its aftermath, examining the ‘war on terror’ and possibilities for peace in several collections of articles (Gregory and 134

Radical Geopolitics Pred 2007; Ingram and Dodds 2009; Kobayashi 2009). Here, critical geopolitics has mostly examined imaginative geographies and representations associated with the war and how they were mobilized to justify intervention (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007; Crampton and Power 2005; Dalby 2008b; Debrix 2005; 2008; Dittmer 2005; Jones and Clarke 2006; Ó Tuathail 2005). Others have investigated Arab media (Falah, Flint and Mamadouh 2006) and boundaries, sovereignty and territoriality (Elden 2005; Williams and Roach 2006) and discussed whether Bush’s foreign policy was better conceptualized in terms of empire or hegemony (Agnew 2005). Derek Gregory has been particularly active and shed light on Guantanamo Bay and spaces of exception, bombing and counter-insurgency in late modern war, as well as the techno-cultural apparatus surrounding American military operations in Iraq – and of course, on the ‘colonial present’ (2004; 2006a; 2006b; 2008a; 2008b; 2010). There has been some important work on geoeconomic aspects of the ‘war on terror’ (Morrissey 2008), but attention has been directed mostly at its discursive aspects and their interaction with geopolitical discourses (Dalby 2007; K. Mitchell 2010; Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003; Sparke 2005; 2007). Likewise, feminist analyses have shown how discourses used to articulate Bush’s foreign policy are gendered (Hyndman 2005; Tickner 2002) but have paid less attention to the causes of the war, let alone to political economy and oil, issues on which radical geopolitics has focused (Harvey 2003; Mercille 2010). While such advances are undoubtedly exciting and contribute to the vibrancy of critical geopolitics, they also confirm the above observation that political economic approaches have been neglected in the field. True, there has been a recent move away from purely textual forms of inquiry and towards incorporating a more empirical focus in geopolitics. For instance, Ó Tuathail notes how critical geopolitics had initially turned its back on regional fieldwork, making critique ‘largely reactive, theoretical and political instead of also being empirical, regional and geographically embedded in the places preoccupying decision makers in major power centers’, which has led him to assert that ‘critical geopolitics can deepen its critical practice by grounding itself in regional research’, which he has done through the example of Bosnia–Herzegovina (2010a: 257). Nevertheless, empirical work does not necessarily mean political economy, and, in any case, it seems that still today, ‘geopolitics is inescapably cultural’ (Ó Tuathail 2010b) as opposed to political-economic. It is true, as Simon Dalby argues, that in the post-9/11 context, critical geopolitics needs ‘to grapple with the culture that produces imperial attempts at domination in distant places’ (2008: 413). However, radical geopolitics would argue that it is the political-economic foundations of Western countries that are the root cause of this domination, and, therefore, focusing too much on the culture behind it may be misleading and moving attention away from the real sources of war and inequality and therefore away from opportunities for progressive social change. Of course, none of this implies that scholarly investigations must necessarily be based on critical political economy to uncover interesting aspects of the political world. But radical geopolitics would argue that neglecting political economy leads to a situation in which what passes for ‘critical’ scholarship is sometimes closer 135

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics to mainstream scholarship than we might think. For example, Ó Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge have addressed the criticism that ‘representations of geopolitical discourses do not exist in a material vacuum’ (Agnew 2001: 11; see Ó Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge 2006) and as such Ó Tuathail’s general introduction (2006a) draws from neo-Weberian analysis and discusses the ‘power networks’ in American society through the concept of the ‘iron triangle’ (composed of defense contractors, congress and Pentagon officials). This political-economic theoretical framework however is mostly concerned with interest groups and their motivations and downplays the significance of (geo)economic factors in shaping policy. The result is that in some cases, the ensuing interpretation of key political events is virtually the same as that found in mainstream/liberal scholarship. For instance, Ó Tuathail argues that the driving cause of American involvement in the Vietnam War was ideological: That the United States became involved in civil wars in Korea and Vietnam, locations thousands of miles from the United States and of questionable strategic value in themselves, was a consequence of a geographically unspecified commitment to containment in US Cold War geopolitical culture. (Ó Tuathail 2006b: 64) But this is the same interpretation as George Herring’s, who in arguably the most popular book on the subject, argues that the American intervention was the result of deeply ingrained ideological assumptions: The United States’ involvement in Vietnam. was a logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a world view and a policy, a policy of containment, which Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question. (Herring 1979: x). The problem with both interpretations is that they neglect the political-economic workings which led American elites to intervene in Vietnam. For political economists, it is not enough to say that government officials enacted such and such policies because they conformed to their ideology – one must explain why those (extreme and violent) ideologies have arisen in the first place.

A more publicly engaged future? Where should critical geopolitics (including radical geopolitics) move next? This section reflects on the possibilities of a more politically, ethically and publicly engaged and, one dare say, activist scholarship. Such calls have been made before along with reviews of research on the subject (Dodds 2001). There have been engagements with activism (Routledge 1996; Koopman 2008), although this has not been the dominant disciplinary paradigm. True, critical geopolitics has made 136

Radical Geopolitics important contributions to the deconstruction of geopolitical discourses, but, as Simon Dalby has noted, the ‘critical’ in critical geopolitics stands more often for the problematization of discourse rather than for concrete political platforms or proposed paths toward new forms of social organization (see also Hyndman 2010). The unfortunate result, as Alexander Murphy et al. have written, is that ‘with few exceptions, geographers and geographical perspectives do not figure prominently in the public debate over these issues. This is particularly the case in North America but it holds true for much of the rest of the world as well’ (2005: 165). Perhaps worse, Fraser MacDonald recently proclaimed that critical geopolitics ‘has not yet presented a serious challenge to the ways in which geopolitics is generally conceived and practiced “in the world”’ (2010: 318). This has led some critical geopoliticians to call for a more ‘progressive geopolitics’ (Kearns 2008) and to remind us of the ‘responsibilities of geography’ and geographers (Sparke 2007). As Jeniffer Hyndman argued while reflecting on ‘the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for “the political” in critical geopolitics and beyond’, a point to keep in mind is that ‘critique and political change are not incommensurate’ (2010: 247–8). One could even go as far as suggesting that ‘critical geopolitics, as scholarship, will survive only if it at once exposes and unravels new laws and tactics of violence’ (Hyndman 2010: 254). Perhaps Virginie Mamadouh sums it up best when she laments critical geopolitics’ ‘lack of impact on policy debates. some geographers might think that it is fine, as they do not wish to serve the Prince; but they do not seem to be relevant to undermine him either. Are academics attracted to the deconstruction of geopolitical representations ready to reconstruct new ones?’ (2010: 321). How could geopolitical scholarship become more political and activist? The remainder of this section outlines three levels at which this could take place – although many more possibilities obviously exist, depending on one’s areas of interest, personal beliefs and politics. Some possible reasons why public and political engagement has so far remained limited will also be suggested. One avenue could be to improve on geographers’ ‘weak normative engagement with the social institution and practices of warfare’ (Megoran 2008). For example, there is a range of views on the morality of war and violence, and making geopoliticians’ values and commitments more explicit on this count would result in a more engaging literature. It is as if geopolitics has shied away from politics, an ironic result given that it is its prime area of study. Megoran, for instance, makes the case for a Christian praxis of non-violence (2008). The advantages and disadvantages to such an approach would constitute a fruitful area of inquiry and reflection. A related area of inquiry could be about the ideal society, or the social, political and economic visions that should guide us. It is easy to conflate all critical geopolitical scholars under the label ‘critical’, but there is a great diversity of political views under this banner: social democrats, anarchists, Marxists, feminists and liberals. A second avenue could be to engage to a greater extent in activism, either through scholarly activism or the study of grass-roots and resistance movements. One can posit a continuum from activism on-the-ground to activism behind-the137

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics desk (D. Mitchell 2008), and the opportunities offered by different positions on this continuum should be explored. In a recent issue of Antipode entitled Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities beyond the Academy, Don Mitchell asserts that ‘there is a real need for what could be called ‘desk-bound radicals’ in any struggle for social change’ (2008: 448). True, but there is also merit in critical scholars engaging in activism on the ground. A third avenue could explore wider engagement in public debates and policy circles (Murphy et al. 2005). From a critical perspective, the key to this challenge is the ‘popularization of knowledge so that knowledge may be better oriented towards and aligned with popular struggles’ (Mitchell 2008: 450). Of course, there exist barriers difficult to remove in this regard, in particular, the fact that public debate is to a great extent restrained to debates between mainstream perspectives. However, in an effort to be critical and reflexive about our own discipline, the remainder of this chapter will argue that there are at least two other hurdles which could in theory be easily eliminated since they have been erected by critical geopolitical scholars themselves: specialist language/terminology and a neglect of causality and political economy, the latter echoing Mamadouh’s comment that ‘critical geopolitics might benefit from more serious engagements with more radical geographies’ (2010: 320). Writing clearly, in a language accessible to non-specialists and the general public should be a priority if geopoliticians are to reach out to non academics, policy-makers, people engaged in popular struggles, as well as with other academic disciplines. Many will surely agree with this statement, but there has been some resistance to the claim from unexpected quarters. For instance, Derek Gregory considers Judith Butler’s observation that ‘the public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown’. He says that this is an example of a ‘wonderfully lucid argument’ and he cites it ‘deliberately to discomfort those who ridicule her writings for their difficulty and opacity’. Those who criticize opaque writing, he argues, ‘usually insist on normalizing a particular mode of address and analysis and, by extension, seek to exclude anybody who does not conform to their own canons’. According to Gregory, this is because ‘the privilege (and with it, moral virtue) accorded to “clarity” is historically and constitutively bound to an imperial geopolitics’ (in Murphy et al. 2005: 184, 190). This observation is puzzling. Writing clearly is bound to imperialism? Does that mean we should explain social problems in opaque ways, so that those who are engaged in struggles have a difficult time understanding what we are trying to say? Nevertheless, a number of political geographers have been active in disseminating their knowledge to a wider public, for example by giving evidence to congressional committees, writing in popular magazines and current affairs publications and even making interventions on television. However, those kinds of activities still remain a (very) minor part of most, if not all, political geographers’ work, and even if such communications are usually clear and accessible, the problem remains that the bulk of our academic writings could still be made more accessible to a broader audience.

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Radical Geopolitics Another problem that sometimes arises when critical geopolitics seeks to engage in public and policy debates is that it misidentifies the causes of social problems and political events. It is of course essential to identify their roots if one is to work in the right direction toward a more progressive world. Unfortunately, as noted above, some forms of critical geopolitics seem to have given up on investigating the causality of political events. Or, alternatively, when causes are identified, the political economic roots of policy are neglected. For example, David Campbell asserts that the reason for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the USA is the latter’s dependence on foreign imported oil, partly to fuel its numerous SUVs: It is the case that the SUV has come to underpin US dependence on imported oil. This dependence in turn underpins the US strategic interest in global oil supply, especially in the Middle East, where the American military presence has generated such animus. the SUV has played a role in creating a number of international legal effects, most notably the United States’ illegal invasion of Iraq. (Campbell 2005: 944–5) Campbell’s otherwise interesting article nevertheless illustrates how the decentring of political economy in the study of international relations can lead to suggesting ‘solutions’ to social/political/economic problems that might not actually be the most sensible or effective. For example, Campbell implies that decreasing the number of SUVs in the USA will reduce Washington’s adventurism in the Middle East. But the fact is that US attempts to secure Middle Eastern oil supplies since World War II have much less to do with US oil consumption than with the control of Middle Eastern oil. Indeed, the control of Middle Eastern energy reserves through friendly authoritarian regimes in the Persian Gulf, which account for 66 percent of global reserves, allows Washington to exert a ‘stranglehold’ on the world economy and influence its development, and possibly to make it more difficult for industrial rivals such as Europe, Japan or China to become more prominent than the US (for a more detailed discussion, see Mercille 2010). Let us imagine that the USA functioned completely on solar energy, but that the rest of the world functioned on oil. Would Washington still be involved in the Middle East? It surely would, as this would provide it with significant leverage over allies and rivals alike, as it has historically. Going back to critical geopolitics’ potential for closer involvement in popular struggles such as those currently faced by Iraqis, providing solutions in this case would involve focusing on the very power structure in the USA that gives rise to invasions and dominance of Middle Eastern countries as opposed to reducing the number of SUVs – although, of course, the latter endeavour will prove useful to solve other problems, such as pollution and traffic congestion. To conclude, perhaps one can wish that today’s geopoliticians would draw some inspiration from the founders of the field. Gerry Kearns relates how a century ago, both Mackinder and Kropotkin, highly respected geographers, nonetheless ‘disappointed many of their geographical admirers by concentrating increasingly

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics on politics’ (2004: 339). One can only hope such unease will soon dissipate – and that, of course, more Kropotkins than Mackinders will arise.

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8

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Neoliberalism Simon Springer

Introduction The rise of neoliberalism can be understood as a particular form of anxiety that first began as a response to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, and a belief that government intervention had jeopardized personal freedoms and was thus responsible for the carnage (Mirowski and Plehwe 2008). Following World War II, the Mont Pelerin Society, the originary neoliberal think tank, resurrected classical liberalism’s three basic tenets. The first of these is a concentrated focus on the individual, who is viewed as the most qualified to articulate her or his needs and desires, whereby society should be organized towards reducing barriers that impede this goal. Second, unregulated markets are considered the most effective and efficient means for promoting self-sufficiency, whereby individuals pursue their wants and needs through the mechanism of price. The third is the belief that the state should be non-interventionist by emphasizing the maintenance of competitive markets and guaranteeing individual rights fashioned primarily around a property regime (Hackworth 2007; Plehwe and Walpen 2006). Out of the geopolitical context of the war’s aftermath, the origins of neoliberalism as a political ideology can be interpreted as reactionary to violence. In short, neoliberals theorized that violence could be curtailed by a return to the foundations of the Enlightenment and its acknowledgement of the merits of individualism. From the perspective of contemporary critical geopolitics, this historical context is somewhat ironic insofar as structural adjustment, fiscal austerity and free trade, the tenets of neoliberalism, are now ‘augmented by the direct use of military force’ (Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003), where the US military in particular provides the ‘hidden fist’ that enables the hidden hand of the global free market to operate. Yet the relationship between capital accumulation and war is hardly new (see Harvey 1985), and the peaceful separation early neoliberals sought for their economic agenda demonstrated a certain naivety. Indeed, while not all wars are capitalist, it is difficult to conceive of a circumstance wherein an economic ideology like neoliberalism could not come attendant to violence insofar as it espouses universal assumptions, seeks a global domain, and discourages heterogeneity as individuals are remade in the normative image of ‘neoliberal proper personhood’ (Kingfisher

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 2007). Either the lessons of colonialism were completely lost on the Mont Pelerin Society, or they uncritically accepted its narrative appeal to the supposed higher purpose of a ‘white man’s burden’ at face value. Democracy-building, a phrase that has been increasingly sullied by its rhetorical linkages to US military exercises, was also implicated in the revival of classical liberalism, as the catastrophic outcomes of authoritarianism during the two world wars allowed neoliberalism to be discursively positioned as the lone purveyor of political freedom. Following proxy wars that engaged appeals to democracy in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, Keynesian political and economic forces began to unravel in the late 1970s and early 1980s, allowing the theorized coalescence between free markets and democracy to gain momentum as the supposed ‘freedom’ of neoliberalism became increasingly regarded as a salve for the global economic crisis (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Those states that refused to conform to the (neo)liberal democratic status-quo were quickly regarded as ‘rogue’, ‘failed’ or were ‘condemned to economic backwardness in which democracy must be imposed by sanctions and/or military force by the global community of free nations’ (Canterbury 2005: 2). This sentiment aligns with the central concern of Roberts, Secor and Sparke, who in outlining a ‘neoliberal geopolitics’, illuminate how neoliberal discourse has fostered a geopolitical vision of near infinite openness and interdependency, where those states that fall outside of this global vision are considered dangerous and thus subjected to ‘enforced reconnection’ (2003: 889). Ideas surrounding the free market have accordingly had important effects on the establishment of neoliberalism as a particular geopolitical order, wherein securitization presently provides the foundation for recalibrating and recasting geopolitical forms within market logics (Morrissey 2011). The stage for such critiques was set by early interventions in geopolitical economy (see Johnston and Taylor 1986), which encouraged the emergence of critical fusions between writings on the power of finance and markets (see Corbridge, Martin and Thrift 1994) and more explicitly geopolitical concerns (see Ó Tuathail 1996). In this vein, Cowen and Smith have recently re-theorized ‘geoeconomics’ as a more accurate appraisal of where the dominant concern of international relations is presently situated under neoliberalism, wherein ‘market calculation supplants the geopolitical logic of state territoriality’ (2009: 43). From here, they suggest that the transition to a globalized geo-economic world under neoliberalization ‘is not a matter of some natural evolution in economic affairs, but a case of active assembly’ (Cowen and Smith 2009: 38). As part of this active assembly, the revival of classical economics further suggests that biopolitical subject formation has only intensified under neoliberalism (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), allowing what was once a fringe utopian idea to materialize as a divergent yet related series of neoliberalizations as an increasing number of states embrace neoliberal modalities (Peck 2008). One of the key tasks for critical geopolitics at the current conjuncture of deepening neoliberalization and systemic crisis is to articulate a ‘geographical vision of a world in which the market is at once tamed, decentralized and “disestablished”

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Neoliberalism and where empowered global citizens are able to challenge opposing elements of the present dynamic of globalization’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 227). Following this introduction, I begin this chapter by demonstrating how a critical geopolitics has contributed to a reading of neoliberalism that challenges the assumed inevitability and all-encompassing ‘bulldozer effect’ that pervades in popular media accounts of free-market capitalism and its colloquial understanding as ‘globalization’. I emphasize neoliberalism’s mongrel character, by attending to the series of mutations, hybridizations and variegations across space that foreground the role of geography in creating multiple forms of processual and unfolding neoliberalizations, rather than a singular and static neoliberalism. I then turn my attention to the continuing role of the state and address how discourse functions to secure consent for neoliberalism’s particular political rationality. I hope to remind readers that although the role of the state has become subtler under neoliberalism through a reconfiguration of the citizen-subject through processes of governmentality, this does not mean that it has entirely left the political scene. To the contrary, I argue that the transformed role of the state under neoliberalization is susceptible to expressions of authoritarianism and violence, which brings the state back into plain view as it comes into conflict with those individuals who have been marginalized by neoliberalism’s belligerent regulatory reforms and discriminatory policy initiatives. Recognition of the transformative practices through which capitalist expansion became tied to legitimating discourses is essential to understanding the power of neoliberalism. While mainstream analyses of conflict theory largely focus on ‘local’ origins of conflict by invoking a geopolitics of ‘backward’ cultural practices as the best explanations for violence (see Huntington 1996; Kaplan 2000), this reading completely dismisses the influence of ideology and economics. The geopolitical imagination of violence vis-à-vis neoliberalism is such that violence is treated as an externality. This problematic vision engenders Orientalist discourses that insidiously posit ‘local’ cultures as being exclusively responsible for any and all ensuing bloodshed following neoliberalization, thereby erasing the contingency, fluidity and interconnectedness of the ‘global’ political economy of violence. Here we can look to the influence of Said’s work (2003), which played an important role in shaping early incarnations of critical geopolitics and made significant contributions to a broader interest in how geopolitical representations and practices produced notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘self’ and ‘other’. In a contemporary sense, Orientalism licenses further neoliberal reforms, as neoliberalization is positioned as a ‘civilizing’ enterprise in the face of any purported ‘savagery’ (Springer 2009a). Neoliberalism is rarely called into question and is either explicitly promoted (see Fukuyama 1992) or implicitly accepted (see Sen 1999) as both the essential condition of human development and the panacea for violence. Such Orientalism places neoliberalism ‘under erasure’, which is the focus of the final section before the conclusion.

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Producing geographical purity? Beyond monolithism and inevitability Neoliberalism as an object of scholarly interest has undergone an incredible expansion in the last decade. One major implication of the increasingly voluminous literature on neoliberalism is that definitional consensus about what is actually meant by the term has waned considerably (Peck 2004). Neoliberalism has been critiqued as suffering from promiscuity (involved with too many theoretical perspectives), omnipresence (treated as a universal or global phenomenon) and omnipotence (identified as the cause of a wide variety of social, political and economic changes) (Clarke 2008). Some commentators are so troubled by the ‘larger conversation’ that neoliberalism invokes or alternatively so disillusioned by the potential explanatory power of the concept, that there now exists a willingness to proclaim neoliberalism a ‘necessary illusion’ (Castree 2006) or simply that ‘there is no such thing’ (Barnett 2005). These misgivings are centered on the contemporary pervasiveness of neoliberalism in academia and a concern that by constituting neoliberalism as a powerful, expansive and self-reproducing logic, we allow it to appear monolithic and beyond reproach. There is a great deal to be gained from such critiques, as it is important to dispute the neoliberalismas-monolithism argument for failing to appreciate space and time as open and always becoming (Springer 2011). Similarly, in concentrating exclusively on an externally produced neoliberalism, we overlook the local geographies of existing political economic circumstances and institutional frameworks, where variability, internal constitution, societal influences and individual agency all play a role in (re) producing, circulating and facilitating neoliberalism’s advance. Insofar as critical geopolitics is about interrogating, deconstructing and undermining essentialist geopolitical discourses (Dalby 1991), it is important to recognize how geographers’ contributions to destabilizing notions of an overarching neoliberalism aligns to this intellectual project. Universality has long been one of the primary geopolitical notions associated with ‘globalization’, and this remains the case with respect to its offshoot ‘neoliberalism’. The popular idea among both advocates and adversaries of neoliberalism is that its political economic rationale proceeds as a singular and monolithic framework that has the ability to wholly transform existing local economies. To those who promote neoliberalism, this abstraction does the work needed to legitimize the idea of creating a level playing field for markets and material rewards, and it often comes attendant to the invocation of inevitability, which is captured in the slogan ‘there is no alternative’. Such a geopolitical world vision is little more than idealism about the virtues of free markets, openness and global economic integration (Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003). To those who oppose neoliberalism, it is often used in the opposite way, insofar as the supposed monolithism and inevitability of neoliberalism’s economic imperatives lends credence to a sense of loss for ‘local’ community, culture and practices to an uncaring and aggressive ‘global’ force. Yet despite the shared assumption of a sweeping dispersion of a ‘pure’ or 150

Neoliberalism ‘paradigmatic’ neoliberalism that both backers and challengers have seemingly embraced, arguably the single most important idea critical geopolitics has lent to theories of neoliberalism is that ‘neoliberalism’ itself is an abstraction. The discourse of neoliberalism proceeds in a way that conceals the geographical variations and contingencies that necessarily exist between different political economic contexts. Thus, by recognizing the mutations and articulations of neoliberalism on its travels around the globe, we engage a critical geopolitics whereby it only makes sense to speak of a series of partial, shifting and thoroughly hybridized ‘neoliberalizations’, rather than a rigid, universal and fully realized ‘neoliberalism’. As Agnew and Corbridge contend, critical geopolitics is a refusal to be confined to a reading of a geographically ordered world rooted in notions of fixity over fluidity and stasis over change (1995). The fact that the idea of ‘purity’ with regards to neoliberalism has only recently been problematized with any sustained sense of rigor (see Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010; England and Ward 2007), speaks to the veracity of the geopolitical imagination that positions neoliberalism in general terms as an all-encompassing program. Yet for geographers to insist that in every specific instance where neoliberal ideology has been adopted there will be messiness that results in a series of geopolitically distinct hybrids should not be all that difficult to accept or envision. Such thinking simply reflects the actual nature of any policy legacy or institutional inheritance. For example, Fordism’s arrival into an array of political economic situations was in every instance a messy and thoroughly contingent process, an evolution that becomes even more obvious when we consider colonialism’s arrival in various contexts. The violence meted out in the promotion of colonialism, the different actors and agents involved in its advance and the varying degrees of accommodation and resistance colonial governments were ultimately met with demands that we acknowledge a sense of heterogeneity. Such messiness does not suggest that these two particular incarnations of capitalism were unsuccessful in the specific contexts in which they unfolded. Most scholars recognize, in terms of both Fordism and colonialism, that they did in fact arrive, where attentiveness to their particular geographies serves to simply highlight their plurality. Thus, instead of Fordism, we have Fordisms, and instead of colonialism, we have colonialisms, whereby any notion of a ‘singular’ or ‘pure’ form in these instances is easily recognized as an illusory abstraction. The same multiplicity must likewise be acknowledged with respect to neoliberalism. In appreciating various neoliberalisms – or ‘neoliberalizations’ as is becoming the convention in the literature – we can look to the USA as an example that supports such a particularized and contingent reading of neoliberalism. While the USA is often considered as both a paradigmatic example of neoliberalism and the prime driver of its global engine through US unilateralism, there is considerable divergence to be found here too. While little doubt remains among critical scholars and activists that the US-led ‘new imperialism’ that has unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11 is a continuation of the neoliberal project (Harvey 2003), the notion of ‘American protectionism’ is much harder to square-up to a neoliberal agenda. Protectionism is contradictory to neoliberal ideals and is 151

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics thus demonstrative of the limits of thinking about neoliberalism as a pure ideology that is immune to Realpolitik. The prevalent influence of nationalist discourses like American protectionism give a strong indication of a lack of purity even in the ostensibly ‘quintessential’ neoliberal case of the USA. Neoliberalism in its actual practice, as opposed to its generalized abstraction, is thus about securing the interests of entrenched elites more than anything else (Harvey 2005). When and where such interests are not secured by neoliberal policies, neoliberalism is placed at odds with the utopian purity that the ideology envisions. Peck and Tickell’s processed-based analysis of neoliberalization (2002) along with Brenner and Theodore’s concept of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (2002) have been instrumental in contributing to a complete overhaul of the way that geographers theorize neoliberalism, whereby emphasis is now placed on multiple hybrid forms. This is precisely what Cowen and Smith refer to when they point to the ‘geographical unevenness and radical incompleteness’ of neoliberalism as a geopolitical-cum-geoeconomic worldview (2009: 38). Yet where do we draw the line between neoliberal hybridity and pluralization, on the one hand, and the rejection of neoliberalism, on the other? In many ways this question typifies the entire literature on neoliberalism. But neoliberalism is not alone here, we could subject Fordism, or even capitalism more generally to the same set of delineating questions and arrive at the same impasse. If universality is to be treated according to Tsing’s interpretation of ‘only be[ing] charged and enacted in the sticky materiality of practical encounters’ (2005: 1), then the universal is not abstract, it always provokes new responses, and always creates friction. The replacement of ‘neoliberalism’ in the geography literature with ‘neoliberalization’, is precisely meant to recognize the non-abstract quality of neoliberalism, which provokes new responses and gives rise to friction. What this means is that in the contemporary zeitgeist, neoliberalism is seldom rejected outright in those policy environments it comes into contact with, as its discursive formations take on ‘commonsense’ qualities that penetrate to the heart of political subject formation. Thus regardless of any critically minded desire to move beyond neoliberal strictures, there is a certain continuity and contagiousness to neoliberalism that must be appreciated, if we ever hope to leave this, the most unforgiving and revanchist version of capitalism, truly in the past. Given what geographers know about the nature of domination and resistance, that is, that neither is ever a ‘complete’ application of power, but rather a continuing, unfolding and circuitous process (Sharp et al. 2000), it is increasingly important to think of neoliberalism in the same light. Put differently, if we acknowledge that geography and friction have an impact upon neoliberalism in its actually existing circumstances insofar as they render its abstract, paradigmatic and pure form untenable, then geography and friction must also leave traces of neoliberalism, however vague, when and where encounter occurs. In short, if the ‘pure’ is impossible in neoliberalism’s travels, encounters and articulations, then so too is its complete rejection. Any supposed ‘completeness’ of rejection actually reveals the abstraction of neoliberalism-as-monolithism, precisely because friction will invariably leave some residual trace of neoliberalism. Moreover, if the universal idea of neoliberalism always creates friction in its actually existing processes as 152

Neoliberalism ‘neoliberalization’, then it becomes impossible to point to the idea of a complete ‘rejection’ in a singular moment of revolution – however widespread such an uprising might actually be – as this assumes an inverse sense of purity. Instead, there is a need to recognize the processual nature of neoliberalization and the way that such a vision transforms citizen-subjects through biopolitics.

The illusion of state dissolution: Governmentality, neoliberal subject formation and violence Critical geopolitical readings of neoliberalism have contributed to an understanding that goes beyond considering neoliberalism as little more than a ‘top down’ government policy. Discourse analysis has allowed scholars to appreciate the internalization of neoliberal logics at various institutional and even individual or embodied scales. In contrast to the doctrinaire interpretation, there now exists a considerable literature on neoliberalism which foregrounds the role of governmentality (see Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Lemke 2001; Mitchell 2006; Ong 2006). Thus, while the basic tenet of neoliberalism in theory is that it involves less rather than more government interference, its actual practice as neoliberalization is a much different beast. Neoliberalism is now more accurately regarded as a process of transformation purposefully used by states to remain economically competitive within an international milieu. It proceeds along both a quantitative axis of destruction and discreditation entailing the ‘roll-back’ of state capacities and a qualitative axis of construction and consolidation, which sees the ‘roll-out’ of reconfigured economic management systems and an invasive social agenda centered on urban order, surveillance and policing (Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002). Neoliberal reason and its extension as biopolitical subject formation have been largely facilitated through ‘commonsense’ rhetoric (Peck 2010), so that discourse itself can now be appropriately understood as a primary component in the creation of consent for neoliberalism. Particular discursive formations like ‘good governance’ (Springer 2010b) and ‘human security’ (Springer 2009b) facilitate penetration at the level of the subject, making the formation of a political rationality possible (Brown 2005). Foucault has demonstrated how the subject is subjected to relations of power as she or he is individualized, categorized, classified, hierarchized, normalized, surveilled and provoked to self-surveillance (1978). As such, neoliberal subjectivation is the process whereby one memorizes the truth claims that one has heard and converts them into rules of conduct (Foucault 1988). This process of internalization functions to effectively lock in the rights of capital. Moreover, as emergent disciplinary rationalities, strategies, technologies and techniques coagulate under neoliberal subjectivation through the proliferation of particular discursive formations, the structural inequalities of capital are increasingly likely to go unrecognized as ‘anomalies’ or ‘externalities’. In this regard, neoliberal penetration at the level of governmentality must be convincing, because if the social 153

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics body does not come to accept the supposed ‘wisdom’ of neoliberalism, tensions will rise and may erupt into violence. The rolling-back of the state is a rationale of neoliberal governance, not an informed choice of the autonomous agents that comprise the nation. Thus, resistance to neoliberalism may actually provoke a more despotic outlook as a state moves to ensure that its reforms are pushed through, particularly if the changes are rapid and a valorizing discourse for neoliberalization has not already become widely circulated. This is why effective subjectivation and the production, functioning and circulation of legitimizing discursive formations become a determinant to the degree of authoritarianism needed under neoliberalization. Yet the possibility of full acceptance is illusory on two counts. First, every member of a society is never going to fully agree with and accept the prevailing discourses. Thus, we find those marginalized by neoliberal reform in continuous struggle to have their voices heard, which is frequently met with state violence when expressed as dissent. Second, social processes have an inherent temporality, meaning that they never sit still. Geopolitical ideas of spatial uniformity and temporal stasis pervade media accounts of a fully integrated ‘global village’, but they are fundamentally reliant upon the problematic notions of monolithism and inevitability, as though space–time has only one possible trajectory (Massey 2005). In the popular imagination, there is little acknowledgment of the discursive work that goes into the (re)production and distribution of neoliberal ideas in a diverse range of contexts (Plehwe and Walpen 2006). As the utopian discourse of neoliberalism rubs up against empirical realities – such as heightened inequality – citizens are more likely to express dismay with particular characteristics of neoliberalization, most prominently the privatization of essential social provisions such as education and healthcare. Recourse to violence thus becomes one of the few disciplinary options left to governments transformed by neoliberalization as they attempt to retain legitimacy. The governmentality literature has enabled a reading of neoliberalism that sees its ‘disciplinary power’ (Gill 1995) go beyond a variety of regulatory, surveillance and policing mechanisms that are instituted and ‘locked in’ despite what the population base desires. A discourse analysis of neoliberalism interprets the ‘dirty work’ of neoliberalism to be much more subtle, wherein neoliberal ideals are articulated, internalized and borne out through the citational chains of the discourses they promote through governmentality (Springer 2010b). Yet this reading does not prevent an appreciation of the more overt mechanisms that neoliberalism retains at its disposal. For example, the erosion of democratic control and accountability that comes attendant to neoliberalism would not be possible without a variety of legal and constitutional devices, whereby the economic model is insulated from popular scrutiny and demands (Overbeek 2000). At the same time, privatized means and decision-makers who are not accountable to the general citizenry increasingly determine the provision of public goods and services. These constrictions of welfare provision serve to intensify the politicization of citizenship and immigration issues, as citizens and ‘others’ come into conflict over who is entitled and who is unentitled to what little remaining protection and welfare the state provides (Ong 2006; Sparke 2006). 154

Neoliberalism Given the exclusions of the poor, the implicit acceptance of violently repressing those groups who seek a decent wage, and, in light of the rising inequality neoliberalism has facilitated (Rapley 2004), it is perhaps unsurprising that the processes of neoliberalization have coincided with a new pattern of conflict. This conflict appears to be concerned with the identity group (however defined) and not the nation-state, so that sources of these ‘new wars’ lay predominantly within rather than between states (Desai 2006; Kaldor 2006). Such a configuration of conflict can be seen as a reflection of the geographic restructuring and uneven development that neoliberalism provokes (Harvey 2005). Former Keynesian patterns of redistribution are replaced with intra-state competition, as particular cities and/or regions become the focal points for development and investment, while peripheral areas are largely ignored. Following from a geopolitical imagination of indigenousas-rural, marginalization is furthered and differences are magnified, resulting in a pattern of conflict primarily between ‘underdogs’ (Uvin 2003), as ‘topdogs’ insulate themselves from reprisal through an ever tightening security regime that uses both the apparatus of the state, such as authoritarian clampdowns on public space (Springer 2009c; 2010a), and private measures visible in the landscape, such as fenced properties patrolled by armed guards (Coleman 2004). This emergent securitization logic of neoliberalism also factors into contemporary assessments of global risk, which are often conceptualized as resulting from the problems of ‘non-governance’ and ‘mis-governance’. Against the idea of neoliberalism as an unqualified dissolution of state power, in the aftermath of 9/11 a public discourse has emerged in the USA around the idea that certain states have too little power. Spaces that are thought of as politically well managed coincide with high degrees of economic integration and financial liberalization, thereby signaling the ostensible ‘need’ for rolling-out new governance structures in those spaces, like Afghanistan, where the state is thought to have failed to administer space ‘effectively’ (Mitchell 2010). Within the imaginative geopolitical scripting of the neoliberal moment, spaces deemed weak, disorderly and ungoverned are also considered as sites where terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking may run rampant and spill across borders to threaten those domains where sovereign power and, importantly, markets are regarded as secure (Morrissey 2011). Mitchell argues that this language of failure and threat is further implicated in the formation of new subjectivities as individuals are increasingly governed through intensified policing and security logics (2010). The result is not only a repositioning of the ‘normative’ vis-à-vis political subjects by ‘opening them up to powerful market forces and technologies of the self such as privatization, entrepreneurialism and responsiblization’ (Mitchell 2010: 290), but an intensification of an authoritarian rationale at all levels of governance. The violent responses to protest movements challenging neoliberal policies in cities as dispersed as Genoa, Mexico City, Seoul, Stockholm, Asuncion, Lilongwe, Port Moresby and Toronto serve as instructive examples of how the unmediated usage of public space and the very practice of democracy have come into conflict with neoliberalism and its securitization discourse. Such counter-hegemonic struggles can be read through the lens of what Routledge calls ‘anti-geopolitics’ (2003), insofar 155

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics as protesters increasingly assert independence from the state by challenging not only its policing-cum-militarizing logics but also the amplification of geo-economic power as neoliberalism continues its spread into various geographical contexts and institutional frameworks around the globe. The diffusion of contestation to this ‘New World Order’ is unsurprising when we appreciate how neoliberalism pivots around the extraction of economic surplus from countries incorporated into the global capitalist system in such a way that necessitates local authoritarian regimes to ensure its functionality (Canterbury 2005; Springer 2010a). Elections are held to confer a semblance of legitimacy, but democratic empowerment through processes such as policy orientation and decision-making in the allocation of resources is never advanced. Instead, neoliberalization actually creates opportunities for elite groups with strong commercial interest to influence political development away from democracy (Jönsson 2002). Local elites often endorse neoliberal policies such as privatization as an opportunity to rapidly line their own pockets through informal control over the bidding process in the allocation of contracts (Springer 2009c). Meanwhile, international investors all too frequently concern themselves only with the economic bottom line or the assurance that natural resources and cheap goods continue to flow regardless of the localized environmental damage and repressive labor conditions, which are treated econometrically as mere externalities. In the end, it is not the accountable, democratic state that is the ideal political shell for neoliberalism (Jayasuriya 2000), nor is it an absentee or minimalist state that is required. Rather, neoliberalism seeks a ‘differently powerful’ (Peck and Tickell 2002) regulatory state capable of insulating its institutions from capture by those vested interests that inhabit such institutions as parliaments, and even more so from public opinion.

Graphing the hidden fist: Illuminating neoliberalism under erasure Within the realm of popular geopolitics, ‘African’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Islamic’ cultures are repeatedly imagined as being somehow ingrained with an ostensibly ‘natural’ penchant for violence, a trend that has only increased in the context of the ‘war on terror’. The public performance of such ideas feeds into particular geopolitical aims, thereby enabling them to gather momentum and acquire a certain form of ‘commonsense’ validity. The imaginative geographies of such Orientalism are constructions that fuse distance and difference together through a series of spatializations that not only mark particular people as ‘Other’, but configure ‘our’ space of the familiar as separate and distinct from ‘their’ unfamiliar space that lies beyond (Gregory 2004; Said 2003). This is precisely the discourse that colonialism mobilized to construct its authority in the past, and in the current context of the Global South, Orientalism can be productively regarded as neoliberalism’s latitude inasmuch as it affords a powerful discursive space for the promotion of 156

Neoliberalism free market ideas. Linking neoliberalism and Orientalism may seem somewhat counter-intuitive when neoliberalism is taken at face value. After all, the neoliberal doctrine conceives itself as upholding a liberal internationalism based on visions of a single human race peacefully united by a common code of conduct featuring deregulated markets, free trade, shared legal norms and states that feature civic liberties, electoral processes and representative institutions (Gowen 2001). Yet growing recognition for neoliberalization’s role in rising inequality, continuing poverty, authoritarian tendencies and a litany of other social ills (see Bourdieu 1998; Duménil and Lévy 2011; Giroux 2004; Goldberg 2009; MacEwan 1999; Springer; 2008), hints at the multiple ‘erasures’ neoliberal ideology has thus far attempted to engage through its rhetorical smokescreen. Although neoliberalism was not her concern when Spivak asked ‘can the subaltern speak?’, there is nonetheless a remarkable resonance that can be drawn from her argument. Spivak contends that dominance is maintained through silencing, where ‘in the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic “under erasure,” to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified’ (1988: 280). This description exemplifies the neoliberal project and is precisely what the Mont Pelerin Society had in mind when, in the post-war conjuncture of Keynesian acceptance, they set out to reconstitute a politically rightist – and in their minds righteous – intellectual agenda (Mirowski and Plehwe 2008). These original neoliberals knew from the outset that their economic ideals would have to become so deeply entrenched in society that they would become like oxygen: utterly pervasive and altogether invisible. Only then could the final determinant of their ‘end of history’ and transcendence to a utopian ‘global village’ be properly signified. Neoliberalism, as proselytized by its apostles, advances such a self-evident and unquestionable image of itself that the phrase ‘there is no alternative’ has taken on mantric connotations. Friedman is one such advocate, arguing that any attempt to refuse neoliberalism is an ‘olive tree’ – or the foolish preserve of tradition-bound tribes and terrorists – which stands haplessly in the path of the mighty ‘Lexus’ being driven inexorably forward by the promise of prosperity for all (1999). To the question of who drives this luxury automobile, an answer is – in keeping with neoliberalism’s abstract doctrine – purposefully elusive. The class project of neoliberalism that Harvey illuminates (2005) is kept ‘under erasure’ by Friedman, while ‘others’ wander aimlessly in the shadows of their ostensibly static cultures. Yet near the end of his book, Friedman (1999: 443) lets the cat out of the bag when he suggests, ‘the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist’. The key to neoliberal dominance is thus, as Friedman celebrates and Sparke critiques (2004), American geopolitical supremacy. As Morrissey argues, the US military machine operates with a ‘neoliberal policing raison d’être’, wherein ‘therapeutic discourses of risk management and explicit appeals to neoliberal economic universality’ are advanced under the ostensible premise that the potentiality of a volatile global 157

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics political economy – made possible by ‘rogue states’ and ‘terrorists’ – necessitates securitization by US military force (2011: 894). And while this fist has become astonishingly visible in Iraq, the vicious blow that was struck following 9/11 was not an opening-round knockout punch. As is the case in other spaces like Cambodia (see Springer 2009a), the hidden fist of Orientalism had long been setting the stage to ensure the fight in Iraq was already fixed where it counted most: the domain of US public opinion. In the absence of natural disasters, which have been used as opportunities to push through unpopular neoliberal reforms on peoples and societies too disoriented to protect their interests, Orientalism lays the necessary groundwork for manufactured ‘shocks’ in forging openings for neoliberalism (Klein 2007). Like the originary state-level neoliberal experiment in Chile (Challies and Murray 2008), the current round of imperialism-cum-neoliberalization in Iraq is exemplary of US geo-strategic meddling and a version of militarism premised on folding distance into difference. Would unsubstantiated suspicions of weapons of mass destruction have been enough to galvanize (much of) the US public in the march to war, if Bush and his hawks had their sights set on Canada rather than Iraq? We can only speculate, but, without a significant dose of Orientalism, such fallacious claims would, in all probability, not have been taken at face value. Notwithstanding the hilarious Michael Moore film Canadian Bacon, which satirizes US military supremacy and the geo-graphing of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, a bombing and subsequent occupation of Ottawa would scarcely have materialized. Likewise, it was ‘faraway/unknown’ Santiago and not ‘nearby/familiar’ Ottawa that played host to Washington’s subversions in the lead up to the ‘other 9/11’ in 1973. Attention to how the ‘geo’ of particular geographies, including imaginative ones, are ‘graphed’ or ‘produced by multiple, often unnoticed, space-making and space-changing processes’ is of vital importance (Sparke 2005). Sparke argues that such acknowledgement is itself an ethical commitment to examine the exclusions – which can be read in the double sense of ‘under erasure’ and ‘Othering’ – in the production of any specific geographical truth claims (2007). The ‘graphing’ of neoliberalism involves recognizing its variegated geographical expressions (Peck and Tickell 2002), imperialist impulses (Escobar 2004; Hart 2008) and authoritarian responses (Canterbury 2005; Springer 2009c; 2010a), all of which confound the theoretical niceties of a smooth-space, flat-earth where neoliberalism rolls-out across the globe without friction and resistance. To cope with the discrepancies between these material ‘graphings’ and a doctrine ostensibly premised on peace, neoliberalism has Orientalism at its indemnifying disposal, where ‘aberrant’, ‘violent’ and ‘local’ cultures can be used to explain away any failings and thereby leave its class project unscathed (Springer 2009a). Orientalism is employed to legitimize the double standards neoliberalism invokes in the global distribution of violence (Sparke 2007), to code the violence of anti-neoliberal resistance, and to geographically distribute and locate blame for violence by insisting that violence sits in particular, ‘Oriental’ places (Springer 2011). The responsibility of critical geopolitics in this ‘age of resurgent imperialism’ (Hart 2006) is thus to shine a light

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Neoliberalism on such ‘neoliberalism under erasure’ so that the virulence of its ‘Othering’ is laid bare, and therein its virility may be refused. There is nothing quintessentially ‘neoliberal’ about Orientalism. The coalescence of neoliberalism with Orientalism is dependent upon the context in which neoliberalization occurs. Said once argued that Orientalism is entwined with the project of imperialism, supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination (2003: 9). As the latest incarnation of ‘empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2000), the principles, practices, theories and attitudes of imperialism remain intact under neoliberalism, so it is unsurprising to discover that the discourses that support such a project similarly remain unchanged. When applied to the Global South, neoliberalization proceeds as a ‘civilizing’ project, operating in much the same way that colonialism and modernization theory did before it. In short, neoliberalism positions itself as the confirmation of reason on ‘barbarians’ who dwell ‘out there’, beyond the gates of ‘Western civilization’. The implications of neoliberalization thus speak to a colonialism that intrudes upon the present (Gregory 2004), wherein Enlightenment-based ideologies such as neoliberalism allow the Global North to continue to essentialize the peoples, places and cultures of the Global South as intrinsically violent. Neoliberalism maintains this selfaggrandizing sense of rationalism precisely because it looks to reason rather than experience as the foundation of certainty in knowledge, a notion that becomes clear when we recognize that the multiple ruptures that have accompanied the worldwide unfolding of neoliberalism – between practice and ideology, reality and doctrine, consequence and vision – are not simply unintentional side effects of this disciplinary enterprise, but are actually among its most fundamental features (Brenner and Theodore 2002).

Conclusion We can never attribute neoliberalism to a direct calculable expression, whereby ‘A’ plus ‘B’ equals neoliberalism. Although this idea is prominent in the popular geopolitical imagination, to attempt such a formulaic interpretation summons ideas of a singular or pure neoliberalism, a dead-letter idea that has been altogether dismissed by geographers. Neoliberalism is a theoretical abstraction that comes up against geographical limits, and hence its ‘actually existing’ circumstances are never paradigmatic. In this sense, the rising tide against neoliberalism and the geographically dispersed protests that signify and support such a movement necessarily occur in terrains that always exceed neoliberalism (Hart 2008; Leitner, Peck and Sheppard 2007). Yet it is vitally important to recognize how the geographies of contestation can be interpreted as a shared sense of betrayal with what can be broadly defined as ‘neoliberal policy goals’. Accordingly, there exists a growing recognition that transnational solidarity is inseparable from ‘local’ 159

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics movements, and must be built upon relational understandings of both resistance to, and the violence of, neoliberalism (see Featherstone 2005; Springer 2011; Wainwright and Kim 2008). Increased class tensions and the intensifying policing, surveillance and security measures that inevitably arise from such strained relations are some of the most noticeable outcomes of a state’s neoliberalization, so while there are variegations and mutations to account for in neoliberalism’s travels, there is also a need to appreciate the similar deleterious outcomes that do in fact all too frequently arise. By offering a more attentive reading of the ‘glocal’ implications of neoliberalization, critical geopolitics has challenged the supposed inevitability and universality that neoliberal ideology purports (see Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003). Agnew and Corbridge hinted at these ideas nearly two decades ago, when in establishing an agenda for the then ‘emerging school of “critical geopolitics”’ they argued: ‘It is a world economy marked above all by a globalization of production, exchange and information flows which has brought with it not so much spatial homogenization as a new round of geographical differentiation and uneven development at all spatial scales’ (1995: 5). In a similar fashion, in accounting for the contestations that have arisen in response to neoliberal policy initiatives, critical geopolitics has likewise been influential in redressing the notion that the state disappears, in particular by focusing on how a Leviathan monopoly of violence is continually evident in both the practices and discourses of the neoliberalized state. Finally, critical geopolitics has much to contribute in terms of deconstructing neoliberalism’s intersections with Orientalism and the racist discourses of alterity that are supported in producing ‘proper’ neoliberal subjects. Transforming popular imaginative geographies is vital to reconfiguring processes of subject formation away from neoliberal modalities. Promoting critical geopolitics and applying the reflexivity it necessitates – both within and beyond the academy – are thus crucial practices in facilitating the circulation of alternative discursive formations that break from the current spell of neoliberal ‘commonsense’.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Gregory, D., 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hackworth, J., 2007. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hardt, M., and A. Negri, 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hart, G., 2006. ‘Denaturalizing dispossession: Critical ethnography in the age of resurgent imperialism’. Antipode 38: 977–1004. —— 2008. ‘The provocations of neoliberalism: Contesting the nation and liberation after apartheid’. Antipode 40: 678–705. Harvey, D., 1985. ‘The geopolitics of capitalism’. In D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, pp. 128–63. —— 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huntington, S.P., 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Jayasuriya, K., 2000. ‘Authoritarian liberalism: Governance and the emergence of the regulatory state in post-crisis Asia’. In R. Robison et al. (eds), Politics and Markets in the Wake of the Asian Crisis. London: Routledge, pp. 315–30. Johnston, R.J., and P.J. Taylor (eds), 1986. A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jönsson, K., 2002. ‘Globalization, authoritarian regimes and political change: Vietnam and Laos’. In C. Kinnvall and K. Jönsson (eds), Globalization and Democratization in Asia: The Construction of Identity. London: Routledge, 114–30. Kaldor, M., 2006. New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity. Kaplan, R., 2000. The Coming Anarchy. New York: Random House. Kingfisher, C., 2007. ‘Spatializing neoliberalism: Articulations, recapitulations and (a very few) alternatives’. In K. England and K. Ward (eds), Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 195–222. Klein, N., 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: A.A. Knopf. Lemke, T., 2001. ‘The birth of bio-politics: Michael Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality’. Economy and Society 30: 190–207. Leitner, H., J. Peck and E.S. Sheppard (eds), 2007. Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. New York: Guilford. MacEwan, A., 1999. Neoliberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century. New York: Zed Books. Massey, D., 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Mirowski, P., and D. Plehwe (eds), 2009. The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mitchell, K., 2006. ‘Neoliberal governmentality in the European Union: Education, training, and technologies of citizenship’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 389–407. —— 2010. ‘Ungoverened space: Global security and the geopolitics of broken windows’. Political Geography 29: 289–97. 162

Neoliberalism Morrissey, J., 2011. ‘Closing the neoliberal gap: Risk and regulation in the long war of securitization’. Antipode 43: 874–900. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ong, A., 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. London: Duke University Press. Overbeek, H., 2000. ‘Transnational historical materialism: Theories of transnational class formation and world order’. In R.B. Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories. London: Routledge, pp. 168–83. Peck, J., 2001. ‘Neoliberalizing states: Thin policies / hard outcomes’. Progress in Human Geography 25: 445–55. —— 2004. ‘Geography and public policy: Constructions of neoliberalism’. Progress in Human Geography 28: 392–405. —— 2008. ‘Remaking laissez-faire’. Progress in Human Geography 32: 3–43. —— 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— and A. Tickell, 2002. ‘Neoliberalizing space’. Antipode 34: 380–404. Plehwe, D., and B. Walpen, 2006. ‘Between network and complex organization: The making of neoliberal knowledge and hegemony’. In D. Plehwe, B. Walpen and G. Neunhoffer (eds), Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique. London: Routledge, pp. 27–50. Rapley, J., 2004. Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Roberts, S., A. Secor and M. Sparke, 2003. ‘Neoliberal geopolitics’. Antipode 35: 886–97. Routledge, P., 2003. ‘Anti-geopolitics’, in J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 236–48. Said, E., 2003. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 25th edn. Sen, A., 1999. Development as Freedom. Toronto: Random House. Sharp, J., et al., 2000. ‘Entanglements of power: Geographies of domination/ resistance’. In J. Sharp et al. (eds), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance. London: Routledge, pp. 1–42. Sparke, M., 2004. ‘Political geography: Political geographies of globalization (1): Dominance’. Progress in Human Geography 28: 777–94. —— 2005. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. —— 2006. ‘A neoliberal nexus: Economy, security and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border’. Political Geography 25: 151–80. —— 2007. ‘Geopolitical fear, geoeconomic hope and the responsibilities of geography’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97: 338–49. Spivak, G.C., 1988. ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313. Springer, S., 2008. ‘The nonillusory effects of neoliberalisation: Linking geographies of poverty, inequality, and violence’. Geoforum 39: 1520–25.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics —— 2009a. ‘Culture of violence or violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and imagining the “savage other” in posttransitional Cambodia’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34: 305–19. —— 2009b. ‘The neoliberalization of security and violence in Cambodia’s transition’. In S. Peou (ed.), Human Security in East Asia: Challenges for Collaborative Action. London: Routledge, pp. 125–41. —— 2009c. ‘Violence, democracy, and the neoliberal “order”: The contestation of public space in post-transitional Cambodia’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99: 138–62. —— 2010a. Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order: Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space. London: Routledge. —— 2010b. ‘Neoliberal discursive formations: On the contours of subjectivation, good governance, and symbolic violence in posttransitional Cambodia’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 931–50. —— 2011. ‘Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism and virulent imaginative geographies’. Political Geography 30: 90–98. Tsing, A.L., 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Uvin, P., 2003. ‘Global dreams and local anger: From structural to acute violence in a globalizing world’. In M.A. Tetreault et al. (eds), Rethinking Global Political Economy: Emerging Issues, Unfolding Odysseys. London: Routledge, pp. 147–61. Wainwright, J., and S-J. Kim, 2008. ‘Battles in Seattle redux: Transnational resistance to a neoliberal trade agreement’. Antipode 40: 513–34.

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RESEARCH

COMPANION

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions1 James D. Sidaway, Virginie Mamadouh and Marcus Power

Reappraising geopolitical traditions Geopolitics seems more popular than ever. Twentieth-century canonical authors like Halford Mackinder are read and being discussed again (Clover 1999) and not only by critical scholars seeking a deeper understanding of early twentiethcentury imperial discourses and their resonances but by commentators who seek to apply geopolitical lessons for today’s ‘strategic dilemmas’. Parallels are made between the present competition in central Asia and the Great Game – the intense rivalry for the control of central Asia between the British and Russian Empires in the nineteenth century. A few moments on the internet – and a browse of online book sellers – reveals thousands of websites and hundreds of books that use the term and invoke these trajectories. This chapter can do little more than scratch the surface of such sprawling literatures. Our purpose in this chapter is to offer an entrée and overview. Many more specialist critical accounts of the expansion and circulation of geopolitical writing in national contexts can be found in the two scholarly journals Geopolitics and Political Geography. Moreover, developing an account of the trajectories of geopolitical thought immediately poses a number of challenges and a paradox. In particular, it has been amongst the starting points of critical geopolitics that the term ‘geopolitics’ has signified many things. That recognition of plurality, in linguistic terms, that ‘geopolitics’ is a polysemic sign, poses particular difficulties for this chapter, 1

This chapter reworks some material from Sidaway and Mamadouh (2012) and Mamadouh (1998). We are grateful to Pearson and Kluwer for permission to rework and incorporate that material here. We are also grateful to Klaus Dodds and Merje Kuus for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. We dedicate the chapter to the celebration of the life and legacy of Professor Les Hepple, a man who investigated trajectories of geopolitics and inspired others to this critical task (see Atkinson 2008; Dodds 2008; Megoran 2008; Sidaway 2008).

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics charged with considering geopolitical traditions. For Heffernan, therefore, critical geopolitics includes an intention to avoid a teleological reading of the past and subvert the idea that geopolitics has flowed in a single intellectual trajectory from the ideologically and morally suspect geopolitics of the late 19th and early 20th century through the radical alternatives of the 1960s and 1970s to a post-structural, ‘critical geopolitics’ in the present. (Heffernan 2000: 347) Yet, whilst the term ‘geopolitics’ can and does refer to many things – and critical geopolitics has opened up the range of these, the long established mainstreams (rather than the critical approaches developed in this book) of such neoclassical geopolitics are associated with a mode of writing (and thinking) about space, states and the relations between them. Just over a decade ago, a landmark collection (Dodds and Atkinson 2000) did much to excavate these and their interrelations. Since then, key figures, most notably amongst them, Mackinder, have been the subject of critical biography (Kearns 2009). Others, whose work exemplifies similar conservative and imperial thought, but is less often invoked under the sign of geopolitics, are being translated into and debated afresh in the English language – notably the Nazi ideologue and advocate of a German Großraum, Carl Schmitt (who continued to write after his release by Allied occupation forces in 1946, though was not able to occupy an academic position again – aside from occasional lectures in Francoist Spain). Stuart Elden warns that: Over the past couple of decades, attempts have been made to reappropriate the notion of ‘geopolitics’, with its imperial connotations as a ‘critical geopolitics’. But just as Mackinder, Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Karl Hauhofer and others need careful, historical, contextual and political readings in such a project, in order to recognize the limits of their work and the reactionary politics that accompanies them, so too does Schmitt. … It is precisely because he appears to be useful that he is so dangerous. The seductiveness is that he seems to transcend his circumstances and political views, when remaining deeply rooted in them. The anointing of Schmitt as a geopolitical theorist with contemporary relevance is thus a serious error, intellectually and politically. (Elden 2011: 102) With such caveats clearly in mind, our task here is to provide a compressed account of geopolitical traditions that will serve as a useful entrée to this chapter on critical geopolitics, in ways that also document and signal research agendas. Our focus here is on material written in English (though much of this analyses writings in other languages). We start by noting the vitality of the field(s) that it signifies. In Google, ‘Geopolitics’ produces over five million hits. The range of these is enormous, in which only a portion originates from academic writings in geography or political sciences. There are also more than 170,000 entries on Google books for geopolitics and nearly 2,000 articles listed on the Web of Knowledge 166

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions containing the word ‘geopolitics’. Google books specifies two distinct peaks in the relative number of English-language books making reference to geopolitics: in the early 1940s and again in the closing years of the twentieth century (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 The relative number of books in English referring to geopolitics (Google Ngram) Examining the record of debates in the British parliament is also revealing of geopolitics’ trajectory. The term ‘geopolitics’ was first used there by the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in a July 1937 debate about the civil war in Spain. In that debate, Eden referred to ‘geo-political laws’ that would shape Spain’s foreign policy whoever won the war. The next mention of the term in Parliament came during the Second World War, when several debates, including one at which the British wartime leader Churchill took part, referred disapprovingly to Nazi geopolitics. After the war ended, such references continued, but were soon supplanted by the use of the term linked to the developing strategies of the Cold War. Thus, in the 1949 debates about the establishment of NATO, the Conservative politician Rab Butler noted: We think that wars will go exactly the same way as they did before, that armies will roll West; but in Canada they are fully aware of the modern and somewhat chilly conception that war may sweep upon them over the Arctic regions, and it is this new geo-political conception, if I may use long words, which we must keep in mind in approaching a pact of this sort. (Butler 1949) This type of reference to geopolitics, stripped from the association with Nazism that had earlier been explicit, became quite frequent in subsequent decades. By the 1950s and 1960s, geopolitics was being cited with reference to issues of British decolonization as well as Cold War narratives and subsequently in discussions about European integration. In recent years, Iraq, Afghanistan and the ‘war on 167

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics terror’ crop up, and during the last decade or so there are more use of phrases in parliament such as ‘geopolitical situation’, ‘geopolitical uncertainty’ and ‘geopolitical diversity’. Nonetheless, amongst this array of references to geopolitics, it is not hard to find many texts seeking to rework and learn lessons from what are seen as a canon of – or indeed laws – revealed in geopolitical writing: much of it dating back to the early twentieth century. Megoran uses the term neoclassical geopolitics to refer to these. He notes how they include: Ways of thinking about the effects of geography on international relations that explicitly locate themselves within the Mackinder-Haushofer-Spykman tradition, but which creatively rework it with reference to changed social, economic, political and cultural factors. (Megoran 2010: 187) This often takes the form of mapping, emphasizing the strategic importance of particular places and justifying, explaining and naturalizing policies through references to the (physical) geography and/or the location of certain place. Therefore such geopolitical traditions are specifically embedded, and geopolitical traditions are often labelled after the nation-state in which and for which they are articulated (Dijkink 1996; Dodds and Atkinson 2000). In this chapter, we approach these strands and their trajectories from the vantage point of postcolonial critique. Such an approach foregrounds the imperial framing of geopolitics. In doing so, it builds on a rich critical vein of scholarship. As Robert Young notes: The term has emerged to describe a set of critical concepts and oppositional political identities and objectives, that have been developed out of the continuing reverberations of the political and cultural history of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. (Young 2001: 69) Whilst there are several aspects to such concepts and identities, those brought to bear here enable a focus on imperial framing and presences. The forms of geopolitics that we examine here have invariably been part – formed within, reflecting or concentrated expressions – of imperial cultures. We will consider this in more detail later, specifically how such imperial cultures acknowledged their position (at the margins) in power politics and were often aware of their vulnerability to other powers and resistance from the margins. Amongst the insights of postcolonial theory has been the precariousness of imperial claims, which are subject to subversion (including mimicry) on the part of the colonized and continually have to be re-asserted, to power, order and civilization. Prior to this however, it is important to note that much geopolitics sees itself as part of, or adapting, a tradition; that is, something conscious of its unfolding historical development and with a sense of important founders (and certain key texts written by them) that was bound up with and framed in the context of empire and imperial governance. It is primarily with work that locates itself as part of 168

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions such a tradition – and in due course, some reactions and countertrends – that will form our analytical focus here. We are acutely aware that limits of scope and space constrain our narrative here. We hope, however, that read in tandem with (or perhaps against) other chapters, this chapter will offer points of departure, reflection and engagement. Many of those who have used the term ‘geopolitics’ see themselves as working within or extending a tradition (thus with a point of origin and canonical texts), usually tracing its origins to the late nineteenth-century writings of conservative Swedish politician Rudolf Kjellén. Kjellén is reputedly the first person to have used the term ‘geopolitics’ in published writings (see Holdar 1992; Tunander 2001). But beyond this idea of a founding moment when the geopolitical ‘tradition’ began with the first use of the term by Kjellén, things start to get complicated. The ‘tradition’ divides, fractures, multiplies and finds itself translated into many languages and cropping up in everything from the writings and speeches of American politicians to texts written by Brazilian generals and Russian journalists. All these re-invent and rework the ‘tradition’ as they go along. As the introduction to a earlier critical collection on ‘rethinking geopolitics’ explains: The word ‘geopolitics’ has had a long and varied history in the twentieth century, moving well beyond its original meaning in Kjellén’s work. … Coming up with a specific definition of geopolitics is notoriously difficult, for the meaning of concepts like geopolitics tends to change as historical periods and structures of world order change. (Ó Tuathail 1998: 1) In other words (and to reiterate our opening lines) exactly what is meant by the term ‘geopolitics’ has changed in different historical and geographical contexts. In so doing, it becomes evident that imperial- and colonial-derived modes of thinking accompany and intertwine with the tradition. This is evident in contexts where the conservative strand of geopolitics has flourished in recent decades – the breakaway settler colonies that became the southern cone of South America and their northern mega-neighbour: the República Federativa do Brasil. One key strand of this geopolitical reasoning was within the national security ideology of the rightwing dictatorships that ruled these countries in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. All were obsessed with security, which became defined primarily as the security of the regimes. Although explicitly locating this within a formal adaptation of geopolitics that – as this chapter specifies later – had its origins in early twentieth-century Europe, this has been a feature of many other states that occupied a relatively peripheral position in the global system (a status that during the Cold War, was designated the Third World). These have been described by Ayoob (2002) and more recently by Sharp (2011) and Sidaway (forthcoming) as ‘subaltern; occupying ’an ambivalent position with respect to dominant [Western] geopolitical representation and practice’ (Sharp 2011: 298). Describing them thus requires that we also attend to the trajectories and uses of the Western strands. In this review we therefore not only pay attention to the geopolitics of hegemonic states and contenders for power, but also of states and actors at the margins of world politics. 169

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Geopolitics in South America: Generals write security at the margins of world politics The commonalities of Latin American geopolitical traditions are many: states compete with each other for territory and influence, are confronted with the same Iberian formal imperial heritage, the same British informal imperial past and the same US informal imperial present and last but not least an obsession with internal enemies. Chile is perhaps the clearest case of the orientation of Latin American geopolitics regarding internal security. On 11 September 1973, the elected left-wing government of Chile (headed by the socialist President Salvador Allende) was overthrown in a coup led by the head of the armed forces General Augusto Pinochet. The ideology of the military regime in Chile (like those elsewhere in South America) was intensely nationalist. More importantly it was a particular conservative form of Chilean nationalism. The nation was held to be sacred and the military were rescuing this ‘sacred body’ from communists, subversives and so on (anyone who opposed the military vision of ultra-nationalism and order and the neoliberal economic and social model which was now imposed). It is in this nationalism and conception of the nation as a kind of sacred body that geopolitics enters the picture. A few years before the coup, Pinochet had published an army textbook on geopolitics. Intended mainly for use in Chilean military academies, the 1968 textbook indicated that Chile’s future dictator took the subject deadly seriously. For Pinochet, geopolitics was the science of the state, a set of knowledge and programmes to perfect the art of statecraft; that is, to strengthen the state in the continent and the wider world, in which it was held to be in competition with others. The starting point and the heart of Pinochet’s textbook and of the wider bleak tradition of geopolitics that it presents is an organic theory of the state. Drawing upon conservative German writings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (which had been codified by the German academic Friedrich Ratzel and were later elaborated by general Karl Haushofer) and with the organic notion of the state in mind, geopolitics claims to identify certain laws that govern state behaviour and that, once identified, can be a guide for those charged with furthering and protecting the ‘national interest’ (or at least a certain definition of the latter). It is not difficult to see how this idea could appeal to South American military dictators, for it gives the military, equipped with the supposedly scientific study of geopolitics, a special mission. In other words it legitimizes their rule. Moreover, the organic idea was extended further to legitimize the extermination of those whom the military defined as enemies of the state. People labelled communist or subversive, indeed all those who oppose the military dictatorship, can be compared with a disease or cancer which threatens the lifeblood of the state-organism and is best ‘cut out’. The otherwise unthinkable (the murder of thousands of people in the name of the wider welfare of the nation-state) is made to seem natural and a good thing, since it serves the longer-term interest of the health and power of the

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Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions ‘living being’ that is the state (see Hepple 1992). With the ‘cancer’ of subversion and disloyalty eliminated, the ‘state-body’ can grow and thrive. Outside Chile, one of the most important expressions of geopolitics in South America has been in Brazil. The military in Brazil overthrew the democratic government in 1964 and stayed in power for the next 20 years. Although never as despotic as the regime led by Pinochet (or similar military governments in Argentina and Uruguay), the long years of military rule gave the Brazilian generals a chance to elaborate and impose a geopolitical vision on the country. One of the most evident aspects of Brazilian geopolitics is the idea that state security requires a measure of national integration. The vast scale of Brazil, the difficulty of travel across its Amazon ‘heartland’ (the world’s largest tropical rainforest) and the fact that it shares borders with every other South American country except Chile gave the geopolitics of the Brazilian generals a special sense of its national mission and an obsession with the potential for the country to be a great power (grandeza). The associated sense of the urgency of the integration of Brazil required the extension of a network of highways across Amazonia and the settlement of its lands by farmers and ranchers (Foresta 1992). It is this geopolitically inspired vision, combined with a system of patronage and favours to those close to the regime, which underlies the enclosure and division of Amazonia into private lands and the accompanying transformation and destruction of the tropical rainforest. This is a colonizing vision. Similarly, an interest, at times an obsession, with Antarctica is evident in much South American geopolitics. Antarctica is prominent in geopolitical writings from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay and also appears in Peruvian, Brazilian and Ecuadorian geopolitical texts (see Dodds 1997). Again this invokes the discourse of frontiers. Although the plankton-rich waters around Antarctica were exploited for seal and whale hunting in the nineteenth century, it was not until the twentieth century that exploration of the interior began. Today, Antarctica has only a transient population (at any time, though with the numbers dependant on the season) of a few thousand scientists and tourists. This presence, plus the relative proximity of the continent to South America and the possibility of exploitable mineral resources, has led to a series of territorial claims. Although Argentinean writers had already represented Antarctica as an extension of the southern Argentine area of Patagonia, the British made the first formal claim in 1908. In turn, parts of this claim were ‘granted’ to Australia and New Zealand. France and Norway made claims in the 1930s and 1940s, followed shortly by Argentina and Chile. After 1945 the USSR and the USA also established a wide network of bases, although without staking formal claims to territory. The claims made by Argentina, Chile and the UK overlapped, and, foreshadowing the British–Argentine conflict over the Falklands/Malvinas, British and Argentine forces exchanged fire in Antarctica in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the context of this potential for conflict and growing possibility of Cold War confrontation, a United Nations Treaty in 1959 agreed that all claims would be (forgive the pun) ‘frozen’ for at least 30 years and the continent reserved for scientific (not commercial or military) use. The treaty was extended in 1991. But prior to that renewal, it was not clear what the future status of the continent would 171

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics be. Even today, the treaty merely defers the issue of claims. Argentina is the South American country with the largest claim. The Argentine claim has also become central to geopolitical discourse there. As Child explains in a study of geopolitics and conflict in South America: For Argentine geopolitical writers, the subject of Antarctica is not only linked to tricontinental Argentina [a power in the South American continent, the south Atlantic and maritime passage to the Pacific and Antarctica], but also to … national sovereignty, patriotism, and pride. This is a particularly touchy combination after the humiliating defeat of the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. The Argentine National Antarctic Directorate has professors of Antarctic geopolitics on its staff. Through the media, maps, and postage stamps and the centralized educational system, Argentines are constantly taught and reminded that there is an Argentine Antarctic just as much as there are Argentine Malvinas. The need to assert Argentine rights in the Argentine Sea, islands, and Antarctica is linked to dreams and national projects of Argentine greatness. (Child 1985: 140–41) Although Antarctica and the South Atlantic are significant components of Argentine (along with Brazilian and Chilean) geopolitics, the former also looks beyond other Argentine frontiers. In particular, Argentine geopolitical writers together with some Brazilians and Chileans have taken a particular interest in the security of Bolivia. They have scripted Bolivia (a relatively impoverished land-locked mountainous country, which has borders with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru) and proximate areas of its neighbours as a key strategic continental heartland (see Kelly 1997). Control of Bolivia, in this vision, would be a vital key to a relative dominance in the South American continent. That Bolivia has a strong revolutionary tradition and was for many years characterized by chronic political instability has reinforced the tendency of the other South American countries to meddle in Bolivian politics. Indeed, during the years when Argentina was last ruled by a geopolitically obsessed military junta (1976–82), the Argentine armed forces were actively involved in supporting a Bolivian military government. This activity took the form of the kinds of brutal suppression and frequent murder of those who opposed the military government and its economic and social strategies (trade union leaders, dissidents, opposition members and leaders). The idea of Bolivia as a ‘heartland’, control of which would be a kind of magic (geopolitical) key to domination of South America, links back to one of the best-known genres in classical (European) geopolitical thought – with clear colonial framing.

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The anxieties of pivots and heartlands: British hegemony under threat The designation of a heartland was famously made by the British geographer (and pro-imperialist conservative politician) Halford Mackinder. In what has since become a widely cited (if less often read) article first published in 1904 following its presentation to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), Mackinder argued that the age of (European) geographical exploration was drawing to a close. This meant that there were hardly any unknown ‘blank’ spaces left on European maps of the world. According to Mackinder, the consequence of this closing of the map, this end of the centuries-long task of exploration and discovery, was that political events in one part of the world would invariably affect all others, to a much greater extent than hitherto. There would be no more frontiers for Europeans to explore and conquer. Instead, the great powers would now invariably collide against each other. Mackinder called this end of European exploration ‘the post-Columbian age’ and the closing of frontiers, the emergence of a ‘closed political system’. Given that this was the case, Mackinder claimed to identify the places of greatest worldstrategic significance, control of which would give any great power a key to world power. In his 1904 paper, he termed this the ‘pivot area’. With Mackinder’s address to the RGS and his subsequent article came a series of maps, the most frequently reprinted one of which (Figure 9.2) shows ‘the natural seats of power’. As Ó Tuathail’s critical account of Mackinder argues: Mackinder’s January 25 04, address to the Royal Geographical Society, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, is generally considered to be a defining moment in the history of geopolitics, a text to which histories of geopolitics invariably point. (Ó Tuathail 1996: 25) Mackinder’s writings reflect his place and time. From the vantage point of imperial Britain, he is concerned to identify threats and dangers to British power. At the time he presented his paper to the RGS, Britain was the pre-eminent world power. It still seemed that way to Mackinder in 1919 when he wrote about the ‘heartland’. But British imperial politicians, like Mackinder, were aware of the growing power of America, Germany and Russia. In fact, potential British imperial competition with the latter in Asia provided a key context to Mackinder’s work. As Peter Taylor explained: Behind every general model there is a specific case from which it is derived. For the heartland model this is particularly easy to identify. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century Britain and Russia had been rivals in much of Asia. While Britain was consolidating its hold on India and the route to India, Russia had been expanding eastwards and southwards producing many zones of potential conflict from Turkey through Persia and Afghanistan to Tibet. But instead of war this became an arena of bluff and counter-bluff, 173

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics known as the ‘Great Game’. … Mackinder’s presentation to an audience at the Royal Geographical Society would not have seemed so original as it appears to us reading this paper today. … Put simply, the heartland model is a codification and globalization of the Great Game: it brings a relatively obscure imperial contest on to centre stage. (Taylor 1994: 404)

Figure 9.2 The natural seats of power (Mackinder 1904: 435) Not only does this envisage the world in a particular way, as a ‘stage’, but it sees only select key actors as the significant figures at play. These are the European powers (plus Russia). Other peoples and places are merely the backdrop for action by ‘white men’. The taken-for-granted racism of Mackinder’s model, in which only Europeans make history, is also that of European imperialism and of the bulk of wider European geographical and historical writings of the time. Yet, beneath the appearance of confidence, power and indeed colonial arrogance lurks a sense of Western vulnerability. For Mackinder, this concerned the British role, challenged as it might be by the rising continental powers, and its relationship with rising American power beyond the ‘marginal crescent’ (Mackinder 1904: 437) controlled by British sea-power. More widely therefore, as Heffernan noted: The fin-de-siècle geopolitical writings of Mackinder, Ratzel and others are often represented as warrants for unfettered imperial expansion, as a pseudoscientific rationale for state aggression. However, they can equally be read as nervous commentaries on Europe’s uncertain fate in the changing conditions 174

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions of the twentieth century. There were many differences of opinion here, from cautious optimism to dark pessimism, but the dominant impression was that Europe was bound to change dramatically in the future and that the traditional hegemony of ‘European civilization’ was under serious threat. The rise of continental-scale land-based powers … seemed to change the relationship between space and power and this carried unsettling implications for the traditional European states whose power had derived from, and produced, a different spatial structure. The world was changing, or so it appeared, and if these transformations were to be understood and predicted, a new language and mode of analysis was required. (Heffernan 2000: 47)

Travelling discourses of geographical fixity: Contenders to power Although Mackinder’s 1904 paper is very much a product of its time and Mackinder’s own conservative worldview, it has proven durable and has been integrated into rather different contexts, which saved it from the relative obscurity that it deserves as an anxious turn-of-the-century imperialist text. The transfer of the discourse of ‘heartland’ to Bolivia by South American codifiers of geopolitics has already been noted. In addition, ‘heartland’ was appropriated by German geopolitics in the 1930s and 1940s and formed part of the backdrop to Cold War American strategy from the late 1940s through to the last decade of the twentieth century. Taylor notes: First in the inter-war years the heartland theory became an integral part of German geopolitics. It fitted the needs of those who advocated lebensraum [living-space], the policy of expanding into eastern Europe [and enslaving and murdering its indigenous populations], coupled with accommodating the U.S.S.R., as a grand continental policy for making Germany a great power again. Second with the onset of the Cold War after World War II, the heartland theory got another lease of life as the geostrategic basis of nuclear deterrence theory. The west’s nuclear arsenal was originally justified in part as compensation for the U.S.S.R.’s ‘natural’ strategic advantage as the heartland power. (Taylor 1994: 405) The formal tradition of writing under the sign of ‘geopolitics’ also found fertile contexts in Italy, Portugal, Spain and Japan. Influenced and supported by Nazi Germany, all these states (together with Hungary and Romania) saw the rise of ultra-nationalist or Fascist movements in the years between the two world wars. With the rapid collapse of Soviet power in Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic after the Nazi invasion of June 1941, geopolitical, racial and ultra-nationalist ideas also found fertile ground in the lands that would become contested between the German 175

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Reich and the USSR. The history of that contest has been enriched by archival research and first-hand testimony since the collapse of Eastern European and Soviet Communism after 1989 (for two stunning accounts, see Hale 2011; Synder 2010). The patterns and scale of destruction and genocide are also becoming more starkly documented. The comparative role of geopolitical concepts within this demands much further and careful excavation – we return to this thorny but vital problem in a moment. Suffice it to note here that, in all these cases, geopolitical debates were crucially negotiated through other cultural and political debates about ‘race’, nationalism, the colonial pasts and futures, supposed national ‘missions’ and destinies and the European and global political contexts. The Japanese case internalized and then inverted European racial hierarchies – presenting Japan as the natural leader of an Asia liberated from Euro-American (‘white’) colonialism. The ends and means of this became the subject of extensive Japanese debates (bolstered by Haushofer’s legacy and writings his 1908–10 stay in Japan at a time when its empire was expanding in east Asia and had defeated Russia in Manchuria) from the 1920s to the 1945 defeat and end of the what the allies called the Pacific War (Takeuchi, 2000).

Figure 9.3 ‘Portugal não é um pais pequeno’ (Portugal is not a small country) (Henrique Galvão, 1934. © Arquivo Histórico Militar, Lisbon) 176

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions In Portugal, the right-wing dictatorship argued that it was bringing Christianity and civilization to the territories it had acquired in Africa and Asia, even projecting these onto a map of Europe to show that – when the African territories controlled by Portugal were taken into account, Portugal was not a small country. This case is instructive in linking notions of grandeur to the possession of colonial territories, integrated – so the discourses claimed and maps presented – into a ‘pluri-continental’ space. Thus as two of us have noted elsewhere, such Portuguese geopolitical maps (for an example from 1934, see Figure 9.3) ‘showed, after all that Portugal was already as great as these other imperial powers, and already as “great” as any European continental power, and without the need for any new orders or annexations’ (Sidaway and Power 2005: 536).

Figure 9.4 ‘Ein Kleinstaat bedroht Deutschland’ (a small state threatens Germany) (Schumacher 1934: map 8)

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics The same year that Portuguese geopolitics was declaring Portugal not to be a small state, German geopolitics was declaring that a small state (Czechoslovakia) threatened Germany (Figure 9.4). These obsessions with relative size and location reveal the anxieties and sense of vulnerabilities that were never far from the surface in geopolitics: even where it claimed to embody or promote national-state power and grandeur. In similar terms, geopolitical journals in Italy under Mussolini saw themselves as serving and expressing the aspirations of the expanding fascist state to establish a new Roman Empire across the Mediterranean (Antonsich 2009). In French writings too, colonial empire as a basis for national power had long been evident. The colonial project faced challenges that would culminate in the postwar defeat at Diên Biên Phu (which led the USA to become involved in Indochina) and collapse in Algeria. In the first instance however, a preoccupation with German claims in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s generated debates about appropriate French reactions. According to Geoffrey Parker: The reactions of French geographers to German Geopolitik were accompanied by attempts to examine France’s role as a great power after World War I. There were two major approaches to this question. One saw France’s future as being principally a colonial power while the other saw her as a central part of a united Europe. The idea of a closer European unity in place of strife became an important theme in French geopolitical writing during the 1930s. (Parker 1987: 145) In other words, if colonial empire might not sustain French grandeur, the solution must lie in new arrangements in Europe. Although the Vichy regime sought to square the circle, such notions would soon founder when they became irreconcilable with German notions of an imperial realm built around Berlin and extending west as well as southwards and eastwards. German geopolitics of this epoch has become the best-known – providing a key point of departure for those who would engage with geopolitics elsewhere. In Germany, organic notions of the state had already been popularized by conservative nineteenthcentury academics. The collapse of the Hapsburg empire after 1918 also offered space for concepts (that had been forming since the nineteenth century) such as Germany’s  vision  of Mitteleuropa (Chiantera-Stutte 2008; Le Rider 2008). Moreover, Germany was characterized by extreme political and economic turbulence in the decades following its defeat in the First World War. This combination provided a fertile environment for the elaboration and circulation of a distinctive geopolitical tradition. In Ó Tuathail’s words: After the shock of military defeat and the humiliation of the dictated peace of Versailles, the Weimar Republic proved to be fertile ground for the growth of a distinct German geopolitics. Geopolitical writings, in the words of one critic, ‘shot up like mushrooms after a summer rain’. (Ó Tuathail 1996a: 141)

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Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions The main features of these writings (which they shared with a wider German nationalism, later codified in Nazism) were a critique of the established ‘World Order’, and of the injustices imposed on Germany by the victors. German claims were often presented graphically in maps that were widely circulated (see Herb 1989: 97), which in turn were caught up with a wider imperial zeitgeist that found similar expression in academic study of Eastern Europe (Burleigh 1988). Like the variants of the geopolitical tradition that were developed amongst right-wing and military circles in Italy, Portugal, Spain and Japan, German geopolitics also asserted an imperial destiny. In this vision, notions of racial hierarchy were blended with conceptions of state ‘vitality’ to justify territorial expansion of the Axis powers (see O’Loughlin and van der Wusten 1990). In Europe, related conceptions of the need for an expanded German living-space were used as justification for the mass murder of occupied peoples and those who did not fit into the grotesque plans of ‘racial/territorial’ purity. The practical expression of these was the construction of systems of racial ‘purification’ and mass extermination. Historical debates about the role and relative significance of German geopolitics within the Holocaust and within broader Nazi ideology and strategy continue (see Bassin 1987; Heske 1986: 87; Natter 2003; Ó Tuathail 1996a). Bassin in particular notes the tension between racial and spatial visions of the new Nazi order in the east (1987), more recently described in Hale’s important account of collaboration in eastern Europe which contrasts the war aims of Hitler (space) and Himmler (race) (2011: 27). Such a neat contrast can be misleading however, and Paul Gilroy is amongst those who have reiterated how ‘racial’, early ecological and geopolitical thinking connected in profound ways to the notions of Lebensraum (living-space) that figured in but were not created by the racist population policies and agricultural and scientific planning of the Nazi period [and to] the geoorganic, biopolitical and governmental theories of the German geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer and the early-twentieth century geopolitican Rudolf Kjellén. These writers supplied important conceptual resources to Nazi racial science, helping it to conceptualize the state as an organism and to specify the necessary connections between the nation and its dwelling area. (Gilroy 2000: 39) As one of us has noted elsewhere (drawing again on Gilroy’s analysis), ‘raciological ways of organizing and classifying and classifying the world’ have been key to the trajectory of geopolitics and arguably this is clearer today than it was in years of Cold War … that were an interlude between the geopolitics of European empires and the convoluted and complex contemporary manifestations of geopolitics. (Sidaway 2010: 680)

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US anxieties: Contested hegemony In the USA in the 1940s, German geopolitics became the subject of lurid tales and depictions, cropping up in the media and in military and government ‘explanations’ of the Nazi danger. Popular magazines, such as Reader’s Digest, informed Americans of the ‘scientists behind Hitler’, describing German geopolitics as the key to Nazi strategy (Antonsich 1995). Whilst the relative significance of the German geopolitical tradition in the wider genocidal ultra-nationalism of Nazism was certainly overstated in such accounts, we should see geopolitics as a particular expression of wider academic and intellectual involvement and complicity in authoritarian state power, war-making and genocide. Much more widely, beyond the geopolitical tradition per se, academic geography was deeply implicated in these activities. Exploring this, Natter notes: The work of disciplinary historians of geography has demonstrated the extent to which the demarcation of geography seems inseparable from the history of war, imperialism and quests for national identity. … Geopolitics, thus, would mark a particular, but in no way separable (and hence containable) geopolitical deployment of geo-power. (Natter 2003: 188) The defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 and the lurid wartime depictions of Nazi geopolitics in the USA dealt something of a blow to the formal tradition of geopolitics, which tended to retreat to Latin America and remaining colonial–fascist regimes, such as Portugal, or to find itself distilled into wider anti-communist containment narratives. In the 1990s however, explicitly right-wing geopolitics returned – in Russia and Ukraine for example, where references to Nazi-era concepts (such as Grobraum) and associated racist and anti-Semitic ideologies have become influential within some contemporary geopolitical thought (Ingram 2001; O’Loughlin, Toal and Kolossov 2005; Wilson 2002). Moreover, references to geopolitics had continued through the 1950s to the 1970s in both Spain and Portugal (see Sidaway 1999; 2000; Sidaway and Power 2005), where fascist regimes remained in power to the mid-1970s, as well as in Turkey (especially when it too was under military rule through part of the 1960s and again in the early 1970s and early 1980s). On the Turkish example, Pinar Bilgin argued that: Constructed through texts authored by military geopoliticians, and disseminated through a variety of institutions including compulsory military service (with access to all males 18+ years of age), the National Security Academy (proving in-service training to high level civil servants and journalists), and the compulsory high-school course ‘National Security’, Turkey’s geopolitical discourse has allowed the military to play a central role in shaping domestic political processes but also make this role seem ‘normal’. (Bilgin 2007: 753)

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Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions In addition, as this chapter has detailed, geopolitics has been influential in recent decades in a number of South American countries, especially in the 1970s’ and early 1980s’ epoch of military rule through much of the continent. These regimes (and plenty of others) were integrated into the US-led anti-communist network of allies. In the allied countries (and as an expression of this strategy of containment), the functions of geopolitics, in particular its ‘strategic vision’ and claim of ‘scientific’ objectivity, continued to operate or were displaced into other disciplines and branches of knowledge, including geography and the expanding subject of international relations. Whilst its assumptions were never absent, by the 1970s the term ‘geopolitics’ had been revived (or rediscovered) by US national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (see Hepple 1986; Sidaway 1998) to refer to the strategic vision deemed necessary to circumvent the sense of growing Soviet power, particularly in the Third World, where a wave of successful revolutions had brought left-wing, pro-Soviet governments to power. More widely, and frequently with Mackinder in the background, US leaders and policy-makers declared that the Soviet Union had to be encircled and contained. The metaphor of disease (containment) was mixed with that of ‘dominoes’ – if one country (Vietnam or Cuba) ‘fell’ to Soviet control or influence, then it could (like a chain reaction) ‘infect’ other proximate ones. The irony of this (which is equally present in the formal geopolitical tradition) is that, in the name of security and strategy, the real complexity of human geographies in the places (such as Vietnam or Chile, Afghanistan, Nicaragua or the Persian Gulf) that are deemed strategic is sometimes obscured or erased. The complex details of the people, culture and society were forgotten: what mattered was the ‘strategic value’ of the place, or the political identity of its government as an ideological and strategic friend or foe. This was the moment when critical geopolitics was proposed – part of the wider demand for alternatives to Cold War narratives that were enjoying a new phase in the 1980s. Similar strategic arguments were made in the post-9/11 era when reasserting Mackinder’s valuable lessons for American global policies (Kennedy 2004; Kaplan 2009; 2012; for a critique from political geography, see Antonsich 2010).

Critical geopolitics: Retrospect and prospects The politics and power of geopolitical labels had been criticized by the American geographer Donald Meing in the 1950s, who according to Agnew, ‘displayed two characteristics that are fundamental to today’s “critical geopolitics” … exposing the fallacy of a timeless physical geography that directs world politics and arguing that the geographical labels often innocently introduced into geopolitical analysis have demonstrable political consequences’ (2009: 426–7). The intellectual inspirations of critical geopolitics are the subject of other chapters in this book, including the writings of Foucault on power/knowledge, Edward Said’s application of this to colonial discourse in Orientalism (1978) and Derrida’s concern to interrogate 181

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics structures of meaning and exclusion in Western thought. But amongst the contexts was the late Cold War proliferation of neoclassical geopolitics in the 1980s. Hepple anticipated this (1986), but arguably the first scholar that explicitly took the approach of geopolitics-as-discourse was Ó Tuathail on the way that El Salvador was being narrated in American narratives as a new Cold War front-line (1986). A few years later, Simon Dalby produced a book length study Creating the Second Cold War specifying the language of danger/threat that accompanied a heightened phase of Cold War confrontation in the 1980s (1990). Subsequently, the move to a discourse-centered approach was set out succinctly by Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992). By then, the changes that accompanied the decline of the Cold War were well underway, providing plenty of fresh narratives for critical scrutiny. Within a decade, the war on terror demanded further critical responses. Prior to these English-language writings that reacted to the Cold War of the 1980s however, at the end of the seventies, the term ‘geopolitics’ acquired a subversive meaning in France with the help of leftist geographers. Geographical knowledge is important for those waging war, hence the observation of the French geographer Yves Lacoste who entitled his radical analysis about geography La Géographie ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre (1976). Translation of his analysis of the logic behind the bombardment of the dikes in North Vietnam by US forces made Lacoste well known within a rising current of radical geography in the English-speaking world (Dijkink 1996: 4; Ó Tuathail 1994: 325–9; 1996: 161). According to Paul Claval it was also the failure of the guerrilla activities in South America that stimulated the interest of these ‘soixante-huitards’ for geography (Claval 1994: 127–8). It is clear that Lacoste contested the world as defined by the Cold War narratives from the official ideologues within the superpowers. His plea for an active (political) geography, as opposed to applied geography, also sought to connect to the work of the nineteenth-century anarchist and geographer Elysée Reclus. In 1976 Lacoste and his associates established a new journal: Hérodote. From issue 27 (1982), the sub-title became Revue de géographie et de géopolitique, but the format remained unchanged: special issues were prefaced by Yves Lacoste, who elaborated upon the building blocks of an alternative geopolitical approach. In the course of time, a school developed around the geographical analysis of situations in which different groups had contradictory claims on a particular territory (Foucher 1988: 439). It concerns the ‘rivalités de pouvoir sur des territoires et sur les hommes qui s’y trouvent’ (Lacoste 1993: 3). In addition, territorial conflicts become a matter of geopolitics according to Lacoste, only if they are the subject of a democratic debate (Lacoste 1993: 1–45; see Durand and Ruano-Borbalan 1994: 34). Because there are as many points of view as there are protagonists (Lacoste 1986: 1: xvi), the word is used in the plural, les géopolitiques, contrary to the conventional usage in French, la géopolitique. Furthermore the geopolitical approach can be applied at different levels of analysis: ‘les états n’ont pas le monopole de la géopolitique’ (Lacoste 1986: 1: xiii). The analyses focus naturally on the nature of the claims of the political actors in a particular area. Lacoste speaks of ‘représentations géopolitiques’, a reference to theatre and tragedy. Maps play a special role in the development and the diffusion of such representations. Finally, territorial conflict 182

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions (rather than the state or the state system) is the unit of analysis. Later Hérodote lost much of its radical edge. In the decades since however – sometimes inspired by both the earlier Francophone move and the subsequent arrival of a largely Anglophone critical geopolitics – there has been a proliferation of scholarship on geopolitics and adjectives attached to it: ‘popular’ (Dittmer 2005), ‘feminist’ (Hyndman 2007; Smith 2001), ‘radical’ (Mercile 2008), ‘banal’ (Sidaway 2001), ‘performative’ (Bialasiewicz et al. 2997), ‘progressive’ (Kearns 2008), ‘urban’ (Fregonese 2012; Graham 2004) among others. These have expanded the range of activities and texts being studied as domains of the geopolitical whilst at the same time brining to bear these insights and critical aspirations to interrogate geopolitical traditions. The result is a rich and engaging vein of scholarship that refuses to accept that the world should be understood in black and white terms. In this way it articulates broader commitments and debates. As Gearóid Ó Tuathail noted, geopolitics, ‘names not a singularity, but a multitude, an ensemble of heterogeneous intellectual efforts to think through the geographical dimensions and implications of the transformative effects of changing technologies of transportation, communications, and warfare on the accumulation and exercise of power’ (1996: 15). These frequently came from the margins, reflecting both anxieties about challenges to an imperial order (as in Mackinder) or claims for a place within it (as in much German geopolitics). Nuanced but critical engagement with these is a necessary, but not sufficient, moment amongst explorations of other ways of knowing and narrating the earth.

References Agnew, J., 2009. ‘Making the strange familiar: Geographical analogy in global geopolitics’. Geographical Review 99: 426–43. Antonsich, M., 1995. ‘De la Geopolitik à la Geopolitics’. Stratégique 4: 53–87; French trans. of M. Antonsich 1994. ‘Dalla Geopolitik alla Geopolitics: conversione ideologica di una dottrina di potenza’ Quaderni del Dottorato di Ricerca in Geografia Politica 4: 19–53. —— 2009. ‘Geopolitica: The “geographical and imperial consciousness” of Fascist Italy’. Geopolitics 14: 256–77. —— 2010. ‘The “revenge” of political geographers’. Political Geography 29: 211–12. Atkinson, D., 2008. ‘Unravelling geopolitical traditions with extroverted scholarship’. Geopolitics 13: 396–402. Ayoob, M., 2002. ‘Inequality and theorizing in international relations: The case for subaltern realism’. International Studies Review 4: 27–48. Bassin, M., 1987. ‘Race contra space: The conflict between German ‘geopolitik’ and National Socialism’. Political Geography Quarterly 6: 115–34. Bialasiewicz, L., et al., 2007. ‘Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy’. Political Geography 26: 405–22. Bilgin, P., 2007. ‘Only strong states can survive in Turkey’s geography: The uses of geopolitical truths in Turkey’. Political Geography 26: 740–56. 183

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Burleigh, M., 1988. Germany turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Butler, R.A.B., 1949. ‘Contribution to House of Commons Debate on the North Atlantic Treaty’. HC Deb 12 May 1949 vol 464 cc2011–131. Chiantera-Stutte, P., 2008. ‘Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa in some debates of the early twentieth century’. European Journal of Social Theory 11: 185–201. Child, J.C., 1985. Geopolitics and Conflict in South America: Quarrels among Neighbours. New York: Praeger. Claval, P., 1994. Géopolitique et géostratégie: la pensée politique, l’espace et le territoire au XXe siècle. Paris: Nathan. Clover, C., 1999. ‘Dreams of the Eurasian heartland: The reemergence of geopolitics’. Foreign Policy 78: 9. Dalby, S., 1990. Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourses of Politics. New York: Guilford. Dijkink, G., 1996. National Identity and Geopolitical Visions: Maps of Pride and Pain. London: Routledge. Dittmer, J., 2005. ‘Captain America’s empire: Reflections on identity, popular culture, and post-9/11 geopolitics’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 626–43. Dodds, K., 1997. Geopolitics in Antarctica: Views from the Southern Ocean Rim. Chichester: Wiley. —— 2008. ‘Professor Les Hepple: A geopolitical appreciation’. Geopolitics 13: 383–5. —— and D. Atkinson (eds), 2000. Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge. Durand, O., and J.C. Ruano-Borbalan, 1994. ‘La Géopolitique: fille de la démocratie’. Sciences Humaines 36: 34–6. Elden, S., 2011. ‘Reading Schmitt geopolitically’. In S. Legg (ed.), Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. London: Routledge, pp. 91–105. Foresta, R.A., 1992. ‘Amazonia and the politics of geopolitics’. Geographical Review 8: 128–42. Foucher, M., 1998. Fronts et frontiers: un tour du monde géopolitique. Paris: Fayard. Gilroy, P., 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London, Penguin. Fregonese, S., 2012. ‘Urban geopolitics 8 years on: Hybrid sovereignties, the everyday, and geographies of peace’. Geography Compass 6: 290–313. Graham, S., (ed.), 2004. Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hale, C., 2011. Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret. Stroud: History Press. Heffernan, M., 2000. ‘Balancing visions: Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’. Political Geography 19: 347–52. Hepple, L.W., 1986. ‘The revival of geopolitics’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: S21– S36.

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Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions —— 1992. ‘Metaphor, geopolitical discourse and the military in South America’. In T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds. London: Routledge, pp. 136–54. Herb, G.H., 1989. ‘Persuasive cartography in Geopolitik and national socialism’. Political Geography Quarterly 8: 289–304. Heske, H. 1986. ‘German geographical research in the Nazi period’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: 267–81. Holdar, S., 1992. ‘The ideal state and the power of geography: The life-work of Rudolf Kjellén’. Political Geography 11: 307–23. Hyndman, J., 2007. ‘Feminist geopolitics revisited: Body counts in Iraq’. Professional Geographer 59: 35–46. Ingram, A., 2001. ‘Alexander Dugin: Geopolitics and neo-fascism in post-Soviet Russia’. Political Geography 20: 1029–51. Kaplan, R.D., 2009. ‘The revenge of geography’. Foreign Policy 172: 96–139. —— 2012. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. New York: Random House. Kearns, G., 2008. ‘Progressive geopolitics’. Geography Compass 2: 1599–620. —— 2009. Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, P., 1997. Checkerboards and Shatterbelts: The Geopolitics of South America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kennedy, P., 2004. ‘Mission impossible?’ New York Review of Books 51(10): 16–19. Lacoste, Y., 1976. La Géographie ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre. Paris: Maspéro. —— (ed.), 1986. Géopolitiques des régions françaises. 3 vols, Paris: Fayard. —— (ed.), 1993. Dictionnaire de géopolitique. Paris: Flammarion. Le Rider, J., 2008. ‘Mitteleuropa, Zentraleuropa, Mitteleosteuropa: A mental map of Central Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory 11: 155–69. Mackinder, H.J., 1904. ‘The geographical pivot of history’. Geographical Journal 23: 421–37. Mamadouh, V., 1998. ‘Geopolitics in the nineties: One flag, many meanings’. Geojournal 46: 237–53. Megoran, N., 2008. ‘The task and responsibility of geopolitical analysis’. Geopolitics 13: 403–7. —— 2010. ‘Neoclassical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 187–9. Mercille, J., 2008. ‘The radical geopolitics of US foreign policy: Geopolitical and geoeconomic logics of power’. Political Geography 27: 570–86. Natter, W., 2003. ‘Geopolitics in Germany 1919–1945’. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 197–203. Ó Tuathail, G., 1986. ‘The language and nature of the “new” geopolitics: The case of US–El Salvador relations’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: 73–85. —— 1994. ‘The critical reading/writing of geopolitics: Re-reading/writing Wittfogel, Bowman and Lacoste’. Progress in Human Geography 18: 313–32. —— 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics —— 1998. ‘Introduction: Thinking critically about geopolitics’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. —— and J. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’. Political Geography 11: 190–204. O’Loughlin, J., and H. van der Wusten, 1990. ‘The political geography of panregions’. Geographical Review 80: 1–20. —— G. Toal and V. Kolossov, 2005. ‘Russian geopolitical culture and public opinion: The masks of Porteus revisited’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30: 322–35. Parker, G., 1987. ‘French geopolitical thought in the interwar years and the emergence of the European idea’. Political Geography Quarterly 6: 145–60. Said, E.W., 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schumacher, R. von, 1934. ‘Zur Theorie der Raumdarstellung’, Zeitschriftfür Geopolitik 11: 635–52. Sharp, J., 2011. ‘A subaltern critical geopolitics of the war on terror: Postcolonial security in Tanzania’. Geoforum 42: 297–305. Sidaway, J.D., 1998. ‘What is in a gulf? From the “arc of crisis” to the Gulf War’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 224–39. —— 1999. ‘American power and the Portuguese Empire’. In D. Slater and P.J. Taylor (eds), The American Century. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 195–209. —— 2000. ‘Iberian geopolitics’. In K. Dodds and D Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 118–49. —— 2001. ‘Iraq/Yugoslavia: Banal geopolitics’. Antipode 33: 601–9. —— 2008. ‘Beyond surface appearances: Les Hepple’s inspiration to critical geopolitics’. Geopolitics 13: 408–12. —— 2010. ‘“One island, one team, one mission”: Geopolitics, sovereignty, “race” and rendition’. Geopolitics 15: 667–83. —— forthcoming. ‘Subaltern geopolitics: Libya in the mirror of Europe’. Geographical Journal. —— and V. Mamadouh, 2012. ‘Geopolitical traditions’. In P. Daniels et al. (eds), An Introduction to Human Geography: Issues for the Twenty First Century. Harlow, Essex: Prentice Hall, 4th edn, pp. 419–41. —— and M. Power, 2005. ‘“The tears of Portugal”: Empire, identity, “race” and destiny in Portuguese geopolitical narratives’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 527–54. Smith, F., 2001. ‘Refiguring the geopolitical landscape: Nation, “transition” and gendered subjects in post-Cold War Germany’. Space and Polity 5: 213–35. Synder, T., 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. Takeuchi, K., 2000. ‘Japanese geopolitics in the 1930s and 1940s’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 72–92. Taylor, P.J., 1994. ‘From heartland to hegemony: Changing the world in political geography’. Geoforum 25: 403–17. 186

Reappraising Geopolitical Traditions Tunander, O., 2001. ‘Swedish–German geopolitics for a new century: Rudolf Kjellén’s The State as Living Organism’. Review of International Studies 27: 451– 63. Wilson, A., 2002. The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2nd edn. Young, R.J.C., 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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10

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Violence and Peace Nick Megoran

Introduction In 1907 US President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a newly upgraded fleet to circumnavigate the globe to impress upon the world – and in particular Germany and Japan – the newfound US status as a world power able to project military force anywhere it chose. When the fleet returned, Roosevelt greeted its vessels and seamen as ‘the best of all possible ambassadors and heralds of peace’ (Houweling and Amineh 2004: 37). It would be easy to dismiss Roosevelt’s statement as cynical: but it is more productive to use its unintended irony to illuminate the pluriformality of the idea of ‘peace’ and to interrogate its multiple deployments and relationships with the idea of ‘violence’. The purpose of this chapter is to do just that with reference to the geographical tradition of geopolitics. The association of the term ‘geopolitics’ with violence is common, but linking it to ‘peace’ may be more surprising. This chapter shows that the history of geopolitics as a term is not one simply obsessed with war, violence and zero-sum game planning, but that there are schools of geopolitical thought which provide an archive for us to recover more pacific ways of thinking and doing international relations. Proceeding in two stages, it uses the broader literature to unpack meanings of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘violence’, and then investigates how these terms have been used in a number of ‘schools’ of geopolitical thought.

Peace and violence How have students of geopolitics defined peace and violence? The short answer is: generally, they haven’t. Williams and McConnell argue that geographers in general remain unclear about ‘what peace looks like, and how to research it’ (2011: 927; see also Megoran 2011). This is largely as true of geopolitics as of other branches of geographical enquiry. However, in their calls for geographers to stop

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics assuming what is meant by ‘peace’, both these interventions, ironically, assume an understanding of ‘violence’, a term they use but leave undefined. Williams and McConnell and I are not alone in this. In a recent article on ‘disaggregating violence’, Toal neither conceptualises nor defines violence, but instead offers a list of atrocities that the term includes for the purpose of his article (2010: 259). Gregory and Pred feel able to introduce their book on ‘violent geographies’ without explicitly telling the reader what they or their contributors mean by ‘violence’ (2007). Political geography’s focus on male, weaponised, militarised, bodily violations – with peace as their absence – has allowed students of geopolitics to assume a shared understanding of what violence and peace are so that definitions are implicitly deemed unnecessary. But, as both words haunt all writing on geopolitics, we cannot ultimately avoid confronting what they mean and how they relate to each other.

Peace What does ‘peace’ mean? A useful way to begin is to corral a number of what might be termed ‘regimes of peace’ fixed historically on geographical coordinates (building on Richmond 2008: 7–8). Thus Rome’s ‘Carthaginian Peace’ refers to a strategy of preventing future violent conflict by razing and salting Carthage; Westphalian, to a system of territorial state sovereignty; Pax Britannica and Pax Americana, to hegemonic leadership of the global capitalist system enforced by naval power; The Hague and Geneva conferences codified the development of the laws of war over previous centuries to limit its destructiveness; Paris was where the 1919 Peace Treaty created a nascent international system of obligations binding members to act for collective security; Rome was where the 1956 Treaty fused warring European states into ‘ever closer’ economic and political unity that would make future war unthinkable; and so on. Each of these regimes of peace reflects different understandings of how the world works and for whom it should work. Peace, clearly, is pluriform. Richmond demonstrates this pluriformity in his authoritative study of how different theoretical traditions within international relations (IR) have conceived of peace. Idealism yearns for an unobtainable world of complete social harmony. Realism posits temporally limited and geographically bounded spaces of order in an anarchic world of competing states. For liberalism, international institutions and organisations representing universal norms make peace achievable, albeit alongside enduring threats such as terrorism and inequality. Marxist versions of IR theorise peace as achievable based on equality between states after the abolition of class and economic hierarchies in the international system. Feminist IR pursues the unmasking of power relations that marginalise women and critiques minimalist and gender-blind versions of peace offered by the inter-state systems. Finally, critical

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Violence and Peace theorists and poststructualists seek an emancipatory peace, with the latter wary of the universalising tendencies and assumptions of the former (Richmond 2008). Although peace may be pluriform, these ways of thinking about it all have a common thread: that peace is a relationship manifesting the absence of conflict. To be sure, the understanding of how far conflict may be absent is dependent upon theoretical assumptions about how the international system works. Each definition of peace, likewise, has different ways of thinking about power and its relative distribution in that relationship. But in each case, peacefulness is challenged or established by assaults on the integrity of one or more entities in that relationship. That is to say: it is not possible to think clearly about peace without explicitly reflecting on violence.

Violence For many working within the fields of international studies, violence is ‘the deliberate infliction of harm on people’ that aims at ‘intentional and direct physical’ damage (Kalyvas 2006: 19–20). Kalyvas chose this definition because of its lack of ambiguity in studying African civil wars, but recognises that ‘violence’ is ‘a conceptual minefield … a multifaceted social phenomenon’ (2006: 19). Other thinkers have advanced more sophisticated taxonomies of violence. Mead contends that although some societies have never invented warfare as a social practice, they may exhibit other forms of violence, such as male on female violence (1964 [1940]). Galtung has provided one of the richest conceptualisations of violence. For him, ‘violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations’ (Galtung 1969: 168). Violence may be ‘personal’ (directed against an individual by another individual) or ‘structural’ – when, in the absence of personal intention, it ‘is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as un-equal life chances’ (Galtung 1969: 171). By this definition, dying of a preventable disease such as tuberculosis or ‘starving when this is objectively avoidable’ is violence (Galtung 1969: 168, 171). Gorsevski extends Galtung’s concept of ‘cultural violence’ and defines it as a rhetorical climate when ‘our social modes of thinking or behaving cause harm to individuals belonging to ostracized groups, such as gays, lesbians, or members of a minority race’ (Gorsevski 2004: 30). The goal of peace research, then, should be to work for the elimination of both personal and structural violence (Galtung 1969: 183).

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Peace, violence and geopolitics Peace and violence are clearly contested and overlapping terms. The purpose of this chapter is to ask how, using the definitions considered above, ‘peace’ and ‘violence’ figure in some of the key thinkers and schools in the geopolitical tradition. In keeping with the focus of this collection, the subsequent exploration confines itself only to geopolitics and does not consider political geography in general. There is slippage between these terms, and some writers use them synonymously, but for the purposes of this chapter it is helpful to distinguish between them. Political geography is a broad sub-discipline of human geography concerned with the spatiality of the exercise of political power. Geopolitics is one sub-field of political geography, being the visual practice of the spatialisation of global or regional politics as a dynamic drama characterised by particular types of places, people and processes. Other traditional sub-fields of political geography, such as migration, elections, state structure/morphology, citizenship, diplomacy and international boundaries, may or may not have geopolitical elements. As Flint helpfully clarifies, geopolitics is not the same as the political geography of international politics (2005). Using these definitions, the chapter begins with Halford Mackinder’s thinking as an exemplar of classical geopolitics. It then considers a series of alternative ‘critical’ responses: humanised, critical, anti-, feminist, progressive, alter- and pacific geopolitics. The chapter is primarily intended to describe and analyse how ‘peace’ and ‘violence’ figure within each ‘school’ considered. In so doing it will problematise simplistic assumptions that classical geopolitics is ‘for violence’ and critical alternatives somehow ‘for peace’. Just as there are multiple forms of violence, peace too is pluriform, and no single school of geopolitical thought has a monopoly on it.

Classical geopolitics In what still remains one of the best expositions of classical geopolitics, Hans Weigert defined geopolitics as ‘political geography applied to national power politics and its actual strategy in peace and war’ (1942: 14). However, Weigert clearly believed classical geopolitics emphasised the latter term to the virtual exclusion of the former, contending that ‘in this world of power politics and political biology the word “peace” has been erased’ (1942: 107). Weigert was here referring to Rudolf Kjellén, but a more nuanced realist conception of peace is fleshed out in Halford Mackinder’s thought. Mackinder had much of interest to say about peace. The advantage of conceptualising peace and violence, as we are doing here, is that it allows us to inquire into what type of peace he was committed to. It would be a mistake to dismiss Mackinder as hopelessly martial. In his famous 1935 address on the history of British geography, he said evocatively: ‘The shadows cast before us by threatened events are among the major causes of the present troubles of mankind’ and thus the reason for geographers to provide ‘a 192

Violence and Peace fresh insight into the present and a new vision of the future’ (Mackinder 1935: 5). His writings towards the end and after the First World War were concerned with what he called ‘the future peace of Europe’ (Mackinder 1917: 5). In one of his last papers, he said that although geographers have been good at considering the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, they needed to explore how the ‘psychosphere’ – mankind’s geographical imagination – can be developed to catch up with the new picture of a closed, interconnected world, rather than dividing itself into untrusting and competing entities (Mackinder 1937: 179–80). Thus Mackinder was ‘for peace’: but what type of peace? ‘Europe can have peace’, he wrote, if there are enough strong buffer states around Germany to check ‘the temptation to German ambition’ (Mackinder 1917: 2). For Mackinder, British imperialism had brought ‘internal and external peace’ to India (1907: 344), and, by active deterrence, the Royal Navy had secured peace without combat (1905: 138). In a 1919 report to London, when serving as High Commissioner for South Russia, he advocated British military support for anti-Bolshevik forces, saying ‘peace with the Soviet at this moment would be universally construed as a decisive victory for Bolshevism’.1 He hoped that after the Second World War the USA, China and India would help produce a ‘balanced globe of human beings. And happy, because balanced and thus free’ (Mackinder 1943: 605). But this was precarious. He said in what may be his last published words, a report of his 1944 acceptance speech of an Association of American Geographer’s medal: ‘May our idealists, when it comes to making peace, not refuse to reckon with the realities of power’ (Mackinder 1944: 132). In a 1906 pamphlet that provides perhaps his clearest statement on the relationship between peace and violence, he wrote that ‘the world’s peace’ depends on ‘Power’. For Mackinder – who exalted its efficacy by capitalising the word – ‘Power’ meant both the use of military force and maintaining the capacity and readiness to use it at all times. He gave examples of how he claimed that parading the threat of naval power (what might be called ‘gunboat diplomacy’, although Mackinder did not use the term) had protected British commercial and territorial interests around the world and actually prevented full-scale warfare. Thus for Mackinder peace and violence were not opposites, but rather the former was a product of the correct use of the latter: ‘we must regard the exercise of Power in foreign affairs’, he wrote, ‘as a normal and peaceful function of the national life, to be steadily provided for’ (1906: 5). The geographer’s role thus became to assist the state’s effective use of power by providing a correct understanding of the geographical aspects of international politics and their modification by currently existing military technologies. It was unsurprising that when Mackinder began teaching at Oxford in 1887 he was reportedly opposed by liberal thinkers who claimed his geography ‘promoted strategical, that is to say militarist and imperialist, ways of thinking’ (Gilbert 1947: 95).

1

‘Report on the Situation in South Russia by Sir H. Mackinder, M.P.’, 21 Jan. 1920; cited in Kearns forthcoming. 193

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Mackinder’s concept of peace was essentially one of a precarious balance of power between competing empires. It left little room for justice between them. He showed more concern for justice within the British Empire, but his thinking here was riven with contradiction and simplification. For example, he professed to despise the teaching in British schools of that kind of imperialism that took joy in possession, an attitude he thought led to despotism. Instead, he wanted the empire to be a ‘league of equals’, with the British currently acting as the ‘trustees for halfcivilised millions’, a trusteeship that would produce ‘world peace’ (Mackinder 1907: 35, 41). Britain was best able to preserve the existence of the empire by redistributing resources within it more evenly and by rejecting racism, seeing Indians and others as equal – ‘you can only peacefully conquer by self-abnegation’, he said (Mackinder 1907: 35). But in the meantime, the ‘lower races’ had to be kept in check through ‘active and spirited interference’ (Mackinder 1907: 42). Likewise, Mackinder was unfriendly to the redistribution of wealth within the UK, except for the purpose of moulding an efficient imperial workforce. Opposing women’s electoral franchise, he was also hostile to rebalancing power between the sexes. Peace for Mackinder was thus the maintenance of the status quo that protected the position of the British Empire against potential rivals. It was a resource that could be ‘won’ through the creation of complex alliances backed by military force in an international balance of power. Justice between and within states featured only dimly in his writings. He indicated opaquely his hope for some more enduring future ‘world peace’, but in the meantime a balance of power that constricts resurgent heartland powers like Germany or Russia was the best that could be expected. This is classic realist peace: temporary truces between alliances of untrusting states in an anarchic world system, with little place for considering justice. Nonetheless, it is still a way of thinking about peace and does provide some purchase on the nature of the inter-state system and the shortcomings of idealist visions of peace. Mackinder believed in democracy and was anxious about its (in) ability to grasp the nature of the threat to it presented by non-democratic regimes: a concern amply demonstrated by the appeasement of Hitler. But Mackinder, like other classical geopolitical thinkers, yields meagre resources for peace.

Humanised geopolitics The pessimistic realism of classical geopolitics has persisted down to the present day, in its various neoclassical reincarnations (Megoran 2010a). However, it has never been uncontested. When the USA entered the Second World War, a school of critique emerged that might, after Weigert, be called ‘humanized geopolitics’ (Weigert 1942: 258). This sought to place human welfare, not the growth and survival of states, at the heart of its thinking. In a searing attack on classical geopolitics – especially its German variety – Weigert accused it of losing all ‘reverence for the dignity of human life’ (1942: 240). In these schemes, he wrote, ‘the last bit of humanity was sacrificed’ such that ‘the individual with his sentimental dreams of 194

Violence and Peace happiness’ no longer exists: indeed, ‘in this world of power politics and political biology the word “peace” has been erased’ (Weigert 1942: 106, 226, 107). Humanised geopolitics was attentive to different meanings of ‘peace’, and contested classical geopolitics’ realist idea of peace as only a temporary interlude of non-combat: ‘To its prophets peace means only a breathing spell to organize forces with which to win a Third World War’ (Weigert 1942: 247). Instead, humanised geopolitics looked to reorganise the geopolitical map of the world by creating new frameworks that would serve human well-being by checking the nationalistic imperialism of expansionist states. Proposals generally focused on using geographical knowledge of the distribution of ethnic/cultural groups and natural resources to reorganise political life at levels greater than the nation-state. Van Valkenburg proposed the world be divided into eight regional blocs (1942: ch. 9). Highlighting the violence of Italian Fascist cultural genocide of minorities on the Italo-Yugoslav boundary, Moodie, in a prescient anticipation of what is now the EU, called for new forms of political organisation with more porous boundary management, achieved by moving away from geopolitical visions such as the Monroe doctrine and imperial nationalism (Moodie 1945: 231). However, most of these schemes were long on grand statements but short on details. Whittlesey advocated ‘local autonomy within a larger frame of pooled but restricted authority’ to avoid the frightening rise in even bigger, warring entities that would occur ‘if power politics is allowed to run amuck’ (n.d.: 190–91). However he had no idea what this would look like, simply expressing the hope that when geographers gained ‘a sure knowledge of the whole earth’, humanity would be able to erect a political framework enabling it ‘to live true to its noblest traditions and in harmony with the ideals of humanity’s ethical leaders of all ages and countries’ (Whittlesey n.d.: 191). Humanised geopolitics had a more sophisticated understanding of violence than the 1930s idealism that preceded it. Gone was the naivety of Atwood’s assurance that proper geographical education could create ‘good will among nations’ and ‘remove all vestiges of hatred’ (1935: 15). Instead, humanised geopolitics recognised a need to address the inequalities in resources that lay behind many wars. Its solutions, however, were also naive. Thus in suggesting that future war in Europe could be avoided by dividing the continent into four autarkic units, Taylor lacked the critical appreciation of capitalism’s role in creating and perpetuating the violence of the inter-state system, an appreciation that Horrabin’s contemporary socialist geography would provide (Taylor 1946: ch. 13; Horrabin 1943). Likewise, because humanised geopolitics was primarily concerned with ‘peace’ as keeping the lid on great-power competition, justice was not seen as integral. Thus although Van Valkenburg proposed an ‘international board’ to rule on boundary disputes, his scheme envisioned not the freedom of colonies but their ‘pooling’ under ‘international trusteeship’ with their raw material resources made ‘equally available to all countries’ (1942: 265, 273–4). Humanised geopolitics’ clearest contribution to our understanding of peace and violence was in demonstrating and documenting at great length how ‘the natural “science” of geopolitics forges arms for the next world war’ (Weigert 1942: 195

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 247). Some recognised that this was true not only of German Geopolitik but also the ‘American geopolitics’ of writers like Spykman who ‘became enchanted by what they mistook to be the melodies of geopolitics, but which were in fact the savage dissonance of inhuman power politics’ (Weigert 1942: 245). However, this insight was not pushed as far as it could have been: for example, Weigert declared himself to be ‘in great awe of Sir Halford Mackinder’s genius’ (1942: ix), overlooking Mackinder’s explicit and implicit politics of imperialism that Ó Tuathail would later call ‘imperial incitement’ (1996: ch. 3). Indeed, it was not until the development of critical geopolitical theory half a century later that geographers were able to advance on humanised geopolitics’ critique of classical geopolitics.

Critical geopolitics In a 1983 landmark article on Allied bombing of urban places during the Second World War, Hewitt complained that geographers have ‘given almost no treatment’ to war (1983: 258). That was beginning to change by the end of the decade with the emergence of ‘critical geopolitics’ as a critique of US geopolitical designations of global and regional politics in the ‘second Cold War’ (Ó Tuathail 1986; Dalby 1990). Critical geopolitics used poststructural theories of international relations to develop humanised geopolitics’ earlier insight that classical geopolitics’ geographical imagination was itself productive of violence. Critical geopolitics has arguably made a greater contribution to our understanding of violence than to peace. Take, for example, its study of how geopolitical framings of the world are produced, circulated and consumed within the film industry (Power and Crampton 2007). Such contributions provide cogent critiques of violence, but generally do not dedicate the same level of critical attention to scripts that explore peace and non-violence. In her book on rhetoric and non-violence, Gorsevski shows how this might be done. Drawing on wellrehearsed critiques of Hollywood as constantly reaffirming violence as the only possible solution to endangerment or injustice, she observes how films that downplay violence and explore creative alternatives get marginalised as ‘women’s films’ (Gorsevski 2004: ch. 4). She devotes much of her chapter to unpacking ideas about violence and peace in one such film, Spitfire Grill, arguing it demonstrates ‘how people can cooperate to fight both structural violence and personal violence’ (Gorsevski 2004: 69). Critical geopolitics has immersed itself in the study of films that perpetuate a worldview of people as essentially sexual and aggressive bodies rather than primarily creative human beings. It is therefore unsurprising that it has thus had much to say about violence and little about peace. Critical geopolitics has thought more clearly about what it is against rather than what it is for. A lack of consistency in considering ethical responses to war means that in some circumstances critical geopolitical interventions even position themselves as incitements to neo-imperial military violence (Megoran 2008). Toal has recently called for a ‘grounded localized critical geopolitics’ that recovers 196

Violence and Peace older traditions of regional fieldwork in political geography that were displaced by the ‘largely reactive’ theoretical/political critiques of critical geopolitics (2010: 263, 257). This is promising, but its contribution to peace is yet to be seen: it is still generally the case that critical geopolitics offers ‘neither a clear characterisation of a better society nor a specific road map for attaining’ it (Kelly 2006: 43). The following sections will examine a number of projects that work with, around or out of critical geopolitics to articulate clearer commitments to peace.

Anti-geopolitics If critical geopolitics can be faulted for a weak engagement with normative questions, the same charge cannot be made of ‘anti-geopolitics’. Through his editorship of the ‘anti-geopolitics’ section of the Geopolitics Reader, Paul Routledge has stamped a particularly influential meaning on the term. Here, we shall consider his editorial introduction and the readings he corrals. Routledge defines antigeopolitics as ‘an ambiguous political and cultural force within civil society’ that challenges both the ‘material (economic and military) geopolitical power of states and global institutions’ and ‘the representations imposed by political elites upon the world … to serve their geopolitical interests’ (2006: 233). This definition is vague, and clarification is further hindered by Routledge’s failure to define ‘geopolitics’: he effectively uses it to mean elite political and economic power. It is easier to grasp what Routledge means by looking at the examples he gives. They embrace an array of interventions including academic analyses, armed uprisings and non-violent mass activism. From the US civil rights movement to al-Qaeda; from the Lithuanian secessionist struggle to Mexico’s Zapatistas; from the Iranian Islamic revolution to books by academics such as Franz Fanon and Edward Said. Anti-geopolitics would appear to be efforts by non-state actors to liberate themselves from what they regard as oppressive state or international non-state actor domination. Because of this oppositional emphasis, Routledge’s writing on violence is clear, considered and searching. His basic taxonomy is of violence as a materially destructive force directed against property, military targets or civilians (Routledge 2006: 234). Such violence may be deployed directly, for example, by Latin American peasant guerrilla movements challenging authoritarian regimes, or indirectly, for example, by the USA training, arming and financing the counter-insurgents and paramilitaries that oppose them (Routledge 2006: 236). To these he adds various structures of violence. A thread running through many of the movements he identifies is resistance to the unjust ways in which the powers that be create and maintain economic inequality. More than this, observing that violent nationalist movements are themselves ‘often deeply patriarchal and repressive of minorities’ and an anti-geopolitics movement like al-Qaeda may be ‘anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist’ (Routledge 2006: 234, 243), he recognises that violence is also the bodily harm and personal and social suppression of marginalised groups. Likewise, colonialism’s violence rested upon ‘a profound alienation of colonized peoples’ 197

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics and geopolitical divisions of the world. Although he does not use the term, what he is describing might be called ‘representational violence’, and Routledge is clear that it is used by the colonizers to dehumanize the colonized ‘in order to legitimize their control and exploitation’ (2006: 236). He is aware of the dynamics of violence: that ‘violence on one side engenders violence from the other’ (Routledge 2006: 244). Thus anti-geopolitics articulates a sophisticated, nuanced and broad understanding of violence. In contrast, Routledge has little to say about peace insofar as it relates to his vision of geopolitics. His earlier work on social movements in India explored the role of space in constituting different practices of non-violent resistance in different locales. Observing that ‘while there is abundant historical material on violent struggles, there is far less information on nonviolent struggles’ (Routledge 1993: xvi), his work made an important contribution towards rebalancing that focus. However, Routledge does not make clear and sustained connections between nonviolence/peace and his later work on anti-geopolitics. There, ‘the peace movement’ is held up as an example of anti-geopolitical resistance to the Cold War (Routledge 2006: 239). Otherwise, non-violence is considered as an anti-geopolitical tactic, which may be deployed as an alternative to or in concert with violent approaches. Thus he observes that ‘armed struggle’ is frequently used by guerrilla movements ‘in concert with non-violent sanctions such as strikes and civil disobedience conducted by the population at large’ (Routledge 2006: 235). Peace remains undertheorised in Routledge’s vision of anti-geopolitics. This is hardly surprising. Anti-geopolitics is defined by what it is against, not what it is for. Therefore it has a rich understanding of violence, but an underdeveloped vision of peace. This would perhaps be impossible for a concept that lumps together movements and tactics as diverse as Ghandian non-violence, US civil rights, al-Qaeda suicide terrorism and apartheid-backed Renamo. It is true that all scholarly labels are exogenous devices, but it may be the case that although anti-geopolitics advances political geography’s understanding of violence, it is too contrived a notion to frame a coherent research agenda around a positive concept of peace. Routledge reprints an essay by Jennifer Hyndman as an example of antigeopolitics: and it is to the ‘feminist geopolitics’ with which Hyndman is associated that we can turn for clearer vision of what ‘peace’ might mean for geopolitics.

Feminist geopolitics Feminist geopolitics began by bringing long-standing feminist political and epistemological concerns into an engagement with critical geopolitics. In a defining text, Dowler and Sharp recognised critical geopolitics as offering ‘an important critical intervention’, but faulted it for offering ‘little sense of alternative possibilities’ (2001: 167). Although it began by indicting ‘the historical reasoning of geopolitical arguments as masculinist’ and ‘the relative absence of women’ in political geography (Dowler and Sharp 2001: 165), it has always been about far more than 198

Violence and Peace gender. As they continue, ‘it offers a lens through which the everyday experiences of the disenfranchised can be made more visible’ (Dowler and Sharp 2001: 169). Crucial to this has been a preoccupation with the body: rewriting women’s bodies into accounts of international relations; insisting that every theorist is located and writes from somewhere; emphasising the agency of bodies and the materiality of violence; and identifying common corporeality as the basis for a contextual politics of empathy. In this sense it echoes the basic move of humanised geopolitics although, somewhat surprisingly, does not engage with its predecessor. Jennifer Hyndman has produced the most sustained corpus of work under the rubric of feminist geopolitics. Her analytical starting point is ‘the human body’s vulnerability to violence’ (Hyndman 2010: 254). This vulnerability allows her to suggest an equivalence between the violence of the al-Qaeda attacks on the USA in September 2011, and that of the US and UK attacks on Afghanistan in October 2011 (Hyndman 2003: 2). It is the basis for contesting constructions of international relations that depend on an erasure of the corporeal scale. She is thus able to show how practical geopolitical designations are complicit in violence, by claiming that media ‘cartographies of peopleless places, mostly in Afghanistan, have mobilized consent for more violence in subtle ways’ (Hyndman 2003: 7). In showing how this vulnerability manifests itself in uneven experiences of violence, Hyndman can demonstrate the interlinking between injustice and violence because ‘inequitable and violent relationships of power’ are frequently inseparable (2003: 7). In short, feminist geopolitics’ foregrounding of ‘the body’ gives it a unique and insightful optic on violence. Hyndman juxtaposes her critique of violence in the ‘war on terror’ with condemnation of the corporeal violence enacted both by al-Qaeda and the USA (2003: 2). A feminist geopolitics works with ‘a more accountable and embodied notion of politics’ that ‘contests the militarization of states and societies’ and ‘eschews violence as a legitimate means to political ends’ (Hyndman 2003: 3). This is a clearer statement of ‘peace by peaceful means’ than is found in humanised, critical, anti- or progressive geopolitics (see below). However it remains underdeveloped. For instance, in her most recent statement on feminist geopolitics, Hyndman restates the case that feminist geopolitical analyses move beyond critique of discourse ‘to generate more embodied ways of seeing and doing politics on the ground’ (Hyndman 2010: 249), but the example she gives is of how the category of ‘child soldier’ is constructed. She chronicles how Sierra Leonean teenager Ismael Beah was orphaned in the country’s civil war and fought for a paramilitary group before being rehabilitated by UNICEF and celebrated as a redeemed former ‘child soldier’. In contrast, Canadian teenager Omar Khadir was captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay for allegedly killing a US solider in combat. Hyndman’s powerfully drawn contrast shows how Beah was excused by being labelled a ‘child soldier’ and thus a victim, whereas, by being classified as an ‘enemy combatant’, Khadir was put beyond official sympathy and the normal operation of the law (Hyndman 2010: 251–4). This is a compelling argument, but it is difficult to see how it can avoid falling foul of the standard critiques of critical geopolitics for not advancing alternatives. To find clearer outlines of practical feminist alternatives 199

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics to war-making and violence, we have to look beyond feminist geopolitics to work such as Elise Boulding’s ‘feminist peacemaking’ that uncovers the ‘extraordinary creativity’ women have shown in making space for peaceful interaction in the midst of violence (Boudling 2000: ch. 5; for a critique of this general approach from a more radical feminist perspective, see Bates 2000). Cockburn’s activist research on women and trans-boundary peacemaking on the island of Cyprus is an exemplary contribution (2004). Although identifying with feminist geopolitics herself, Koopman is disappointed with what she sees as this failure to move beyond critique. ‘From violence to what?’ she asks pointedly. Recalling Dowler and Sharp’s earlier statement that feminist geopolitics critiqued critical geopolitics for offering ‘little sense of alternative possibilities’, she turns it on itself by contending that ‘feminist geopolitics has so far given little sense of the many alternatives being worked out on “the streets”’ (Koopman 2011: 277). Feminist geopolitics’ focus on corporeal vulnerability enables an original and insightful theorisation of violence and is a reminder that the transformative projects of peace materialise through and beyond bodies. But it has not, apparently, facilitated much thinking about peace. Why has feminist geopolitics thus far not grappled as explicitly with concrete alternatives for peaceful transformation as might be expected? It may be that the shared corporeality of ‘the body’ is too fragile to ground transformative projects of peace. ‘The body’ simply begs the question: why is a human body worth protecting from violence? Countless civilisations down the ages have concluded that it is not, and in recent times radical modernist projects have regarded them as so much dispensable fodder for building grand social projects for the perceived greater good. Kearns implies that epistemological concerns of feminist thought hinders it from talking about ‘what sort of home we want to make of the Earth’ (in Agnew et al. 2011: 57). As we shall consider in the next section, no such reticence holds Kearns back from advocating a more specific set of alternatives to classical geopolitics.

Progressive geopolitics In an important book, Kearns considered the contention that inequality is inevitable and force is necessary in international relations (2009). Classical and neoclassical geopolitics think that it is; Kearns thinks that it is not. This argument is fleshed out by comparing and contrasting Mackinder and his neoclassical advocates, on the one hand, and their critics, on the other. Although Kearns’ interest in Mackinder predates the rise of critical and feminist geopolitics, he engages with them in framing a ‘brief prospectus’ of progressive geopolitics. He expresses dissatisfaction that critical geopolitics has failed to provide sufficient ‘critical accounts of international relations’ (Kearns in Agnew et al. 2011). Against the concerns of feminist geopoliticians such as Sharp (2011) about the epistemological difficulties of making truth claims, Kearns insists that geographers should ‘talk about what sort of home we want to make of the Earth and 200

Violence and Peace the ways that geographical studies direct our attention to the forces and capacities that might help or hinder making such a home’ (in Agnew et al. 2011: 57). Although not expressly articulated as such, Kearns has a clear conceptualisation of what counts as violence in geopolitics: the ways in which imperialism uses force to create and sustain inequalities. For example, in discussing the dispossession of indigenous peoples he writes that ‘globalization’ is the latest term for ‘the ongoing violent processes associated with European contact that have more than decimated aboriginal populations through disease, murder, theft of resources, and disruption of indigenous social, cultural, and economic systems’ (Kearns 2009: 292). In integrating personal and structural violence and showing how they are both tools and effects of imperialisms that create and maintain inequalities, Kearns demonstrates the link between violence and injustice. In contrast, Kearns’ account conceptualises peace less clearly. Counterposing it to his definition of imperialist violence, he tries to show that it is not only states, force and capitalism that matter in the global order but also international institutions, non-force and the supply of goods and services other than as commodities through unregulated trade (Kearns 2009: 266). This is an important conceptual step in linking peace to justice: ‘justice, rather than force, is the salve for many conflicts’ (Kearns 2009: 280). However, because Kearns builds up an idea of peace by seeking negations to the definition of imperialist violence that is at the core of his book, rather than by theorising peace itself, ‘peace’ rapidly becomes contradictory. For example, although claiming that progressive geopolitics ‘must build upon and articulate the values of non-violence if it is to serve the cause of making a better world’, he also seems sympathetic to ‘humanitarian intervention’, which is another type of military force usually deployed by imperialistic powers (Kearns 2009: 295, 279). Similarly, he sets great store on the agency of international organisations as alternatives to geopolitics’ concentration on states. Implying that Kearns is naive in holding up international organisations as a more progressive vehicle for global politics, Jeffrey opines that Kearns ‘relies too heavily on a sanitised account of NGO practice that overlooks the ways in which these organisations are at times a necessary symptom of conservative geopolitics rather than the possibility for an alternative’ (Jeffrey 2011: 722). Both these difficulties occur because Kearns lacks a clear formulation of what ‘peace’ means and therefore fails to engage with the contradictions and tensions of what Richmond terms ‘the liberal peace’ — likeminded states coexisting in an order of democracy, market capitalism, human rights, development and civil society, maintained by force. This liberal peace empowers an epistemic community legitimately able to transfer knowledge of this peace to those who do not have it. It is a form of victors’ peace, reliant on dominant states and the hegemony of the state system, but makes strong claims to be emancipatory (Richmond 2008). It is far from clear that the ‘liberal peace’ is progressive: but the NGOs, humanitarian interventions and other aspects of Kearns’ progressive geopolitics are embedded within its project.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Kearns’ progressive geopolitics develops geopolitical scholarship on peace and violence by moving beyond critical and feminist geopolitics’ failures to think consistently through alternatives. Its conceptualisation of violence is a particular advance of the literature. However, its concomitant failure to think through consistently what peace means reduces its potential to frame a coherent research or political programme. That is not true of the next alternative vision of geopolitics which we will consider, Alter-geopolitics.

Alter-geopolitics Koopman critiques critical geopolitics for its focus on the production of elite geographical imaginations. Although accepting that this ‘continues to be important’, she considers that it does not leave enough space ‘for everyone having access to re-envisioning and reworking both the map and its rules’ (Koopman 2011: 275). Likewise anti-geopolitics’ attention to localised social movements is faulted for leaving little space for exploring transnational activism that goes beyond simple resistance to specific injustices. She finds feminist geopolitics’ sensitivity and everyday responses to international dramas more productive, yet is disappointed that Hyndman’s passing references to ‘non-violence’ remain undeveloped. Feminist geopolitics, Koopman argues, should be not simply pointing to, but non-violently ‘creating’ alternatives – or rather looking to where people are already doing this. This she terms ‘alter-geopolitics’. In setting out her argument, Koopman moves between two examples of altergeopolitics. The first was her 1980s childhood involvement with the faith-based Sanctuary Movement that created an underground network to protect refugees fleeing violence in Central America (Golden and McConnell 1986). The second is her doctoral work on the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s ‘protective accompaniment’ programme in Colombia, where US and other foreign nationals shield Colombian peace activists from murder by government or paramilitary forces. In both cases, people formed international solidarity networks to sustain creative new geopolitical imaginaries that demonstrated that ‘other securities are happening’. For Koopman, alter-geopolitics is ‘geopolitics being done differently’ (2011: 280). It weaves together elements of critical, anti- and feminist geopolitics, but has two key markers. First, it goes beyond the academic critique at which she considers feminist geopolitics generally stops: it works with and writes about actually existing alternative geopolitical practices. The second characteristic that distinguishes it from, say, Kearns’ progressive geopolitics, is that it is non-violent and ‘tries to live the change it seeks in the world’ by working ‘to build and live alternatives to the (in)security of violence’ (Koopman 2011: 281). It advances a vision of peace as actively resisting structures of violence, but doing so in a way that fosters solidarity between peoples in different places and is always non-violent. However, in following anti-geopolitics and exclusively studying non-state actors, it misses important processes and potentialities at other scales. The final alternative 202

Violence and Peace geopolitical project that we shall thus consider, pacific geopolitics, recognises that geopolitics can be done differently in settings other than grassroots activism.

Pacific geopolitics Pacific geopolitics is ‘the study of how ways of thinking geographically about world politics can promote peaceful and mutually enriching human coexistence’ (Megoran 2010b: 385). Whereas critical geopolitics has focused on exposing how geopolitical visions are constitutive of violence, pacific geopolitics extends critical geopolitics to explore how ‘spatialising and ordering the world in imaginative geographies can contribute towards more harmonious relations between states and other human groupings’ (Megoran 2010b: 385). It seeks concrete examples of how geopolitical visions can be reformulated to produce new ways of making peace, using as an example the transformative effects of apologies for the Crusades on Christian missionaries in the Middle East (Megoran 2010b) and reconciliationfocused ‘Holy Land’ tours (Megoran 2011). With classical geopolitics, pacific geopolitics considers war and peace legitimate topics of geographical research. With humanised geopolitics, it departs from classical geopolitics’ desire to put geographical knowledge at the service of war-makers. With critical geopolitics, it recognises that many of these geographical projects set up as alternatives to German Geopolitik were themselves examples of British or American ‘imperial incitement’. Although adopting the methods and approaches of critical geopolitics, it goes beyond simply exposing ‘militarist mappings of global space’ and challenging ‘how contexts are constructed to justify violence’ (Dalby 2010: 281) – vital though this endeavour remains for a fuller geography of peace. With anti-geopolitics it seeks the identification of alternatives, but joins feminist geopolitics in insisting that they be non-violent. With alter-geopolitics, it extends feminist geopolitics by valorising the study of actually existing alternative ways of doing geopolitics. However, it is too limiting simply to focus upon grassroots activism: with progressive geopolitics, therefore, it recognises that states, and the systems of inter-governmental law and government that their elites can produce, may also be productive of more pacific ways of organising the human social life of our planet. Pacific geopolitics draws upon the work of Galtung and others to conceive of peace as ‘okayness’ (Yoder 1987), a relationship manifesting in the first place the absence of conflict but ideally an inclusive transformation of society to ensure just and non-violent social relationships, not only between states, but between sexes, ethnicities and other social groups within those states. Peace is not a once-forall outcome, but a continuously negotiated social relationship: thus questions of power are crucial. Eschewing the pursuit of peace through violence, it avows a commitment to non-violence as a platform for a progressive political geography of peace. It frames a specific research agenda that first interrogates how peace is

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics conceptualised and, second, makes a commitment to peace through the intersection of academic research and activism within a normative agenda (Megoran 2011). However, thus far it lacks a proper conceptualisation of ‘violence’; reversing the charge that can be made against most of the alternative projects outlined, it is clearer about what it is for than what it is against. If, as argued at the start of this chapter, then it is not possible to think about the two terms in isolation, then this is potentially a serious shortcoming in pacific geopolitics. The geopolitical study of peace and violence is still in need of both conceptual clarification and detailed empirical research.

Conclusion In 1983 theologian and prominent anti-apartheid activist, Allan Boesak, discovered that he was the target of a foiled assassination plot by the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Akrikaner Resistance Movement). In a sermon, Boesak opined that their murderous hatred was explicable when ‘racist laws, racist structures, racist attitudes emphasize in a thousand ways the sub-human status of black people in South Africa’ (1983: 46). Declaring that Jesus ‘did not come to bring a superficial kind of peace’, he rejected the option of ‘cheap reconciliation’ which ‘denies justice, and which compromises the God-given dignity of black people’ (Boesak 1983: 42, 46–7). Instead, he said, he would work for ‘true peace’ between black and white, which was only possible when both the oppressed had been freed from apartheid’s denial of their rights and humanity and also when the oppressors were liberated from their oppression. This was to be pursued through civil disobedience rather than violence. Boesak’s African liberation theology incorporated a rigorous theorisation of violence with a clear vision of a just and peaceful future obtainable by peaceful means and practical application in the messy context of a localised struggle. For both analytical purchase and practical value, geopolitical thought likewise needs to think clearly and rigorously about how it understands violence and peace, and how this informs practical action for peace in a given context. Classical geopolitics has done this, with thinkers such as Halford Mackinder articulating a realist understanding of peace as the temporary cessation of hostilities between alliances of highly militarised states in a fragile balance of power. Humanised geopolitics reacted against classical geopolitics’ service of warmakers, but its ambitious yet naive alternatives failed to get to grips with enduring structures of violence. Critical geopolitics went some way to rectifying this by adding greater theoretical insight to humanised geopolitics’ critique of the violence of classical geopolitics. Anti-geopolitics and feminist geopolitics have provided even more developed conceptualisations of violence. But none of these alternatives to classical geopolitics has got to grips with what ‘peace’ might mean and how it might be built. More recently, alter-, progressive and pacific geopolitics have begun to think through more rigorously what peace means. 204

Violence and Peace The task for critical variants of geopolitics is, as I have argued elsewhere for geography in general, twofold (Megoran 2011). The first is to conceptualise peace – to be clear about what geopolitical scholars and actors have meant by the term over time, and to be clear about what we mean by it. The second is to commit to it. This is a commitment to researching how geopolitical visions and actions have actually created spaces for peace. But it also means critical involvement with and care for the movements we study, and emphasising peace in our teaching and public engagement. This chapter has shown that the history of geopolitics as a term is not one simply obsessed with war, violence and zero-sum game planning but that there are schools of geopolitical thought which provide an archive for us to recover more pacific ways of thinking and doing international relations. It is vital that we keep in mind – and keep reminding the world – that although violence appears pervasive, it does not have to be that way, will not always be that way, and in fact is not actually that way. Put simply, critical geopolitics should be for peace.

References Agnew, J., et al., 2011. ‘Reading Gerry Kearns’ Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder’. Political Geography 30: 49–58. Atwood, W., 1935. ‘The increasing significance of geographic conditions in the growth of nation-states’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 25: 1–16. Bates, P., 2000. ‘Women and peacemaking’. Development Bulletin 53: 77–9. Boesak, A., 1983. ‘And even his own life’. In A. Boesak, Walking on Thorns: The Call to Christian Obedience. Geneva: World Council of Churches, pp. 42–9. Boudling, E., 2000. Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History. New York: Syracuse University Press. Cockburn, C., 2004. The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London: Zed Books. Dalby, S., 1990. Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics. New York: Guilford. —— 2010. ‘Recontextualising violence, power and nature: The next twenty years of critical geopolitics?’ Political Geography 29: 280–88. Dowler, L., and J. Sharp, 2001. ‘A feminist geopolitics?’ Space and Polity 5: 165–76. Flint, C., 2005. ‘Geography of war and peace’. In C. Flint (ed.), The Geography of War and Peace: From Death Camps to Diplomats. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–15. Galtung, J., 1969. ‘Violence, peace, and peace research’. Journal of Peace Research 6: 167–91. Gilbert, E.W., 1947. ‘The Right Honourable Sir Halford J. Mackinder, P.C., 1861– 1947’. Geographical Journal 110: 94–9.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Golden, R., and M. McConnell, 1986. Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad. New York: Orbis. Gorsevski, E., 2004. Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. New York: SUNY Press. Gregory, D., and A. Pred, 2007. ‘Introduction’. In D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–6. Hewitt, K., 1983. ‘Place annihilation: Area bombing and the fate of urban places’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73: 257–84. Horrabin, J.F., 1943. An Outline of Political Geography. Tillicoultry, Clacks: NCLC. Houweling, H., and M. Amineh, 2004. ‘The geopolitics of power projection in US foreign policy: from colonization to globalization’. In M. Amineh and H. Houweling (eds), Central Eurasia in Global Politics. Leiden: Brill, pp. 25–75. Hyndman, J., 2003. ‘Beyond either/or: A feminist analysis of September 11th’. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2: 1–13. —— 2010. ‘The question of “the political” in critical geopolitics: Querying the “child soldier” in the “war on terror”’. Political Geography 28: 247–55. Jeffrey, A., 2011. ‘Review of “Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder”’. Progress in Human Geography 35: 722–4. Kalyvas, S., 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearns, G., 2009. Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— forthcoming. ‘Imperialism and the heartland’. In N. Megoran and S. Sharapova (eds), Halford Mackinder and the International Relations of Central Asia. London: C. Hurst and Co. Kelly, P., 2006. ‘A critique of critical geopolitics’. Geopolitics 11: 24–53. Koopman, S., 2011. ‘Alter-geopolitics: Other securities are happening’. Geoforum 42: 274–84. Mackinder, H., 1905. ‘Man-power as a measure of national and imperial strength’. National Review 45(265): 36–143. —— 1906. Money-Power and Man-Power. London: Simpkin Marshall. —— 1907. ‘On thinking imperially’. In Lectures on Empire, ed. M. Sadler. London: privately published. —— 1917. ‘Some geographical aspects of international reconstruction’. Scottish Geographical Magazine 33: 1–11. —— 1935. ‘Progress of geography in the field and study during the reign of His Majesty King George the Fifth’. Geographical Journal 86: 1–12. —— 1937. ‘The music of the spheres’. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society 63: 170–81. —— 1943. ‘The round world and the winning of the peace’. Foreign Affairs 21: 595– 605. —— 1944. In ‘The monthly record: Presentation of the medals awarded by the American Geographical Society to two British geographers’. Geographical Journal 103: 131–5. 206

Violence and Peace Mead, M., 1964 [1940]. ‘Warfare is only an invention – not a biological necessity’. In L. Bramson and G. Goethals (ed.), War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology. London: Basic Books, pp. 269–74. Megoran, N., 2008. ‘Militarism, realism, just war, or nonviolence? Critical geopolitics and the problem of normativity’. Geopolitics 13: 473–97. —— 2010a. ‘Neoclassical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 187–9. —— 2010b. ‘Towards a geography of peace: Pacific geopolitics and evangelical Christian Crusade apologies’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 382–98. —— 2011. ‘War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography’. Political Geography 30: 178–89. Moodie, A.E., 1945. The Italo-Yugoslav Boundary: A Study in Political Geography. London: George Philip & Son. Ó Tuathail, G., 1986. ‘The language and nature of “new geopolitics”: The case of US–El Salvador relations’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: 73–85. —— 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge. Power, M., and J. Crampton (eds), 2007. Cinema and Popular Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Richmond, O., 2008. Peace in International Relations. Abingdon: Routledge. Routledge, P., 1993. Terrains of Resistance: Nonviolence Social Movements and the Contestation of Place in India. London: Praeger. —— 2006. ‘Anti-geopolitics: Introduction’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 233–48. Sharp, J., 2011. ‘Situating progressive geopolitics: Culture, politics and language’. Political Geography 30: 51–2. Taylor, G., 1946. Our Evolving Civilisation: An Introduction to Geopacifics: Geographical Aspects of the Path Toward World Peace. London: Oxford University Press. Toal, G., 2010. ‘Localizing geopolitics: Disaggregating violence and return in conflict regions’. Political Geography 29: 256–65. Van Valkenburg, S., 1942. America at War: A Geographical Analysis. New York: Prentice Hall. Weigert, H., 1942. Generals and Geographers: The Twilight of Geopolitics. London: Oxford University Press. Whittlesey, D., n.d. German Strategy of World Conquest. London: F.E. Robinson & Co. Williams, P., and F. McConnell, 2011. ‘Critical geographies of peace’. Antipode 43: 927–31. Yoder, P., 1987. Shalom: The Bible’s Word for Salvation, Justice and Peace. Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton.

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PART II SiTEs Introduction: Geopolitical Sites Joanne Sharp

Although apparently focused upon geography, classical geopolitics has been critiqued for its lack of theoretical understanding of the role of spatial processes and imaginations on political practice. Critical geopolitics has been, since its inception, highly critical of the ways in which classical geopolitics has tended to posit the influence of geography and space in assumed and mechanistic ways. Drawing on poststructural and feminist theories, critical geopolitics has sought to ground the grand narratives of classical geopolitics in the times and places of their creation. This Companion seeks to continue the process of situating knowledge to develop a more nuanced understanding of the institutional, epistemological and geographical spaces through which geopolitical representations are made and received and in which geopolitical practices are performed and played out. The contributors to this section thus all seek to examine some of the spaces through which critical geopolitics has articulated geopolitical practices and imaginaries, to expose the spatial assumptions of this thinking, challenge the implications of these hidden geographies, and to explore the more complex, entangled geographies that are at often at play. Of course, given the space limitations of a collection such as this, this exercise is inevitably flawed through the selection, bounding and labelling of certain sites for inclusion. Some will no doubt question the inclusion of particular sites: of course there are many, many other sites that could have been selected. Such questions around bounding are at the heart of Anssi Paasi’s chapter (‘Borders’). Although, as he argues, the history of work on borders is as long as the history of political geographies, they ways in which geopolitical and critical geopolitical theorists have understood the notion of borders have changed considerably. However, despite the impacts of globalisation and the epistemological and ontological challenges to borders posed by poststructural accounts, in everyday geopolitical practice, and in the continued production of geopolitical narratives, the place and power of the border is still paramount.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics There are a number of sites that have conventionally been at the centre of geopolitical thought, and the next three chapters address what are perhaps the most significant: the state, the space of militarisation and the media. As Sami Moisio argues in his chapter (‘The State’), ‘geopolitics must be understood not only as a theory of the state but also as political action that has sought to mould the geography of the state’. He traces the different ways in which the state has been theorised in critical geopolitics, from the influences of political science and feminist theories, to more recent understandings of the state in the contemporary neoliberal world order. The links between geopolitics and warfare have historically also been strong and so the spaces of militarisation are addressed by Matthew Farish in the next chapter (‘Militarization’). While conventional accounts stress the military as a space of violence, separate from peaceful spaces of civilian life, Farish shows how critical and, especially, feminist, forms of geopolitics have demonstrated the fluidity and interconnectness of these spaces through processes of militarisation of everyday life. The ‘Third Estate’ of the media was not initially included as a site of geopolitical knowledge production in early critical geopolitics where the focus was much more centrally placed on the formal spaces of statecraft. However, those influenced by Gramscian conceptualisations of power soon drew attention to the immense influence of the media on the geopolitical imaginary – both that of the general populous, but also of those figures who lead their countries. Paul Adams (‘Media’) explores the various ways in which critical geopolitics has engaged with the role of the media, considering both the content of media messages and the processes through which these are incorporated and used by a variety of audiences. Geopolitics is underwritten by economic as well as political/territorial concerns, and spaces of resources – and control over these valuable spaces – has long been a focus of geopolitics. Philippe Le Billon (‘Resources’) suggests that while critical geopolitics is not the only sub-field to engage with the politics of resources, it is distinct in its focus on the international dimension and the interplay between the materiality of resources and the spatial representations within policy and practice. We can broaden our focus from resources to the environment more generally. In her chapter, Shannon O’Lear (‘Environment’) considers the ways in which narratives of the environment are drawn into discourse as geopolitical threat, as well as the geopolitical dimensions of access to various environments and the resources they supply. O’Lear navigates the different routes through which geopolitical power runs through understandings and representations of the environment and the ways in which the environment is now marked as a resource to be strategically protected or as posing a threat that needs geopolitical expertise to contain and manage. Both classical geopolitics and, initially, critical geopolitics have been sited in hegemonic spaces. Drawing on realist models of international relations, classical geopolitics was concerned only with the actions of the hegemonic or most influential states, and much critical geopolitical scholarship has similarly focused on US and Western geopolitical practice and imaginary. Chih Yuan Woon (‘The Global South’) makes the case for also including the perspectives of those located in the Global South as offering alternative geopolitical representations and practices to challenge the hegemony of the West. Drawing on postcolonial theory, he seeks to go beyond 210

Part II: Sites a binary geography of North and South to demonstrate the interconnectedness of global geopolitical practices and representations, without ignoring the power inequalities which run through these relationships. Feminist approaches to geopolitics have also challenged dominant interpretations of ‘important’ or ‘significant’ sites of action and knowledge-production. Feminist theory has insisted upon the political nature of spheres and spaces designated as domestic, private or apolitical. Feminist geopolitics has thus highlighted the power invested in bounding space to separate domestic and international politics and to distinguish other scales of action. Thus, Deborah Cowen and Brett Story (‘Intimacy and the Everyday’) explore the role of intimacy and the everyday in remaking geopolitics. Through the use of vignettes of everyday life, they expose the interconnectedness of scales of life – from the ‘mundane’ to the scale of ‘global geopolitics’ – to highlight the impossibility of somehow bounding the everyday and regarding it as outside the imaginary and performance of geopolitical process. They demonstrate both how the everyday is impacted upon by geopolitical practices operating at state, regional and global levels but also how the everyday is necessary to the constitution of these other scales. This section concludes with a site that may seem rather obtuse. Terror is something which is not necessarily associated with particular sites, however, as Ulrich Oslender (‘Spaces of Terror’) demonstrates, geopolitical representations have territorialised terror to reside in particular places, while various geopolitical practices ensure that certain places are terrorised. Each of the chapters included in this section develops perspectives in critical geopolitics which highlight the fact that geopolitical representations and practices are made in – and are made of – particular sites. This challenges narratives and representations which claim universality or timelessness. What this has allowed critical geopolitics to do is to consider the various actors who undertake these practices and performances, and it is to this which the final section turns.

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Borders Anssi Paasi

Introduction: Borders and political geography Borders have provided perhaps the most enduring research object in the tradition of political geography: the history of border studies is as long as political geography itself. The first major text, Friedrich Ratzel’s Politische Geographie, published in 1897, included a survey of the functions of borders and he took some steps to develop the terminology of border studies. In his organistic thinking, borders were an expression and measure of state power. States were ‘living organisms’, thus reflecting the social Darwinist zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. Respectively, all ‘vigorous states’ try to expand in spatial terms while declining states contract to physically easily defensible land contours. After the horrors of World War II borders maintained their position as research objects, being now often understood as empirical categories, material ‘border landscapes’ related to given state territories or functional spaces rendering possible – or not – economic and social interaction (Paasi 2011; Prescott 1965). Border studies witnessed a major revival in the 1990s. This was related to several international events and tendencies, such as the collapse of the ideological divide between the capitalist and communist blocks, the acceleration of ‘globalization’ and the development of information and communication technologies. In Europe the deepening integration and the EU’s active tendency to lower the borders between member states motivated scholars. National security has been closely related to borders but the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA gave a new boost to this idea and to security-related border studies and also partly twisted the scale of such studies by bringing on stage new supra-state dividing lines such as the much criticized Huntingtonian idea of the ‘clash between civilizations’ (Huntington 1996). A crucial element of the academic impulses behind the new interest in border issues was the rise of postmodern and poststructuralist thinking in social and cultural sciences. New theoretical literature both expanded and ‘homogenized’ conceptual views that border scholars adopted in various fields. Borders were now understood as social constructs rather than naturally given entities (Newman and Paasi 1998). Critical or ‘dissident’ IR scholars challenged the state-centric assumptions of realist IR theory and questioned the self-evidence of such divides

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics as inside/outside, self/other or domestic/foreign that were typically exploited in the maintenance of the discourses on ‘national security’ (Ashley 1987; 1988; Campbell 1992; Walker 1993). New IR studies looked at how such national moral spaces – made possible by the ethical borders of identity as a much as by the territorial borders of the state – were often constituted by leaning on images of threat and enemy in foreign policy (e.g. Campbell 1992). The emerging poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist and postcolonial language was soon adopted by critical geopolitics scholars and keywords such as ‘power’, ‘discourse’, ‘de- territorialization’ and ‘re-territorialization’ soon appeared in their vocabularies. The representatives of critical geopolitics were greatly influenced by the dissident IR theory that was interested in discursive practices (Dalby 1990a; 1991; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992). The key tenets of dissident IR inspired critical geopolitics scholars who were from the beginning interested in the geopolitical dimensions and ideologies hidden in foreign policy discourses. The first major books in the field, Simon Dalby’s Creating the Second Cold War (1990a) and Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics (1996), also draw on this theoretical basis but both took further steps to develop the theoretical language of critical geopolitics. Ó Tuathail, especially, strove to contextualize his account into the history of power– knowledge relations and their spatialization in geopolitical thinking and, against this background, to develop new conceptual ideas. As to border studies, these books were at the same time both intriguing and paradoxical. The paradox was that while both books were crucially related to the issues of boundedness, that is the real and imagined lines that bordered and ordered political life, and, further, while both of them scrutinized how these lines manifest themselves in foreign policy discourses or in definitions of the state, territory and the Other, contrary to the accounts of some dissident IR scholars (e.g. Ashley 1987; Campbell 1992), these books did not include theoretical discussion on borders that could somehow bring the new themes of critical geopolitics into a dialogue with the long tradition of border studies. Concrete borders and border contexts thus seemed to be, in a way, too prosaic and material to become topical in the early accounts in critical geopolitics that were dealing with wider themes, such as foreign-policy discourses and that leaned on textual strategies when looking largely at different texts (written texts, maps and so on). The aim of this chapter is to make sense of the paradox by asking questions such as: what was the role of ‘boundedness’ and borders for early critical geopolitical thinking, what were the key sources of inspiration for this thinking, and how did the choice of certain perspectives – and the neglect of others – lead simultaneously to neglect the theorization of borders? ‘New’ border studies emerged gradually, paralleling critical geopolitics, and took inspiration partly from similar sources as critical geopolitics scholars but built also on other premises to theorize borders and power as part of production of territory and territoriality. Nor did new border studies and critical geopolitics match at first. Later, especially after the turn of the millennium, critical geopolitics and border studies have become partly fused. This chapter will look at these themes in seven sections. First it will scrutinize how the works of early critical geopolitics tackled with the issue of ‘boundedness’ 214

Borders (rather than theorizing ‘borders’). Secondly, it will reflect the rise and characteristics of new border studies that are increasingly interdisciplinary. This section will also discuss some research themes that have been studied by border scholars inspired explicitly by critical geopolitics. Then the role of borders in the making of territories is discussed. The next section looks at the role of maps in bordering. Then the meanings of borders in everyday life and how critical geopolitics has tackled this issue are scrutinized. This is followed by a discussion on current and future challenges in border studies that will especially problematize the onesided view on the ‘location’ of borders on border areas alone, an issue that was almost a self-evident, given ‘fact’ in the tradition of border studies but which is increasingly problematic in the current relational world of interactions. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

Critical geopolitics and the issue of boundedness Early studies in critical geopolitics leaned on a number of sources of inspiration that were related to the boundedness of social life. The general idea of the roots of social and political distinctions, that were present, for instance, in Bachelard’s and Said’s key texts, motivated political geographers (Bachelard 1969; Said 1978). Dalby, for example, draws on Said’s thoughts to develop his ideas of the Other and Otherness that he then used to study empirically the security discourses and images of ‘Soviet threat’ in the writings of the members of an influential political lobby organization in the USA, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) (Dalby 1990a). Many conceptions developed by critical geopolitics scholars closely resonated with ‘dissident IR’ studies, where researchers had scrutinized critically how the dividing lines between inside/outside are constructed in the context of state and sovereignty (Ashley 1987; Walker 1993). This theme was soon theorized also by political geographers – the best-known conceptual analysis of this issue is John Agnew’s idea of the ‘territorial trap’ (1994). Yet some IR scholars had reflected on the issue of bordering even more explicitly. They analyzed the meanings of boundaries mainly in the context of foreignpolicy discourses, relating borders to boundary-producing practices. Particularly important was Ashley’s comment that accentuated foreign policy not merely as behavior across boundaries but rather as a ‘specific sort of boundary producing political performance’ (1987). Ashley suggested that this political performance – taking place in a historically carved out social space – has important effects such as the constitution and reaffirmation of socially recognizable boundaries separating fields of practice on a global scale. Later Ashley drew explicitly on poststructuralism when reflecting on the roles of the boundary that the state patrols and marks and that separates the total ‘other’ from the total ‘same’. He wrote how displacing the state, poststructuralism puts this boundary in doubt. The boundary itself is never simply there, poststructuralism knows. It is always 215

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics in the process of being marked, transgressed, erased, and marked again. The questions to be asked are not: Where is the boundary? What marks the boundary? … Instead, the sort of question to be asked is … a how question. How, by way of what practices, by appeal to what cultural resources, and in the face of what resistances is this boundary imposed and ritualized. (Ashley 1989: 311) Another IR scholar David Campbell borrowed this idea in his Writing Security (1992). Campbell was interested in the relations between identity and difference and how they are exploited in the construction of threats in foreign policy discourses. The representations of threats, for their part, are often used to secure the boundaries of a state. He suggested that foreign policy needs to be understood as giving rise to a boundary rather than acting as a bridge: Foreign policy shifts from a concern of relations between states which take place across a historical, frozen and pregiven boundaries, to a concern with the establishment of the boundaries that constitute, at one and the same time, the ‘state’ and ‘the international system’. (Campbell 1992: 56) Many geographers adopted Ashley’s idea on foreign policy as boundary-producing practice that seemingly both directed the choice of research topics and the conceptual basis in critical geopolitics (Dalby 1990a; 1994). Dalby followed Ashley’s lead and wrote that ‘geopolitics is about that ideological process of constructing spatial, political and cultural boundaries to demarcate the domestic space as separate from the threatening Other; to exclude Otherness and simultaneously to discipline and control the domestic political sphere’ (Dalby 1990b:173; see Ashley 1987). While discussing ‘boundedness’, Dalby did not reflect more deeply on the idea of border in relation to existing border studies and how these studies could be developed further in the new research framework that accentuated discourse, power and practice. This is somewhat surprising since the new perspectives clearly forcefully challenged and claimed to radically broaden the ideas of borders that were simultaneously set forth by political geographers, such as ‘boundaries as human creations are an expression of territoriality, reflecting a basic human need to live in a bounded space’ (Leimgruber 1991: 41, my emphasis). The representatives of critical geopolitics thus followed the pathway opened by IR scholars but actually did less to contribute to border studies than IR scholars. Nor did they all agree that geopolitics is a boundary-producing practice. Indeed, Ó Tuathail commented on Dalby’s poststructuralist idea that geopolitics is a boundary-producing practice whose ‘essential moment’ is the exclusion of the Other and the inclusion of the same (Ó Tuathail 1996: 182–3). He argued that Dalby’s view essentializes geopolitics within the terms of an identity politics narrative and is a reductionist reading strategy of foreign policy texts that allows one to read off the production of Otherness from foreign policy texts. Ó Tuathail suggested that in producing Otherness geopolitical actors are not only specifying a dangerous external Other beyond the territorial borders of the state, as Dalby seemed to imply, 216

Borders but that these actors are also projecting an image of their own subjectivity and its Other, and, respectively, the Other is not only ‘a beyond’ but ‘a within’, a threat not only from abroad but also within domestic and personal sphere. Ó Tuathail’s conclusion was that reading geopolitics-as-spatial-exclusion solely in territorial terms limits other possible productive readings of this suggestion. However, two years later Ó Tuathail and Dalby were largely on the same track in their introduction to an edited volume, Rethinking Geopolitics: [Critical geopolitics] pays particular attention to the boundary-drawing practices and performances that characterize the everyday life of states. In contrast to conventional geography and geopolitics, both the material borders at the edge of the state and the conceptual borders designating this as a boundary between a secure inside and an anarchic outside are objects of investigation. Critical geopolitics is not about ‘the outside’ of the state but about the very construction of boundaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’ (Walker 1993). (Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998: 3–4) They referred again to Ashley (1987), Walker (1993), and Campbell (1992) to support their arguments and stressed that ‘geopolitics is already about more boundaries than those on a map, for those boundaries are themselves implicated in conceptual boundary-drawing practices of various kinds: the boundary drawing practices we seek to investigate in this volume are both conceptual and cartographic, imaginary and actual, social and aesthetic’ (ÓTuathail and Dalby 1998: 4). Rethinking Geopolitics included two chapters that took the idea of border further by analyzing how borders have been exploited in geopolitical national identity construction. Rygiel analyzed these processes in the case of Turkey (1998), and Bonura discussed boundaries on a more theoretical level when looking at the geopolitics of nation and culture (1998). The same lack of deeper reflection of ‘border studies’ and the idea of border characterizes many publications at the beginning of the 1990s. While ‘boundedness’ was thus an implicit, or at times even explicit theme in publications, their authors did not simply pay attention to simultaneous border studies. This neglect can be understood only in relation to wider theoretical, interdisciplinary academic backgrounds that were major sources of inspiration to early critical geopoliticians and to the dominant features of the long, empiricist tradition of border studies. This tradition clearly did not provide similar theoretical inspiration as the emerging postmodern and poststructuralist theories regarding social and political life and the discourses and power relations hidden in all kind of texts (written texts, maps, images and so on). Political geographers thus looked beyond the disciplinary boundaries but neglected perhaps the potential of their own tradition. A comment by John Agnew is probably telling of the zeitgeist. In a book review he wrote how border studies had long been one of the most torpid sub-fields of political geography, seeming largely oblivious to theorizing about geographies of political identity and the spatialities of power. New interdisciplinary perspectives, raised by 217

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics a new generation of political geographers and the old political geographic thinking on borders simply seemed not to match (Agnew 1996: 181). One of the few explicit references to the tradition of border studies was put forward by Dodds, who stated, again reflecting the more theoretically oriented zeitgeist, that ‘given the tenor of much of the recent work in critical geopolitics, it might seem strange to propose a return to the study of boundaries’ (1994: 202). Yet his response was not to re-theorize borders but to accentuate, in the spirit of the then ongoing debates in media studies, philosophy and dissident IR, how old, apparently fixed, political spaces seemed to be outdated in the dynamic world of all kinds of interactions. The challenge to develop border studies thus remained while at the same critical geopolitics scholars expanded their ideas of boundaries to such issues as state, everyday life or male–female relations (Dalby 1994; Sharp 1996). Perhaps the strangest feature in the rapid rise of critical geopolitics and its leaning on dissident IR literature was that IR scholars continued their life largely as if there were no critical geopolitics at all: they very much ignored the works of critical geopolitics scholars. Challenging Boundaries, a 500-page volume edited by Shapiro and Alker (1996), for example, included only a couple of minor references to critical geopolitics. And if critical geopolitics scholars did not cite, use and develop border literature produced by political geographers, nor were the emerging critical geopolitical perspectives familiar among political geographers working at the same time. A fitting illustration is the edited collection Political Boundaries and Coexistence based on papers from a border symposium organized in Basel in 1994 (Galluser, Brugin and Leimgruber 1994). It includes almost 50 articles on borders, but there is not a single reference to critical geopolitics literature. Critical geopolitics and border studies where hence still travelling forward in different trains.

The rise of border studies In spite of the fact that the early work in critical geopolitics did not pay particular attention to the re-conceptualization of borders, ignored this issue, regarded earlier accounts of borders as examples of a fixed world view or leaned on the general ideas of border suggested by IR scholars, a lot happened in border studies that began to mushroom in political geography, anthropology, literary criticism and sociology (Paasi 2011). Often publications were located at one of two ideological extremes: for a few scholars, borders were passé in a new borderless world; for others they were perpetually fascinating objects of research. To take but a few examples from various fields, the disappearance of state borders was proposed by globalization propagandists like Ohmae (1995) and partly followed by some IR scholars, such as Luke who was excited about the rise of transnational trends, ‘informationalization’ and the rhetoric related to all kinds of flows that inspired many scholars during the 1990s.

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Borders Flows are decentering, despatializing, and dematerializing forces, and they work alongside and against the geopolitical codes of spatial sovereignty. … The flows create new transnational communities that are blurring the old geographics of ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘I’, or ‘friend’ and ‘foe’ in new informational modes if ideography, technography, demography, or plutography (Luke 1993: 240). Sociologist Donald Levine suggested that major developments in the social world were weakening the claims of national boundaries (1996), whereas another sociologist T.K. Oommen tried to show how new boundaries do not replace the old ones but rather tend to co-exist (1995). Philosopher E. Balibar scrutinized the historical contingency of state–nation relations and problematized the production of people, national belonging, ‘fictive ethnicity’ and ideal nation (1990). He discussed the role of ‘translators’ (politicians, writers, journalists) in the creation of national languages, as well as the roles of family and schools. He also emphasized the roles of borders for identities. Anthropologists, who had a long tradition in border studies (Barth 1969), now looked critically at the relations between state and nation and the territorialization of national identities (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Feminist scholar Nira Yuval-Davis reflected on emerging asymmetries related to borders, such as the gendered and generation-based features of de-bordering and re-bordering (1997). On the basis of the new heterogeneous theoretical literature and empirical approaches to boundaries, four themes seemed to be important to political geographical argumentation: (1) the suggested ‘disappearance’ of boundaries in the postmodern world, (2) the role of boundaries in the construction of socio-spatial identities, (3) boundary narratives and discourse and (4) the role of different spatial scales of boundary construction (Newman and Paasi 1998). These forced a rethinking of the classical political geographic question of the relations between borders and territories. New, interdisciplinary, but internally somewhat contradictory, literature on boundaries soon made it clear that the answers to the questions on the persistence or disappearance of boundaries are not of the simple either/ or type, because boundaries were no longer understood as mere physical, static and immovable spatial entities. For most borders scholars the issue of a borderless or bordered world was more complex and questions of power, knowledge, representation and context became crucial in reflecting on and understanding borders and boundedness. The challenge was now to develop abstractions to make ‘theoretically’ visible the dimensions of territory and boundary building.

Borders and the making of territory Political geographers have recognized the role of borders for (state) territory and territoriality for a long time. Sack, for example, argued that borders are crucial in the making of a territory and in the exercise of territoriality (1986). He suggested 219

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics that circumscribing things in space or on a map does not itself create a territory. Territory is related to control and certain delimitated areas become territories only when their boundaries are used to affect behavior, resources and power by controlling access. This is most obvious in the case of international state borders, where border-crossings are policed and controlled very effectively and practices related to state sovereignty, such as admitting citizenship, are crucial in this process. Yet Sack did not relate his theoretical discussion on territoriality to the political geographic ideas of borders. Border was for him a fundamental, but largely given, element of territoriality. Paasi attempted to bring together his earlier theoretical work on the institutionalization of regions/territories, the issue of spatial scales and power relations and analyzed the construction of territories and the making of borders as both institutions and symbols (1996). His study of the Finnish–Russian border follows a geo-historical approach which accentuates the contextuality of borders and the need to relate their making to both wider international context, nation-building process and the everyday lives of ordinary people. The idea of the institutionalization of territories led him to conceptualize boundaries as a phenomenon that are ‘located’ not only on edges but are ‘spread’ around the territory, in diverging institutional and discursive practices and that the perpetual making of the territory (represented as the creation of ‘us’ or ‘we’) can actually extend outside of the territory. Paasi integrated the dimensions discussed by cultural theorists and IR scholars (Bachelard 1969; Said 1978; Walker 1993) and showed that both ‘we’ and ‘the Other’ can be both ‘here’ and ‘there’, dividing lines between these sociospatial elements may be fuzzy (Figure 11.1) – an idea suggested also by Ó Tuathail (1996). This inevitably complicates the idea of making national bounded spaces on the basis of categorical Othering and the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This issue is increasingly significant in a world characterized by immigrants and refugees that often ‘transport’ symbolic boundaries from one cultural context to another (Lamont and Molnár 2002). In analytical terms, the symbolic construction of space, territoriality and borders are based on a dialectics between two languages: the language of integration and the language of difference. Whereas the language of integration aims at homogenizing the contents of collective spatial consciousness and experiences, the language of difference strives to distinguish this homogenized experience from the other (Paasi 1996).

Here

There

We

Integration within a territory

Integration over boundaries

Other

Distinction within a territory

Distinction between us and the Other

Figure 11.1 An analytic framework for forms of socio-spatial integration and distinction (Paasi 1996: 14) 220

Borders By looking at the construction and historical contingency of the Finnish–Russian border this work showed how boundary-making was closely related to foreignpolicy discourses but also to certain prosaic forms of banal nationalism that entered everyday life and were present in media discourses and school textbooks. This led to the theorization of spatial socialization; that is, the process through which individual actors and collectivities are socialized as members of certain territorially bounded spatial entities and through which they more or less actively internalize collective territorial identities and shared traditions (Paasi 1996: 8). ‘Othering’ and the construction of images of threat, for instance, occur in many forms that are related to daily lives of citizens. Moisio has shown how geopolitical images of order and threats to security have been crucial in the Finnish identity project and related boundary construction (1998: 120).

Maps, territory and bordering One important theme raised by critical cartographers was the relation between power and cartography (Harley 1988; Wood 1992), an issue that is crucially related to the ‘bordering’ themes raised by critical geopoliticians (Ó Tuathail 1996) and by IR scholars (Krishna 1994). Paasi used Wood’s and Harley’s works when analyzing the discursive roles of cartography and maps in Finnish geopolitics during World War II and scrutinized their role especially in the making of borders (1996). He also showed how human bodies, especially female bodies, are often used as allegories of the nation so that bodies become ‘maps’ in a way, mixing spatial scales. Later the power of maps in the making of territory and borders has motivated several scholars who have grounded their work in critical geopolitics. Berg and Oras studied post-Soviet Estonia and how this ‘new’ entity was written on to the world map in diverging boundary-producing practices (2000). Other examples of studies inspired by critical geopolitics are Herb’s analysis on the territorial strategies that were in use in the making of national identities in Germany between 1949 and 1979 (2004) and Culcasi’s study on the geographical construction of Kurdistan (2006). Herb looked at the period when there were two ‘Germanies’. In the initial situation both governments claimed to represent German national identity but this changed gradually and both states developed their own strategies in identity work. The border between the two states was a crucial element in this work. Culcasi’s study analyzed US journalist cartography to see how it represented the geopolitical conflict in Kurdistan. She found that cartographic representations not only reflected social and political narratives but also constructed and communicated subtle and blatant positions towards Kurds and Kurdistan. All these studies were explicitly using discursive perspectives and the ideas developed within critical geopolitics.

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Borders, everyday life and critical geopolitics Ó Tuathail and Dalby made a division between formal, practical and popular geopolitics that are all related to the spatializing of boundaries, dangers and geopolitical representations of the self and the Other (1998). At the turn of the millennium there was some critique of the dominance of formal and practical geopolitics research perspectives and the related ‘geopolitical remote sensing’ approach that looked at boundary-producing practices from a distance and largely through official texts; that is, not by paying attention to the geopolitical issues, problems and struggles, affects and emotions in the context of everyday life (Ó Tuathail 2010; Paasi 2000; 2009; Power and Campbell 2010). Feminist scholars have argued that the exclusive focus of critical geopolitics on texts – as opposed to the embodied and the everyday – left it open to charges of elitism and academic distance (Sharp 2007). This critique emerged partly from theoretical grounds, but one concrete background was the lack of local (ethnographic) studies and of deeper knowledge of the contextual features of political cultures. The importance of studying the meanings of borders in everyday life is obvious, since borders provide most individuals with a concrete, local and powerful experience of the state, for this is the site where citizenship is strongly enforced (through passport checks, for instance) (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Paasi brought together in-depth interviews and participant observation and used ideas from visual anthropology to study local experiences and meanings of borders and combined them with a broader societal analysis of the production of space and scale (1996). Later Megoran developed ethnographic, focus-group based and participating methods in a series of articles in which he used theoretical ideas from critical geopolitics and brought this literature into a dialogue with border literature (2004; 2005; 2006). He analyzed how a critical geopolitics of danger emerged in the context of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan boundary dispute and claimed that more cross-cultural work is needed in a world where Western narratives tend to dominate border studies. Similarly Ó Tuathail’s long-term project on Bosnia has aimed at developing the conceptual and methodological basis of ‘localized geopolitics’ (2010). Sharp has also made claims about the need to take the perspective of critical geopolitics beyond the formal boundaries of the state (1993; 1996; 1998). For her, this meant the analysis of the products of popular and media culture. These can be effective boundary-producing artifacts and are useful in the analysis of gendered dimensions of geopolitics. The research materials she used were the popular American magazine Reader’s Digest with its changing perception of the Soviet Union and communism between 1930 and 1945 and post-Cold War American movies. Similarly political cartoons have motivated research in critical geopolitics (Dodds 1998). Cartoons can be effectively used both to create geopolitical imaginaries and borders, as well as to deconstruct them (Dittmer 2005). This perspective continues, for example, in studies that have scrutinized the so-called Mohammed cartoons and the cultural dividing lines and conflicts associated with them (Ridanpää 2009).

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Where are borders? Going beyond the lines Increasing border crossings, all kinds of mobilities, post 9/11 security-related control of travelers and refugees and the simultaneous diversification of border studies have led scholars to ask where borders actually are located. Paasi’s work on the institutionalization of territories expanded the traditional idea of border from being a mere line between territories, and, by accentuating the location of borders around territories in discourses, symbolisms and social practices, this idea has gained new ground in the literature (1986; 1996). There seem to be two main strands of thought where ‘bounded spaces’ are challenged: relational thinking (and the related topological idea of space) and the ‘borders are everywhere’ thesis. The first of these ideas is closely related to network-based thinking (for example, actor-network theory). Relational thinking sees bounded spaces generally as politically regressive and suggests that territories should be seen as open networked or topological spaces of social relations (Amin 2004). It may be argued that contrary to the current vibrant theoretical and empirical research on the meanings and functions of borders, relational thinking has been more general and normative. Relational thinkers have not studied concrete state borders but have rather reflected on and challenged their ontological roles as products of modernity. The thesis that ‘borders are everywhere’ is related to Balibar’s idea that has gained currency during the last ten years or so. He suggests that borders have perhaps not disappeared but have rather become so diffuse that they have transformed whole countries into borderlands (Balibar 2004). New technologies of border control that have been developed in since 9/11 to prevent terrorism, for example, are not located merely in border areas but may exist literally ‘everywhere’: at airports, in shopping precincts, in streets and even in other states. Such complexity and networking becomes clear on the homepage of the UK Border Agency, for example, which is now a global organization with 25,000 staff operating in local communities, at the UK’s borders and across 135 countries worldwide.1 These new landscapes of control constitute something that can be called ‘technical landscapes of control and surveillance’ (Paasi 2011). These landscapes are monitored by increasingly technical devices that have gained importance in the post-9/11 world. This may simultaneously strengthen bordering in a society, be constitutive of social, cultural and political distinctions between social groups and also contribute to the making of ‘calculable territories’ that each state tries to produce and reproduce to govern space and population (Hannah 2009). These tendencies have also forced researchers to expand the concepts of security that have by tradition characterized border studies. Feminist scholars have defined security beyond classical binaries – such as inside/outside or same/different – and thus also challenged the militarized, bounded version of security ‘which posits an identity which needs protection from the danger posed by a different external other’ (Sharp 2007: 383). Feminist scholars have reminded us also how other scales than that of the nation-state have to be studied in critical geopolitics (Hyndman 1997; 1

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 2001). Indeed, the body, nation and globe are now seen as indicative of the same processes rather than as separate scales (Sharp 2007). Hyndman has discussed how people’s bodies are often construed as ‘territories’ in conflict situations and how, for instance, in civil wars they may become sites of public violence on which the symbolic construction of the nation and its boundaries occurs (2001). The new interest in the (mobile) bodies and security has given rise to new conceptual perspectives in current border studies. Amoore, for example, speaks about ‘biometric borders’ which are, on the one hand, related to digital technologies, data integration and managerial expertise in the politics of border management; and, on the other, to the exercise of biopower such that the ‘body itself is inscribed with, and demarcates, a continual crossing of multiple encoded borders social, legal, gendered, racialized and so on’ (2006: 338). Biometric borders have motivated border scholars to study new increasingly technical security practices in such networked places as airports (Martin 2010). However, borders are typically simultaneously rooted in historically constructed, contingent practices and discourses that are related to nationalist ideologies and identity narratives, that is discursive or emotional landscapes of social power that often draw on banal forms of nationalism (Paasi 2011). The persistence and almost universal power of such nationalist landscapes is related to the observation that in 2000 only 3 percent of the world’s population resided in a state other than the one in which they were born (Cunningham 2004: 333). While physical borders may at times be significant symbols and institutions, the ‘location’ of the national(ist) border is therefore not only in the borderland but rather in the wider manifestations of the perpetual nation-building process and nationalist practices. The roots of these manifestations are contextual and have to be traced back to the histories of these practices and existing iconographies. A lot of emotional bordering and ‘Othering’ may be hidden in flag or independence days and other national celebrations, military parades, international sports events, nationalized and memorialized landscapes and other elements of national iconographies (Paasi 2011). These practices may ‘stretch’ across borders in both time and space and can be ultimately very international. It is important to recognize that the role of the state is also changing. It is increasingly the case that traditional self–Other and friend–enemy distinctions between states in foreign policies are surpassed or at least paralleled by practices and narratives related to geo-economic rivalry between states (Moisio 2008). Such narratives may accentuate the openness of borders simultaneously as cultural identity narratives maintain ideas of the boundedness of the state. This shows, as Taylor had earlier suggested, that the practice of territoriality may take simultaneously different overlapping forms (1994).

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Conclusion Earlier accounts on the evolution or ‘development’ of border studies have accentuated the historically contingent nature of such studies and that each generation of scholars seems to create their own vision of what is relevant and topical (Paasi 2005). The role of generations challenging traditional thinking has been recognized also more generally in science studies literature (Johnston 1991). New developments in theory and research practice reflect not only institutional developments in academic fields but also wider academic and societal contexts. This tendency can be seen, for example, in the rise of positivist, humanist, behavioral or Marxist geographies. The origin of critical geopolitics can also be understood as a rise of a new generation of scholars in political geography, a generation that was drawing effectively on interdisciplinary, mainly postmodern and poststructuralist literature. Its representatives used actively interdisciplinary conceptual ideas to develop their disciplinary thinking. They were particularly influenced by IR and soon constituted a visible ‘community of circulating ideas’ through citing each other’s publications. In terms of border studies the start was much slower. At first critical geopolitics scholars seemed to be happy with the general border ideas that they adopted from IR literature. Richard Ashley’s idea of foreign policy as a boundary-producing practice motivated critical geopolitics scholars interested in foreign-policy practices. Gradually the idea of border itself gained more attention and became an object of theoretical endeavor. Yet it is difficult to say to what extent new ideas reflected exactly ‘critical geopolitics’, which had itself developed into a heterogeneous set of ideas and perspectives. Increasing attention was paid to how geopolitics existed in popular forms and further how it may modify everyday life in certain contexts. Feminist scholars have simultaneously challenged the ‘self-evidence’ of militarized, bounded versions of security and the ideas of fixed, linear borders. The language used when discussing boundaries also partly changed. The ideas of borders, boundaries, borderlands, border-crossings and transgressions of borders that the representatives of various disciplines used, were increasingly employed in a metaphoric sense and did not inevitably refer to the material borders of states that political geographers had typically dealt with. New interest in boundaryproducing practices gave rise to studies analyzing the practices and discourses in which hegemonic ideas representing certain forms of ‘boundedness’ are produced. This led to an analysis of the images of threat, danger and, more widely, foreignpolicy practices. Such studies may actually be separate from concrete state borders and yet be highly significant. Think, for example, of the Cold War ‘macro level’ dividing lines between capitalist West and communist East or the later, much criticized, abstract dividing lines between ‘civilizations’. This chapter shows that, as far as concrete state borders are concerned, there is no specific single approach to borders that could be labeled ‘critical geopolitical’ as such. Rather the perspectives developed gradually in critical geopolitics seem to inform current border studies in many ways by raising new questions, by opening new research materials and concepts. Thus these perspectives may help to re225

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics direct and develop border studies (Johnson et al. 2011). Perpetual ‘updating’ of border studies will henceforth be a major challenge in a world where accelerating globalization, integration, economic competition and new images of security threats characterize the operations of states and economic blocs, and where the mobility of human beings and their border-crossings are crucial elements of the international human landscape.

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Borders —— 1990b. ‘American security discourse: The persistence of geopolitics’. Political Geography Quarterly 9: 171–88. —— 1991. ‘Critical geopolitics: Discourse, difference, and dissent’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9: 261–83. —— 1994. ‘Gender and critical geopolitics: Reading security discourse in the new world disorder’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12: 595–612. Dittmer, J., 2005. ‘Captain America’s empire: Reflections on identity, popular culture and post-9/11 geopolitics’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 626–43. Dodds, K., 1994. ‘Geopolitics and foreign policy: Recent developments in AngloAmerican political geography and international relations’. Progress in Human Geography 18: 186–208. —— 1998. ‘Enframing Bosnia: The geopolitical iconography of Steve Bell’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 170–97. Galluser, W.A., M. Brugin and W. Leimgruber (eds), 1994. Political Boundaries and Coexistence. Bern: Peter Lang. Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson, 1992. ‘Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference’. Cultural Anthropology 7: 1–23. Hannah, M., 2009. ‘Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s’. Political Geography 28: 66–75. Harley, B.J., 1989. ‘Deconstructing the map’. Cartographica 26: 1–20. Herb, G.H., 2004. ‘Double vision: Territorial strategies in the construction of national identities in Germany, 1949–1979’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94: 140–64. Huntington, S.P., 1996. The Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hyndman, J., 1997. ‘Border-crossings’. Antipode 29: 149–76. —— 2001. ‘Towards a feminist geopolitics’. Canadian Geographer 45: 210–22. Johnson, C., et al., 2011. ‘Interventions on rethinking “the border” in border studies’. Political Geography 30: 61–9. Johnston, R.J., 1991. Geography and Geographers. London: Edward Arnold. Krishna, S., 1994. ‘Cartographic anxiety: Mapping the body politic in India’. Alternatives 19: 507–21. Lamont, M., and V. Molnár, 2002. ‘The study of boundaries in the social sciences’. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–95. Leimgruber, W., 1991. ‘Boundary, values and identity: The Swiss–Italian transborder region’. In D. Rumley and J.V. Minghi (eds), The Geography of Border Landscapes. London: Routledge, pp. 43–62. Levine, D.N., 1996. ‘Sociology and the nation-state in an era of shifting boundaries’. Sociological Inquiry 66: 253–66. Luke, T.W., 1993. ‘Discourses of disintegration, texts of transformation: Re-reading realism in the new world order’. Alternatives 18: 229–58. Martin, L.L., 2010. ‘Bombs, bodies, and biopolitics: Securitizing the subject at the airport security checkpoint’. Social and Cultural Geography 11: 17–33.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Megoran, N., 2004. ‘The critical geopolitics of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary dispute, 1999–2000’. Political Geography 23: 731–64. —— 2005. ‘The critical geopolitics of danger in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 555–80. —— 2006. ‘For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and re-imagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures’. Political Geography 25: 622–40. Moisio, S., 1998. ‘Finland, geopolitical image of threat and the post-Cold War confusion’. Geopolitics 3: 104–24. —— 2008. ‘From enmity to rivalry? Notes on national identity politics in competition states’. Scottish Geographical Journal 124: 78–95. Newman, D., and A. Paasi, 1998. ‘Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: Boundary narratives in political geography’. Progress in Human Geography 22: 186–207. Ohmae, K., 1995. The End of the Nation-State. New York: Free Press. Oommen, T.K., 1995. ‘Contested boundaries and emerging pluralism’. International Sociology 10: 251–68. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge. —— 2010. ‘Localizing geopolitics: Disaggregating violence and return’. Political Geography 29: 256–65. —— and J. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’. Political Geography 11: 190–204. —— and S. Dalby, 1998. ‘Introduction’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Paasi, A., 1986. ‘The institutionalization of regions: A theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity’. Fennia 164(1): 105–46. —— 1996. Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. Chichester: John Wiley. —— 2000. ‘Rethinking geopolitics’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 282–3. —— 2005. ‘Generations and the “development” of border studies’. Geopolitics 10: 663–71. —— 2009. ‘Bounded spaces in a “borderless world”? Border studies, power, and the anatomy of the territory’. Journal of Power 2: 213–34. —— 2011. ‘A “border theory”: An unattainable dream or a realistic aim for border scholars?’ In D. Wastl-Walter (ed.), A Research Companion to Border Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 11–31. Power, M., and D. Campbell, 2010. ‘The state of critical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 243–6. Prescott, J.R.V., 1965. The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries. Chicago: Aldine. Ridanpää, J. 2009. ‘Geopolitics of humour: The Muhammed cartoon crisis and the Kaltio comic strip episode’. Geopolitics 14: 729–49.

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Borders Rygiel, K., 1998. ‘Stabilizing borders: The geopolitics of national identity construction in Turkey’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 131–51. Sack, R.D., 1986. Human Territoriality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, M.J., and H.R. Alker (eds), 1996. Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sharp, J., 1993. ‘Publishing American identity: Popular geopolitics, myth and the Reader’s Digest’. Political Geography 12: 491–503. —— 1996. ‘Hegemony, popular culture and geopolitics: The Reader’s Digest and the construction of danger’. Political Geography 15: 557–70. —— 1998. ‘Reel geographies of the new world order: Patriotism, masculinity, and geopolitics in post-Cold War American movies’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 152–69. —— 2007. ‘Geography and gender: Finding feminist political geographies’. Progress in Human Geography 31: 381–7. Taylor, P.J., 1994. ‘The state as container: Territoriality in the modern world-system’. Progress in Human Geography 18: 151–62. Walker, R.B.J., 1993. Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, D., 1992. The Power of Maps. London: Routledge. Yuval-Davis, N., 1997. National Spaces and Collective Identities: Borders, Boundaries, Citizenship and Gender Relations, Inaugural Lecture Series. London: University of Greenwich.

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The State Sami Moisio

Geopolitics and the state have always been seamlessly intertwined. For the European geopolitical thinkers of the early twentieth century, geopolitics was a scientific approach concerned with the impact of geographical factors on the constitution, success and maintenance of states. Geopolitics was entangled with the territorialization of political power around the state. It was about drawing state borders, building nations as definite territories, constructing domestic social order through various biopolitical techniques, and about geographical justifications of territorial claims. Classical geopolitical thought thus represents a wider twentiethcentury discourse which Ó Tuathail terms ‘geo-power’ (1996). It is epitomized, for instance, in the works of geopolitical scholars such as Rudolf Kjellén and Friedrich Ratzel. Their conceptualizations of the relationship between politics and space were, indeed, theories of the state and the fundamental elements of state sovereignty. The geopolitical system presented by Kjellén, for instance, was an attempt to single out the different constituents of the state: the nation, the national elites, the population of the state, the civil society and its ‘life’ (what he termed ‘biopolitics’) and state apparatus (Kjellén 1919). In historical perspective, geopolitics must be understood not only as a theory of the state but also as political action that has sought to mould the geography of the state. The history of geopolitical scholarship is thus about changing modes of political action and engagement with the state. In this view, geopolitical action can be considered against the background of the wider development of political geography. Usefully for the purposes of this chapter, Guntram Herb makes a distinction between three political engagements of the political geographical scholarship (2008). The first is closely connected to state-building: scholars of geography have played a role in facilitating the process of creating and maximizing the territorial power of the state. In the course of history, this process has taken different ‘nationalist’ forms in different contexts, of course. One of the key logics of this process has been to develop a specific type of geographical knowledge that not only makes the state visible for educational, governmental or expansionist purposes, but which also separates the state from the other states. The second form of engagement in Herb’s classification is closely associated with the construction of the so-called ‘welfare state’. This form of political engagement

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of geographical knowledge came to characterize parts of the ‘advanced world’ already in the 1930s. It intensified from the 1950s onwards during the so called Keynesian peak of state development. In short, political geographical knowledge was needed to assist further development and maintenance of the territorial power of the state. This was the heyday of what Cowen and Smith conceptualize as the constitution of the ‘geopolitical social’ (2009). The process to construct welfare structures for the needs of political power led to the politicization of geographical knowledge in the form of what is known as applied economic geography and regional planning scholarship. The state has remained one of the key constitutive concepts and intellectual problems in contemporary critical political geography and, thus, in critical geopolitics. Even though one may argue that the link between state theory (see Jessop 2009) and critical geopolitics has been somewhat loose, critical geopolitics is self-evidently about the third dimension in Herb’s list of political engagement. This is a form of scholarship that seeks to deconstruct, criticize and even resist the spatial practices of the state. This is explicitly stated by Ó Tuathail: ‘Critical geopolitics is one of many cultures of resistance to Geography as imperial truth, state-capitalized knowledge, and military weapon’ (1996: 256, my emphasis). This chapter opens up this theme by discussing critical geopolitics with regard to the state as an intellectual problem. Given that a good share of the works which could be gathered under the banner of critical geopolitics has touched upon the state or state power, this chapter is inescapably selective in its scope. The idea is to single out critical geopolitical thinking on the state through some of the best-known ‘classical’ texts which were published in the 1990s as well some more recent contributions. I use this literature as a springboard to discuss what I call the neoliberal geopolitics of the state as one of the possible themes that diversifies the critical geopolitical study of the state. The chapter proceeds in four steps. In the following section I discuss the ways in which early critical geopolitics made a contribution to the literature on the state through an inquiry into the ‘classics’ of critical geopolitics by Simon Dalby and Gearóid Ó Tuathail. In the third section I introduce some of the more recent research, feminist geopolitics in particular, that has significantly contributed to our knowledge on the geographies of the state. In the fourth section I shall discuss the neoliberal geopolitics of the state. In the brief concluding section I suggest that bringing the literature on spatial political economy into a closer dialogue with critical geopolitics would be worthwhile.

The early critical geopolitics of the state Classical geopolitics was closely intertwined with the theory of the state. Key critical geopolitical literature that emerged in the 1990s, however, only implicitly discussed state theory in general or engaged with the concept of the state in particular. Some exceptions, however, can be mentioned – even if these are not normally associated 232

The State with critical geopolitics. John Agnew’s well-known ‘territorial trap’ thesis is a forceful critique of the state-centered perspective, which takes the spatiality of the state as given and still dominates most of the traditional scholarship in international relations (IR) and has become a canonical text that has bridged political geography and IR (1994). Peter J. Taylor’s treatment of the statist ramifications of knowledge production, a phenomenon which he called the ‘embedded statism’ in social sciences, is an equally powerful critique of state-centricity in the mainstream social science approaches to the social world (1996; see also Häkli 2001). These works are important given that one of the foundational ideas of critical geopolitics was to examine not only the crucial role of geographical knowledge for the operations of state power but also the social, political and spatial situatedness of this knowledge production. As Power and Campbell suggest, critical geopolitics ‘was concerned with developing a mode of interrogating and exposing the grounds for knowledge production and of seeking to analyze the articulation, objectivization and subversion of hegemony’ (2010: 243). Critical geopolitics was a perspective interested in the politics of knowledge, the production of such knowledge, and the epistemic underpinnings of ‘knowing the world’ and representing it geographically. This flexible theoretical standing is useful as it enables critical geopoliticians to study the ways in which political practice is bound up with territorial definition of the state. The early practitioners of critical geopolitics made notable contributions to our understanding of the state as a spatial entity. They not only located the discursive aspects of geographical knowledge production but also linked these discursive practices to the foreign and security policies of the state, often the USA. The emphasis on foreign and security policies may not come as a revelation given that early critical geopolitics took some of its inspiration from the so-called dissident IR. The dissidents challenged the foundational ideas of neo-realism in particular and in so doing developed a powerful critique of modernism in IR theory. They problematized state-related practices through which the ambiguous, fractured and uncertain (de-territorialized) world was constantly territorialized by the ‘sovereign man’ employing ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ method (see Ashley and Walker 1990). For them, statecraft was a specific action ‘inscribing problems and dangers that can be taken to be exterior to sovereign man and whose exteriority serves to enframe the ‘domestic population’ in which the state can be recognized as a center and can secure its claims to legitimacy’ (Ashley 1989: 302). The dissidents also deconstructed the seemingly coherent national identities that were now understood as constituted through totalizing narratives of ‘national security’, a central constituent of statecraft and sovereign man (see Ashley and Walker 1990; Campbell 1992). What was presented as the critique of modernism in IR arguably resonated well with the theoretical needs of early critical geopolitics. Those few scholars who developed critical geopolitics in the 1980s, Simon Dalby and Gearóid Ó Tuathail in particular, were clearly inspired by the methodological promises of dissident IR: deconstruction, genealogy, discourse analysis (tracing what it is possible to talk of and about) and the flexible definition of social construction. Geopolitics of modern geopolitical space (Ashley 1987) – space that was later conceptualized as being 233

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics constructed in practical, formal and popular discourses (see Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998) – became an object of analysis in critical geopolitics. This was so, irrespective of the fact that Ó Tuathail also aimed some criticism at the dissidents (1996: 173). Accordingly, rather than critiquing the classics of IR theory, the dissidents should engage in deconstructing the discourses ‘deployed in the practice of statecraft’. The two exemplary contributions of the early critical geopolitics, Dalby’s Creating the Second Cold War (1990) and Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics (1996) reflect the strong impact of dissident IR and its postmodern and poststucturalist standing on critical geopolitics. Simon Dalby deconstructed the discourses of threat, Otherness and order by the security policy ‘scripts’ of the right-wing lobby group Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in the 1970s and 1980s and studied their ‘impact’ on Reagan’s administration. He was successful in demonstrating how seemingly apolitical imaginations (or ‘geo-graphs’) framing Otherness and related dangers posed by the conceived expansionist USSR informed security-policy practice of statecraft that resulted in increasing militarization (see also Sharp 2000a). One of the contributions that Dalby’s work made to the theory of the state is methodological. He combined the seemingly neutral or objective expert narratives from various fields of social and cultural action – political realism, Sovietology, geopolitics and military technology/strategy – and demonstrated the ways in which they together formed an ideological space and shaped the discourse of state security of the Reagan administration. He pointed out that the expansion of the capitalist state constantly needs this kind of an ideological space that justifies its functions (not least the expansion of the military). Dalby demonstrated that the CPD actually does geopolitics by way of providing geographical arguments to support the expansion military forces. This not only included discourses excluding the Other and representing the Other as less civilized/developed, dangerous, irrational and expansionist. The classical geopolitics of Mackinder and Spykman was also in-built in the work of the CPD. Even if Dalby did not explicitly elaborate on the sign ‘geopolitics’ (Ó Tuathail 1996) the work nevertheless made a clear contribution to the geography of the state. It is noteworthy that Dalby not only sought to deconstruct the CPD’s conservative, technology-centred, state-centred and militaristic knowledge production. He also engaged in tailoring an alternative, more peaceful and culturally sensitive (less ethnocentric) discourse of security that would be based on separating security from identity and rejecting the model of security as being based on the spatial exclusion of otherness (for a recent discussion of the political engagement of critical geopolitics, see Megoran 2008; Hyndman 2010). Dalby argued that it is exactly this questioning that ‘strikes at the heart of the political theory of the state, premised on the state as a spatial entity, within which a state of security is provided’ (1990: 172). Dalby’s idea of critical geopolitics was thus ultimately about rejecting theories of the state which served the needs of the ‘ruling classes’ who ‘aligned themselves closely with the expansion of state power’ (1990: 172). The implicitly Gramscian critical geopolitics which Dalby had in mind was based on a specific scalar logic of security as a political practice, more precisely decoupling the concept of security from state security (and the so called abstract space mastered by security elites) 234

The State and attaching it to the concept of the local. Accordingly, ‘security can be linked to the politics of locality, not to the abstract spaces of state administration and rule. Thus security is extricated from the prerogatives of state rule and analysed in terms of people’s control over their own social space’ (Dalby 1990: 173). Ó Tuathail’s work is similarly an important agenda-setting contribution to critical geopolitics. Even though this agenda is also about disclosing the political dimensions of the ways in which geographical discourse scripts politics, it differs somewhat from that of Dalby. Indeed, Ó Tuathail refused to read geopolitics principally as spatial exclusion, for this ‘neglects other possible and highly relevant readings of geopolitical discourse’ (1996: 182). If we leave important issues such as the theories of (Cartesian) perspectivalism and the problematizations of the status of geopolitical seeing and visioning aside, Ó Tuathail’s Foucaultian perspective (Foucault himself considered formal state theory as an ‘indigestible meal’) sought to trace the nexus between power, knowledge and geographical discourse in various historical contexts. In so doing, his critical geopolitics made an explicit link between geography and state development. Critical geopolitics took the governmentalization of geographical knowledge into a closer scrutiny: the production and utilization of geographical knowledge by the eye of power became an object of textual analysis. Foucault’s notion of governmentality acted as a springboard for Ó Tuathail’s formulation of the concept of ‘geo-power’. The term refers to ‘the functioning of geographical knowledge not as an innocent body of knowledge and learning but as an ensemble of technologies of power concerned with the governmental production and management of territorial space’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 7). He also pointed out that there is a constant struggle over ‘geography’ and that this contest should not be reduced to the battle of cartographic techniques. Rather geography was understood as different ways of visioning the world, it was about competing ‘images and imaginings’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 14–15). Ó Tuathail’s treatment of ‘modern geographical knowledge’ as a power– knowledge relation that is closely entangled with the centralization and imperialist expansion of the modern European state system was also an important opening. Equally important was the emphasis on the institutionalized nature of seeing and portraying space and thus producing geographical knowledge. It is therefore fairly easy to see that the rich treatment of the governmentalization of ‘geography’ is one of the major contributions that early critical geopolitics made to our understanding of the state as a spatial entity. Indeed, Ó Tuathail explicitly stressed that the concept of geo-power was to be understood as ‘a historical problematic of state formation’ (1996: 8). This understanding was broadened few years later by Ó Tuathail and Dalby who now argued that: As the geographical politics that enframes all foreign policy practices, geopolitics is not a specific school of statecraft but rather can be better understood as the spatial practices, both material and representational, of statecraft itself. Consequently, the critical study of geopolitics must be grounded in the particular cultural mythologies of the state. Critical 235

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics geopolitics confronts and analyses the geopolitical imagi-nation of the state, its foundational myths and national exceptionalist lore. (Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998: 3, emphasis in original) Whereas the first few chapters of Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics (1996) made explicit the links between geo-power and the state, the latter part of the book dealt more with the politics of writing global space (as the sub-title of the book indicates) through specific territorial prism. Accordingly: We should not be mesmerized by the deployment and use of the sign ‘geopolitics’ but look toward the more important problematic it marks. That problematic is the problematic of geo-politics, the politics of the production of global political space by dominant intellectuals, institutions, and practitioners of statecraft in practices that constitute ‘global politics’. How is global political space envisioned and scripted by these actors? How are certain constellations of geopolitical meaning congealed around global visions like lebensraum, the Cold War, the New World Order, or global anarchy? How do certain locations within these global visions – Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Vietnam, Cuba, the Persian Gulf, Central America, or Bosnia – become the sights, sites, and cites of a governmentalized global scene? How, in sum, is geographical discourse governmentalized in the practices of statecraft by centers of authority and power? (Ó Tuathail 1996: 185) Here, critical geopolitics turned to the study of elites of powerful states and other institutions that operate through global (foreign policy) visions. Critical geopolitics of this type is interested in how global space is imagined and represented by the dominant states (see Ó Tuathail 1998: 27–8): it inquires into the global centers of power, and the geo-graphs or scripts they produce in foreign and security policy discourses. As the quote above suggests, geopolitical orders are understood being championed by elites (key individuals and institutions) of the ‘great powers’, orders which are then ‘imposed upon the world’ (Sharp 2009: 358). Seen from the perspective of the concept of the state, this type of critical geopolitics is problematic at least in two respects. Firstly, such critical geopolitics hints that these dominant powers are the only states which operate through global geopolitical visions or seek to ‘get global’. Secondly, such a perspective potentially distances critical geopolitics from the state practices and ‘sites’ that are not normally understood as belonging to the sphere of ‘foreign policy’. I shall return to these issues later.

Recent critical contributions Recent critical geopolitical scholarship has produced notable contributions on the state and statecraft. For instance, critical scholars have paid increasing attention to the discursive aspects of territorial sovereignty in different spatial contexts. 236

The State Merje Kuus and John Agnew have not only emphasized the socially constructed and discursive nature of state sovereignty as constantly performed, enacted and represented in state-related practices but also suggested that there exist different ‘sovereignty regimes’ which exhibit different combinations of state authority and territoriality (2008; for more detail, see Agnew 2005). None of these sovereignty regimes are predicated on strictly bordered state territories but may well be based on networked modalities of power. In such a view, state sovereignty is a specific outcome of a wide range of ‘territorial’ and ‘networked’ (relational) practices of the state that ‘take place’ within and beyond the borders of the state. By following the idea that state sovereignty is constructed, discursive and not necessarily strictly territorial, Fiona McConnell, for instance, has problematized the concept and practice of state sovereignty as these are articulated by the Tibetan government-in-exile (2009). In all its exceptionality the case is perhaps somewhat obvious, but McConnell’s study nonetheless perfectly demonstrates that the concepts of the state, territory and sovereignty can be theoretically disentangled. Again, this study demonstrates that the taken-for-granted understanding of the ‘rigid’ relationship between state territory and sovereignty is problematic. McConnell writes about the many modalities of sovereignty: ‘de facto’, ‘displaced’ and ‘tacit’. Displaced sovereignty, for instance, breaks down the often assumed correlation of sovereignty with a single bounded territory, but does not entail that the link between sovereignty and territory is eroded. In sum, the work of both McConnell and Kuus and Agnew illustrates that in carefully teasing out some of the constitutive elements of the state (and state power), critical geopolitics is able to effectively destabilize the conventional understandings of the state as a spatial entity. Scholars of feminist geopolitics have also scrutinized the state. They have not only deconstructed the gendered representation of foreign and security policies that are constitutive elements of international order but also scrutinized the embodied aspects and everyday dimensions of global geopolitics. Indeed, feminist geopoliticians have attached the concept of geopolitics more closely to people who are often silenced in state-centered geopolitical analysis. The conventional notion of the state as the protector of such silenced people is thus challenged and taken up in analysis. In her critique of Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics Joanne Sharp argued that: The division of life into political–effectual and non-political–ineffectual spheres in Critical Geopolitics has a … damaging effect. It silences a whole range of people and groups from the operations of international politics. This division of international and domestic politics reinforces the publicdomestic spheres division characteristic of patriarchal capitalist society, where women are effectively contained within the immanent space of home and kept from the transcendence of the public. … I think it is also necessary to ask who is made invisible by this spectacularizing of international politics. (Sharp 2000b: 363) Feminist geopoliticians have pointed out that the ways in which the statecentered notions of security are gendered is an important theme (see also Dalby 237

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 1994) but that this type of inquiry remains insufficient from the perspective of feminist geopolitics (Hyndman 2001; 2004). It is argued that critical geopolitics focuses too much on text and representations and pays too little attention to embodied practices and to the materiality of geopolitical discourses. In short, ‘its deconstructive impulses are insufficient to generate change for building alternative futures’ (Hyndman 2001: 213). This critique is one of the standpoints from which feminist geopolitics scrutinizes the state. Feminist scholars have made notable contributions to the existing literature by ‘embodying’ the nation-state (and showing how the state is embodied) (see e.g. Mountz 2004) and in so doing linking together the feminist concern with the body and the state. In feminist geopolitics, the state is treated not as a coherent entity but rather as a complex mixture of practices that are potentially discriminating and marginalizing. Accordingly, the prevailing power relations position individuals and groups of people in different hierarchical relations within states and with the state. Feminist geopolitics ‘destabilizes’ the state by scrutinizing marginal and silenced voices (such as women in foreign-policy practices or those displaced), by discussing ‘informal arenas’ (the private) of politics and by bringing the mundane aspects of geopolitics of the local into closer investigation. One of the central ideas of feminist geopolitics has not only been to interrogate politics at scales other than the nation-state but also to analyze the operation of state power at a multiplicity of scales (Hyndman 2004). Feminist geopolitics characteristically studies human security rather than state security: it contests ‘the militarized, bounded version of security which posits an identity which needs protection from the danger posed by a different external other’ (Sharp 2007: 383, emphasis in original). By pointing out that state security and human security are not always synonymous as political events unfold – vulnerable people may be harmed by policies that operate in the name of state or global security – feminist geopolitics has sought to unsettle the conventions of state security by introducing both finer and coarser scales of analysis and political action (Hyndman 2001). It thus also studies the dovetailing of global discourses and lived and experienced day-to-day spaces of the local: the streets, the home, the factory and so on. This does not mean however that feminist geopolitics leaves the state unexplored. In her agenda-setting paper, Hyndman suggests that a feminist geopolitics is one comprised of an embodied view from which to analyze visceral conceptions of violence, security and mobility. While the state remains a vital subject of interrogation in relation to security, it obscures fear and violence at other scales, beyond its purview. … Feminist geopolitics decentres but does not dismiss state security, the conventional subject of geopolitics, and contests the militarization of states and societies. It attempts to develop a politics of security at the scale of the (civilian) body. (Hyndman 2004: 308–9)

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The State

Critical geopolitics of the neoliberal state The world we live in is increasingly characterized by an ‘embedded neo-liberal consensus’ (Cerny 2009). One may thus argue that neoliberalization of space in general and state space in particular is the very feature that characterizes contemporary world politics. Indeed, new forms of governance that are motivated by neoliberal commonsense have significantly changed the ways in which both the state and its territorial basis are conceived and represented politically in different policy sectors in changing geographical contexts. Thus the geopolitical rationalities through which contemporary states – whether these are labeled ‘neo-liberal states’ (Harvey 2005), ‘competition states’ (Cerny 1990) or ‘postmodern states’ (Sørensen 2001) – operate requires sustained critical geopolitical attention. The transformation of state space as one of the central phenomena of contemporary international politics is a theme that begs critical geopolitical scholarship. More than twenty years ago, the scholars of dissident IR, most notably Richard Ashley, were interested in the ‘geopolitical domestication of global political space’, in other words, ‘the power political making, maintenance, administration, and transformation of the practical boundaries of sovereign state rule – the boundaries separating a rational domestic order from the recalcitrant world beyond its sway’ (Ashley 1987: 423; see also Walker 1993). Domestication of global political space is one of the key political processes in the age of the neoliberal state. There is thus a constant need to return to the issue of ‘domestication’, the complex political geographical process that is today closely intertwined with the issue of neoliberal globalization and transnational liberalism. An examination of this process requires shifting the focus away from the narrow definition of foreign and security policy. The argument that I would like to provide here is that an inquiry into the geographical representations and practices that produce the spaces of today’s world politics (Agnew 1998) should explicitly focus on the state practices (projects, strategies and so on) and governmental interventions that are normally understood as belonging to the sphere of the domestic. In such a view, the concept of foreign policy refers to the practices whereby different actors articulate the link between the state and ‘world’. This broad conceptualization may help to develop a critical geopolitics of the state that recognizes both the enormous economization of the sovereign man and the subsequent neoliberal rationalities and associated governmental interventions that seek to ‘open up’ the state space but which are not articulated by security or foreign policy intellectuals understood in a traditional sense. The transformation from ‘geopolitical social’ – which crosses traditional borders of internal and external to the nation state – towards ‘geo-economic social’ should be taken seriously in the critical study of the neoliberal state. Cowen and Smith argue that: The point here is not simply the privatization of everything public, from water to roads. Far more trenchant is the privatization of the state itself. In the acid of geoeconomic calculation, the state becomes an entrepreneur in its 239

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics own right, a player in the market first and foremost rather than a regulator of the market’s ‘excesses’. (Cowen and Smith 2009: 41) Even if Cowen and Smith are skeptical of the term ‘critical geopolitics’, they make an important contribution to the existing literature by suggesting that during the epoch of neoliberalism the state is reframed as a geo-economic agent in which territorial security is increasingly associated with the capacities of this agent to accommodate supra-national flows. Accordingly, the control of territory of the state under geo-economic calculation does not become irrelevant but it is now principally a tactical option, not a strategic necessity (Cowen and Smith 2009: 42). Post-9/11 geopolitics may be ultimately underpinned by different forms, logics and governmental rationalities of security. However, ignoring the geo-economic rationality which is in operation in these security practices restricts our ability to understand the operations of the state under an embedded neoliberal consensus. The neoliberalization of the state does not mean that the concept of security ceases to be fundamental to the study of geopolitics but, rather, that the issue of state security is being re-invented as part of the rise of the geo-economic and the subsequent erosion of geopolitical calculation. The logic of security becomes extended to and exploited in the sphere of the economy which is articulated in the name of the state’s international competitiveness. In other words, the economy pervades spheres of the state which were previously immune to it, for example, security. Contemporary geopolitics which revolves significantly around the issues of competitiveness and the related policies of ‘efficiency’ and ‘maximum economy’ highlights that managing knowledge and talent, making something into some one’s private property and producing ‘creative’ subjects is located at the core of statecraft. Today, being ‘a normal state’ is about turning the previously constituted spaces of mass production, natural resources and public property into new state spaces that associate the state with proverbial global flows and networks characterized by ‘innovations’ and ‘footloose capital’ (Moisio 2011). It is clear that the new geographical ideas that are represented in this context as making the state more ‘competitive’ serve particular interests that are articulated in terms of ‘national survival’. However, as a critical scholar should recognize, all political formations are contested. We do not live in a monolithic neoliberal world (Larner 2009: 378): neoliberal statecraft might thus also be considered as being composed of the ‘collision of the mutually opposed tactics’ (Jessop 1990), which are played out by different societal groupings, institutions and other actors. Critical geopolitical study of the state brings together some of the central ideas of critical geopolitics and spatial political economy. For instance, an inquiry into different kinds of ‘sites’ within states which are part and parcel of the neoliberalization of state space would open up new insights into the ‘foreign policy’ of states under neoliberalism. New spaces or zones of competitiveness are under construction all over the world. These spaces are constructed in order to link the state to the ‘global’ spaces of capital accumulation and ‘civilization’, but they potentially also disclose many other societal processes that are underway. Many 240

The State special economic sites in different parts of the world serve as illustrations of the geo-economic calculation discussed by Cowen and Smith (2009). To illustrate, the question of ‘metropolis’ has recently emerged as an important geopolitical issue in Finland (in a wider European context, see Brenner 2004). The debate that surrounds the issue reflects the ever stronger governmental rationality according to which ‘state success’, ‘national competitiveness’ and ‘the future of the welfare state’ are connected with the issue of being capable of linking the state spatially (and very selectively) up to the network of global metropolises. The term ‘metropolis’ not only denotes innovativeness, future, competitiveness, creativity and growth but also casts other type of state spaces as outdated and ineffective. For the most active protagonists of the radical spatial reconstruction of Finland, the construction of a ‘globally significant metropolis’ is perceived to enable the state to manage global mobility, increase its economic efficiency and thus prevent the state of becoming periphery in the world economy (Moisio 2011). In Finland, the recent governmental interventions whereby the state space is re-imagined in order to cope with the imagined new global condition are enacted in a multifaceted ensemble of institutions, analyses and tactics which have the population as its target and specific ‘Porterian’ political economy as its main form of knowledge. In fact, critical geopolitics that deals with the ideas of the contemporary ‘super star scholars’, such as economist Michael Porter or spatial thinkers Richard Florida and AnnaLee Saxenian, would not only open up the geopolitical logic of their economistic thinking but also point to the fact that these individuals are among the most influential contemporary ‘theorists’ of world politics. One may argue that the theories of the state and regional competitiveness (see Porter 2009) together with the theories of the attractiveness of places (see Florida 2008) are crucial for understanding the neoliberalizing state strategies of today. Both of these ideas are predicated upon a specific portrayal of the ‘global’. It is represented as an aggressively competitive setting to which political ‘units’ – regions, places, states, individuals – have to adapt swiftly and skilfully, or else they may face deprivation. It is not a surprise, then, that the notion of ‘national survival’ is increasingly being reinvented and associated with specific processes of economization and optimization of space (Kangas and Moisio 2012). In the geopolitical imaginations that portray the national survival as a matter of economic calculation, those who ‘adapt’ successfully will prosper and those who fail will remain locked in the spaces of nationally scaled mass production based on the extraction of natural resources (for this logic, see Florida 1995). The global gurus of globalization engage with earth-writing and in so doing highlight the creativity ‘inherent in the process of using geographical reasoning in the practical service of power’ (Sharp 2009: 359). These earth-writings and the political practices implicated in them are then domesticated in various geographical contexts and put into operation in different place-specific forms. Since neoliberalization is an inherently transnational process of policy evolution and learning, the neoliberal geopolitics of the state is connected with specific policy transfer processes. In these processes transnational policy concepts and practices, which are produced by various actors from bureaucrats to transnational policy 241

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics entrepreneurs and intermediaries, are being taken from place to place through the process of translation (Peck 2011; Prince 2012). The new intellectuals of statecraft epitomize the fact that the neoliberal world is based on specific geopolitical theories and truths or ‘cults’ (Peck 2009). These theories are not only being applied creatively in different contexts but also serve certain political interests (quite often of the most internationalized factions of capital). The political action motivated by these theories, which often emphasizes the ‘hard facts of globalization’, is clearly located at the core of the formal practices of statecraft. Not least because of the dominance of such earth-writing, the very issue of ‘national survival’ is increasingly being conceived and represented as an economic issue, not as a matter of realist power calculation that looks on ‘state power’ in terms of military strength and national unity or the like. The geopolitics of neoliberal states proceeds through the practices of economization, subjectification and optimization of the entire spectrum of social life (Rose 2007) and spatial structures. One of the key logics of this new political setting is to manage and create immaterial property – ideas and knowledge which can be turned into profit – and to produce ‘useful’ citizens and state spaces for this end (Moisio 2011). The inter-state competition for ‘innovativeness’ nevertheless entails intensifying political conflicts regarding the state as a singular social and spatial entity. The reason for such development is that the neoliberalization of the state inescapably produces new social and spatial hierarchies which may in the end destabilize the authority of the state apparatus as being located ‘above’ places and regions (see Ferguson and Gupta 2002).

Conclusion The critical geopolitical study of the neoliberal state follows some of the key theoretical and methodological advances which have been developed in the classical and more recent critical geopolitics literature. It asks how knowledge, truth and meaning are constituted in contemporary state strategies and governmental interventions that not only seek to make the state ‘competitive’ but also to produce a world that operates according to the neoliberal rationality of competition. This kind of critical geopolitics of the state would pay attention to the transnational actors and institutions which fundamentally shape the qualitative transformation of state, space and subjectivities. It would examine the ways in which ‘globalizing’ governmental rationalities clash, co-exist and also co-constitute the territorial practices (of sovereignty) that continue to produce national identities, state-based loyalties, community and social order. The complex and contested processes of the neoliberal state may be approached from many critical angles. Given that the neoliberalization of national spaces has fundamental impacts on the experiences of people all over the world (see e.g. Cupples 2005), those interested in class, gender and new spatial and social hierarchies

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The State that manifest themselves as part of the construction (and reconstruction) of the neoliberal state and its spatiality may find it useful to analyze these experiences. The geopolitics of the state is not a given but is reconstructed in different ways in changing contexts. An inquiry into the ideas, governmental rationalities, techniques of governance and the associated governmental interventions involved in the process of producing new state spaces is thus a challenge for critical geopolitics. A notable task is also to inquire into the governmental interventions in which state subjects are given new responsibilities and duties during the economistic geopolitical calculation and the associated space-making in the ‘enterprise society’. One may thus study how different versions of neoliberalism draw different people into regulatory relationship with the state, and what forms of social subjectivity are being constituted in the neoliberal state projects (Larner 2009: 378). One might also examine how state governance based on neoliberal rationality produces new forms of state citizenship that is re-articulated with actors set into motion by market forces – and which is increasingly detached from state territory, nation and specific rights (Ong 2006). In sum, the neoliberal geopolitics of the state is not beyond the ordinary people who are increasingly supposed to act as creative, useful and effective subjects of state competitiveness. In addition to the governmentality-inspired approach, one way to enrich critical geopolitics scholarship on the state would be to pay more attention to the political economic dynamics of various policies that shape the spatiality of the state in the twenty-first century (cf. Mercille 2008). Indeed, this perspective would continue the work by Agnew and Corbridge who conceptualized geopolitical discourses and the processes of geopolitical economy as dialectically related more than 15 years ago (1995; see also Herod, Ó Tuathail and Roberts 1998). Neil Smith’s work on Isaiah Bowman also exemplifies the possibility of combining some of the elements from critical geopolitics inspired by poststructuralism with those of critical political economy leaning on historical–geographical materialism (2003; see also Smith 2000). This is to propose that the enthusiasm of critical geopolitics – whether in its classic form or more recent scholarship – for the discursive as the fundamental moment in state transformation may be usefully tempered by stronger attention to the material. Critical geopolitical study of the state should empirically demonstrate the construction of various geopolitical imaginaries and wider discourses through which the neoliberalization of the state occurs. Simultaneously, state space should not be associated one-dimensionally with domestic politics, but rather it would be useful to interrogate how globalizing political practices instigated by transnational actors, institutions and factions of capital take place in state space. This would potentially yield interesting insights into the transformation of the state towards the enterprise form of social and political organization.

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The State —— 2010. ‘The question of “the political” in critical geopolitics: Querying the “child soldier” in the “war on terror”. Political Geography 29: 247–255. Jessop, B., 1990. State Theory. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. —— 2009. ‘State theory’. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 4, pp. 416–21. Kangas, A., and S. Moisio, 2012. ‘Creating state competitiveness, re-scaling higher education: The case of Finland’. In P. Aalto, V. Harle and S. Moisio (eds), Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 199–225. Kjellén, R., 1919. Valtio Elinmuotona [The state as a form of life]. Hämeenlinna: Karisto. Kuus, M., and J. Agnew, 2008. ‘Theorizing the state geographically: Sovereignty, subjectivity, territoriality’. In K. Cox, J. Robinson and M. Low (eds), The Sage Handbook of Political Geography. London: Sage, pp. 117–132. Larner, W., 2009. ‘Neo-liberalism’. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 4, pp. 373–8. McConnell, F., 2009. ‘De facto, displaced, tacit: The sovereign articulations of the Tibetan government-in-exile’. Political Geography 28: 343–52. Megoran, N., 2008. ‘Militarism, realism, just war, or non-violence? Critical geopolitics and the problem of normativity’. Geopolitics 13: 473–97. Mercille, J., 2008. ‘The radical geopolitics of US foreign policy: Geopolitical and geoeconomic logics of power’. Political Geography 27: 570–86. Moisio, S., 2011. ‘Political geographies of the state and scale’. Political Geography 30: 172–4. Mountz, A., 2004. ‘Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling’. Political Geography 23: 323–45. Ong, A., 2006. Neo-Liberalism as Exception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge. —— 1998. ‘Postmodern geopolitics? The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 16–38. —— and S. Dalby, 1998. ‘Introduction’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Peck, J., 2009. ‘The cult of urban creativity’. In R. Keil and R. Mahon (eds), Leviathan Undone? Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 159–76. —— 2011. ‘Geographies of policy: From transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation’. Progress in Human Geography 35: 773–97. Porter, M., 2009. On Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press. —— and D. Campbell, 2010. ‘The state of critical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 243–6. Prince, R.J., 2012. ‘Policy transfer, consultants and the geographies of governance’. Progress in Human Geography 36: 188–203. Rose, N., 2007. The Politics of Life Itself. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Sharp, J., 2000a. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity 1922– 1994. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. —— 2000b. ‘Remasculinising geo-politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’. Political Geography 19: 361–4. –– 2007. ‘Geography and gender: Finding feminist political geographies’. Progress in Human Geography 31: 381–7. —— 2009. ‘Critical geopolitics’. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 4, pp. 358–62. Smith, N., 2000. ‘Is a critical geopolitics possible? Foucault, class and the vision thing’. Political Geography 19: 365–71. —— 2003. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sørensen, G., 2001. Changes in Statehood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, P.J., 1996. ‘Embedded statism and the social sciences: Opening up to new spaces’. Environment and Planning A 28: 1917–28. Walker, R.B.J., 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Militarization1 Matthew Farish

In this chapter, I consider the contributions of critical geopolitics to the study of militarization, understood as the organization of societies ‘for the production of violence’ (Geyer 1989: 79). The changing approach to and presence of this theme in critical geopolitics over the last quarter-century has effectively paralleled its investigation within the broader realm of critical human geography. While it is important to acknowledge precedents, it is only in the last decade that geographers have turned consistently and thoroughly to the military production of geographical knowledge and to military practices – thereby converting military geographies, as Rachel Woodward has neatly suggested, into ‘militarism’s geographies’ (2005). While the mandate of critical geopolitics has certainly inspired some of this diverse literature, it is more accurate to suggest that the relationship is reciprocal and fluid, such that any attempt to grapple with militarization as it is currently addressed ‘inside’ critical geopolitics quickly becomes a futile exercise of intellectual boundarymaking. For similar reasons, it is important to gently defy the prevalent impulse in geographic writing on militarization to emphasize contemporary variants of war and security. In a series of recent publications, Richelle Bernazzoli and Colin Flint have simultaneously clarified and contested the geographical study of militarization. Beginning from the sensible refusal to separate military and civilian spheres or to distinguish between peaceful and violent times and spaces, they echo Cynthia Enloe’s ground-breaking feminist search for the ‘core beliefs’ of militarism – particularly those concerning the naturalization of violence and the automatic association of militaries with masculinity, modernity and state sovereignty (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009b: 449). But they are also keen to show how such beliefs acquire substance and are exercised in particular sites and across interconnected scales (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009a; 2010). Nodding to Enloe’s description of militarization as ‘the multitracked process by which the roots of militarism are driven deep down into the soil of a society’ (2004: 219–20), Bernazzoli and Flint nonetheless suggest that militarism and militarization 1

I would like to thank the editors, for their advice and patience, and Jo Sharp, in particular, for her illuminating suggestions and support.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics ‘should be replaced with “securitism” and “securitization”, respectively, in order to adequately denote the openness of these concepts and the processes they represent’ (2009b: 450). While I will return to this definitional matter, the more pressing contentions in these publications are twofold: the reminder that militarization occurs within nominally civilian contexts (even if these contexts are still too frequently separated by state boundaries), and the insistence that militarization works to normalize militarism (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009a: 397; Lutz 2009). Students of militarization must thus ‘monitor the transformation of assumptions, reassessment of priorities, [and] evolution of values’, but also the reconfiguration of ‘political economies and institutions’ (Enloe 2004: 220; Loyd 2009: 864). As Enloe puts it, ‘many people can become militarized in their thinking, in how they live their daily lives, in what they aspire to for their children or their society, without ever wielding a rifle or donning a helmet’ (2000: 2). In short, militarization legitimates certain forms of violence, including the structural and the everyday, along with associated forms of hierarchy and discrimination (Loyd 2009: 864). Judged by the orientation of the field to date, addressing militarization presents both a challenge and an opportunity for those wielding the analytical tools of critical geopolitics. Since its emergence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, critical geopolitics has been driven by searches for and rebukes to ‘geography as imperial truth, statecapitalized knowledge, and military weapon’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 256). Indeed, the late Cold War killing fields of El Salvador and the willingness of the USA to sponsor Central American violence in the name of geopolitical ‘position’ (Westad 2005: 339), inspired Gerard Toal’s (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) first publication, an article that crystallized some of the early concerns of critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1986). As Toal and other colleagues explored and defined critical approaches to geopolitics in the 1990s, they also inevitably restricted its purview. This was done by emphasizing the role of (overwhelmingly male) ‘intellectuals of statecraft,’ by opting for international or global perspectives on politics, and perhaps most importantly by treating geopolitics first and foremost as a ‘discursive practice,’ a way of seeing, representing, and writing about the world (Ó Tuathail 1996: 59–60; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 190). Still, even the earliest attempts at definition sought to expand the treatment of geopolitics beyond its familiar ‘formal’ roots to the more ‘practical’ statements of politicians or military leaders (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992). These ‘pragmatic’ expressions were distinct from the pronouncements of ‘strategic thinkers and public intellectuals who set themselves up as authorities on the totality of the world political map’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 60). But this inclusive gesture remained firmly within the discursive realm and offered few connections between, for instance, the ‘spatialization of “El Salvador”’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 61) and the Salvadorian landscapes and lives shattered by violence, much of it encouraged by the restless extension of US militarism to cover a global Cold War domain. Scholars working under the banner of critical geopolitics have certainly been concerned not just with geographical knowledge as it has been expressed in the ‘management of territorial space’ but also with the objectionably violent consequences of this deployment (Ó Tuathail 1996: 7). And yet it is still fair to 248

Militarization suggest that critical geopolitics, for all of its attention to what Simon Dalby called ‘the military … formulations of security provision’ (1990: 184) and for all of its preoccupation with the quintessentially militaristic term ‘strategy’, has been slow to attend to the role of geography as a ‘military weapon’. The decade-old comments of Klaus Dodds are still relevant: ‘The US military’s geographical imaginations and practices (just to mention one state) deserve further close attention because if critical geopolitics is going to be in a position to articulate alternatives to militarism then one must have some understanding of these particular organizations and cultures’ (2001: 472). The limitations of critical geopolitics in this arena are particularly evident if we go further and acknowledge that the ‘full scope’ of militarization can be masked by the prioritization of ‘direct violence’ and the ‘hegemonic categorizations and institutions of war’ (Loyd 2009: 866; see also Lutz 2004; Nixon 2011). Toal himself has recently acknowledged as much, in calling, cautiously, for a more ‘localized geopolitics’ grounded in regional research, such as the work he has conducted over the last decade in the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus (Ó Tuathail 2010; Toal and Dahlman 2011). While this is not the only route to a reconfigured critical geopolitics, it is undoubtedly the case that ‘Bosnia’, as it appears in Toal’s current scholarship, is treated quite differently than the ‘El Salvador’ of his 1986 paper. At least some of this distinction is attributable to a sharpened understanding of militarization’s significance and consequences.

The historical entanglements of geopolitics and militarism As a field preoccupied with the present, critical geopolitics has rarely strayed beyond the final years of the Cold War; the subsequent decade, often associated with accelerated globalization and proliferating ‘threats’; and, since 2001, a seemingly endless and omnipresent ‘war on terror’. But the role of critical geopolitics as both a challenge and an alternative to other forms of geopolitical reasoning has resulted in occasional forays into the more distant past. As they reach backward, most of these studies halt near the end of the nineteenth century, the moment when a form of explanation labelled ‘geopolitics’ was named and defined amidst the jostling nation-states of Europe. As Gerard Toal notes on the very first page of The Geopolitics Reader, ‘the word ‘geopolitics’ had a twentieth century history that was intimately connected with the belligerent dramas of that century’ (Ó Tuathail 2006: 1). This claim prompts two questions. First, what has critical geopolitics, established precisely as a critique of those connections, told us about them, and what has it yet to tell us? Second, with the prominence of names such as Ratzel, Kjellén, and Mackinder – all ‘wise men’ familiar to students of geopolitics and its histories – is critical geopolitics so twinned to its classical foe that it cannot help us understand the world before the late nineteenth century? For students of militarization, these are crucial queries. The recent proliferation of scholarship on geographies of violence influenced by the subversive writing and lectures of Michel Foucault is all the more striking given that his rich inquiries 249

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics into biopolitics, governmentality, and strategy were rarely concerned with the twentieth century (see e.g. Foucault 2003). This is not a damning disjuncture, but it should prompt us to seek work that does not arbitrarily constrain the historical geography of militarization. According to Julian Reid, for Foucault war was ‘the problem of political modernity par excellence’ (2006: 127). John Agnew has claimed that the ‘modern geopolitical imagination’, a particular way of framing world politics (with an emphasis on the global nature of this vision), is traceable to sixteenth-century Europe (1998). Within this world-as-picture were emerging nation-states, understood as both the containers of ‘society’ and the natural bases for political action beyond state boundaries. In a predestined struggle for dominance and hegemony, various spatial hierarchies were produced, dividing the world into configurations of ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’. While Agnew’s explanation is schematic, it still alludes usefully to the ‘generation of discourses that have sought to explain and justify state militarism, territorial expansion, overseas imperialism and warfare’ (Ó Tuathail 1998: 22). These acts are obviously not limited to the recent past. Indeed, the intellectual success of geopolitics, as it was officially defined in the early moments of the twentieth century, was premised on the combination of such older discourses with both new military configurations and geography’s recent solidification as a scientific university discipline (Hudson 1977; Stoddart 1992; Cowen and Smith 2009). In this light, it is particularly interesting that Toal’s Critical Geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996), a book preoccupied with the dismantling of twentieth-century geopolitical discourse, begins in a very different time, and arguably in a more material register. It is there, in a discussion of the sixteenth-century English colonization of Ireland, that Toal comes closest to showing precisely how a form of geographic understanding was violently imposed over space – but also how it was contested, hundreds of years before the modern geopolitical imagination seemed to fray amidst the ‘de-territorializing’ forces of Toal’s own era (see also Ó Tuathail 1998: 23). In Ireland and other colonial contexts, this imposition was frequently, if never completely, a matter of war, carried out by various armed groups provided sanction and support from monarchs and governments (and it might be noted that the word ‘military’, in English, dates to the sixteenth century). While relatively brief, then, Toal’s treatment of colonial violence – related closely to cartography, surveying and territorial management conducted for or by armies – is very pointedly linked to his subsequent discussions of geopolitics. Rather than castigate critical geopolitics for a twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury bias, it is more helpful to align Toal’s intriguing use of colonial Ireland with the substantial literature on the historical geographies of colonialism, particularly that which directly addresses ‘the geography of violence’ (Blomley 2003; see also Driver 2001; Harris 2004; Nally 2011). Similarly, we might draw parallels between the long genealogy of militarism implied within the premises of critical geopolitics and the focus, in a wide range of post-colonial scholarship, on ‘strategies of cultural projection, incorporation, debasement and erasure … the discursive (or epistemic) violence of colonialism’ (Clayton 2003: 356). An alternate and equally fruitful line of inquiry would blend detailed attention to military geographies with Stuart 250

Militarization Elden’s ambitious research into the history of territory as a ‘political technology’ (Elden 2007; 2010). Even as the benefits of casting back to older histories of militarization should be apparent, it is still the case that the ‘industrial militarism’ of the last 200 years has ‘dramatically altered the conduct of warfare’ (Tyner 2010: xvii), with extraordinarily destructive consequences for human societies (and much else) far beyond ever more ambiguous battlefields. The geopolitical writers of the early twentieth century were products and self-defined prophets of this period, and the entanglements of geopolitics and militarization are certainly present in key accounts such as Toal’s Critical Geopolitics. These connections are most apparent in Toal’s chapter on American geopolitical discourse during the Second World War, which has since been complemented and expanded by several historical geographers who also share an interest in geopolitics. As a result, a reasonably clear and detailed understanding of geographical knowledge produced in the USA for that global conflict, along with parts of the subsequent Cold War, is now in place (Barnes 2006; 2008; Barnes and Crampton 2011; Cloud 2002; Farish 2010; Sharp 2000a). Collectively, this scholarship is characterized by a determination to push past the earlier, narrow focus on intellectuals of statecraft and the narrow approach to those individuals. Even in the form of biography, this double goal is realized in both Neil Smith’s comprehensive study of Isaiah Bowman (2004) and the more recent profile of Halford Mackinder by Gerard Kearns (2009). Both books are concerned with the making and maintenance of empires (American and British, respectively), but they play close attention to the military dimensions of imperialism, and both gesture intriguingly to more recent episodes of militarization and empire-building. That said, after over two decades critical geopolitics still faces a rather poorly populated historical map. Concerted efforts have been made to stretch beyond Anglo-American contexts (Hepple 1992; Dodds and Atkinson 2000) and to address finer geopolitical scales and various forms of militarization (Pinkerton, Young and Dodds 2011; Farish 2010; Krupar 2007), but even some of the twentieth century’s ‘belligerent dramas,’ such as the Vietnam War, remain woefully underserved (but see Barkawi 2004; Gregory 2011b). A similar paucity of historical scholarship exists with respect to the production of geopolitical discourses inside military institutions and affiliated think tanks (but see Morrissey 2011a). Thankfully, future exponents of critical geopolitics will be able to draw from a rapidly expanding library on the geographies of militarization – from the enormous shelf of studies concerned with the ‘war on terror’ (see below) and detailed historical investigations of the US military–industrial complex (Loyd 2011; Vitale 2011) to careful explorations of placebased ‘militaristic cultural hegemony’ and the banal geographies of militarization (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009a; 2010). But there remain many other military histories, and many histories of militarization, that call for geopolitical analysis.

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The wars of critical geopolitics The initial attempts to define critical geopolitics, while unquestionably proximate to episodes of military violence, were not concerned with the particularities of militarization. Instead, the authors of these studies chose scales, sources, texts and theories that matched terms such as ‘foreign policy’, ‘expansionism’, ‘statecraft’ and ‘strategy’. These terms have violent connotations, to be sure, but there was little initial effort to pursue the intimate connections between militaries and the production of geopolitical knowledge, even as a parallel route had been sketched in the 1970s and 1980s by radical geographers such as Yves Lacoste (1973; see also Ó Tuathail 1996: ch. 5). This road was slowly widening in the Reagan era (see Bunge 1988). In a polemic published in the same year as Gerard Toal’s article on El Salvador, Ben Wisner noted the ‘individual voices raised in protest against the misuse of geography’, especially since the election of Reagan and the intensification of nuclear danger, but he maintained that this scholarship ‘comes nowhere near the systematic rethinking of geography that is needed if its military abuses are to be widely understood and countered’ (1986: 213). While critical geopolitics has certainly contributed to this ongoing ‘rethinking’, its early interests in narratives and scripts diverged from Wisner’s concerns with structural violence, the social consequences of conflict (see also Hewitt 1983), popular struggle and ‘alternative geographies’ – although the last two were consolidated, a decade later, under the banner of anti-geopolitics.2 Still, the military overtones of Cold War geopolitics were present in an important early essay by Simon Dalby (1990). And in the early days of 1991, political geographers were provided with the opportunity to examine a dramatic military engagement. The brief and yet consequential First Gulf War has been sadly eclipsed and almost forgotten within the nation-states whose leaders opted to join the US-dominated Operation Desert Storm. But it sparked a significant volume of academic commentary and analysis, work driven mainly by the technological facets of the conflict. As the ‘first full scale GIS war’, it ‘put geography on the public agenda in a quite palpable if impalatable way’ (Smith 1992: 257). Much of this geography, Klaus Dodds wrote, was presented to news-network viewers in the form of a ‘remarkably sanitised and controlled televisual spectacle’, staged with the aid of authoritative ‘armchair strategists’. Moreover, the ‘Western Alliance’ drew on Second World War tropes of a ‘good war’ fought against a villainous invader of a nearby nation, a script whose success reflected the particular purchase of simplistic military geographies (Dodds 1993: 72–3; see also Ó Tuathail 1993; Sidaway 1998).3

2 3

Paul Routledge, who did much to define the term, stated that the concept of antigeopolitics drew on the Hungarian novelist György Konrád’s 1984 essay Antipolitics, a call to escape the violent binary of Cold War rivalry (2003; see also Koopman 2011). In a series of publications, Dodds was also training a similarly critical, retrospective geopolitical eye on British representations of 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War (see e.g. Dodds 1993b). 252

Militarization Fitting the first Gulf War into a discussion of discourse was thus not difficult, but the conflict, which left tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians dead, also presented practitioners of critical geopolitics with vivid scenes of devastating, disproportionate violence. The representational prominence of US military masculinities and other gendered aspects of the war also inspired pointed responses from feminist scholars (for a prominent example, see Enloe 1993). It is not surprising that this writing soon migrated into political geography, where it merged with concurrent feminist critiques of geographical knowledge to form a feminist geopolitics that was clearly related to but not encompassed by its ‘critical’ counterpart (see Dalby 1994; Sharp 1998; Sparke 1994). The imperative of feminist geopolitics, according to Joanne Sharp, was a demand that political geographers ‘examine the power relationships woven through everyday life, and to challenge boundaries wherever encountered’ (Sharp 2003: 60; see also Hyndman 2001). The consequences of this call were multiple and significant. For one, feminist geopolitics reconfigured the terrain for analysis of processes such as militarization, portraying it in ‘more embodied and impassioned’ terms (Sharp 2003: 71). The casualties of military actions became more visceral and tangible, and sexual violence and exploitation were no longer ‘rendered invisible or incidental’ in studies of war – or, for that matter, in the legal conventions which frame the spaces of war (Hyndman 2004: 319; 2007; 2010). As Jennifer Fluri’s recent work on ‘violence from below’ in NATO-occupied Afghanistan suggests, a feminist approach can concurrently shift, make more numerous and draw together the scales of investigation in political geography (2009). Finally, feminist geopolitics has broadened and sharpened definitions of security and violence (Hyndman 2004). It is now possible to strive for an ‘emotional geopolitics’ which will ground sweeping political narratives of ‘fear’ and ‘panic’ (Pain 2009; Gregory and Pred 2007) or to interrogate the historical militarization of an ‘inner’, psycho-social landscape (Farish 2007; Orr 2004). Geopolitical knowledge is made by and within military agencies, but because militaries have never been isolated entities, the traffic between nodes of critical geographical scholarship on militarization is busy and complicated. As I write this paragraph, the film Captain America: The First Avenger has just completed a weekend atop the US box office, with some $65 million in ‘domestic gross’. Along with the original comic book – which debuted in 1941, before the USA entered the war, and thus served as an important vehicle for the consolidation of patriotic national identity – the film portrays the transformation, by experimental serum, of Steve Rodgers into a Second World War ‘super-soldier’. In a series of publications on Captain America and other superheroes, Jason Dittmer has convincingly linked such cultural artefacts to American exceptionalism and its ‘rescaling’ into the imaginations of individual readers, but he has also troubled a strictly textual interpretation of comic culture by calling for further attention to the intricate production and consumption of ‘popular geopolitics’ (for examples, see Dittmer 2005; 2007). Dittmer’s work on Captain America stands as an inquiry into the relationship between popular culture and the creation and maintenance of hegemonic territorial 253

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics identities. This was a relationship, to be sure, at the centre of some early work in critical geopolitics, such as Joanne Sharp’s discussions of Reader’s Digest (collected in Sharp 2000a). As with Sharp’s treatment of the paradigmatically middlebrow periodical, the subsequent embrace of visual culture by political geographers, while certainly indebted to early work in critical geopolitics that identified and destabilized ‘panoramic’ visions of political space (Ó Tuathail 1996: 12), was marked by a determination to incorporate other forms and sources of geopolitical vision (see Sharp 2000b). These ranged from military and televisual simulations, which offer a much more immersive viewing experience, to documentary photography and photojournalism (Campbell 2007), to the pointed and dissident news cartoons of illustrators such as The Guardian’s Steve Bell (Dodds 1998; Hughes 2007). Not surprisingly, some authors have begun to interrogate the relationships between popular culture and militaries in certain films and video games more directly (for examples, see Dodds 2008; Power 2007). The best of the literature on popular geopolitics does not just introduce more ‘subjects, events, sites and forms of geopolitical agency’ (Hughes 2007: 989), although such introductions are welcome. In addition, this scholarship reconfigures the very temperament of geopolitical critique (see MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010). While critical geopolitics has made much of the detached and commanding nature of geo-strategic perspectives, to look upon the world is an active gesture. Thus the experience of watching a missile test is as much of a geopolitical act as the creation or diagnosis of a strategic map (MacDonald 2006). As this example suggests, at least some of the conceptual implements brought to, say, a cuttingedge digital ‘first-person shooter’ game – with its paradoxical combination of dazzling interactivity and narrow, endless antagonism (Power 2007) – might also be turned to older or less spectacular cases (Hughes 2007). For instance, Fraser MacDonald has shown how the drama of Cold War rocketry was introduced and perpetuated through popular media and mundane objects such as toys – a literal domestication of the atom (2008). Critical geopolitics has thus now reached the ‘incipient militarization of everyday life’ (MacDonald 2007: 602; Bernazzoli and Flint 2010) – and not just its contemporary manifestations.

The power of the Pentagon On 16 September 2001, five days after al-Qaeda terrorists had launched devastating suicide attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, American President George W. Bush announced that ‘this crusade – this war on terrorism – is going to take a while’ (quoted in Bazinet 2001). On the same day, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed in a television interview that ‘the people we’re dealing with have no armies or navies or air forces or battle ships or carriers or capital cities, even, or high-value targets. … It is a very different kind of war’ (quoted in Bazinet 2001). The first comment – with its overtones of religious violence, its awkward naming of an ambiguous and universal conflict 254

Militarization and its suggestion of an indefinite duration to this conflict – quickly became hugely significant. But Rumsfeld’s ‘new war’ diagnosis (see Kaldor 2006) is more directly related to the extraordinary proliferation of geographical scholarship on militarization over the last decade. While some of the early preoccupations of critical geopolitics are certainly present in this recent work, the many elements of ‘the long war’, ‘the forever war’, ‘late modern war’, ‘liberal war’ – or, put spatially, ‘the everywhere war’ (Gregory 2011a) – have also encouraged more expansive conceptual and empirical inquiries. It is exceedingly difficult – indeed, pointless – to mark a unique location for critical geopolitics in the evaluation of the contemporary world (for a useful overview, see Ingram and Dodds 2009). Many of the early concerns of critical geopolitics, expanded and enriched substantially by several generations of students and interlocutors, can be found in recent geographical scholarship on the ‘colonial present’ (Gregory 2004); ‘urban geopolitics’ and ‘military urbanism’ (Graham 2004; 2010; Gregory 2010a); the global (and local) proliferation of militarized landscapes (Paglen 2010; Woodward 2004); the political economy of militarization and security (Cowen and Smith 2009); the territorial configurations of the ‘war on terror’, including various ‘spaces of exception’ (Elden 2009); the affective and subjective dimensions of both military operations overseas and programs designed to secure ‘the homeland’ (Anderson 2010; Cowen and Gilbert 2007); and the deployment of new technological practices (Amoore 2009; Gregory 2010b; 2011a; for a precedent, see Ek 2000). This is a partial list of themes and references, and it will certainly be enhanced by additional scholarship – including historical investigations decades hence. What unites much, if not all of this research is a stress on the USA, and more specifically on the US Department of Defense. Of course, the scope of geographical inquiries into militarization should be expanded – to China, for instance, or, for that matter, to the ongoing multinational contestation of regions such as the Arctic. But this acknowledgment must be balanced against certain profound disparities. Given that the USA accounts for roughly half of the world’s total military spending (closing in on a trillion dollars per year), employs an uncountable number of geographical analysts who have access to extraordinary technologies, and is currently conducting or aiding military operations in numerous environments around the globe, an emphasis on the Pentagon in contemporary critical geography is entirely understandable. As the historian Michael Sherry has written, war and national security are ‘consuming anxieties’ in the USA, and have long provided the ‘memories, models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life’ (1995: xi). The various attempts at various scales to muster public support for a ‘war on terror’ have also affirmed the durability of certain features of militarization, from gendered stereotypes (Hyndman 2003) to the twentieth-century roots of an ‘American way of bombing’, with its predilection for casual killing and disengagement (Gregory 2011b). More broadly, the contemporary USA seems locked in a state of perpetual war that is rarely acknowledged and even more infrequently granted its full historical and geographical genealogy (Gregory 2010b; Kohn 2009). 255

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics There are many ways to interrogate this troubling condition: one promising sign-post is that provided by political theorists who are considering the relationship between liberalism and war (for the central account, see Dillon and Reid 2009). Even as these inquiries are fixated on a recent ‘age of biohumanity’ (Dillon and Reid 2009), ‘liberal war’, featuring a preoccupation with peace achieved through violence, is certainly not novel. The ‘protection and advancement’ of certain ‘modes of existence has always been the principal object for liberal political strategies’, which have merely shifted to accommodate more complex forms of life (Evans 2011: 748). It seems both sensible and distressing to suggest that the spatial nuances of such ‘liberal wars’ – set on a global stage, directed at subduing ‘others’, conducted ideally from a distance, waged though depoliticizing mechanisms of law and humanitarianism, and driven by robust invocations of ‘emergency’ and ‘security’ – will prove intriguing for future proponents of critical geopolitics (Evans 2011; see also Morrissey 2011b). This framework calls for empirical specificity, but it is also situated on an appealingly broad historical and geographical horizon.

Conclusion: Impediments in the path The changed role and continued significance of critical geopolitics in the study of militarization are both evident in a recent collection of essays on the geographies of reconstruction. As Scott Kirsch and Colin Flint suggest in their introduction, blurring the entrenched categories of ‘war’ and ‘peace’ requires more than the ‘focus on text and narrative’ that was characteristic of critical geopolitics in its early years. Understanding reconstruction – ‘the rebuilding of state, economy, culture and society in the wake of war’ – demands ‘the study of practices in real-world settings in conjunction with the deconstruction of geopolitical narratives’ (Kirsch and Flint 2011: 3–5). Kirsch and Flint go on to note that ‘it is wrong to think of any moment when politics was not connected to the violence of territorial control’ (2011: 17). What have changed, over time and space, are the ‘mechanisms by – and extent to which – this occurs’ (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009b: 450). As I noted above, this persistence of violence and the popular habit of separating military from civilian social spheres are enough for some to set aside a word like ‘militarization’ in favour of ‘securitization’. This is an understandable choice in an era of powerful appeals to security – to a political subject who lives ‘freely through contingent threats to insecurities around its existence’ and is thus necessarily made to be resilient (Evans 2011: 753). Such ‘threats’ and the permissible and expected responses to these threats are not all military in the conventional sense: perhaps very few of them actually are. It is certainly crucial to locate militaries within larger processes, so that the increasing role of private corporations alongside and within state militaries, for instance, is acknowledged and investigated (see Cowen and Smith 2009). But the embrace of a ‘broader range of actors and arenas’ (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009b: 450) under the banner of ‘securitization’ also carries a risk that echoes the limited 256

Militarization treatment of militaries and militarization in the literature on critical geopolitics to date. Let us assume that future work in critical geopolitics will not treat militaries as artificially independent or grant militarization an imagined ‘time zero’ (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009b). Let us also assume that this research will not artificially separate moments and spaces of ‘war’ from those of ‘peace’ or ignore the potential of geographies that offer alternatives to militarization (see Flint 2005; Gregory 2010b; Koopman 2011; Megoran 2011). If these conditions are met, then it can be argued that an institution as significant, prolific and multifaceted as the US Department of Defense demands even more focused attention. The expansion of critical geographical scholarship on militarization and the concurrent, related reconfiguration of critical geopolitics over the last decade are both causes for optimism in this regard. Faced with a process ‘that has reshaped almost every element of global social life’, this may well be a limited hope. But if the ultimate responsibility of critical scholars of militarization, according to Catherine Lutz, is ‘to put some impediment in its deadly path’ (2002: 723), understanding that path seems key to the production and placing of impediments.

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Militarization MacDonald, F., 2006. ‘Geopolitics and “the vision thing”: Regarding Britain and America’s first nuclear missile’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31: 53–71. —— 2007. ‘Anti-astropolitik: Outer space and the orbit of geography’. Progress in Human Geography 31: 592–615. —— 2008. ‘Space and the atom: On the popular geopolitics of Cold War rocketry’. Geopolitics 13: 611–34. —— R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), (2010). Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Megoran, N., 2011. ‘War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography’. Political Geography 30: 178–89. Morrissey, J., 2011a. ‘Architects of empire: The military–strategic studies complex and the scripting of US national security’. Antipode 43: 435–470. —— 2011b. ‘Liberal lawfare and biopolitics: US juridical warfare in the war on terror’. Geopolitics 16: 280–305. Nally, D.P., 2011. Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Nixon, R., 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orr, J., 2004. ‘The militarization of inner space’. Critical Sociology 30: 451–81. Ó Tuathail, G., 1986. ‘The language and nature of the “new geopolitics”: The case of US–El Salvador relations’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: 73–85. —— 1993. ‘The effacement of place? US foreign policy and the spatiality of the Gulf crisis’. Antipode 25: 4–31. —— 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. —— 1998. ‘Postmodern geopolitics? The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 16–38. —— 2006. ‘General introduction: Thinking critically about geopolitics’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, 2nd edn, pp. 1–14. —— 2010. ‘Localizing geopolitics: Disaggregating violence and return in conflict regions’. Political Geography 29: 256–65. —— and J.A. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’. Political Geography 11: 190–204. Pain, R., 2009. ‘Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics’. Progress in Human Geography 33: 466–86. Paglen, T., 2010. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New York: New American Library. Pinkerton, A., S. Young and K. Dodds, 2011. ‘Postcards from heaven: Critical geographies of the Cold War military–industrial–academic complex’. Antipode 43: 820–44. Power, M., 2007. ‘Digitized virtuosity: Video war games and post-9/11 cyberdeterrence’. Security Dialogue 38: 271–88. 261

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Reid, J., 2006. ‘Life struggles: War, discipline and biopolitics in the thought of Michel Foucault’. Social Text 24(1): 127–52. Routledge, P., 2003. ‘Anti-geopolitics’. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 236–48. Sharp, J., 1998. ‘Reel geographies of the new world order: Patriotism, masculinity, and geopolitics in post-Cold War American movies’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 152–69. —— 2000a. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 2000b. ‘Remasculinising geo-politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’. Political Geography 19: 361–4. —— 2003. ‘Feminist and postcolonial engagements’. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 59–74. Sherry, M., 1995. In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sidaway, J.D., 1998. ‘What is in a gulf? From the “arc of crisis” to the Gulf War’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge, pp. 224–39. Smith, N., 1992. ‘History and philosophy of geography: Real wars, theory wars’. Progress in Human Geography 16: 257–71. —— 2004. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sparke, M., 1994. ‘Writing on patriarchal missiles: The chauvinism of the “Gulf War” and the limits of critique’. Environment and Planning A 26: 1061–89. Stoddart, D.R., 1992. ‘Geography and war: The “new geography” and the “new army” in England, 1899–1914’. Political Geography 11: 87–99. Toal, G., and C.T. Dahlman, 2011. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyner, J., 2010. Military Legacies: A World made by War. New York, Routledge. Vitale, P., 2011. ‘Wages of war: Manufacturing nationalism during World War II’. Antipode 43: 783–819. Westad, O.A., 2005. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wisner, B., 1986. ‘Geography: War or peace studies?’ Antipode 18: 212–17. Woodward, R., 2004. Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell. —— 2005. ‘From military geography to militarism’s geographies: Disciplinary engagements with the geographies of militarism and military activities’. Progress in Human Geography 29: 718–40.

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14

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Media Paul C. Adams

One of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century shows a Vietnamese girl, naked and crying, fleeing from a napalm attack (Figure 14.1). The photograph had a historic role helping to ‘mark out’ the Vietnam War as a source of national shame (MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010b: 11) and a journalist has called it ‘one of the key images of the Vietnam War, creating such shock and revulsion that it was widely credited with hastening the American withdrawal from South-east Asia’ (Preston 2007; see also Chong 2000). President Nixon suspected that the picture had been ‘fixed’ (Collins 2002), indicating the potent yet contestable truth-claim of the photographic medium as well as the adversarial relationship that emerged during this war between journalists and policy-makers as ‘the tensions held within the conjunction of democratic and imperial impulses in the American worldview began to visually erupt’ (Kennedy 2008: 282). We will be considering many media in this chapter with regard to their critical geopolitical implications, outlining an approach inspired by actor-network theory but sensitive to subjectivation and affect. As we will see, the elements of sociotechnical context include infrastructure, audiences and participants, rhythms and temporality, sensory modes, regulation and control, and networks of production and distribution. There is a reason to put a fine point on our understanding of the photograph before considering these more general issues. Any medium is a unique form of expression, ‘saying’ things that could not be said in any other medium, so this pause serves to indicate the way a medium itself needs to be considered aside from the geopolitical implications of that medium’s texts. A photograph speaks to themes that are universal – for example human conflict, loss and pain – but does so within a unique socio-technical context. The emotional, intellectual and social potential of the photograph is different than that of any possible essay, film, painting, musical performance or newspaper article. Each communication medium likewise offers unique affordances in regard to both representation and the circulation of affect, and it enters into particular performative constellations involving those who routinely or opportunistically, officially or unofficially provide critiques, commentaries, captions and responses (Kress 2003; Ryan 2003). We must take pains to emphasize that ‘a medium’ is not merely a technology or set of technologies. Each medium can be seen as

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Figure 14.1 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc by AP photographer Nick Út (8 June 1972). The girl had torn off her clothes, which were covered with burning napalm, and was fleeing the town of Trảng Bàng, flanked by family members, relatives and photographers (Nick Út / AP) a heterogeneous network including particular representational and perceptual practices, technological devices, infrastructural systems, financial arrangements and social institutions. This is why we must avoid sweeping generalizations about ‘the media’. There are differences between media that make nearly any generalization misleading. At the same time we must take care not to assume there are impermeable boundaries between media. Considering the photograph, neither its technologies nor its uses nor its audiences are entirely separate from the technologies, uses and audiences of other media like the book, the film, the music recording or the website. Thus, the actor-networks of a medium are interlinked with but distinct from the actor-networks of other media, and both links and disjunctures have geopolitical implications. So what is it about photography that makes it geopolitically distinctive? What is the photograph’s peculiar claim to authenticity, and how is that different from a form of representation that cannot be accused of being, in Nixon’s term, ‘fixed’? How does a photograph ‘move’ us in a visceral, embodied way to feel the shiver of 264

Media skin exposed to air, the dirt road under bare feet, the bite of napalm, the obscenity of war? How can a photograph form the nucleus of a social memory, stake out a moment in history, even change the course of history? How does a photograph assemble an ephemeral social gathering based around particular sensory, emotional, intellectual and political responses to a given image? How does a photograph mobilize and rework particular ways of sensing, thinking and feeling? Only a few answers can be offered here (for many more see MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010a; Rose 2001; Ryan 2000). We can note first off that as a physical trace of light captured at a particular moment in time, a photograph does not just stand for what it seems to show, it stands in for reality as a kind of miniature and, thereby, offers ‘a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge’ (Sontag 1973: 4). This vicarious insertion into place moves a viewer to shudder, laugh, scowl, smile, sigh, turn away or gaze in breathless fascination. A photograph activates memories of the past, but these are selective visions, challenging or affirming certain power relations (Ryan 2000). Embodied, affective, memory-laden modes of response can make photographs powerful tools for progressive politics. Photographs can also be politically regressive since the image’s apparent naturalness disguises the selectivity of the photographer’s gaze (Campbell 2007). In the networks that make up photography, we must include an amoral interest in meeting a standard of visual appeal shared by a network of photographers, editors, printers, publishers and photo viewers. Strategic inclusions and exclusions aestheticize even the grimmest, most horrifying aspects of life. This aesthetic imperative raises ethical concerns – it can exhaust and numb viewers’ righteous indignation, shame, guilt or other moral sensibilities – but it can also expand the sphere of sympathy, permitting moral concerns to jump scale and draw in previously uninterested bystanders (Adams 1996). If a particular photograph is seen as political, that is often because it has been positioned as political by a network of actors, including photographers, publishers, printers and audiences. The fact that a particular photograph is not seen as comic, romantic, nostalgic (or, as this example shows, pornographic) is a provisional status achieved by a temporary constellation of actors. The ‘political photograph’ is a way of seeing established in diverse, unequal power relations of race, age, gender and colonial power, and, like any image, it is inevitably drawn into these ways of seeing (Berger 1972). A network of relations invests a photo with social significance, staking out a role for the image that is always undergoing change, unlike the image itself which seems to ‘capture’ and ‘freeze’ an instant in time. Therefore the political photograph, whether progressive or reactionary, has other potentials – voyeuristic, objectifying, ironic, ridiculous, pretty, seductive. Even the most shocking images suffer an erosion whereby they become familiar, banal and politically impotent over time but old photos can also take on new political relevance if they are enrolled in new networks (Ryan 2000: 123; Sontag 1973: 21). In the case of Figure 14.1, something should be said of the fact that the subject was female, nude, vulnerable, emoting and surrounded by men. Clearly most audiences did not read this photo as ‘a nude’ in the conventional sense (Berger 1972), yet an intertextual relationship exists with the phantoms of other exposed, posed, imaged, circulated 265

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics and observed female bodies and a constellation of voyeurism, patriarchy, social and sexual domination. But we cannot rush to dismiss the photo on this account: these phantoms do not contaminate the photo; they circulated through the network along with the photo and helped expose the obscenity of the Vietnam War. Following photographic actor-networks leads us along complex and shifting paths (Ryan 2000; 2006). The photographs from Abu Ghraib revealed not only bodies and practices of torture, but photography itself as a form of trophy-hunting. The Abu Ghraib pictures would not exist if soldiers had not enrolled cameras along with leashes, handcuffs, batons and ropes into networks whose purpose was producing abjection and humiliation (Butler 2010). Eventually journalistic exposés and legal investigations changed the photographic actor-networks of Abu Ghraib by enrolling new audiences, jumping scale, exposing soldier–photographers to critique and catalyzing public responses within and outside the USA. Terms like ‘language’, ‘script’, ‘discourse’, ‘text’, ‘metaphor’, ‘frame’, ‘storyline’ and ‘symbol’ have been central to critical geopolitics from the outset but their focus on communication content arbitrarily truncates communication. We can expand geopolitical critique by addressing not just media content but also the various socio-technical contexts of communication – the particular space–times and sensory modes of mediated encounter, as well as the corresponding audiences and participants and the social institutions enacting regulation, administration and control, production and distribution. A bit more of what this entails is suggested in the following discussion.

Foundations Beginning with Lacoste’s initial re-engagement with géopolitique, media have been central theoretical concerns for critical geopolitics (Dijkink 1996; Dodds 2000; Ó Tuathail 1996a: 160–68; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992; Sharp 2000a). Contributions have drawn from a wide range of media, albeit in a somewhat piecemeal way. The majority of efforts foreground the word, including speeches and press-releases (Ciută and Klinke 2010; Flint et al. 2009; Gregory 2010), periodicals of many sorts (Atkinson 2000; Ciută and Klinke 2010; Claval 2000; Coleman 2003; Hepple 2000; Sharp 2000a; 2000b; 2003), as well as novels, diaries and newspapers (Adams 2004; 2007; Dittmer 2008; Falah, Flint and Mamadouh 2006; Kirby 2000; Kuus 2008; Ó Tuathail 1996b; Ryan 2006; Strüver 2008; Taylor and Jasparo 2003). Another significant body of work engages the geopolitics of audio-visual media such as television and film (Adams 2007; Christophers 2009; Dixon and Zonn 2004; 2005; Dodds 2003; 2005; Gertz and Khleifi 2005; Ó Tuathail 2005; Philpott and Mutimer 2005; Pinkerton 2008; Power and Crampton 2005; Scharf 2005; Shapiro 2005). For reasons of both self-interrogation and critical analysis, a third major focus of critical geopolitics research has dealt with cartography (Boria 2008; Cairo 2006; Herb 1989; Herb et al. 2009; Strandsbjerg 2008; Zeigler 2002). Somewhat fewer studies have considered non-cartographic modes of visuality, looking for example 266

Media at photography and postage stamps (Butler 2010; Campbell 2007; Kennedy 2008; Raento 2006; Raento and Brunn 2008; Ryan 2000; Williams 2010; Woodward, Winter and Jenkings 2010). Closely associated with the work on visual and verbal representation is a group of writings about comics and cartoons (Dittmer 2005; 2007; 2010; Dodds 1996; Falah, Flint and Mamadouh 2006; Ridanpää 2009). Finally, a smattering of studies has addressed the geopolitics of internet communications and computer games (Adams 2007; Hughes 2010; Mamadouh 2003; Purcell 2005; Purcell and Kodras 2001). What we might call geopolitics of the eye, broadly defined, has attracted far more attention than the geopolitics of the ear or other senses (though see Boulton 2008; Pinkerton and Dodds 2009). One of the most universally accepted heuristics in critical geopolitics is a distinction between formal, practical and popular geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996a). To give examples, a think tank offers scripts for formal geopolitics, a government press-release updates audiences on practical geopolitics and adventure movies stoke the flames of popular geopolitics. The habit of ordering these geopolitical types with popular geopolitics following the others may suggest that it is subordinate or predetermined. It merits noting that formal geopolitics often elaborates and systematizes the biases and exclusions employed in popular geopolitics, and practical geopolitics often ‘wags the dog’ by catering to popular geopolitical passions. Popular geopolitics can also tenaciously adopt different logics than formal and practical geopolitics (Ciută and Klinke 2010: 325). It is therefore more useful to consider the three types of geopolitics as complementary and entangled (MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010b: 13). The nightly television news, for example, weaves together government statements, the opinions of pundits and phrases and images chosen for entertainment value, hybridizing formal, practical and popular geopolitics so as to please sponsors, audiences and political authorities (Herman and Chomsky 1988). It is essential to work away from using ‘the media’ as an updated synonym for mass media (for examples, see Dalby 2003; Jones and Clarke 2006; Strüver, 2008; Taylor and Jasparo 2003). Theater, websites and popular songs slip out of the edges of our viewfinder if we do this, along with diaries, photo albums, graffiti and Twitter, not to mention our own, scholarly communications. Referring to ‘the media’ as a singular rather than a plural noun neatly airlifts scholars out of discursive battles and enables a comfortable iconoclasm (Ryan 2003: 234). A deeper critique recognizes that the actor-networks of film, television, newspapers and radio are entangled with those of policy-making, political science, geography and other academic specialties. In short, critical geopolitical scholarship could benefit from attention to the particularities of media as socio-technical contexts and recognition that media are not just out there but in here. The first step in this direction is shifting from ‘media is’ to ‘media are’.

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From ‘media is’ to ‘media are’ A particular example – a photograph – was presented at the outset in order to resist the common tendency to collapse ‘the media’ from a network to an object. If we pick a similar medium, like film or painting, or a radically different one, like the novel or television news story, carefully following connections shows different sociotechnical ingredients arranged in different ways. The translations between media are multiple, complex and elusive, involving diverse processes, flows, mechanisms and actors. This complicates any attempt to pin a particular geopolitical discourse onto a particular medium. For example, although the burning towers of 11 September 2001 were seen on television, in magazines and newspapers, the event was aptly described as ‘cinematic’ insofar as ‘the space for it had already been prepared’ by film (Žižek 2002: 15). Hollywood had established a way of seeing and responding, a suspension of belief in response to special effects, that was oddly and discomfortingly activated by the burning and collapsing towers. People had to un-suspend belief and remind themselves that they were not at the movies: this was real. Observers were drawn into a habitual intensity of aesthetic pleasure that had to deny its own existence and transform into something else: in this case xenophobic hatred and nationalistic fervor mobilized by cinematic stunts like President Bush’s appearance on the deck of an aircraft carrier (Ó Tuathail 2003). But while the response to ‘9/11’ was broadly cinematic it enrolled many different media, including country music which helped turn a date into a somatic marker (Ó Tuathail 2003: 858). Finally, critical geopolitics of the media cannot stop with critique. For example, awareness of the power relations of scopic regimes should not dissuade us from thinking about ‘how geography ought to be visual’ (Ryan 2003: 236). This raises the point that scholars need not always make their arguments in writing (Butler 2010: 47). Critique must inspire creativity, as well as further critique. Geographers cannot escape media so they might as well embrace them. Geographical discourse inhabits media so in any case critique must branch out, innovate and appropriate bits of existing media actor-networks. With these ideas in mind we can turn to consider the elements of socio-technical context that compose, define and distinguish particular media.

Elements of socio-technical context Figure 14.2 shows communication content (the normal subject of geopolitical research) in relation to geopolitical context (the normal domain of geopolitical research) with the addition of an intervening ring of socio-technical factors. It is these contextual elements we need to recognize, as indicated by the term ‘medium’. What the diagram illustrates is that media can be understood in terms of an intermediate context between the geopolitical context with its spatial, economic and political elements, on the one hand, and communication content with its 268

Media

Figure 14.2 The conceptual relationship between communication content and geopolitical context, with mediation shown as an intermediate ring (author)



representational and performative aspects, on the other hand. In short, media are what lie in the unexplored in-between. Drawing attention to their existence is only the first step, and more effective (geo)political engagement should be facilitated by redirecting our attention toward media use in a strategic way.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Infrastructure Communication hardware and infrastructure are sometimes reductively referred to as ‘the media’, particularly in connection with claims that new media change society. It is important to understand that ‘the social’ is hybrid (Latour 1993; 2005) and political transformations take place within a larger socio-technical universe. The material side of media is important, nonetheless, insofar as it permits certain topologies to form – dyadic, radial or multiplex linkages (Adams 1998), and the unevenness and centralization of infrastructure shapes geopolitics. However, we must take care to recognize that media are hybrids, and their ability to act as dividing, excluding and centralizing networks emerges precisely in the ways they include humans and non-humans in heterogeneous networks. To consider one example, cyber enthusiasts have greatly overstated the political potentials of the networked computer as a technology, but online communication as a hybrid process provides alternatives to the one-way, centralized topology of ‘mass media’ (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). The internet circulates politically resistant ideas, arguments, facts and impressions within a heterogeneous collection of spaces. Dependence on digital code facilitates creativity, the blurring of lines between producers and consumers, and modes of engagement that interface multiple technologies including digital cameras, music players and cell phones (Kitchin and Dodge 2011: 125–34). The political implications of this situation remain largely unexplored within the critical geopolitics literature.

Audiences and participants Media products are not simply ingested but are actively brought into socio-technical networks by audiences. A medium’s uniqueness is therefore largely a product of its on-going re-construction as a context for social interaction (Carey 1988; Marvin 1988). A technological apparatus serves the purpose of communication only when it has been appropriated by a particular set of users who actively seek things, including what were called ‘gratifications’ in past decades (Blumler and Katz 1974) and now understood in terms of affect. ‘Audiences’, ‘consumers’ and ‘participants’ are some of the guises in which human participants seek mediated emotional gratification and engage in mediated flows of affect, in turn constituting ephemeral gatherings and fragile social formations. Ó Tuathail’s three-way distinction between formal, practical and popular geopolitics (1996a) can be revisited. If we think of an audience not as a group but as a particular mode of engagement with a technology – a social reality realized through a communication apparatus – then we can see formal geopolitics as linked to scholarly ways of ‘audiencing’, practical geopolitics to policy-oriented audiencing, and popular geopolitics to audiencing as, for and by people in the roles of ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’. Actual engagements slip between these categories since people do not belong to a single audience but perform different communicative roles. American country music is associated with hawkish foreign 270

Media policy perspectives (Boulton 2008: 375; Ó Tuathail 2003), but this is not simply a matter of country music having particular politics; rather, the audiences of country music vote for and listen to conservative politicians before and after they purchase and listen to country music, carrying expectations and subjectivities between situations. Rather than debate whether popular politics are radical or conservative, it makes more sense to follow actors across the networks linking them to different politics through distinct sets of technologies, distribution networks, temporalities, spatialities, performances and representations. When geographers refer to ‘the media’ they often mean popular media in particular: television, newspapers and mass-market magazines. Critiques of ‘the media’ slip quickly into inferences regarding the mechanistic top-down control of popular geopolitics which is at best an incomplete picture (Ciută and Klinke 2010). It makes more sense to follow particular audiences: occasional readers of the New York Times, people who read USA Today when traveling out of state, commuters who listen to National Public Radio during ‘drive time’ and so on. Specificity regarding a particular audience and its spatial and virtual positions helps redirect inquiry to the complex paths of mediated sensation and action while avoiding erroneous impressions of media as monolithic, static, and immune to interpretive creativity. Let us take comic books as an example. Comic books are mundane, taken for granted, cheap and in Billig’s terminology ‘banal’ (1995), yet they are geopolitically important, all the more so for their tendency to be ignored by everyone except their fans. Children appropriate and vicariously inhabit comic book spaces in the process of becoming adults, precisely ‘at the developmental moment when sociospatial frameworks are being formulated’ (Dittmer 2005: 628). The patriotic superhero Captain America has been shown to provide vicarious embodiment of ‘an anthropomorphized version of the American identity, uniting the scale of the body politic with the scale of the individual body’ (Dittmer 2007: 405; see also Dittmer 2005; 2010). Comic books employ a peculiar visuality which both embodies and performs national identity, and their audiences play with nonlinear temporal sequences and non-Euclidean geometries, reworking perceptual habits (Dijkink 1996; Dittmer 2007; 2010; Dodds, 1996; Falah, Flint and Mamadouh 2006). In many cases the fantasy spaces of comic books promote violence and exploitation, but they may be progressive or even radical at times. Playful representations of demonic Others can set up a kind of mimetic trap wherein our vision of ‘them’ and ‘their’ vision of ‘us’ become mutually re-enforcing, a vortex in which mutual mis-recognition of the Other leads to and sustains real-world violence (Der Derian 2010). But this is not a rule, and the comic book medium supports creative modes of reading, participating and audiencing. Like other audiences, comic book audiences are under construction, which renders them open, porous and fluid.

Rhythms and temporality Media are distinct in terms of their temporality: cycles overlay cycles, episodic and progressive patterns at different periodicities. For example, a television program 271

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics commonly appears weekly during the season when it is released, then this weekly cycle stops for several months to be replaced by re-runs. The placement of the program within the weekly TV schedule reflects and affects its popularity and the annual cycle ‘switches’ this weekly cycle on and off. In addition, a television series evolves episodically as conflicts emerge and are resolved in linear time. Cyclical and linear temporalities are thereby overlaid in a way that is distinctive to television. Some media, like the internet and live television, benefit from immediacy, while others incorporate a long or short delay between the moment of production and the moment of reception. This degree of newness is deeply political. Last week’s political commentary is already stale, but Mark Twain’s strongly political autobiography was released to great interest 100 years after his death. Twain could be more politically outspoken with a 100 year delay, while WikiLeaks and text messaging evade top-down control because of the virtual instantaneity with which digital information can be copied and transmitted. Overall, multiple media temporalities, both linear and cyclical, perform a syncopated counterpoint to ‘real world’ cycles like elections and wars. Several geopolitical studies have addressed the geopolitics of periodical publications like magazines and scholarly journals. The very term ‘periodical’ demonstrates the importance of temporality in defining their media-actor networks. Studies have examined National Geographic (Campbell and Power 2010: 188–90), Time (Campbell and Power 2010: 188–9), Reader’s Digest (Sharp 2000a; 2000b; 2003), the French journal Hérodote (Claval 2000; Hepple 2000; Ó Tuathail 1996a: 164–8) and the Italian journals Geopolitica and Limes (Antonsich 2009; Atkinson 2000). Whether popular or scholarly, the periodical emerges and fades on a regular basis. Its rhythmic quality permits the cultivation of beliefs, attitudes, assumptions and theoretical dichotomies promoting a particular geopolitical agenda. There are also temporal qualities to the text itself. Comic books, for example, employ a peculiar visual language in which simultaneity, pastiche, loops and backtracks constitute ‘plurivectorial narration’ (Dittmer 2010: 230). Nonlinear temporality can implode the taken-for-granted ‘demarcations of the domestic and the foreign’, here and there, the now and then (Dodds 1996: 589). By twisting and warping time, comics have a temporal innovativeness that spills over into the realm of the political, disrupting realist constructions of self and other, world and action. In general, media rhythms build a particular time and space with corresponding modes of subjectivation, which in turn affects the structure of national identities and geopolitical attitudes.

Sensory modes Terms for mediated experience often relate to particular senses. Instead of ‘witnesses’ and ‘observers’ (implicitly attending with their eyes) or ‘audiences’ (presumably engaged only in listening), we should perhaps speak of ‘experiencers’ or ‘feelers’ as a reminder that the entire sensorium is involved in media. Geopolitical visuality is ‘indivisible from a wider bodily sensorium’ and ‘inevitably implicated in the 272

Media world of words’ which are themselves evocative of all of the senses (MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010b: 5–6). Words can serve as ‘imperial eyes’ (Ryan 2006: 582) but also have tactile, auditory and olfactory connotations (MacDonald 2008). Rather than reducing media or audiences to particular sensory modes, we learn more, again, by following the actors through networks. Experiences like watching television and reading comic books are linked to the tactile manipulation of toy soldiers, weapons, tanks and the like (MacDonald 2008). This is a prime example of the circulation of geopolitical power through what Thrift calls ‘the little things’ (2000). Experience builds through both mediated and non-mediated means, beyond simple intertextuality (Mehta and Bondi 1999) to multisensory embodied involvement. The medium that critical geopolitics has studied the most is, not coincidentally, the map. Both internal and external to the discipline of geography, cartography is dominated by a visuality that translates the messy substance of the threedimensional, multisensory world into something flat and static. The god’s eye view, its detached illusion of knowledge, the translation of three-dimensional space-time into two-dimensions through a seemingly neutral mathematical transformation, the homogenization of objects that are inherently dissimilar, the reduction of unevenly controlled territories to uniformly rendered borderlines, and finally the inevitable selectivity that renders only a few things visible and the rest invisible, are all well-studied aspects of the geopolitical work done by maps (Boria 2008; Herb 1989; Zeigler 2002). Addressing vision more generally, Derek Gregory refuses to accept the arbitrary division between military surveillance and visual propaganda (2010). In light of geography’s special relationship to the map and to vision, surprisingly few authors have offered guidelines for creating alternative cartographies and innovative visualizations (Herb et al. 2009). Critical geopolitics would benefit from a more progressive cartographic practice exposing the spatiotemporal arrangement of power in, by and for all of the sensory modes.

Regulation, administration and control The actor-networks of each medium also include conditions affecting the broadcasting, publishing and posting of content, such as regulatory frameworks, censorship and surveillance. Communication flows are not channeled only by technology but also by attitudes and expectations regarding free speech, civil society and the public sphere. Relations stabilizing flow are achieved in a certain way for each medium. State or corporate control may be extreme in the case of one medium and moderate in the case of another, and there are varying expectations of such control depending on medium, users, place and time. Some media actively control communication flows. Postage stamps are fascinating in this regard, since they not only represent state power but also ‘authorise the aerial movement of letters and thus, in a very direct way, enact the power they purport to represent’ (Williams 2010: 94). Multiple acts are bound together: administration and control of the sale of stamps, design and printing in 273

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the making of stamps, dyadic communication actuated by the movement of stamps and territoriality expressed in the imagery of stamps. The stamp’s role as a hub or nexus of communication is taken for granted, but like other media these actornetworks can be peeled apart to reveal how mediated communication creates, sustains and grows out of regulation, administration and control.

Production and distribution networks The systems of regulation, administration and control are enacted relative to social channels, control points and flows. For example financial networks permeate the spaces between media and bind media to the rest of society through investments, user subscriptions, franchise fees, royalties and advertising revenues (Christophers 2009: 241–87). A very different tissue of connectivity is formed by networks of writers, artists, designers, musicians, actors, directors, technicians and so on (Dixon and Zonn 2004; Dodds 2005: 272–4). These networks of productive capital and creativity are complemented by distribution networks, which include marketing, funding and transportation. Relations among these various networks and flows indelibly imprint what is produced, how and when it can be accessed and how it is understood. The geopolitics of any medium are of course a function of the centralization of control over the ability to ‘publish’ one’s viewpoint, but production and distribution includes various revisions, commentaries and ‘mashups’ by multiple participants. The broadcast media funding structure sells audiences to advertisers rather than selling entertainment to audiences. Actor-networks of broadcasting therefore link producers and distributors to audiences through sponsors which function as intermediaries. Websites offer a production and distribution network with somewhat different dynamics. This explains why the internet helps to navigate the ‘uneasy individual process of coming to terms with sweeping global changes induced by migration and globalization’ (Mamadouh 2003: 210). Websites used by individuals build transnational identities and ‘overlapping imaginations’ relating tangentially to other geopolitical texts which in turn revise notions of center and periphery (Adams 2007: 167–205; Dittmer 2008: 299; Purcell and Kodras 2001). The most powerful states clearly have an ‘advantage in deploying information technologies to sustain power’ but the internet enables minor geopolitical players to re-inscribe themselves in spatial relations (Purcell and Kodras 2001: 347; Purcell 2005: 214) and has made the boundaries of public debates increasingly porous (Mamadouh 2008: 210). This brief survey has reminded us to ask how each medium links infrastructure, audiences, space-time, the senses, production, distribution, regulation and reception. In the abstract these terms are of little use, but they serve well as indicators pointing toward the elements one might find in concrete situations, enrolled in media actor-networks.

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Conclusion Benedict Anderson aimed scholars in the right direction by arguing that ‘new imagined communities [were] conjured up by lexicography and print-capitalism’ (1983: 109). The hyphen in ‘print-capitalism’ indicated a socio-technical network linking printing to nationalism. Much earlier, Marshall McLuhan’s claim ‘the medium is the message’ indicated that mediated communication embodies subjectivity in a peculiar way that constructs both knowledge and social organization (1962; 1964). Latour’s interest in actor-networks and hybrids offers the clearest explanation of how to systematize such insights (1993; 2005). In relation to critical geopolitics, however, one more major issue arises: Whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms, how we articulate political analyses, depend upon a certain field of perceptible reality already being established. in which the notion of the recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human. (Butler 2010: 41) Photography helped humanize Vietnamese civilians by giving a face and body to the abstract fact of suffering. The contorted bodies in the photographs from Abu Ghraib set in motion political processes, because audiences recognized humanity in these humiliated and tortured bodies. Among all of the actors in a network, it is humans whose suffering imposes a clear moral obligation, and humans who may sense an obligation to change the network. Actor-networks are not symmetrical. People are unlike other actors. The most useful approach to the geopolitical study of media therefore adopts from actor-network theory an interest in heterogeneous networks, translations and dispersed agency but dispenses with a passion for ‘symmetry’. It admits moral and ethical concerns unique to humans through attention to the subject and how it is constructed through mutual recognition. It follows McLuhan’s lead by paying attention to the senses while simultaneously recognizing that audiences and participants are building ‘imagined communities’, to broadly adapt Anderson’s term. This approach facilitates understanding how a photograph or any other text, discourse or performance can effectively intervene in geopolitical dynamics.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics —— et al., 2009. ‘Intervention: Mapping is critical!’ Political Geography 28: 332–42. Herman, E., and N. Chomsky, 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Hughes, R., 2010. ‘Gameworld geopolitics and the genre of the quest’. In F. MacDonald, R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 123–42. Jones, S.H., and D.B. Clarke, 2006. ‘Waging terror: The geopolitics of the real’. Political Geography 25: 298–314. Kennedy, L., 2008. ‘Securing vision: Photography and US foreign policy’. Media Culture Society 30: 279–94. Kirby, A., 2000. ‘The construction of geopolitical images: The world according to Biggles (and other fictional characters)’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 52–71. Kitchin, R., and M. Dodge, 2011. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Kress, G., 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. London and New York: Routledge. Kuus, M., 2008. ‘Švejkian geopolitics: Subversive obedience in Central Europe’. Geopolitics 13: 257–77. Latour, B., 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, F., 2008. ‘Space and the atom: On the popular geopolitics of Cold War rocketry’. Geopolitics 13: 611–34. —— R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), 2010a. Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. ——, —— and —— 2010b. ‘Introduction’. In F. MacDonald, R. Hughes and K. Dodds (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1–19. McLuhan, M., 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill/ Mentor. Mamadouh, V., 2003. ‘11 September and popular geopolitics: A study of websites run for and by Dutch Moroccans’. Geopolitics 8: 191–216. Marvin, C., 1988. When Old Technologies were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Mehta, A., and L. Bondi, 1999. ‘Embodied discourse: On gender and fear of violence’. Gender, Place and Culture 6: 67–84. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996a. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1996b. ‘An anti-geopolitical eye: Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992–93’. Gender, Place and Culture 3: 171–85. 278

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ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Resources Philippe Le Billon

Introduction From the myth of El Dorado fuelling hopes of riches in the New World to the devastation of oil-fuelled militarism in the Persian Gulf, resources constitute an important dimension of geopolitical representations and praxis. Speaking against the violence of imperialist resource valuation and extraction, a critical geopolitics of resources serves to expose and counter the logic of geopolitical perspectives seeing and acting upon the world for the sake of resource control. Resources not only come to define particular areas but also populations. Among the prime objects of often-racialized dispossession enabled by geopolitical perspective, ‘rich’ but ‘underutilized’ or ‘mismanaged’ resources call for settlers and development projects to take over from ‘backward’, ‘indolent’, ‘corrupt’ or ‘vulnerable’ people. Tying resources and people into highly unequal ‘globalized’ economies and distorted identities, such prejudiced perspectives and misrepresentations speak more of the culture of those involved in the craft of geopolitical imagination than that of those being represented. A critical geopolitics of resources, in this regard, provides a critique of the violence of resource ‘managerialism’ and consumerism while seeking to bring about alternative ecological relations, and by doing so help reconfigure power relations around nature. Critical geopolitics is not the only sub-field to engage with these topics and objectives. Much is shared with critical approaches to the political economy and geography of resources, as well as with political ecology. Most distinctive, however, is an emphasis on international dimensions and the importance of spatial representations in policy praxis. From the onset of critical geopolitics as a sub-field, Dalby called for ‘deconstructive and genealogical investigations’ (1991: 227) of international relations themes such as the ‘geopolitics of minerals’ (e.g. Haglund 1986). The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, ‘peak oil’ and ‘conflict resources’ narratives and recent commodity price booms have rekindled geopolitical interest in resources: an interest that reached previous heights between the two world wars and during the 1970s to mid-1980s at a time of intense resource nationalization and renewed Cold War tensions. Specific critical geopolitical works on resources

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics remain relatively scarce, however, and mostly focus on representations of key oil and mineral production areas. This chapter reviews contributions from critical geopolitics to the study of natural resources, with examples largely drawn from the petroleum and minerals sectors (for a discussion of the environment, see O’Lear, ‘Environment’, below). In exploring these contributions, the chapter focuses on how poststructuralist concerns might be brought together with the politics of representation in order to analyze the ways in which discourses shape political practices associated with resource exploitation. Of necessity, this discussion ranges over scholarship that identifies itself as critical geopolitics (rather limited in number), while also including work drawn from political ecology and economic geography – subdisciplines which also emphasize the view that representations play a crucial role in practices of legitimization or resistance to resource production, circulation and consumption. The first section of the chapter outlines three major dimensions in the politics of resource representations. This is followed, in the second section, by a brief historical perspective on the geopolitics of resources, focusing on resource wars and presenting some (early) critical perspectives. The third section reviews contemporary critical geopolitics works, mostly dealing with oil politics and demand for resources from ‘emerging’ economies. I conclude by stressing the importance of considering how the materialities and representations of resources reflect and contribute to geopolitical practices.

(Geo)politics and resource representations Through its sensitivity to local contexts and agencies, critical geopolitics seeks to depart from state-centrism and geographic essentialism, hoping to reveal the ‘Othering’ and prejudicial consequences of ‘geopolitical storylines’ and to expose ‘the messiness of places in world affairs and the inability of state-centric logics to capture the connectivities, flows and belongings that characterize particular locations’ (Ó Tuathail 2008: 672). Analytical frameworks which flow from this perspective on the (geo)politics of resource representation tend to include three major dimensions. The first accounts for the resource itself, the second deals with the process through which a resource becomes available for use and the third encompasses spaces associated with resources. Each dimension is approached from a critical geopolitics perspective through a deconstruction of representations seeking to address resource fetishization (how resources are understood and granted agency to explain power relations), resource production (how resources are socially produced, used and exchanged to maintain or challenge power relations) and resource spatialization (how the imaginative geographies of resource sites are both reflective of, and influence power relations). Below, I briefly review each of these perspectives in turn to show the socio-natural foundation of resources and point to the range of representations that critical perspectives can engage with.

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Resources Resource fetishization The term ‘resource’ is used in this chapter as an umbrella term, including natural resources, raw materials and primary commodities – each term being associated with a particular epistemology (environmental management, industrial production, economic analysis). Etymologically related to the Latin resurgere, meaning ‘to rise again’, the term resource conveys a sense of (re)empowerment and opportunity, but also dependence and vulnerability. Without a resource, one may not be able to stand back up after falling. Adjectives such as ‘critical’, ‘crucial’, ‘strategic’ and ‘vital’ are commonly attached to geopolitical representation of resources, further accentuating a (fearful) sense of hope. This hope is linked to the ‘intrinsic’ qualities of resources that give them at least their use-value if not their exchange-value. Oil does pack a lot of energy into a moveable, relatively benign and accessible form. Diamonds do shine when cut and polished, and they are harder than nearly anything else. The quasifetishistic character of resources, however, goes beyond the use-value of their material qualities to encompass their (imaged) social potentialities: ‘life without work’ in the case of an oil bonanza (Kapuscinski, cited in Watts 1992: 35) or combat without death in the case of diamonds on royal shields and armors. Such ideas do not mean ascribing a fixed and deterministic sense of agency to resources but recognizing what Appadurai calls the ‘social life of things’: that resources both reflect and contribute to material cultures (1988). Demand for resources is not simply driven by human needs but by the social practices that resources, as objects, enable (Baudrillard 1968). Oil is not in demand simply because people need energy, but, as discussed below, because these needs relate to specific forms of energy – in this case high-density liquid energy – that are part of so many social practices that go well beyond the geopolitics of oil production areas (Bridge and Le Billon 2013). The aim of de-fetishization is thus not to deny the ‘social construction’ and relational ‘agency’ of resources, both of which are, for example, productively recognized in actor-network theory (Callon 1986). Rather, de-fetishization seeks to counter naturalistic and deterministic interpretations attributing unmediated powers of influence to resources. From a critical geopolitics perspective, defetishization also aims to de-essentialize social relations and spatial representations associated with these commodities. As Castree points out, such de-essentialization poses major difficulties, as going beyond a critique of (geopolitical) representations requires ‘naming the sites and subjects of social, cultural, economic, and environmental exploitation without somehow doing symbolic injustice to them’ (2001: 1524). When unveiling the nasty aspects of resource production and consumption for the sake of getting the message across to the public, de-fetishizing narratives may underplay the positive sides of production and consumption and use images that are themselves tainted by prejudice. Informing consumers of unethical practices in a market full of ‘smoke and mirrors’ is ethically necessary, but such an exercise can occasionally prove counter-productive if it mostly (re)produces prejudiced imaginative geographies and agendas (Bridge 2001; Cook and Crang 283

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 1996). Arguably, this risk may be increased as advocacy campaigns against conflict resources rely on distant perceptions of problems and people, co-depend on the mass media to build seductive storylines, and outbid each other in caricaturing situations to attract maximum attention and public support (Freidberg 2004). In the case of diamonds, for example, human rights organizations denounced the use of diamond revenues for arms purchases and the many forms of violence associated with diamond mining. By using terms such as ‘blood diamonds’ and exposing industry practices, campaigners and journalists contributed to defetishize diamonds as marketed objects of love and purity, helping to draw the attention of potential customers to the practices of the industry and pushing diamond companies and governments of diamond-producing countries to create the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme prohibiting the trading of diamonds originating from rebel-held territories. Mobilizing such powerful terms as ‘war’, ‘blood’ and ‘terror’ in consumption politics can in this sense prove highly rewarding for advocacy campaigns and media coverage. Yet it may also be ambivalent in terms of the effects on producers, consumers and the actual advocacy campaigns. The inclusion of racialized images of Africa in the reporting of ‘diamond wars’, for example, arguably burnished the ‘reputable’ character of Western industrialized mining interests at the expense of their historical accountability, while associating terror with artisanal diamond miners in Africa (Le Billon 2006).

Resource production The politics of representation do not only concern the supposed ‘intrinsic nature’ of resources, but also their social production. If resources come from ‘nature’, it is their identification, processing and use by humans that turn them into resources, thus ‘resources are not; they become’ (Zimmermann 1933). Based on this recognition of resources as a ‘relational category’, the notion of social production is central to the deconstruction of representations of resources (Bridge 2009). From this perspective, a resource ‘is a property of things – a property that is the result of human capability’ (De Gregori 1987: 293). Human knowledge and capabilities are thus in this light the prime resources ‘defining’ all others. Such arguments, in turn, lead some resource companies to claim that they ‘create’ resources: a claim that comes in handy for arguing that the resources to belong to those ‘creating’ them, rather than to those ‘sitting’ on them – such claim narrowing the broad and emotionally charged concept of ‘land’ to that of surface rights. Contrasting with the ‘godly’ ability of ‘creation’ asserted by some resource companies, critics prefer representing the ‘patriarchal’ or ‘devilish’ capacity of ‘exploitation’ of a ‘pristine’ and metaphorically feminine nature common within deep-ecology and ecofeminism (Collard and Contrucci 1989; Roach 2003). There is thus a normative graduation between resource creation, production, extraction and exploitation – one that is not fixed but becomes politicized through situated representations. To take one example, ‘oil sands production’ contrasts with

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Resources ‘tar sands exploitation’: the former being a generic term used in corporate and government discourses, whereas the latter is used in NGO narratives. The deconstruction of resource production rests, in part, on historically grounded commodity-chain analysis that helps identify the links between different scales of resource production, transformation, circulation and consumption. Commodity-chain analysis also helps to identify responsibilities, regulatory spaces (and absence thereof), licit or illicit (socially acceptable or unacceptable) and legal or illegal (legally banned) social practices (Leslie and Reimer 1999; Van Schendel and Abraham 2005). One of the purposes of commodity-chain analysis is to bridge or fold scales in order to counter the Orientalizing ‘localism’ present in some ‘resource wars’ narratives. This is a critical point: in articulating scales and sites, commodity-chain analysis not only helps to connect ‘mining/killing fields’ to ‘shopping malls’, but also broadens understandings of different forms of violence, moving away from the most physically direct consequences capturing the interest of the media to recast and connect them within much larger processes of global commodity circulation and consumption. In the case of diamonds, multiscalar analysis demonstrates the structural (e.g. inequity), cultural (e.g. racism) and physical (e.g. amputations) forms of violence involved in the diamond sector (Le Billon 2008). Greater attention to contextualization has sought to frame the (geo) politics of indigenous self-determination and claims to land-rights and resources more carefully. Dalby notes that within the broader questioning of ‘ecological assumptions of modern sovereign subjectivities’, critical geopolitics can bring ‘further reflexive engagement with the identities that themselves now write critical geopolitics’ (2003: 181).

Resource spatialization The third major dimension in the politics of resource representation is that of spaces associated with resources. As Bridge argued, resource-based narratives enable greater control over resources by emptying spaces of alternative knowledge: historically complex and dynamic socio-ecological spaces are turned into ‘resource-supply sites’ (2001). Landscapes including valuable timber, for example, are discursively and materially depopulated, with historically complex and dynamic socio-ecological spaces turned into ‘forest reserves’ and ‘logging concessions’ through restrictive legislation and coercive enforcement that not only prohibit residence and livelihood access for local populations, but also transform ecosystems through ‘combating’ fires and ‘promoting’ some plant species over others (Kull 2002). The ecological and economic motivations of the state and in some cases its counter-insurgency concerns motivate such spatial strategies of creating ‘political forests’ (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). Environmental groups also resort to such purification, although they are motivated by nature conservation rather than indigenous rights (Braun 2002; Sundberg 1998). This emptying of complex socio-ecological areas is producing particularly skewed forms of knowledge, exclusively associating a particular region with 285

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics only one set of resource-related identity and social relations. The risk of ‘resource determinism’ is high, as the lens through which an area, its people and broader relationships with the world is both focused and tainted by prejudices associated with resources. Many resistance narratives unsurprisingly seek to repopulate and diversify the content of these discourses, seeking for example to move beyond portraying Iraq exclusively through the figure of oil-funded militaristic dictator Saddam Hussein (Gregory 2004). This discursive work can have important material effects. For example, not only do particular places become caricatured through geographical imaginations of resource regions, but, in the case of ‘resource wars’ (as discussed below), other aspects of conflicts get brushed aside. As discussed above this is typical of depictions of the Persian Gulf as an ‘oil pump’ or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a ‘geological scandal’.1 Policy reports by aid agencies and NGOs, public relations material by extractive companies and journalistic accounts frequently contribute to the reproduction of such narrow geographical imaginations by their prominence and often necessary focus. Popular geopolitics conveyed through atlases, video games and movies also contribute to the cultural reproduction of resource-based places and world politics. Children’s pictorial atlases render places ‘intelligible by inscribing on them economic function, almost invariably primary commodity production or basic manufacturing’ (Bridge 2001: 2157). Strategy video games, such as Age of Empire III, adopt materialistic principles of politics based on notions of resource scarcity and Lebensraum, leading players to understand politics as primarily a ‘struggle for resources’ that is conducted through war: ‘to control resources means to win’ (Nohr 2010: 186). Recent James Bond movies reinforce stereotypes of resource exporting countries, such as The World is Not Enough (1999), based on the control of Central Asian oil exports, or Die Another Day (2002), linking West African conflict diamonds to North Korean weapons of mass destruction (Dodds 2003; Le Billon 2006). Not all Western mass-audience movies reinforce these caricatures, however. Some movies address links between resources and conflicts in relatively more nuanced ways, such as Syriana (2005), Lord of War (2005) and even Blood Diamond (2006). In the case of Iraq, Three Kings (1999, with the working title Spoils of War) provided a sharp critique of US petro-imperialist motives and betrayal of the Iraqi people during the 1991 Gulf War (ironically providing grounds for the USled invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003). Movie directors has also focused their lens on the crude home-based geopolitics of oil consumption, most prominently in Mad Max (1979), which was originally derived from the 1973 fuel crisis’s effect on Australian motorists and the ‘raw violence’ exerted against anyone trying to jump the queue at fast-depleting pump stations (McCausland 2006), or the infamous Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), casting an ‘early 1970s Texas gas station

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Coined in 1892 by Belgian geologist René Cornet, the term ‘geological scandal’ is very frequently used, although the real scandal is the underdevelopment associated with resource exploitation in that country (see Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002). 286

Resources that has no fuel and that offers only death to those who assume petroleum’s easy purchase’ (Jackson 2008: 48). Most recently, James Cameron’s Avatar was exemplary of interpretations of recurring struggles by indigenous peoples to protect their relationship with nature and maintain sovereignty against violent mining corporation greed. The movie could have been a public-relations disaster for extractive companies. Some environmental and human groups used the movie to raise awareness about indigenous struggles against mining, alleged corporate involvement in the killing of anti-mining community leaders, and the environmental devastation of the tar sands. A pro-mining conservative columnist, in turn, described James Cameron’s work as ‘lurid anti-capitalist, anti-mining fantasies that provided the psychic substructure for [a] mega-grossing but Oscar-short movie’ (Foster 2010). In the end, companies’ share values did not seem to register any dips as a result of the movie, but popular geopolitical visions of imperialistic militarized resource extraction are likely reinforced among a new generation of consumers. To sum up, resources are not simply raw materials coming out of nature, but hybrid objects and subjects of socio-natural processes (Swyngedouw 1999). In turn, resource-related representations encompass a broad range of registers with several dimensions including resources themselves, the ways in which they are ‘produced’ and the spaces with which they become associated. In turn, critical perspectives not only deal with states or resource companies seeking to impose representation and praxis consolidating their ‘sovereign’ and ‘economic’ interests, but also with local communities and environmental and human rights NGOs advocating alternative narratives. Such perspectives, in turn, can much contribute to critiques of geopolitical accounts of resources, and in particular ‘resource wars’.

Geopolitics’ staples: resources, wars and resource wars Over the past decade, water wars, drug wars, diamond wars and oil wars have all entered the popular lexicon of international relations and media reports. Although debates over the importance of resources in war have a long pedigree, the term ‘resource wars’ is of relatively recent origin. The twentieth century, characterized by a rapid increase in rates of resource extraction, gave rise to a vast literature on conflicts over ‘raw materials’ (Staley 1937). The term ‘resource wars’ was popularized in the 1980s as a geopolitical device to both explain and exacerbate renewed tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union over the control of fuel and minerals in disputed ‘peripheries’, notably minerals in South Africa and oil in the Middle East (Broad 1980; Klare 1981). The term is also applied to popular struggles against large-scale resource exploitation projects and neoliberal reforms in resources and public utility sectors (Gedicks 1993; Perreault 2006) and is widely used for ‘trade wars’, such as in the examples of bananas, tomatoes and wheat (Alston, Gray and Summer 2005; Bredahl, Schmitz and Hillman 1987; Josling and Taylor 2003; Striffler and Moberg 2003). Conventional geopolitical perspectives 287

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics define resource wars as armed conflicts revolving around the ‘pursuit or possession of critical materials’ (Klare 2001: 25). To paraphrase Prussian war thinker Clausewitz, resource wars are, from this perspective, the continuation of resource politics by military means. The concept is mostly used in reference to inter-state conflicts over the supply of ‘strategic resources’, giving way to a narrow and militaristic notion of ‘resource security’, and in particular ‘energy security’ (Bradshaw 2009; Mulligan 2010; Schlosser 2006). Resource wars are thus the result of a lack of imagination, knowledge or capacity to find alternative resources: going to war over resources is testimony of the incapacity to acquire them or their alternatives through less costly and risky means. Traditional geopolitical perspectives tend to favour ‘fixed variables’, and natural resources fit the bill: their ‘natural materiality’ providing the factual solidity of foundational geopolitical assertions, as well as ‘geographical fixity’ – the reassuring spatial anchor on which to moor imaginative geographies of ‘strategic spaces’. Traditional geopolitical perspectives also tend to favour ‘strategic variables’: here, wars fit the bill: their ‘ultimate policy’ and supposed ‘game changing’ character providing some of the rationale for geopolitical thinking. At the confluence of these two entrenched concerns lies a staple of geopolitics: resource wars. In most geopolitical accounts, resource areas become the contested grounds of contending states, and resources the spoils of state/corporate scrambles. Crudely politicized resource geographies map out binaries of fear and security, wealth and scarcity, enmity and solidarity. Rough materialism and raw essentialism shape geopolitical destinies with no escape in sight, locking resource-dependent countries into undiversified, inefficient, corruption-ridden and shock-prone economies until their resources are exhausted, painting vast landscapes of future resource wars or inspiring dreams of material supremacy. Controlling the ‘oil spigot’ of the Persian Gulf, for example, is an archetypal geopolitical object of hydrocarbon-fuelled late modernity, one that is critiqued by Sidaway’s reframing of the Middle East as an ‘arc of crisis’ (1998) or taken for granted by Harvey’s Mackinderesque assertion that ‘whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future’ (2003: 19). This theme is central to political-economy critiques of power relations in the Middle East (Nitzan and Bichler 1995; 2003). These perspectives echo a more general position in the literature: Western geopolitical perspectives about resources have been dominated by the equation of trade, war and power (Findlay and O’Rourke 2007; Mansfield 1995). Overseas resources and maritime navigation were at the core of this equation, with resources providing some of the means and motives of early European power expansion and being the focus of inter-state rivalry and strategic denial of access (Evelyn 1674; Mahan 1890). Trade and war became intimately linked during the mercantilist period of the fifteenth century, as progress in maritime transportation enabled the accumulation of ‘world riches’, mostly in the form of bullion, by which power was perceived to be determined (Lesser 1989). Tropical, slave-produced commodities were at the core of Western imperial extension (Clarence-Smith 1985), with duties on sugar, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, coffee and opium providing ‘modernizing’ states 288

Resources with the finances to open new markets through warfare (Armitage and Braddick 2002). Since sea power relied on access to timber, naval timber supply became a critical preoccupation for major European powers from the seventeenth century onwards (Albion 1926) – a situation comparable to the case of oil in the twentieth century. Given the strategic role of resources, concerns for resource scarcity and war received considerable attention from contemporary scholars. Malthus, for example, viewed war as a positive check against the limits of agricultural resources by raising the death rate (‘vices of mankind and able ministers of depopulation’), usefully staving off (rather than resulting from) food scarcity (Malthus 1798: 44). With growing industrialization and increasing dependence on imported materials during the nineteenth century, Western powers intensified their control over raw materials, leading (along with many other factors such as political ideologies) to an imperialist ‘scramble for resources’ both within Europe and much of the rest of the world (Aron 1962). Critiques of capitalism linked its rise and diffusion to imperialism and militarism, tying together the expansion of violent forms of ‘primitive accumulation’, focused on raw materials and labor in the form of slavery (Marx 1976 [1887]), with the opening up of markets for commodities (Luxemburg 1913). The significance of resources in industrialization and militarization – most notably coal, iron and later oil – reinforced the idea of resource competition among European powers, the focus of much commentary with respect to the geopolitical resource dimensions of the two World Wars and concerns over access to raw material distribution and inter-state conflicts resulted in a flurry of studies between the wars (Eckel 1920; Nearing 1923; Westing 1986). The geographical closure of imperialist territorial expansion, including the punitive seizure of German colonies after World War I, augured a new era of economic intensification (Bowman 1921), but also renewed claims among industrialized powers aspiring to colonial conquest, chiefly Germany, Italy and Japan, who saw themselves as victimized by an international order privileging Britain and France (Haushofer 1931; Obst 1926). Initiated most notably through a series of meetings under the auspices of the League of Nations (Leith 1931), debates opposed the ‘haves versus have-nots’ in the ‘raw materials race’ that contributed to the preparation, onset and conduct of World War II (Marshall 1995). While the ‘have-nots’ (Germany, Italy and Japan) sought to achieve resource access through territorial redistribution, the ‘haves’ (the UK, France and the USA) stressed the limits of raw material advantages derived from the colonies, the risks associated with territorial redistribution and the positive impacts of free trade and of moving away from nationalistic views of the economy (Angell 1936; Staley 1937). Geopolitical perspectives informed by resource concerns were clearly at work in the two world wars, whether in British and German efforts to own or control oil sources in Mesopotamia and Persia as they converted their navies from coal to oil in the 1910s (Engdahl 2004), in Hitler’s failed Fall Blu military campaign in 1942 to capture and later to destroy the oil fields of the Caucasus (Hayward 2000), or in Japan’s preemptive strike on Pearl Harbor in the face of an oil embargo by the USA and conquest of South-East Asia to secure access to natural resources, including 289

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics oil from the Dutch East Indies (Sagan 1988). Less well-known examples include the destruction of British-controlled oil wells in Egypt by an Austro-Hungarian commando in 1915, the first oil-related military operation on the African continent (Rosenthal 2005), or Japan’s invasion of British Malaya in 1941 and capture of the world’s largest rubber plantations, a strategic sector from which Japanese firms had been partly excluded during World War I as Britain prohibited new rubber land acquisitions by foreign interests. Following World War II, international studies on resources and wars focused on resource supply geopolitics, the building up of stocks of critical materials, and foreign investment policies. This was most acute in the USA, with the Paley Commission (Paley 1952; see Robertson 2008). The growing assertiveness of their independence by Third World states during this period transformed the political landscape of sovereignty of natural resources, including though the nationalization of resource sectors and the use of ‘resource weapons’ (the political and economic leveraging of resource dependence among importing countries) (Leng 1974).2 Resources also constituted the foundation for a more peaceful Europe through the 1951 Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community – with the treaty seeking to turn these two sectors from a source of contention between France and Germany into one of cooperation. Strategic thinking about resources during the Cold War continued to focus on the vulnerability arising from resource supply dependence and the potential for international conflicts resulting from competition over access to key resources (Arad and Arad 1979; Krasner 1978; Lipschutz 1989; Westing 1986). Emphasis was placed on concepts of ‘resource security’ (through strategic reserves and alliances with producing countries) and a military ‘balance of power’ between the US and Soviet blocs. The decolonization process, the 1956 Suez crisis, the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the 1979 Iranian revolution and subsequent Iraqi military invasions in Iran and Kuwait also increased Western strategic concerns (among states and businesses) over domestic and regional political stability and alliances (Russett 1981), as well as the threats presented by the more assertive countries in the Third World (Bergsten 1973). Areas identified as prone to armed conflicts, due to both domestic and international factors, included those where external power involvement was likely due to economic resources (Cohen 1973). Beyond the Cold War, such ‘resource supply’ security continues to inform governmental and corporate decisions in the management of several minerals (Anderson and Anderson 1997), particularly concerning high-tech minerals – such as rare earths that came under the quasimonopoly of China – and radioactive materials, with oil standing in a category of its own for its global strategic importance (European Commission 2010; US Department of Energy 2010). By the 1960s, broader geopolitical conceptualizations of security had begun to incorporate issues such as population growth, environmental degradation and social inequalities in poor countries (Falk 1971; Linnér 2004; Sprout and Sprout 2

In 1962 the UN General Assembly passed resolution 1803 (XVII) to ensure ‘Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources’ (Kobrin 1985; Maull 1975). 290

Resources 1957; Timberlake and Tinker 1984). The term ‘environmental security’ was coined to reflect emerging ideas of global interdependence illustrated through debates on global warming, environmental ‘limits to growth’ and political instability caused by environmental scarcity in the Global South (Brown 1977; Meadows et al. 1972; Ullman 1983). The concept has been criticized as representing a skewed and controversial ‘securitization’ of environmental issues, unfairly casting blame on the poor, uncritically legitimizing support for military solutions and constructing biased identities and narratives of endangerment (Dalby 2002). From this analysis we can surmise that, at the outset of the twentieth century, resources were still defined as they were in early historical periods: as loot or as military strategy (Le Billon 2012). But by the end of the twentieth century, another view had become important: resources as part of the ‘global environment’ – a potential threat not only to economic growth and political stability, but also to survival as the scale of human interferences reached the point of defining a new geological era, the Anthropocene (Dalby 2007). The resulting ‘securitization’ of environmental concerns within discourses of warfare resulted in concepts such as ‘green wars’ (wars caused by declining environmental conditions) and ‘environmental refugees’ (see Dalby 2009). With the end of the Cold War came greater attention to the internal mechanisms of war as the (supposed) end of competitive superpower clientelist politics and support for belligerents (notably through ‘proxy wars’) changed the conditions for armed conflict worldwide. Three main views emerged. First, an entrenchment of neoliberal politics of deregulation and tax cuts auguring a supposed ‘age of plenty’ under extremely favorable conditions for transnational resource companies, especially in the mining sector (Bridge 2001; 2004). Representation of resource sector and resource areas as ‘risky’ was part of the framing of major tax breaks (Emel and Huber 2008).3 Second, a critique of the violent (end) of US hegemony centered upon its repeated military ventures against the Iraq regime and emphasis on a political-economy agenda linked to the control of oil resources from the region (Harvey 2003; Jhaveri 2004; Mercille 2010; Muttitt 2011; Smith 2004). Third, a representation of wars as violent scrambles for resources amongst local warlords, regional powers and international actors were a major feature of contemporary conflicts, particularly given the supposed ‘declining’ role of ideology in regional or local conflicts (Klare 2001; Korf 2011; Le Billon 2001; Reno 1999). Representation of conflicts in several African countries during the 1990s as ‘diamond wars’ (Le Billon 2006) or of the resource control militancy in the Niger Delta as ‘oil funded’ terrorism (Watts 2004) were typical of the era. The US-led ‘war on terror’ that marked the first decade of the twenty-first century largely continued on the same themes. Akin to the Cold War, interventions have been framed around conflated concepts of freedom and security. Debates on oil and the US security agenda have significantly shifted as a result of the 9/11 3

The fall-out (for the industrial sectors of the West, but also those of many industrializing and low-labor manufacturing economies) was the rapid and deepening shift of manufacturing towards mainland China (Mesquita Moreira 2007). 291

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics attacks in the USA. On one side, those opposing US military interventionism have argued that the ‘war on terror’ provided one more convenient cover for a renewed ‘imperialist oil grab’ in the region; on the other, links between oil and terrorism pointed to problems of authoritarian (and warmongering) governance in several oil producing countries – not least an irony when considering the Texasbased and oil-linked Bush–Cheney administration (e.g. McQuaig 2006). As the Bush administration reframed the ‘war on terror’ unleashed on Iraq as a war of liberation against oil-funded dictatorial regimes, the USA portrayed its Middle East foreign policy as broadening from securing a free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf to promoting democracy in the region (Le Billon and El Khatib 2004). Most contemporary accounts of tensions and future resource wars are associated with a combination of rapidly increasing demand for raw materials, growing resource shortages and contested resource ownership (Gao 2009; Klare 2008; Kunstler 2006). I will now turn to critical geopolitics work on specific resource-related sites.

Resourceful sites: Critical perspectives on the spatiality of resource politics Critical geopolitics is about two decades old, and resources attracted relatively little attention in this sub-field until the late 1990s. Even in the following decade very few works specifically took on a critical geopolitics approach to resources. There is a wealth of work of interest to critical geopolitics, however, from within political ecology, political geography and resource geography. I review here those pertaining to oil geopolitics and the implications of emerging economies for resource geopolitics. Oil, and more broadly hydrocarbons, has unsurprisingly received most of the attention directed at resources from a critical geopolitics perspective, notably through critiques of oil-related geographical representations of Iraq and Nigeria but also through geographical dimensions within narratives of peak oil, climate change or oil consumption (Bridge and Le Billon 2013; Dalby 2007). Some of this attention was not so much directed at the politics of oil, but at the politics from oil. Following connections engineered between hydrocarbon fuels and politics, Mitchell reiterates the importance of the materialities and spatialities of hydrocarbon production, circulation and consumption. Contrasting, for example, the greater opportunities and incentives for strikes among coal miners than for those of petroleum workers or the emergence of welfare democracy in the age of coal while the ‘limits of contemporary democratic politics can be traced in relation to oil’ (Mitchell 2009: 422). Threats to oil supplies in this respect are interpreted through both politics of hope and despair. Referring to Farmanfarmaian’s reading of male fantasies in motivating US militarized interventions in the Persian Gulf (1992), Ó Tuathail emphasized the explanatory importance of ‘the castration anxiety produced by the perception of Saddam Hussein’s threat to “our vital organs” (ie oil wells)’ (1994: 232). 292

Resources If the threat of Saddam controlling the ‘world’s oil spigot’ was represented as the main danger of the 1990s – one that for some critics proved useful to address the oil glut of the 1990s and its threat to the profit margins of Western oil companies and the welfare authoritarianism of allied regimes (Le Billon and El Khatib 2004; Mitchell 2002) – the narrative of ‘peak oil’ came to dominate the first decade of the twenty-first century. Examining the impact of peak oil narratives on the (future) profitability of oil companies, Bridge and Wood argue that such representation of ‘physically-induced scarcity obfuscates rather than illuminates’ as most of the squeeze on companies ‘originate primarily above-ground: in the ownership of reserves, the politics of resource access and the changing structure of the international oil industry, and not below-ground in geological limits’ (2010: 575). Such rearticulating of risks is doubly instrumented by the Canadian policy of promoting the country as an ‘energy superpower’ and the tar sands of northern Alberta as a response to both physical scarcity and political difficulties – a geopolitical representation that ignores many of the violent environmental and social dimensions of oil and gas development (Le Billon and Carter 2010). Among the challenges to ‘Big Oil’ are the politics of ‘ungovernable spaces’ within which petro-capitalism, in the case of Nigeria, undermines the project of secular modern governance through the reshaping of incompatible community identities, from the indigenous to national scale (Watts 2004). Besides the politics of oil-production representation, some works have also engaged those of oil consumption and its consequences. Geopolitics of resource consumption have long focused on the representations that enabled critiques of uneven and over-consumption. Accounting for about of quarter of world demand, the (ir)responsibilities of US oil consumption are central in critical accounts. Yet, as Huber points out, ‘despite the deepening contradictions of US oil consumption, “pain at the pump” discourse projects a political sense of entitlement to low priced gasoline’ (2009: 465). Such politics of entitlement is of course not simply dictated by the need of people to move, but because individualistic movement in the form of automobility has become part of so many social practices (Paterson 2007; Urry 2004). Whereas chrome-laden cars in the 1950s and 1960s were advertised as conquering the vast expanse of tarmac expressing the dominance of US modernity (but not its fascistic roots in the autobahn) and beating communism through massconsumption, the 1990s SUVs were publicized as conquering the last remaining wilds of the North American continent and (imaginatively) a now widely opened post-Cold War ‘barbarian’ world in need of imperial conquest. As Paterson and Dalby suggest from their review of automobility advertising, ‘contemporary geopolitics provides a setting within which contemporary consumer cultures work. At the same time, such vehicles are themselves central to the (re)production of both the material conditions of Empire, and its geopolitical identities’ (2006: 1). Symbolic of imperial and militarized automobility, the military SUV H1 Hummer brought to (euphemistic) civilian life by machine-gun-touting actor and former California senator Arnold Schwarzenegger was in effect outlawed by public

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics outcry.4 The military vehicle, though, is still roaming the streets of Baghdad and securing the new oil ventures of foreign oil companies in Iraq. More broadly, the literature and policy practices of peak oil ‘relocalization movements’ and climate-change induced ‘forced environmental displacement’ offer interesting material for critical geopolitics at a range of scales and in domains where affect and embodiment constitute important dimensions (Barnett 2007; Chaturvedi and Doyle 2010; McNamara and Gibson 2009; North 2010). A second, and closely related, site of critical enquiry is the geopolitical representations of competitive resource control and contested resource ownership arising from so-called scramble for resources putatively resulting from the growing demand of ‘emerging economies’, in particular China (Klare 2008). Both China and the USA, in this regard, are portrayed as deploying aggressive ‘resource diplomacy’ supporting (in the archetypal case of China) or toppling (in that of the USA) dictatorships, and bolstering their military capacities and international bases. Besides relations with the USA, the Chinese ‘global quest for energy’ is also portrayed as a source of tensions with Japan, India, South East Asian countries and possibly Russia (Lang and Wang 2007: Lee 2005). Among prominent disputed areas are the Caspian region, the South and East China Seas and the Arctic Ocean. The Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia areas are depicted as the ‘cockpit for a twenty-first century energy version of the imperial “Great Game” of the nineteenth century’; a cockpit in which the ‘dangerous vortex of competitive pressures’ from US, Russian, Indian and Chinese interests would play out through military bases, massive pipeline investments, and support for local autocrats (Klare 2008: 115; see also Winrow 2007). Sovereign claims over the islands of the China Seas have been a long-standing source of tension in the region exacerbated by resource deposits (Santolan 2011). The Arctic seabed, with an estimated 80 billion barrels of oil and vast gas resources is another such area for potential conflicts, this time involving coastal states, with for example the planting of a flag in 4,000m of water by a Russian submarine at the North Pole in 2007 being interpreted as aggressive diplomatic posturing (Chivers 2007; Posner 2007). China’s role in Africa has perhaps received the most attention in terms of representations of resource politics (Carmody and Owusu 2007). Several geographers have stressed the hypocrisy and often-counter-productive effects of ‘China bashing’ for its scramble over resources (Mawdsley 2007; Spiegel and Le Billon 2009). For Power and Mohan, China is ‘opening up new “choices” and altering the playing field for African development for the first time since the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s’ (2010: 462). The choices start with an alternative to Western oil and mining majors, fewer political constraints on human-rights abuses 4

After bringing the deadly creature to US streets in the early 1990s, Schwarzenegger converted his ‘Humvees’ to biodiesel and hydrogen a decade later and ultimately sold all of his fleet of seven (except his hydrogen one) in 2006 as the State of California he then governed announced it was suing carmakers for excessive greenhouse gas emissions. GM ultimately killed the Hummer brand off in 2010 after a Chinese buy-out fell through. 294

Resources and barter deals that offer tangible infrastructure but also new opportunities for high-level corruption. Western governments and resource companies seek to represent themselves as promoters of ‘good governance’, but Carmody stresses the contradictions of seeking to ‘regularize social interactions to achieve poverty reduction, but by promoting a continuing emphasis on natural resource exports … [that] contributes to the problems it seeks to address’ (2009). Building on Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, Zalik argues that corporate and mainstream media representations of contestations to resource exploitation in the Niger Delta or the Canadian tar sands, result in the social construction of boundaries between legal/illegal protest and licit/ illicit forms of extraction [whereby] the radicalization of resistance, in a form that involves physical destruction and/or so-called criminality, emerges from a heavily securitized response to social claims on capital extraction that has repressed and constrained popular protest. (Zalik 2011: 263) Within and beyond these thematic contributions, studies are also extending the domain of critical enquiry into new areas. Greater sensitivity to affect and attention to material embodiment are translating into closer attention to the ‘microgeographies’ and transcalar dimensions of resource politics (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Dittmer and Gray 2010; Popke 2009). Critical geopolitics, in this respect, is methodologically broadening from mostly textual analysis to interviews and participant observation that help to reveal the intimate dimensions of resource politics and to get a better sense of the materialities and ‘multiple mechanisms of territorialized rule’ involved (Korf 2011: 750; see also Ingram and Dodds 2009; Watts 2004). Such broadening is also enriched through analyses of performativity, building for example on the use of soundscapes to create ‘genuine spaces of Aboriginal self-determination and self-expression’ (Gibson 1998: 163). Such approaches, in turn, can help better understand how the discursive, performative, affectual and material based qualities of resources are assembled and disassembled to create specific geopolitical presentations and praxis. A positive impact is also the further consolidation of the ethical motives of critical geopolitics, pointing to responsibilities within geopolitical praxis as well as emancipatory potentialities.

Conclusion Critical perspectives on resource sectors have focused largely on resource dispossession and environmental impacts. However, from a critical geopolitics perspective, approaching resource politics through the concept of ‘resource dispossession’ is itself too narrow to capture tensions between political imaginations. Local populations, especially indigenous groups, are not so much dispossessed of a resource as dispossessed of socio-ecological systems that provide

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics both physiological and cultural sustenance and meaning.5 Such dispossession first consists in the erasure, marginalization and vilification of ontologies distinct from those recognizing ‘socio-nature’ as ‘resource’ (or ‘wilderness’ in the case of conservation). The political effects of geographical imaginations play an important role here, with the (de)legitimization of particular ontologies, such as contrasting representations of political imaginations of affect and connection for places within deep ecology versus those of resource development working landscapes within resource utilitarianism. Technical terms such as ‘topsoil’ in ecology versus ‘overburden’ in mining illustrate the vernacular of such respective imaginations. For Bridge, ‘resources “become” only through the triumph of one imaginary over others’ (2009: 5). In this respect, political imaginations shape geographies of enclosure and exclusion (Bridge 2007; McCarthy 2001). Landscapes are represented and regulated in ways that suit the needs of actors pursuing the commodification of nature in order to create, change or expand its exchange value; representations that conflict with those of actors seeking to maintain, for example, subsistence-based or intrinsic use-value. Critical perspectives have been attentive to the material and scalar dimensions of resource production and their deployment to suit geopolitical projects. Examining rescaling of the ‘production’ of water in Spain through massive hydraulic infrastructures during the Franco period (1939–75), Swyngedouw pointed to geopolitical projects of national territorial and US–Western alliance integration, aiming at the ‘eradication of regionalist or autonomist aspirations’ (2007: 9). Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi used the country’s oil wealth to seek to unite the Arab world, then the African continent and, in between, to prop-up numerous rebel groups from Aceh to Sierra Leone, while fighting growing internal dissent. Yet, as in the Iraqi case, the geopolitical ‘illusions of petroleum wealth’ did not serve the political projects of their leaders and proved tragic for their populations (Martinez 2010). The geopolitical branding and entrepreneurship of Qatar’s oil and gas rich monarchy is put to use through its news broadcasting Al Jazeera, peace-making ventures and, most recently, its military intervention as the only Arab country joining in the NATO bombing of ‘Gaddafi loyalists’ in Libya. To conclude, critical geopolitics has much to contribute to the politics of resources. Through its focus on the spatialities and politics of resource representation, critical geopolitics useful complements political ecology and political economy perspectives. As much critical geopolitics remains based on textual analysis, combining a closer attention to materialities, performativity and non-representational approaches will enrich future research. This will not only open new areas of work in the domains of material embodiment and affect but will also enrich critical geopolitics through greater attention to the ‘micro-geographies’ and transcalar dimensions of resource politics and further bring ethics to the fore.

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This is not to say that all local populations and indigenous groups oppose resource production, but seek to it on ‘their’ terms. 296

Resources

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16

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Environment Shannon O’Lear

Introduction Critical geopolitics aims to decode narratives about geographies of risk, threats and power (Dodds 2010a; Ó Tuathail 1998), so a critical geopolitics of the environment looks to decode narratives about how environmental features pose risks to society and how environmental resources empower society and narratives about dangerous or desired human–environment interactions. Noel Castree has made the case that although environmental problems may be real, there is no singular, objective perspective about any given problem. Instead, he encourages us to examine the geopolitics behind representations of environmental problems. Castree points out that dominant discourses that define and establish management practices for environmental problems often serve to maintain ‘business as usual’. A critical geopolitics view, however, seeks ‘to contest existing geopolitical arrangements, uncovering the power relations inherent in them and the possibilities for more just interstate relations’ (2008: 435). This objective becomes clear when we look at a realist-inspired geopolitics of the environment and contrast it with a critical geopolitics interpretation. Robert Kaplan wrote a widely read article for Atlantic Monthly titled: ‘The coming anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’ (1994). In it, he describes economic desolation, violence and environmental degradation in West Africa (as in other less developed parts of the world) as compounded problems that are likely to turn people in those places against wealthier, more comfortable societies in economically advanced parts of the world. Conflict will emerge at the sub-state level and challenge states to contain the violence and protect citizens. Protecting the accepted arrangement of sovereign, territorial states will become, he predicts, increasingly difficult in the face of exploding populations and degraded environments in poorer parts of the world. The argument is a geopolitics narrative at its finest: a threat is identified and located, state security is invoked and described as threatened and action is implied if not outright justified. In contrast, Simon Dalby’s response to Kaplan’s article demonstrates a critical geopolitics critique of Kaplan’s narrative. Dalby draws our attention to ways that

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Kaplan’s arguments are selective and oversimplified (1996). Dalby argues that the political violence and environmental degradation described by Kaplan are, in fact, tied to larger economic processes including a history of colonization of Africa by European states and current neocolonial arrangements with former colonizers. Kaplan describes environmental scarcity as a determining factor in the decline and imminent failure of these societies. Yet Dalby points out ways in which Kaplan’s spatial assessment of the situation he describes may be viewed as limited, partial or even incorrect. In short, Dalby demonstrates a critical geopolitics critique of a realist geopolitics representation of the environment. Klaus Dodds has also applied a critical geopolitical perspective in his work on the Antarctic Treaty System and on claims to the Arctic (Dodds 1997; 2008; 2010b; see also Dittmer et al. 2011). Dodds analyzes a variety of claims to sections of Antarctica in support of national agendas despite the fact that the Antarctic is viewed, under agreement, as a nuclear-free zone for international scientific collaboration. Argentina, for example, claims that its national territory extends underwater to include a portion of the Antarctic, and Russia has made similar, territorial claims about the Arctic. These narratives can be interpreted in the context of current understandings about climate change, ice-cap melting and potentially valuable, emergent land areas. That context provides the basis for interpreting how these specific places and environmental resources are identified, valued, contested and claimed. Resource conflicts are another topic that has been examined from a critical geopolitics perspective. Natural resources, such as oil, timber, diamonds, drugs and food may indeed shape how and where conflict unfolds (Le Billon 2001). However, narratives about resource conflict often imbue natural resources with an agency that they do not actually have (Agnew 2011). Narratives about resources also form cartographies of risk and danger in the interest of promoting particular political agendas (Zerner 2005). Assuming that resource scarcity or abundance will automatically create conditions for conflict can promote limited understandings of security (Barnett 2000) and overlook important dynamics at work in specific contexts (Forsyth 2008; O’Lear 2005; O’Lear and Gray 2006). The next section will consider what is meant by ‘the’ environment and then turn to a brief introduction to power. The approach to power taken in this chapter is intended as a way to theorize manifestations of power in human–environment relationships. From there, the chapter considers case studies that demonstrate a critical geopolitics analysis of ways in which power dynamics have shaped our understanding of a selection of environmental issues.

The environment … which environment? In recent years, there has been a growing trend for the construction of aquaria in the USA. Many cities, even those nowhere near the ocean, build aquaria in the hopes of attracting tourists and boosting the local economy. Exhibits showing exotic, colorful 306

Environment fish tend to be more popular than those showing dull brown or grey fish even though those fish may actually be natives. People tend to be attracted to elaborate displays of tropical fish, as if they promise a temporary transport to distant locations and warm, sandy beaches. These displays allow people to imagine another setting, another place, pristine and teeming with life. In reality, there is a thriving trade in black-market fish that serves to support growing demand for exotic, tropical fish. One means of supplying these fish is a practice known as cyanide fishing. In places such as Indonesia and the Philippines, economic hardship has diminished the viability of traditional fishing and other activities, and fishers have had to turn to more desperate practices to earn enough money to survive. Cyanide fishing is one such practice that has grown particularly in areas with coral reefs, the rain forests of the ocean. Fishers need only basic diving equipment and a plastic squeeze bottle of cyanide. Cyanide shot into the coral stuns fish and immobilizes them, making them easy to capture. Not only are local fish populations depleted, but the coral is also harmed by this practice. The fish are then sold to various distributors, who make them available to buyers around the world. Visitors to aquaria are unlikely to know the exact origins of the fish they are admiring or to connect their experience at an aquarium to the economic or environmental conditions of tropical areas on the other side of the globe. Which part of this story reflects ‘the environment’? The tropical places where the actual fish originate? Human-built aquaria that display and preserve fish? What about the habitats that are harmed through fishing practices motivated by economic hardship and tourist demands? We might imagine that there exists a natural, untouched environment beyond the reach of cities and suburbs, but we interact daily with a stunning range of environmental features – backyards, parks, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the fuel and materials we use and the waste we generate. Clearly, there are many environments and many different perspectives on what ‘the environment’ means. Environments are multifaceted, interrelated and constantly in flux. There are many layers and dimensions to environments, so it is not realistic to suppose there is one, single, comprehensive view of or approach to environmental features. One way of thinking about the environment is to think of it as the ‘natural’ world. However, can there be such a thing as a natural, pristine environment in this era when smog, airborne pollutants and fallout from decades of nuclear and other weapon testing roam the planet? Scholars have argued that humans have, through a variety of activities and technologies, brought about a new geological era defined by human-driven alterations to the earth’s environmental systems (Crutzen 2000; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). This current era, called the Anthropocene, is characterized by irreversible changes to the planet’s atmosphere, rivers, oceans, deserts, soil and the distribution, number and genetic make-up of plant and animal species. The geography of environmental wealth and environmental ill health, however, is not spatially even. Spatial patterns of negative impacts on and benefits from the use of environmental resources are not uniform. Simon Dalby has made the case that acknowledging the Anthropocene allows us to consider how arrangements of power have led to disparities between groups of people, between 307

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics places and between environments in those places (2007). Dominant economic and political systems have had far-reaching influence on the means and ends of manipulating environmental systems leading to staggering gaps between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in terms of economic wealth and environmental health. The Judeo-Christian roots that underlie much of Western society’s approach to environmental issues encourage the belief that humans are distinct from the environment. This view that humans are separate from and in control of the environment has enabled the destruction of habitats, landscapes, water bodies and the like because they are not ‘us’. In much the same way, mass human atrocities are enabled when groups of people are isolated and identified as ‘Other’. Yet if we take the idea of the Anthropocene seriously, we cannot distinguish human society from the environment. To the contrary, the Anthropocene recognizes that our activities and well-being are entangled with the environment in multiple and complex ways (see O’Lear 2010). Not only have human activities irreversibly altered environmental features, but recent studies of human bioindicators confirm that we carry toxins and chemicals from an array of industrial activities permanently in our blood and tissues (World Wildlife Fund International 2005; Schapiro 2007). On careful examination, we can see that current environmental ‘threats’ often have their roots in human systems and practices of domination which should lead us to question who (and where) benefits from current arrangements of power.

Power An objective of this chapter is to consider the role of power in human–environment relationships. Critical geopolitics often draws upon the work of Michel Foucault as a useful approach to interpreting power. Foucault’s approach to power complements a critical geopolitical perspective since it does not focus solely on state power. Foucault viewed power not as a resource located at some central point but as manifested in techniques and practices. These techniques and practices might be spatial, organizational, representational or other, but they serve to limit possibilities for social response (Allen 2003). In Foucault’s view, ‘power is not a commodity, a position, a prize, or a plot; it is the operation of the political technologies throughout the social body’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 185). Foucault’s work on power was intended not so much as a theory but as a framework for analyzing the ‘web of unequal relationships’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 185). This understanding of power is helpful as we consider a complex range of actors and interests related to complex, environmental issues. To operationalize an analysis of power in society, I employ Michael Mann’s schema of types of power (1986), because this approach allows us to trace power structures through different aspects of society. Mann focuses on social networks that have spatial, organizational reach to secure outcomes. He identifies four broad categories of resources around which such networks are organized: military, economic, political and ideological. Mann’s focus on the scope and reach of these overlapping networks is helpful for 308

Environment this chapter because it contributes to a spatial understanding of power and allows us to look at ways in which a variety of actors exercise power at different spatial scales. Mann examined how history has been shaped by different forms of power at different times. By his definition, ‘power is the ability to pursue and attain goals through mastery of one’s environment’ (Mann 1986: 6). Power, by this view, is measured by the ability to organize, coordinate and cooperate at whatever spatial reach – concentrated or extensive – is necessary to achieve the desired objective. Mann’s four main types of power are: Military power is perhaps the most straightforward. Military power is characterized by the ability to coordinate aggression and physically control or defend territory. Military power usually relies on centralized, top-down control. Military power may be used to preserve or challenge state stability. Political power is wielded by sovereign governments and political parties and is therefore usually focused on the spatial scale of the state. Political power aims to promote the interests of the state. Political power may be exercised both within the state to maintain control and beyond state borders in arenas of diplomacy and international geopolitics. There is not a technique of power unique to political power, and it may incorporate strategies used in other forms of power (for example, military power in the interests of pursuing a state-level objective). Economic power is employed by groups of people or organizations that are ‘able to monopolize control over production, distribution, exchange, and consumption’ (Mann 1986: 24). These activities include the control and management of the transport, processing, marketing and distribution of raw materials and goods. Economic power may be concentrated in particular sites of production, but it may also be diffuse over large areas reflected in marketing and consumption trends. The example of the promotion of the ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ logo to encourage continued consumption trends is an example of economic power as wielded by the packaging industry. This marketing strategy is also related to ideological power since a key objective of the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ campaign was to influence people’s perceptions and behaviors in a way that was conducive to the packaging industry. Ideological power is perhaps the most difficult to discern. Ideological power has to do with the meanings and values we associate with our social organization and activities. Ideological power may be seen in group identities, religious beliefs, ritual practices, social norms and expectations. Ideological power controls belief systems and therefore shapes people’s behaviors, what people accept as normal and what people view as unacceptable.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Each of these forms of power shapes different aspects of human–environment interactions and generates spatial relationships of patterns and processes. These forms of power may be in effect simultaneously or one may predominate at particular times and places. Mann’s types of power shares with Foucault’s work an interest in interpreting the influence of a range of social networks. Assessing the influence of power helps us to imagine how things might be different and why some places are affected in certain ways and other places are not. This way of thinking reflects a critical geopolitical perspective: tracing power dynamics, including but beyond and within state-level power, that underlie spatial differentiation and the creation of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. The case studies that make up the remainder of this chapter each highlight one of the four forms of power in Mann’s schema. Yet, as will be clear in each case study, the different forms of power are often interrelated and simultaneous. By assessing the influence of power, we can gain insight into how we think (or how we do not tend to think) about environmental issues and the spatial understandings that emerge from these perspectives.

Military power, nuclear energy and radioactive waste Military power can be used by non-state entities in an attempt to gain control over territory or resources, but military power is most often used by states to defend or promote state interests. Military power often uses nationalistic arguments to justify actions. The impact of military action often goes unchallenged if it is framed as serving the interests of the state or as promoting state security. These efforts may be questioned by the public, but negative environmental consequences of military power are often less visible than other impacts of military action. Joni Seager has taken a feminist perspective toward the military and other types of institutions that are strongly influential in society–environment interactions. She questions assumptions underlying institutional activities that result in damage to the environment. She observes: The environmental crisis is not a crisis of physical ecosystems. The real story of the environmental crisis is a story of power and profit and political wrangling; it is a story of the institutional arrangements and setting, the bureaucratic arrangements and the cultural conventions that create conditions of environmental destruction. Toxic wastes and oil spills and dying forests, which are presented in the daily news as the entire environmental story, are the symptoms – the symptoms of social arrangements and especially of social derangements. (Seager 1993: 3, emphasis in original) Militaries, because ‘their daily operations are typically beyond the reach of civil law’ (Mann 1986: 14), can exert a significant influence on the environment through the development of technologies and through their spatial reach. Nuclear energy, 310

Environment for instance, was initially developed as a military technology and was then later retooled for civilian uses such as energy generation. Rather than dwell on the realities of, for example, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, on which the USA dropped nuclear bombs to hasten the end of World War II, public service campaigns in the 1950s sought to make nuclear energy acceptable to the public. Public campaigns used ideological power to transform nuclear energy from a fearful military weapon to an acceptable, if not preferred, means to generate household and industrial energy. President Eisenhower’s administration promoted nuclear energy and financially supported its development for civilian use (Farber and Weeks 2001). In a parallel fashion, the Soviet Union also spent years of the Cold War constructing nuclear generators for industrial and civilian use. Most nuclear facilities are expected to have a life span of about 40 years. That means most of the nuclear generators built in the 1960s have reached the end of their lifespan. Other countries, such as France, have built nuclear power plants more recently and with advanced technology, but their lifespans are not that different from the older models. Nuclear generators compound a problem shared with military nuclear projects, namely, the storage of waste. Nuclear waste, whether from decommissioned weapons or public energy generation will remain lethal for an estimated 10,000 years. Nuclear waste is difficult to contain. There is no material that will last long enough to isolate spent nuclear fuel or keep it from leaking into the air, the ground and water bodies. Even Nevada’s Yucca Mountain facility, the site selected by the US Federal Government for the long-term storage of nuclear waste from the country’s military and civilian nuclear endeavors, is not expected to keep these materials secure from seismic activity and leakage. Debates about the advantages and disadvantages of developing a centralized location as mass repository of toxic, nuclear waste do not tend to question whether or not the use of nuclear energy should be continued. National sacrifice zones – areas devastated beyond recovery from weapons testing, waste burial or industrial activities such as strip mining – are often accepted as the cost of military strength. The assumption here is that military efforts on behalf of the country serve to benefit the entire country. The logic that follows is that everyone in the state benefits equally. Terms like ‘the national good’ associate efforts, costs and benefits with the country as a whole as if these features were uniformly distributed across the entire territory of the state. This kind of argument conflates state-level security and individual security. Although it is clear that maintaining safe boundaries, stable economic flows and public safety could all be elements of both state and individual security, the argument is not necessarily helpful in drawing a direct connection between the pursuit and development of nuclear weaponry and the health and environmental risks emanating from national sacrifice zones to nearby populations. Part of the confusion in the discussion of nuclear weapons is that there are more actors than just the state and state militaries. Research laboratories, some of which are supported by government funding, and businesses with an interest in the munitions industry, private contractors and even public utilities have all been associated with the development and expansion of nuclear technology. It 311

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics is an oversimplification to refer only to ‘state interests’ or ‘state security’ when profits become involved. These complex relationships between state activities and businesses may be obscured by emphasizing, instead, threats to national security and the need for national military prowess. It is important and helpful to understand the array of interests that have been involved in the promotion of nuclear energy, both as a military technology and a civilian technology. Particularly now, when militarism around the world has become an end in itself (Tyner 2010), we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to untangle the actors, interests and impacts associated with military power. The situation with nuclear power and toxic waste highlights interesting spatial dimensions of military power. Military power, as discussed above, tends to justify its actions by pointing to state-level security. Also noted earlier in this section, military actions to maintain or reinforce state-level security may in fact undermine various forms of security for people living in the state (for example, the negative health impact of living downwind from a nuclear weapons testing area or near a nuclear waste storage facility). Military power cannot necessarily control the after effects of the deployment or use of weapons and technologies. Although military power and the use of physical aggression usually have a very specific spatial focus, toxic weapons, once deployed, can no longer be controlled in space or time. This observation is not only true for nuclear power, it is also true for chemical, biological weapons and even weapons such as herbal and animal-derived toxins used in ancient times (Mayor 2003). The environmental legacy of military power, therefore, is dynamic and spatially extensive but not often critiqued in terms of what kinds of security it actually reinforces or undermines.

Political power, climate change and the territorial trap Political power is associated with the state and state-level interests. It differs from military power because it is not exclusively focused on physical aggression. Instead, political power seeks to maintain the state entity and associated institutions (for example, county-level elections or political parties and bureaucratic leadership). The dominant discourse of climate change prioritizes state-level decision making. Global climate models often divide and assess the globe in a grid of two-by-two degrees, but climate change is an issue that tends to be discussed in terms of statelevel actions. International climate negotiations are state-centric. For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by assigning states to categories of Annex 1 or Annex 2, depending on their contributions and capacities to reduce emissions. Other meetings and agreements, such as the first and second World Climate Conferences in Geneva and the Earth Summit in Rio include state delegations as key participants, state representatives negotiate the parameters of discussion and states are recognized as legitimate actors that may sign final agreements at these meetings.

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Environment What difference does it make that the dominant discourse on climate change is spatialized at the scale of the state? States have the authority to pass and enforce domestic laws and standards regarding emissions levels, and in that way states may serve as important actors to bring about change. Indeed, the field of international relations focuses on state behaviors and interactions on a range of issues for precisely this reason. Yet if we focus exclusively on the state level as a means to understand or explain why things are the way they are, we fall into what John Agnew has called the ‘territorial trap’ (1994). When we assess problems and identify solutions at the state level, we limit our ability to take into account flows and interactions across multiple scales. Climate change appears to be such a significant, far-reaching problem that discussions tend to focus on states as the most able actors to facilitate change. Paterson and Stripple have examined state-centered articulations about climate change (2007). By naturalizing (or not questioning) an understanding of climate change based on territorial states, certain perspectives and solutions appear legitimate. President Bush declined to sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions on a country-by-country basis. His reasoning was that since economically developing countries were not required to cut their emissions as drastically as richer countries, they would have an unfair economic advantage and threaten US economic security. Yet if we step back and consider that many economically developing countries are still struggling with a legacy of colonization that impoverished their own options for economic growth while making other countries rich, we get a different sense of what might be considered ‘fair’. What does ‘global security’ mean in a world where economic disparity is the norm (Litfin 1997)? From the perspective of indigenous groups and other groups at a power disadvantage, ‘inequality is masked by arguing that climate change is global. There is no “common future”’ (Smith 2007: 208). Another critique of state-centered decision-making in regards to climate change comes from Agarwal and Narain (1991; 1998). They argued that it is unfair to treat emissions generated from survival activities, such as burning coal for cooking, the same as luxury emissions, such as driving an individual vehicle when public transportation is available. They have argued for a change in how emissions are calculated. Rather than absolute, state-by-state measurements of emissions, they call for a measuring process that takes into account each country’s percentage of the world population and relating that to the world’s total carbon-sink capacity. Such calculations would result in a more equitable distribution of obligation to reduce emissions. This approach considers population and size of territory, and places value on maintaining landcover that serves as a carbon sink, such as forests. Even so, this approach, too, is based on state territorialization and does not seek to include other groups, such as industry, as actors that might be involved in altering emission output. A mere five countries are responsible for over half of the world’s greenhousegas production: USA 22%, China 18%, Russia 6 %, India 5% and Japan 5% (Rayner 2008). The remaining 44% of emissions come from 200 countries combined. International efforts to deal with global climate change imply a more evenly 313

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics distributed responsibility for emissions than there really is. We might ask if it is precisely those few, powerful states that maintain the state-level focus, so that they may influence what is considered to be the best approach to climate change. As long as climate change is considered to be a global problem requiring international negotiations, we might miss an altogether different perspective on climate change as summarized by Sarewitz and Pielke (2000): 1. Regardless of proposals and plans to reduce CO2 emisssions, atmospheric CO2 levels will continue to increase. 2. Even if greenhouse-gas emissions could be reduced to pre-industrial levels, the global climate would continue to change. These observations return us to the idea of the Anthropocene. If these points hold, then our efforts are better directed not toward reversing current conditions but toward adaptation. With an increasing global population, the effects of climate change will be felt by more people and may drive more people toward desperate uses of natural resources. Shifting world focus away from reversing climate change and toward efforts at reducing people’s vulnerability may actually have a greater positive impact on people and ecosystems than international negotiations on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Looking at climate change as a threat to systemic vulnerability – economic, environmental and other systems – highlights how ‘the implicit moral imperative is not to prevent human disruption of the environment but to ameliorate the social and political conditions that lead people to behave in environmentally disruptive ways’ (Sarewitz and Pielke 2000: 63). This view of climate change brings to bear different forms of power at multiple spatial scales reflected in government policies, product standards, consumption trends, citizen action, corporate behavior and so on. No one spatial scale or avenue of action is likely to hold the solution to climate change, but by finding ways to reduce systemic vulnerability and increase system resilience (Adger, Arnell and Tompkins 2005), we will have improved our ability to cope with the realities of climate change, whatever they may be.

Economic power, the Farm Bill and corn Economic power, as conceptualized by Mann, is used by groups of people or organizations that are ‘able to monopolize control over production, distribution, exchange, and consumption’ (Mann 1986: 24). The example considered here is the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007, also known as the latest iteration of the US Farm Bill. This bill represents an official piece of legislation that is revised by Congress every 5 years. The Farm Bill was born out of an interest by the Federal Government in 1929 in supporting agriculture and improving farm-based income. Originally, a wide variety of crops was eligible for subsidies, but over time the list of the most heavily subsidized crops has been shortened to just a few commodity 314

Environment crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton (Blatt 2008). The Farm Bill dictates not just subsidies and agricultural output, but it also influences the demand for specific agricultural inputs (for example, seeds and fertilizer), the availability and pricing of food and food processing inputs and it influences food security both in the USA and beyond (see O’Lear 2010). What is a food commodity? It is a basic ingredient of food products. Corn is a heavily subsidized food commodity. Subsidies to produce corn lead to an abundance of corn supply which, in turn, motivates research and development into new uses for corn. High-fructose corn syrup is an excellent example. Turning corn into corn syrup is a lengthy, energy-intensive process, so much so, in fact, that the widespread use of corn syrup was prohibitively costly in the 1970s. Then, once corn subsidies led to an abundance of inexpensive corn, corn syrup became cheaper to produce. Cheap corn syrup became favored over beet and cane sugar, and it is now a staple of the food-processing industry. Corn syrup may be found in a staggering array of processed foods from cookies to ketchup to meat products. Anyone who pays attention to ingredient labels will quickly see how far the Farm Bill reaches into our food supply just through the ubiquity of corn syrup (‘throwback’ pop, containing real sugar, notwithstanding). Corn is just one food commodity favored and prioritized by the Farm Bill. Corn represents economic power wielded by seed and fertilizer companies, food transport and processing companies and politicians and investors who benefit from the promotion of a specific crop. The power reflected in corn reaches beyond the USA. When the USA negotiated the details of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with its neighbors, it wanted to ensure that the US corn industry would have minimal competition from Mexico, which, at the time, was a major corn producer. Mexico slashed its corn production to meet NAFTA’s terms. In the process, Mexico adjusted its land tenure policies which, in turn, negatively affected many farmers in Mexico whose families had grown corn for generations. The Mexican region of Chiapas was particularly affected by the overhaul of the corn industry, and corn farmers were outraged. The Zapatista movement was born, and its leader, Subcomandante Marcos, with his signature balaclava and pipe, became an international icon fighting for Mexican peasants who had no other means to gain their government’s attention. Again, we see that the treatment of corn in the US Farm Bill and in NAFTA reflects economic power in the ability of some groups to control production, distribution, and consumption. The Farm Bill extends beyond food supply. Together with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the US Farm Bill promotes a national ethanol program which focuses on corn-based ethanol. How did this biofuel become the most favored by national policy? Again, economic power led to this outcome: Archer Daniels Midland Co. spent $440,000 in the first six months of 2007 to lobby on the farm bill, the energy bill, renewable energy issues, and other regulatory and general trade issues. The Renewable Fuels Association spent $310,000 in lobbying on the farm bill, energy bill and a number of other 315

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics measures of interest to the renewable fuels industry. The American Coalition for Ethanol reportedly spent $20,000 on lobbyists, and the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition spent $30,000. (Schill 2007) In turn, the Farm Bill promotes ethanol in the USA by allocating funds in that direction: $320 million for a new loan guarantee program for the development and construction of commercial-scale biorefineries, provides $300 million in the Bioenergy Program to provide assistance to biofuel production plants for the purchase of feedstocks, provides $118 million for biomass research and development efforts; reauthorizes and provides $250 million for grants and loan guarantees for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, and authorizes a new program, the Biomass Crop Assistance Program to help producers transition to new energy crops for biofuel production. (Zimmerman 2008) This focused financial support enables a handful of companies to have a lot of control over food and fuel production in the USA: Today five major seed companies dominate world-wide: Monsanto, Aventis, DuPont, Syngenta, and Dow. In the US, four firms slaughter 81 per cent of the beef; four firms own 60 percent of the terminal grain facilities, and three firms export 81 percent of corn and 65 percent of soybeans. In addition, four firms have 46 percent of the total sows in production and four firms slaughter 50 percent of all American broilers. (Morgan, Marsden and Murdoch 2006: 55). All of this coordination of business and policy favors the industrialization of the food supply. The concentration on relatively few commodities and the streamlining of the agriculture and food production processes takes its toll on the environment in terms of pesticides, fertilizers and demand for water. Large-scale food-production operations contribute concentrated amounts of wastes and toxins. For example, large, corporate pork-production facilities have been replacing smaller, family farms. A single hog-processing facility generates a constant flow not only of fecal matter from millions of hogs, but also antibiotics, vaccines, insecticides, afterbirths, blood and pig carcasses. Holding ponds for this waste often leak or can be flooded, so nearby soil, water tables and even air are affected with toxic waste (Tietz 2006). Varieties of corn promoted both for the food industry and for biofuels are among the most input-intensive crops in terms of energy (Pimentel 2003), pesticides and fertilizer. Ethanol-processing plants require so much water that communities are starting to protest the construction of these facilities. To produce 50 million gallons of biofuel in a year requires almost 500 gallons of water per minute (The Economist 2008). These are just a few examples of ways in which the economic power behind the Farm Bill leads to significant environmental impacts. If the Farm Bill were 316

Environment required to plan for a longer time period, such as 50 years instead of 5, we might expect a rather different set of priorities and perhaps a greater focus on long-term sustainability of agricultural practices.

Ideological power and garbage Garbage and waste are a fact of human societies. Ancient civilizations generated waste, and the industrial revolution altered the rate, reach and nature of the production of waste. Ideological power can be seen in how we perceive waste and how we discern between waste and commodities of value. How we view, produce and manage waste has direct impacts on the environment. Waste is waste, right? Actually, the definition of waste is not absolute. Before chemicals were used to tan leather, the astringent in dog excrement got the job done. That meant there was gainful employment in collecting dog excrement to serve that purpose. Petroleum spirit was a by-product of the paraffin refining industry. There was no use for this waste product, and it was burned off in giant pits. Finally, the combustion engine was developed to use a version of petroleum spirit for fuel, and that was the beginning of the automotive industry and the US-dominated airline industry. Today we feed rendered animals to other animals, and we recycle human body parts: A single human body that has been ‘abandoned’ to medical research or over which no-one claims possessory rights of disposal is worth in excess of $70,000 to the cosmetic surgery industry. Corpse tissues are used in lip-enhancement, breast augmentation, penis-enlargement and in treating wrinkles. Ounce per ounce, human tissue in this industrial complex, is as valuable as diamonds. (O’Brien 2008: 78) Ideological power shapes what we accept as waste and what is viewed as appropriate or necessary consumption. During World War II, the US public was widely involved in conserving materials: scrap metals, rubber, paper and even silk stockings. Public service campaigns promoted the saving and recycling of materials and made these efforts part of a larger, national effort. Doing with less or doing without was viewed as patriotic. Shortly after the war ended, however, US businesses wanted a boost. Advertising campaigns promoted not just new products but a new image for the US consumer. Now, consuming was viewed as patriotic. Even after the attacks on the USA in September 2001, the US public was encouraged to go shopping to show that terrorists had not disrupted ‘normal’ life. The strategy of planned obsolescence, either through technological failure, ever-changing fashion trends or the promotion of disposability contributes to this endless demand and consumption (Slade 2006). A critical geopolitics perspective looks not merely at the power shaping attitudes and relationships but also at the spatial effects of those relationships. The example of e-waste highlights this geography of waste. E-waste, or electronic 317

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics waste, includes computers and cell phones as well as a range of gadgets from digital cameras to Xboxes to zip drives. The demand for these products creates a waste stream that spans the globe. The production of many of these gadgets requires coltan, a key mineral used in making capacitors for high-tech electronics. Coltan is mined mainly in Australia, but reserves in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are gaining attention (Grossman 2006). Mining coltan – like most minerals – generates toxic mine tailings, but in the DRC the mining industry involves unsafe and unregulated mines, impinges on agriculture, reduces the food supply and weakens the social fabric in communities in mining areas. As the life cycle of electronic gadgets continues, packaging and transport contribute to more waste. At the end of their life cycles, electronic gadgets are added to landfills where their heavy metals generate toxic leachate that can affect water supplies. In other cases, e-waste is shipped to other countries. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, known as the Basel Convention, was intended to reduce international trade in toxic and hazardous substances and to encourage their disposal close to their source. This agreement, however, is not entirely successful. Richer countries still manage to send e-waste to countries in Asia and Africa which do not have adequate facilities for processing or storing this waste: We saw people using e-waste to fill in swamps. … Whenever the piles got too high, they would torch them. … Residents complained about breathing the fumes, but the dumps were never cleaned up. We saw kids roaming barefoot over this material, not to mention chickens and goats [which end up in the local diet]. (Schmidt 2006: A234) Sometimes there are attempts made to recover materials from e-waste. Recovery efforts in these countries often involve, ‘women and children laborers who cook circuit boards, burn cables, and submerge equipment in toxic acids to extract precious metals such as copper’ (Schmidt 2006: A235). Ideological power focuses our attention on only part of the process, namely, a drive to buy the latest technology and perhaps a concern about where these gadgets end up. A critical geopolitics of the environment enables a broader, investigative perspective. It allows us to assess the life cycle of e-waste and to examine the many ways in which this particular aspect of contemporary society has environmental (as well as social and economic) impacts in several different places.

Conclusion Disasters, even worst case ones, are not special. Destruction is no more special than construction. Political struggle is also normal, even when the subject is large-scale devastation. Everyday life is political. So are worst cases. If we care about what produces them, how we should respond to them, 318

Environment how we might prevent some of them, we must understand the distribution of power that permeates societies. (Clarke 2006: 128) This passage returns us to Foucault’s emphasis on tracing unequal power relations to their functioning in the material world. Mann’s typology of four types of power is one way to trace power relationships across a range of social, political and economic processes. When we examine power dynamics in a given situation, we can more clearly see how power structures have emerged and how they are maintained. We also gain insight into why other scenarios have not emerged due to an uneven distribution of power. Once we have an understanding of the dominant structures that enable current power dynamics, we also gain insight into how the environment is (or is not) viewed and valued. Dalby’s critique of Kaplan’s portrayal of environmental degradation in West Africa demonstrated how Kaplan’s narrative is spatially limited and focused selectively on trends which are largely unexamined. In the same way, a critical geopolitics of human– environment relationships helps us to see power arrangements that dictate the uses of and priorities for natural resources. This chapter has described examples of military, economic, political and ideological power as a means of taking a critical perspective on geopolitical relationships that affect the environment as both a source of supply and a sink for waste. There remain many questions that a critical geopolitics approach could examine that pertain to environmental issues. How and by whom is the environment securitized or invoked in narratives of national security? Which aspects or features of the environment or natural resources are prioritized or neglected in such narratives and why? To what extent and in what contexts are environmental features given agency or power that they do not have? In what ways are different forms of power hidden in narratives about shared resources, commodity resources or ecosystem services? What are the power dynamics and spatial relationships of ecological imperialism at global, international and even local scales? Environmental features have many different, simultaneous meanings and uses. Which meaning and which use predominates in any particular case or place may be seen as a factor of how competing interests achieve a particular outcome.

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Environment Litfin, K., 1997. ‘The gendered eye in the sky: A feminist perspective on earth observation satellites’. Frontiers 18(2): 26–47. Mann, M., 1986. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayor, A., 2003. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Duckworth. Morgan, K., T. Marsden and J. Murdoch, 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain. New York: Oxford University Press. Ó Tuathail, G., 1998. ‘Introduction: Thinking critically about geopolitics’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. O’Brien, M., 2008. A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society. New York: Routledge. O’Lear, S., 2005. ‘Resources and conflict in the Caspian’. In P. Le Billon (ed.), The Geopolitics of Resource Wars. London: Frank Cass, pp. 161–86. —— 2010. Environmental Politics: Power and Scale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and A. Gray, 2006. ‘Asking the right questions: Environmental conflict in the case of Azerbaijan’. Area 38: 390–401. Paterson, M., and J. Stripple, 2007. ‘Singing climate change into existence: On the territorialization of climate policymaking’. In M.E. Pettenger (ed.), The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses. Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 149–72. Pimentel, D., 2003. ‘Ethanol fuels: Energy balance, economics, and environmental impacts are negative’. Natural Resources Research 12: 127–34. Rayner, S., 2008. ‘Get serious about climate change’. Wired Magazine 16(10): 176. Sarewitz, D., and R. Pielke, Jr, 2000. ‘Breaking the global warming gridlock’. Atlantic Monthly 86: 54–64. Schapiro, M., 2007. ‘Toxic inaction: Why poisonous, unregulated chemicals end up in our blood’. Harper’s Magazine, Oct.: 78–83. Schill, S.R., 2007. ‘Ethanol lobbying dwarfed by oil industry’. Ethanol Producer Magazine, Nov. . Schmidt, C.W., 2006. ‘Unfair trade: E-waste in Africa’. Environmental Health Perspectives. 114: A232–A235. Seager, J., 1993. Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge. Slade, G., 2006. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, H.A., 2007. ‘Disrupting the global discourse of climate change: The case of indigenous voices’. In M.E. Pettenger (ed.), The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses. Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 197–215. Tietz, J., 2006. ‘Pork’s dirty secret: The nation’s top hog producer is also one of America’s worst polluters’. Rolling Stone, 14 Dec. . 321

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Tyner, J., 2010. Military Legacies: A World made by War. New York: Routledge. World Wildlife Fund International, 2005. Generations X: Results of WWF’s European Biomonitoring Survey. Brussels: WWF EPO. Available at . Zerner, C., 2005. ‘Emerging cartographies of environmental danger: Africa, Ebola, and AIDS’. In B. Hartmann, B. Subramaniam and C. Zerner (eds), Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 159–85. Zimmerman, C., 2008. ‘Ethanol provisions in Farm Bill’. Domesticfuel.com, 8 May. .

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17

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Global South Chih Yuan Woon

Introduction The infusion of postcolonial theories into geography has arguably bequeathed the discipline with critical epistemological and methodological reflections related to the pertinence of de-centering ‘Western’ knowledges and initiating culturally sensitive scholarship across the North–South divide (McEwan 2009; McFarlane 2006a; Sidaway 2000; Sharp 2009). Without over-romanticizing the potentialities of working/learning across difference, there have been poignant reminders that the categories of ‘North’ and ‘South’ do not merely reflect diverse identity positions that are tied to particular geographical locations. Crucially, any attempts to bridge this spatial dichotomy must first engage in careful consideration of issues bordering on the interface of power and representation across the North–South divide (Blunt and McEwan 2002; Rigg 2007; Slater 1997; 2004; Sparke 2007a). Indeed, the emergence and evolution of the categories of ‘North’ and ‘South’ must be analyzed in tandem with the power that has been exercised over peripheral societies through the repeated employment of subordinating modes of representation. In lieu of the recognition that such discursive tags are not natural but are instead geopolitical constructs borne out of specific spatial–temporal developments, geographers have begun to cast scrutiny on the changing dynamics of North–South interactions. In particular, attention is directed to the ways in which ‘geographies of resistance and domination within the South are increasingly shaped in relation to discursive materialities of terrorism, invasion, security, occupation and so on, primarily produced and sustained by powerful actors in the North’ (Sheppard and Nagar 2004: 558). Aligning with such perspectives, this chapter is broadly concerned with mapping out the critical geographies of the so-called Global South. Concurring with Sheppard and Nagar that the South is a relational entity that cannot be discussed without reference to the North, I highlight how the former has been imagined visà-vis dominant geopolitical discourses emanating from its Northern counterpart. Rather than assuming the universality of such imaginative geographies, I proceed to illuminate some of the criticisms directed at these forms of representational practices. Building on Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’ (1978), I attempt

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics to harness a postcolonial approach in tracking the geo-graphings of the Global South in persistently critical ways (see Sparke 2005). This will involve critiquing the dominant maps of meanings (Jackson 1989) that have provided the practical guides and promotional props for ‘Western’ (colonial) powers to overwrite and obscure the huge heterogeneity of the Global South, replacing it instead with pernicious ‘us–them’ oppositions and ‘West is best’ assumptions (Sparke 2007a: 117–18). Insofar as representations are closely bound up with material effects, these imagi(in)ngs are performative in justifying violent territorializing imperatives in the Global South for the ultimate purpose of political–economic dispossession. But, as this chapter will exemplify, these cartographic cover-ups and carve-ups of the Global South have never succeeded in obliterating the efforts of those oppressed to reclaim and re-territorialize their human geographies by representing them in other more grounded, embodied and accountable ways. To this end, I will engage in a thematic exposition of the plethora of geopolitical writings that seek to relate the multiple struggles against violence and dispossession in the Global South, This is however not a straightforward academic exercise of simply including ‘voices’ from this part of the world. Rather, debates have been rife with regards to the epistemic violence and power relations that are implicated in privileged researchers’ act of ‘speaking for’ the communities of the Global South. This has in turn provoked reactionary endeavours that attempt to harness academic responsibility for the enactment of localized learning strategies as well as collaborative knowledgeproduction avenues. In this sense, the Global South can serve as site of intervention that exposes the reductionism inherent in homogenizing, (Northern) meta-theories as much as it can function as a site of learning to appreciate the multiple life/ developmental trajectories of those living in ‘different’ spaces. The chapter is divided into four sections. First, I will trace the genealogy of the term ‘Global South’, demonstrating how its meanings and interpretations are intimately connected to discursive portrayals enacted by various Northern agencies. An Orientalist critique of these multiple representations of the Global South will follow, illuminating in the process the ways in which they are complicit in territorializing imperatives and dealings of dispossession. Following that, attention will be given to the geographical research that attempt to insert ‘other’ experiences emerging from the Global South into the theoretical radar of geopolitics. This will be interwoven with methodological contemplations pertaining to researchers’ encounters in the Global South and the associated implications for responsible knowledge production. The conclusion will reflect on the role of this chapter in locating the Global South at the intersection of entangled (geo)politics of dispossession and repossession in order to create the possibilities for rethinking the premises of a more equal, humane and peaceful world (see Sparke 2007a).

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The Global South

Genealogical origins of the ‘Global South’: What’s in the name? In 1980 ex-German Chancellor Willy Brandt presided over a commission whose report, North–South: A Programme for Survival, provided an overall conspectus of a clear dividing line between an affluent and powerful North, and a impoverished and marginalized South. Positioned outside the Cold War’s East–West dichotomy of the capitalist ‘First World’ as well as the Soviet ‘Second World’, the Global South or ‘Third World’ was seen something as a residual category, in need of sustained assistance to ensure its development. Indeed, Pletsch in explicating the origins of the ‘three worlds’ concept notes that ‘modernization theory is constituent to the structural relationship among the underlying semantic terms’ (1981: 576): there is the assumption that traditional and backward societies (the Third World) are all destined to become modern ones. As such, the Third World exists no more than a group of unaligned objects of the competing imperialistic policies of the first two worlds. However, the relentless geopolitical transformations in the global arena over the past decade has rendered the so-called Brandt Line seemingly obsolete: the old Soviet Union has dissolved, leaving new low-income countries (such as Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) in its wake; economic progression in some parts of the South has bequeathed countries (including Singapore and South Korea) with the prestigious ‘high income’ status; and still others (Brazil, India and China to say the least) have become significant regional or even global players in their own right (see Rigg 2007). Such complications to the Brandt Line’s neat distinctions between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless does not in any way negate the importance of the North–South divide in continually shaping geopolitical imag(in)ings and discussions of the Global South. Indeed, Rigg claims that although the Global South is an eclectic grouping that comprises nation-states with diverse socio-economic and political characteristics, certain tropes are consistently being evoked to connote the contrary idea of the South as being an undifferentiating and coherent entity (2007). Such representations of the South often implicitly take conditions in the Global North as their point of reference, thereby attesting to the intimate connections and linkages between these two spatial blocs. Without lapsing into reductionism by asserting that there is no heterogeneity in the North, it must be pointed at the outset that what is really being discussed here is how particular groups of people in the North imagine the South and it is the constitution of such views in the field of power that enable them to become hegemonic and representative. One of the most common geographical imaginations of the Global South is related to its impoverished condition. These representations are primarily based on how people should live and are grounded on the premise of the South lacking something, whether it be material goods or particular social or political structures. In this sense, the peoples of the South are constructed as unable to make their lives better; rather, the only way improvements can be made is through assistance from the North. A paternalistic relationship is thus proliferated. Such representations are 325

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics best encapsulated through campaigns and advertisements for public assistance for aid. Although not implying that problems such as famine and disease do not exist in the South, there are ways in which pictures and language can reinforce ideas of Northern agency and Southern passivity. They can also present homogenizing images of the South, focusing usually on parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and often using children as a focus to elicit affective consequences for the wooing of Northern donors. The use of mothers and children in news reporting on crises and disasters in the Global South is also widespread (see Moeller 1999; on newspaper coverage of the Dafur conflict, see Campbell 2007). Media reports may also use racialized themes, with ‘white heroes’ embarking on a ‘noble’ journey to rescue the darker-skinned, starving and dispossessed, emphasizing once again on the interrelated chain of binaries: North/active/giving and South/passive/receiving (Harrison and Palmer 1986; McEwan 2009). Gender can also be implicated whereby Western liberal agendas engage in widespread constructions that ‘white men or women are needed to save brown women from brown men’ (Sharp 2009; see also Roy 2002; Spivak 1988). If the South is cast as besieged by widespread poverty and needing (Northern) help, its imagining as a dangerous terrain which directly threatens lives and lifestyles in the North similarly demands such interventions. The threats emanating from the South do not manifest in one form; rather, they have allegedly been imagined to stem from three different sources. First, the South is presented as overpopulated, which not only creates problems internally but also for the global community. The current population of the global South is both large (around 5.4 billion of a global total of 6.4 billion) and growing faster than that of the North: between 1975 and 2005, annual average population growth was 0.7 percent in countries classified as high income by the World Bank, compared with 2.3 percent in the low-income countries (UNDP 2007). Within the Global South, there are however significant disparities in population growth rates, with many countries of Latin America and East Asia experiencing annual growth rates of less than 2 percent, while much of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have annual growth rates of over 2 percent per annum (Rigg 2007). Although the difficulties of accurately measuring these statistics have been raised, they have nonetheless formed the basis for the claim that the South is ‘overpopulated’ and is thus endangering either the North or the planet as a whole. This threat can then be couched in two distinct fashions: as an ecological/environmental threat to the planet in line with Malthusian interpretations of resource constraint or as a threat of mass Southern immigration that might engulf Northern countries. The South is also often represented as a region that houses conflicts and political instability. The underlying contention is that if such strife is not contained, it can ‘spread’ to induce negative ramifications for a wider geographical area (including the North). For instance, the contemporary ‘war on terror’ has involved representations of particular parts of the Global South, most notably countries in the Middle East or those elsewhere with a significant Muslim population, such as Indonesia, as containing threats to global security (Glassman 2005; Gregory 2004). Sparke has examined the rhetoric of key US politicians to bring out the manner in which 326

The Global South particular geographical imaginations become embedded: ‘The repetitive conjuring of fear created … a form of geopolitical spatial fix’ (2007b: 342). Thus, even when it became clear that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or links with al-Qaeda, the majority of the US public continued to believe that Iraq posed an immediate danger to the USA as this representation of a particular space had been ‘fixed’ in their minds. Gregory similarly focuses on the Middle East (and Central Asia) to emphasize the complex imaginative geographies and colonial histories that are complicit in the recent bloody ‘Western’ assault on this region (2004). One of Gregory’s central claims is that we live in a colonial present – that in Afghanistan and Iraq, the USA, and in Palestine, the state of Israel act in a colonial manner. The war on terror is the current form taken by the ideologies justifying colonialism. In the name of civilization, colonial powers have fought against what they have repeatedly configured as barbarism in its nationalist, communist and now Islamic forms. The result is a sobering reminder that historical antecedence and Orientalist projections have come to sustain and surround the ‘war on terror’ primarily in the Global South. My own work has, on the other hand, discussed the geographical implications pertaining to the extension of the ‘war on terror’ to a ‘second front’ in South-East Asia (Woon 2009). I argue that whilst some South-East Asian states are clearly less affected by terrorist activities than others, the label of the ‘second front’ essentially ensures that the metonyms of ‘fear’, ‘threat’ and ‘danger’ are universally associated with the entire region. Finally, the South has been constructed as a threat to Northern populations due to its status as a hotbed of disease. Lucy Jarosz, for example, highlights how discourses of the ‘dark continent’ which were used in relation to Africa in the nineteenth century have also been detected in language used to discuss the origins and spread of HIV/AIDS (1992). Paul Farmer draws out a similar process in his analysis of US views of Haiti’s role in the spread of the virus (2006). In this case, the hegemonic view was that Haitians were the source of the disease, possibly due to ‘voodoo practices’, and had passed it on to the North Americans who visited the island or when Haitians migrated to the USA. Farmer goes on to reveal a different geography of the spread of HIV/AIDS, with US visitors introducing the virus to the local Haitians. Rather than using his findings as evidence to apportion blame, the study achieves the arguably more important task of underscoring how prevailing understandings of the South can obscure what is actually going on. The aforementioned problems said to be plaguing the Global South have indeed rendered imaginings of it as a collection of places and peoples in need of constant external (Northern) interventions. In particular, with the ending of the Cold War and the intensification of global interdependence, discourses of ‘governance’ are constantly (re)produced to frame discussions about the possible pathways to guide the Global South out of its troubling quandaries. Hence, under the euphemism ‘good governance’, it is argued by international institutions like the World Bank and leading (Northern) states such as the USA that public decision-making in the South would be better served if state bureaucracies were reduced, legal systems reformed, accountability improved, democracy and democratic institutions entrenched and market-led reforms implemented (Harvey 2005). In this sense, having strategies 327

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics to administer governance in the Global South is not enough – they must be sound governance measures that are aligned and empowered by a neoliberal vision. As Roberts, Secor and Sparke put it, the contemporary neoliberal idealism, bolstered by the ‘simple master narrative about the inexorable force of economic globalization’ uphold that the universal extension of the virtues of openness, transparency and integration inherent in free markets will ultimately bring ‘worldwide peace and prosperity’ (2003: 887). In other more idealist accounts, such as those of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the process of marketized liberalization is heralded as a phenomenon possessing an ontological status, which, ‘like the dawn’ we can appreciate or ignore but not presume to stop (Friedman 1999: xviii). Premised on a market-driven approach to shaping the political and economic priorities of the state, neoliberalism is unequivocally represented as a force that will lift the whole world out of poverty as more and more communities embrace and partake in the workings of the capitalist global economy (Tickell and Peck 2003). The corollary of this consensus is that Southern nations, cities and people must conform with neoliberal agendas in order to prosper – and are responsible for their own failure or refusal to conform. Deviation is increasingly disparaged and penalized. Indeed, Dodds and Woon have explicated the complicities of neoliberalism in shaping contemporary geo-economic and geopolitical dynamics (2012). For Southern states, especially those with weak economies and limited control over their national territories, their only developmental trajectory is to subscribe to the neoliberal reform package which is designed to make their economies more ‘accessible’ to foreign investments and corporations. This unitary vision of progress is in turn defended and policed by global institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) (primarily dominated by powerful Northern actors) – demands are made on Southern states to fully participate in ‘structural adjustments’ (involving economic privatization and reduction of trade barriers) so that they can qualify for loans to save their debt-ridden economies. In addition, with the present geopolitical landscape reverberating with conspiracies of terror, the neoliberal approach is further touted to be the panacea for restoring peace in the international arena – one needs to look no farther than the writings of Thomas Barnett (2003; 2004) to realize the pervasiveness of such a perspective. Barnett upholds that the ‘Gap’ (which consists mainly of geographical locations in the Global South) is a ‘strategic threat environment’ due to its inability to ‘harmonize’ its ‘internal rule sets’ with an emerging global set that he equates in normative neoliberal fashion with ‘democracy, transparency and free trade’. In keeping with the hawkish agenda of the Bush administration, Barnett goes on to argue that the goal of the US (and those Northern states constituting the ‘core’) can no longer be pitched in terms of ‘containment’ but rather should entail a more aggressive shrinking of the ‘Gap’, drawing it into the global capitalist circuit. The core must ‘suppress the bad things [terrorism, drugs, disease and instability] coming out of the Gap’ so as to set the stage for ‘neoliberalism’s idealist and multilateralist rendering of a new world order of peace and justice for all’ (Barnett 2003). Hence by positing that the geopolitical faultlines lie between the periphery of the global 328

The Global South economy and the integrated core of empire where civilization rules, Barnett is essentially providing a manifesto for global warfare to transform the world, for the betterment of the international community (cf. Dalby 2008; Elden and Bialasiewicz 2006). Indeed, as Dalby has succinctly espoused, Barnett’s thesis is a ‘dangerously seductive ideological vision of the promise of imperial warfare’ (2007: 305) whereby America does not need to abide by the normal rules of human conduct because it is the universal bearer of the promise of the future of humanity. In Derek Gregory’s words concerning the invasion of Iraq: ‘The strategy of the Bush Administration was, once again, to present the United States as the world – the “universal nation” articulating universal values – against “the enemies of civilization”: terrorist, tyrants and barbarians’ (2004: 195). Summarizing the preceding analyses, it can be seen that the categories of Global North and South cannot be mapped neatly onto existing national boundaries that approximately separate wealth from poverty, development from underdevelopment (as demarcated by the Brandt Line). The ways in which imaginings of the South are increasingly defined in relation to conditions in the North attest to Sheppard and Nagar’s observation that the geographies of these two spatial entities are ‘progressively fractal and closely inter-related’ (2004: 558). But rather than assuming that representations of the South are absolute and uncontested, I concur with Sheppard and Nagar that North–South tensions exist around such issues as ‘power and role of the WTO, the UN, and international finance institutions, global civil society and donor driven NGOs, mobility of labour vs that of capital and commodities and public health crises related to AIDS’ (Sheppard and Nagar 2004: 557). The following section will involve a critical scrutiny of the discursive frames surrounding contemporary North–South relations, highlighting alternative re-mappings and re-configurations of the (real and imagined) geographies of the Global South.

‘Orientalizing’ the Global South? Power, agendas and responses The discussion above has highlighted some of the ways in which the geopolitical category of the Global South has been conceptualized within dominant discursive registers. Given the recognition that representations are never neutral but are emblematic of certain interests and agendas (cf. Barnes and Duncan 1991; Rose 2007), this section will employ Edward Said’s felicitous notion of ‘Orientalism’ (1978) to interrogate the motivations underpinning constructs of Global South and the associated material effects they produce. Orientalism, according to Said, offers a critical pathway to conceptualize the history of relations between what we might commonsensically call the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ or the Occident and the Orient. Rather than accept the term as one that designates an area of neutral scholarly expertise (be it Oriental languages, 329

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics literatures or customs), Said argues that Orientalism was and continues to function as a discourse in which the West’s knowledges about the Orient are inextricably bound up with its domination over it. Evoking Michel Foucault’s proposition that all forms of knowledge are productive of power (constituting someone/thing as an object of knowledge is to assume power over it), Said assesses the implications of Western construction of the Orient as an object of knowledge during colonial expansion. Because he refuses to accept the innocence of knowledges about and representations of the Orient, Said is able to consider how Orientalism’s classification of the East as different and inferior legitimized Western interventions and rule. For Said, therefore, representations of the Orient produced by Orientalism are never simple reflections of a true anterior reality but composite images which came to define the nature of the Orient and Oriental as irredeemably different and always inferior to the West. Orientalism hinges on a set of polarities that draws on imaginative geographies of the Orient as irrational, exotic, erotic, despotic and heathen, thereby securing the West in contrast as rational, familiar, moral, just and Christian. Not only does these Orientalist stereotypes ‘misrepresent’ the Orient, they also misrepresent the Occident – obscuring in their flattering vision of European superiority the tensions along the lines of gender, class and ethnicity that ruptured the domestic scene. Eventually, Orientalism, as a body of knowledge about the East produced by and for the West, came to bypass Oriental sources altogether in a self-referential process of legitimation that endlessly asserted the power of the West to know, speak for, and regulate the Orient better than the Orient itself (cf. Spivak 1988): As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient, Orientalism thus comes to exert a three-way force, on the Orient, on the Orientalist, and on the Western ‘consumer’ of Orientalism. …. The ‘Orient’ (‘out there’ to the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, ‘our world’; the Orient is thus ‘Orientalized’: a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codification … as the true Orient. Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which time seems to owe even its existence to the Orientalist (Said 1978: 67, emphasis in original). All in all, Said’s work is crucial to drawing out the process of ‘Othering’ and how power functions to place the European experience at the center while positing other cultures/peoples in other places as inferior and abnormal. Such imaginative geographies are performative insofar as they produce effects – they constantly help to justify ‘Western’ civilizing initiatives and control over the so-called Orients. Applying Said’s expositions to the analysis of North–South relations, it can be similarly argued that power is fully implicated in dominant geopolitical representations of the South – the South’s apparent subordinate and marginalized position is not a natural condition but is constructed to be as such to fulfill certain 330

The Global South (Northern) agendas. Indeed, as pointed out earlier, the representations of the South as poverty-stricken and threatening have been used to usher in normative judgements related to its progression pathways. However, critiques have been rife in pointing out how neoliberalism as an idealized developmental norm actually serves as a facade to obscure the territorializing imperatives that have functioned in the interests of dispossession (Gregory 2004; Harvey 2005, Sparke, 2007a). There are various examples that would fit well into this paradigm. One good reference point is Roberts, Secor and Sparke’s detailed interrogations of America’s contemporary counter-terrorism initiatives in different parts of the world. Elaborating on what they term ‘neoliberal geopolitics’, their primary aim was to explore ‘how a certain globalist and economistic view of the world, one associated with neoliberalism, did service in legimating the war [on terror]’ (Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003: 887). Using the recent Iraq War as a case in point, the authors go on to elucidate the ways in which a neoliberal world vision has served to obscure the more ‘traditional’ geopolitical purposes of USA’s interventions in Iraq. Indeed, whilst the Bush administration insists that the Iraq War is one that seeks to augment the much-desired neoliberal values of democracy and freedom in the Middle-Eastern state,1 Roberts, Secor and Sparke echo other geographers in arguing that the war was in fact a traditional national, imperial war aimed at the monopolization of resources (cf. Graham 2004; Le Billon and El Khatib 2004). To quote them at length, It was … partly a war about securing American control over Iraqi oil. Russia’s Lukoil and France’s TotalFinalElf will thereby lose out vis-à-vis Chevron and Exxon; more importantly, the US will now be able to function as what Christian Parenti (2003) calls an ‘energy gendarme’ over key oil supplies to East Asia and Europe. Other, still more narrowly national circuits of American capitalism benefited from the war – including for example, Kellog Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, that having helped the Pentagon orchestrate contracts to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure using proceeds from Iraq’s ‘liberated’ oil sales. (Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003: 888) The excerpt illustrates how resource geopolitics and the military–industrial complex (Eisenhower 1961) are pertinent in shaping the Bush administration’s decision to go to war. In other words, the specific vision of neoliberal geopolitics has convinced many neoliberals to ‘support the war insofar as it helped to … facilitate the planning and overarching coordination of the violence and insofar as the war showed how the extension of neoliberal practices on a global scale has come to depend on violent interventions by the US’ (Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003: 895). As such, 1

The initial justification put forth by the Bush administration for invading Iraq in 2003 was premised on the conviction that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). However, when these alleged WMDs were not found on Iraqi soil, the argument shifted to the notion that the Saddam regime was not democratic (let alone republican) and abusive of human rights (see Flint and Falal 2004; Woon 2011a). 331

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics neoliberal discourses function as a source of power to enable certain US actors to hide their insidious agendas, consequently leading to the wider socio-economic dispossession of the Iraqi communities (given that their everyday geographies are defined by existential violence and the country’s resources exploited to nourish foreign interests). Interestingly, such a perspective clearly contravenes Barnett’s earlier idea that US military incursions into the South were strategic and benign exercises that had the ultimate purpose of incorporating this spatial bloc into the neoliberal, capitalist circuit so as to successfully manage global security problems including terrorism, disease and political instability (2003). This confirms Dalby’s view that Barnett’s thesis is partial and strongly rooted in a particular geopolitical mode and reasoning (2007). It constitutes an insensitive account that derides and erases the lived geographical diversity of humanity, sliding instead towards the genre of tabloid imperialism whereby wars are constantly (and successfully) invoked as prime solutions ‘to eradicate the regimes, peoples and conditions that breed opposition to Empire’ (Dalby 2007: 306). Besides exposing the intricate relations between neoliberalism and militarism, critiques have also revealed the ethnocentricity of the neoliberal developmental trajectory envisaged for the Southern states. The earlier section has highlighted how the North has often viewed the South through the ‘development’ lens. There is the dominant understanding that desirable economic progress and development in the South have to be modeled on the experiences of Western nations and can only come about through a subscription to the liberal, democratic capitalist system (Hart 2001). However, in recent years, many of these Northern-driven developmental policies and modes of thinking has been subjected to critical assessments by postdevelopment theorists (Escobar 1995; Rahnema 1997). Setting out to deconstruct the concept of development, these critiques are important in pointing out the Northern-centric nature of development as it has been implemented in the Global South. Hence rather than being neutral, ‘development’ is theorized as a discourse and set of practices based on particular ideas abut how societies and economies should progress. It is important to point out that such criticisms do not equate to a call for a total abandonment of the Western developmental model. Indeed, whilst concurring that Northern strategies of economic growth may function well in some societies, post-development scholars argue for the need to take note of the contextual discrepancies in influencing developmental dynamics and outcomes. For instance, Ferguson uses the example of the Thaba-Tseka Development Project in a mountainous area in central Lesotho to highlight how development interventions are based on preset categorizations of beneficiary populations by Northern aid agencies (1990). The main aim of the project was to develop commercial livestock farming in the region. This included training for farmers, developing road links to enhance market access and the setting up of a regional centre for warehouses, training facilities and offices. All these services would help reduce the isolation of the region’s population, but the project failed to acknowledge the existing networks of livestock markets, a government livestock improvement center and the widespread receipt of remittances from migrant workers in South Africa’s mines. Given such a disjuncture between the framing of the project and 332

The Global South how people live on the ground, it is not surprising that many projects like this one fail to deliver most of the planned development benefits. To address such inadequacies, post-development theorists have advocated alternative models that focus on grassroots, environmentally sustainable and participatory forms of change (see Potter et al. 2004). These ‘bottom-up’ approaches seek to initiate contextual and culturally sensitive forms of development by engaging with local communities and giving them a ‘voice’ in deciding what kind of developmental futures they desire.2 In addition, critics have also raised reservations about the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that has been enforced on many Southern states by the World Bank and IMF. They suggest that the program’s underlying claims of good governance and development are actually a disciplinary impulse (a form of neoliberal governmentality) in which Southern governments and their national populations were trained to operate in new ways, with the incentive being that they were more likely to attract additional aid and investment (Larner 2003; Watts 2003). Moreover, the caveats and stringent conditions accompanying the program (e.g. reduction of trade barriers) are accused of operating to allow the Northern imperial powers to take advantage and gain access to the economic opportunities in the emerging markets of the South. In one of the most scathing attacks on the SAP, Mohan et al. have pointed out that the initiative’s biggest achievement in Africa is not in enhancing the economic viability and sustainability of the area but in allowing Western powers and businesses to gain control of the region’s precious resources (oil, diamonds and so on) (2000). As such, the scenario of accumulation through dispossession is once again enacted in the socio-economic landscapes of the South. Eschewing lapsing into mere Orientalist critiques of the problematic representations and initiatives related to the global South, researchers have increasingly paid attention to alternative ways forward in terms of critical interventions. As Lisa Lowe rightly notes, Orientalism, like any discourse, must be regarded as multivocal and heterogeneous, a formation made up of dissimilar and non-equivalent instances. This redefinition of Orientalism as an ‘uneven matrix of orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites’ in which each Orientalism is ‘internally complex and unstable’ (Lowe 1991: 5) then allows us to look for evidence of counter-hegemonic or subaltern (embryonically counterhegemonic) voices that may contest and to varying extents transform the power relations of hegemonic discourse. Indeed, there have been increasing calls for academic documentations of the critical geographies of the Global South in rallying and representing struggles of repossession. In what follows, I will highlight some of these geopolitical writings that seek to accentuate the ‘alternative’ trajectories and experiences that are unfolding in the Global South. This will serve as a crucial 2

Ideas of post-development have also received significant criticism themselves, not least because the ‘development’ they criticize is a one-dimensional representation of a particular form of development that has changed significantly since the 1950s and 1960s (Wainwright 2008). Moreover, post-development theorists have often failed to recognize some of the benefits which have accrued from top-down large-scale development projects, particularly in the fields of health (Corbridge 1998). 333

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics reminder to invoke this spatial entity as an ‘open-ended and inclusive category: not a fixed territory or geo-strategic bloc, but rather a congeries of human geographies that are place specific and space-making in the face of devastating forces’ (Sparke 2007a: 123).

Geopolitics of the Global South As alluded to in the previous section, geographers working in the field of geopolitics have become increasingly sensitive to the rallying powers and resistance movements in the Global South that have been articulated in the face of oppressive dispossession. Adopting different approaches, these works broach the conceptual and empirical realms and, often, political praxis to provide promising directions for understanding, conceptualizing and researching (critical) geopolitics of the Global South. First and most long-standing, an anti-geopolitics, that is more often than not centered on the Global South, has been alive and well for a number of years. Clear manifestos have been espoused by Dalby (1993) and Ó Tuathail (1996) but the term has been most frequently associated with Routledge who has engaged with it more explicitly (1996; 2003; 2006). Whereas hegemonic geopolitics is traditionally carried out by those in positions of power, anti-geopolitics, in Routledge’s words, is ‘geopolitics from below’ – it helps to challenge ‘both material geopolitical power of states and political institutions and the representations imposed by political and economic elites upon the world and its people to serve their geopolitical interest’ (Routledge 2003: 237). Given such a critical agenda, it is perhaps unsurprising that anti-geopolitics has been employed as a crucial lens to interrogate oppositional politics and dissident efforts in the Global South. Routledge himself has been involved in a large number of projects that focus on the resistance practices around much of the so-called ‘developing’ world: the anti-missile-base resistance conducted by peasant farmers and fisherfolk in Baliapal, Orissa; the Chipko peasant movement (resisting deforestation in the Himalayan foothills of Uttar Pradesh); the anti-tourism resistance organizations in Goa, and the resistance against the construction of mega-dams in the Narmada valley, Madhya Pradesh. Social movements in the Global South also seem to form the basis of Oslender’s work (2007). Focusing on the black communities in Columbia who have been displaced as a result of the state’s counter-insurgency program against local guerrilla militias, he investigates how this group has managed to forge anti-geopolitical alliances at difference geographical scales. Such strategic partnerships, as Oslender shows, are important in helping the community claim back their territorial rights, guarantee their access to natural resources and, more importantly, protect and sustain their Afro-Colombian culture. The common feature uniting both Oslender and Routledge’s work is their engagement with the political activities of ‘those who don’t want to be politicians and who refuse to share in power’ (Routledge 2006: 233). It would appear then that anti-geopolitics involves people (usually from the Global South) taking their own initiatives to place themselves on the map. 334

The Global South As opposed to anti-geopolitics, Joanne Sharp chooses to expound on a different terminology to describe the ‘doing’ of geopolitics in the Global South (2011). ‘Subaltern geopolitics’, as she terms it, is different from anti-geopolitics insofar as it does not portray its subjects as simply outside the state: cast purely as the ‘Other’, as alternative, as enacting resistance. Instead, it is a ‘positioning that recognizes the possibility that political identities can be established through geographical representations that are neither fully “inside” nor “outside”, and thus seeks a model of political subjectivity to challenge that perpetuated by dominant western geopolitics that does not rely on otherness’ (Sharp 2011: 271–2). Indeed, in the special issue on subaltern geopolitics (Geoforum 42(3) (2011)), various geographers have taken up Sharp’s conceptualization to forward a geopolitical agenda related to the Global South. For instance, Koopman calls for the augmentation of the notion of ‘alter-geopolitics’3 – new proposals and practices that challenge hegemonic geopolitics and create new geopolitics. She draws attention to grassroots movements that build international relations of solidarity in opposition to mainstream geopolitics, arguing that academics might become involved in struggles where principles of feminist geopolitics are already being translated into political reality. Using the case of international accompaniment in Columbia, Koopman highlights how ‘Western’ volunteers actively rely on their ‘privileged’ bodies to shield and protect precarious lives. This helps to resist oppressive powers by establishing their own performances of security – ‘putting [their] bodies together for safety, by establishing [their] own people-to-people relations across space’ (Koopman 2011: 274). Alternatively, I have been interested for some time now in the efforts of the Philippine rebel group, Rebulusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa ng Mindanao (RPM-M), and how the dissident organization has actively repudiated the terrorism label that it has come to be associated with by emphasizing instead issues of stateinduced vulnerability and marginalization. In this case study, I argue for a form of security that emphasizes links rather than difference – peoples in the Global South can place themselves in an ‘extended tapestry of connection and belonging that does not arise from an imagined fear of “others” nor does it have exclusion as its basis’ (Woon 2011b: 294). Although the exact focus of these writings differs, they are perhaps unanimous in their conclusion that the South is not simply an inferior and less progressive model of the North. Rather the different trajectories, experiences and dynamics in the South can offer plenty of epistemological and ontological insights for a more humble and humane worldview (rather than one which firmly revolves around the North). As such, there has been a recent surge in the idea of responsible learning in order to bridge the North–South divide (Chakrabarty 2000; Maxwell 1998; Robinson 2002; 2006). Learning is an ethical imperative (Jazeel and McFarlane 2007) – learning in this sense is not about speaking for an individual 3

Although Koopman does not employ the term ‘subaltern geopolitics’, Sharp has argued that Koopman shares the concerns of subaltern geopolitics by recognizing ‘the dispersion of agency through the political system, to see those outsider of the formal circuits of power/knowledge of international relations and statecraft’ (2011: 272). 335

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics or group in order to produce something like a notionally more cosmopolitan geographical knowledge. Instead, this learning seeks to develop new positions through interactions between researchers and people in disparate locations. It requires a ‘greater sensitivity to the relationship of power, authority, positionality and knowledge’ (McEwan 2003: 351): an ethic that demands consistent critical reflections in effort that seek to learn between contexts and constituencies (McFarlane 2006a; 2006b). This is reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of political responsibility and the appropriation of subaltern knowledge through her differentiation between ‘speaking to’ and ‘speaking for’ subaltern places/peoples/ communities. Spivak writing about the relationships between European leftist intellectuals and Third World knowledges, famously argued that the subaltern cannot speak, so imbued must s/he be with the words, phrases and cadences of ‘Western thought’ in order to be heard (1988). What this essentially signifies is that the subaltern cannot be heard as a consequence of the privileged position that, for example, Euro-American academic researchers occupy. This can entail epistemic violence, wherein ways of knowing the world outside the language of ‘Western’ science, philosophy and development are invalidated or trivialized. Thus ‘the subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself, but always already interpreted’ (Briggs and Sharp 2004: 664). To counter this, writers working in the Global South have increasingly engaged in a methodological commitment to praxis that refocuses on resistance, agency and action in the developing societies: moving out of the ivory towers and collaborating with the communities and social movements in the South. This can involve employing field techniques that broach a collaborative ethos such as those offered by Participatory Action Research (PAR) (see Kesby, Kindon and Pain 2005; Kindon, Pain and Kesby 2007). Indeed, both Koopman and myself have been keen to advance the possibility of geopolitics happening ‘off the page’ to build solidarity and form alliances with peoples from the ‘South’ for the (re)building of their own collective futures (Koopman 2011; Woon 2011b). In this sense, by acknowledging the plurality of knowledges in a variety of locations, the dangers of misrepresenting the ‘Other’ can be avoided through culturally informed understandings of the agency of research participants in the (re)making of their individual life-worlds. But while the subjugation of local knowledge must be sensitively addressed, Jazeel and McFarlane have also rightly caution that it should not be romanticized. Responsible learning is a central and urgent methodological issue as much as it is fraught with difficulties: it urges those who traverse the North–South divide to confront basic, albeit often overlooked, questions such as: ‘Why do we produce knowledge and for whom do we produce it? What kinds of knowledge predominate and what work does knowledge subsequently do? What modes of representation do particular forms of knowledge production entail?’ (Jazeel and McFarlane 2007: 785). What these inquiries hint at is the uncertainties inherent in a postcolonial approach to learning, a sense that knowledge, ideas or theory may be altered, transformed or even rejected through responsible engagements with different constituencies. This is not simply to suggest that hierarchies of North– South, First World–Third World can be abandoned, as if it was in the power of 336

The Global South development practitioners to do so. Rather, in the rethinking of what these notions stand for indirect learning can occur by drawing comparisons across disparate and seemingly unlikely places.

Conclusion This chapter has critically analyzed the changing geopolitical meanings and multiple responses to the idea of the Global South. Drawing on the theoretical insights offered by Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’, I have argued that dominant constructions of the Global South have served as powerful imaginative geographies to justify (Northern) territorializing imperatives for the purpose of socio-economic dispossession in the South. It must however be emphasized that these destructive cartographies have never succeeded in silencing the voices of the South in rallying and representing struggles for repossession. Indeed, by tracing the plethora of geopolitical writings related to the Global South, I have demonstrated the potential lessons that can be learned and extracted from counter-hegemonic interventions and initiatives in these supposed marginalized spaces. Specifically, these academic and ‘real-life’ efforts help to decenter the hegemony of Western developmental theories and strategies and highlight the possibility of other trajectories and visions of progress. Hence, in explicating these dimensions, this chapter not only embodies a political responsibility to critically track the open-ended geo-graphings of the Global South, but more importantly, cast attention on the processes, skills and priorities that should feed into the development of new collaborative geographies – geographies that are committed to building alliances and producing knowledges that cross spatial, socio-economic and cultural borders.

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18

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Intimacy and the Everyday Deborah Cowen and Brett Story

It is in everyday life that the crisis as a limitless experience and a field dramatizing particular forms of subjectivity is authored, receives its translations, is institutionalized, loses its exceptional character and in the end [appears] as a ‘normal,’ ordinary and banal phenomenon. (Mbembe and Roitman 1995: 325) Many radical social theorists see the political deployment of intimacy crises as merely ornamental or a distraction from ‘real’ politics. They have become alienated by the intensities of the sex and identity wars, which seem to be disconnected from more important and public questions of equity, justice, and violence in political life in general. But they have been misdirected by a false distinction between the merely personal and the profoundly structural. (Berlant 1997: 9) 6:00am, al-Azariya, West Bank, Occupied Territories The morning arrives early for a young Palestinian man named Nidal. He must be at the Sawahreh checkpoint early if he is to make it to East Jerusalem in time for his shift at the Christmas Hotel. Yesterday he waited almost three hours. By the time he arrives today, a long line of cars and taxi vans has already formed, surrounded by young men in dusted pants on their way to construction jobs and older women hoisting large bundles of nuts to sell in the Old City. It is harvest time in the nearby villages. Nut and olive trees pepper the landscape, their deep roots reaching into the depreciating underground aquifers. Nidal waits while a voice calls through the loudspeaker for the Palestinians to move forward in groups of three. A blue and white flag with the Star of David looms high above a concrete bunker, where Israeli soldiers hunker down amongst sandbags, the black nozzles of their machine guns catching the light. In front of him an elderly woman holds a tattered medical receipt, explaining to her baby-faced interlocutor that though her travel permit has been confiscated, today is the only day she could get an appointment at the al-Makassed hospital in East Jerusalem. Frustration has

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics brought her to tears, her pleas registered for the solider as no less tedious than the endless questions, papers and permissions mediating the rest of the day’s duties. If interrogation is brutal, it is also boring. Nidal has witnessed worse amongst the tangled mess of wire and the dusty bottle-neck that has become the routine of his day. If only his father would return from Jordan, then maybe Nidal could find an apartment in East Jerusalem and avoid this constant humiliation, maybe even meet someone. He leans back against the van to wait, daydreaming of romance. An Israeli helicopter passes noisily overhead. 7:48am, Edinburgh, Indiana, USA. In an otherwise quiet suburban house in a small Midwestern town, the strange electronic sounds of a Sega Xbox begin to blare. Kathy, homemaker, caregiver and mother of two, navigates the narrow hall of the split-level ranch home with arms full of laundry. Her basket clips a photograph from the mantle as she positions herself between 11-year-old Brendan and the TV screen and says, firmly, ‘Breakfast!’ She picks up the picture of Martha and George Owen, her mother- and father-in-law, standing proudly in front of a brand-new 1952 Levittowner, places it flat down on the coffee table, then herds Brendan to the kitchen, where 8-year-old Kimberly is slowly spilling canned peach juice onto the lap of her Brownie uniform. Brendan sits down next to her and reaches for the margarine, and Kathy, as she does every day, fixes peanut-butter sandwiches and wraps them in Saran wrap. ‘School bus in 5 minutes!’ Kathy announces before returning to the living room, scooping up the laundry and heading upstairs. Careful not to let too much light into the room where her husband Don lies in bed, Kathy dumps the clothing on the carpeted floor. She walks over to the bedside and gently lifts Don’s head. Don opens his eyes partially and his mouth slowly. Kathy drops two pills onto his tongue, pours water into his mouth from the plastic cup by the side of his bed, then lowers his head back onto the pillow. Hearing the schoolbus out front, Kathy returns to the kitchen, makes a quick cup of instant coffee, then sits down at the laptop at the back of the room, sighs out loud with relief and begins to browse. 6:52 am, Lower Manhattan, New York, USA Her shoulders aching, Georgia places the last of the bottles into the recycling and takes a deep breath before lifting the bin. It is the beginning of the day and still dark, just shy of the 7am that she usually rises from her thin cot in the building’s refurbished boiler room. All week Georgia has been waking early to scrub the kitchen clean of her employer’s late night meal-making. As his nights get later her mornings get earlier; the day a strange elastic that seems to grow infinitely longer without ever yielding actual time. She knows there is something wrong. Everyone is tense, but last time she asked questions she 342

Intimacy and the Everyday was berated furiously. His anger frightens her, and they have both made it clear that her position with them is anything but secure. She knows it has something to do with the financial crisis, though cannot imagine what either of them, both professionals in the city, could have to worry about. Georgia has been with this family for just under 18 months, but has worked as a live-in nanny since she emmigrated from the Philippines nine years ago. She is 52 years old, has five children of her own, and four grandchildren, only one of whom she’s met. Soon she will have to wake the two children under her care and begin to get them ready for school. The house, a three-story brownstone that hugs that strange class warp of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is only a short walk from the private school they attend, but time is still tight. Georgia makes a mental note to stop at the bank before going to the post office later. An alarm clock rings in one of the bedrooms.

The monumental in the mundane These scenes tell wildly different stories of people and places. From the suburban stress of Edinburgh, Indiana, to a checkpoint crossing during the journey to work in the West Bank, Palestine, little would seem to connect these mornings. The routinized anxiety of the ‘domestic life’ of the domestic worker in Manhattan’s financial core seems like it could not be further away from these other sites at the start to the day. And yet, there is common ground: these scenes are all saturated, even structured, by the everyday and intimate life of geopolitics. In distinct ways each scene is constituted by a series of relations, forces and events that we typically refer to as ‘geopolitical’. Sometimes these relations play out in the foreground, as with the West Bank border crossing, which immediately conjures up histories and geographies of territorial violence and struggle. Sometimes these relations linger in the background, as with the domestic worker, where there are hints of geo-economic crisis, on the one hand, and the persistence of national borders propelling and constraining human mobilities, on the other. Geopolitics appear totally concealed in the seemingly peaceful, ‘normal life’ in Indiana, which is nevertheless deeply shaped by militarism and warfare in ways we make plain below. It is not only the everyday and routine nature of the geopolitical that connects these scenes, but also their intimacy. Relations of power and violence are not simply acting upon already-constituted scenes of private life – they shape the very trajectories of protagonists’ lives. Geopolitics does not simply permeate relations of care, familial forms and notions of the self, but forges them too. In this chapter we mobilize these morning scenes – all hypothetical but not unrealistic – of everyday life and the family to explore profound shifts underway in the field of critical geopolitics. We mobilize these micro-spaces and minute details to investigate the generative and intimate nature of conflict and violence at multiple spatial scales and to explore significant shifts in the literature that place 343

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the intimate everyday at the centre of inquiry. While a review chapter typically traces changing scholarly debates on a theme, this chapter is a little different in that it primarily tracks the growing presence of our key concepts as subjects of scholarship in this field. Furthermore, because the concepts of ‘everyday’ and ‘intimacy’ are only rarely present within the formal bounds of critical geopolitics, we also include broader literature from feminist geopolitics, transnational feminism, critical theory and postcolonial, poststructuralist and Marxist thought in our review. The growing influence of feminist and postcolonial scholarship in critical geopolitics and other closely related fields has been particularly important in placing matters of the family and the everyday in the scholarly spotlight, but so too has a range of literatures on violence, the body and the urban. The literature on the geopolitics of the intimate and the everyday that concerns us, both within and beyond the bounds of critical geopolitics, does not simply replace a focus on the public with the private realm, matters of global importance with those of local concern, or exceptional instances of violence with everyday acts, but is concerned precisely with the entanglement of these spheres. Thus, we devote some time to exploring the persistent ways in which a series of binary categories, such as public/private, global/local, inside/outside and normal/exceptional, continues to underpin so much scholarship in political geography, in a sense keeping concerns with the intimate and everyday at bay. In other words, we explore the ongoing work these categories do in reproducing geopolitical visions of the world, while we also highlight how new spaces and subjects of violence and transformation are made visible when critical geopolitics crosses these borders. The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section we untangle the particular ways in which geopolitics shapes our opening scenes in order to highlight key arguments that have emerged in a variety of literatures regarding the geopolitics of the intimate and everyday. We explore both the constitutive geopolitics that are operative in each and the literatures that have emerged within critical geopolitics and entangled fields that help us draw them out. This chapter then shifts to examine how divisions between geopolitics and the intimate and everyday emerged and continue to haunt the field. Building on long-standing critiques, we suggest that the persistent limitations in the critical geopolitics literature mean that the most exciting work on the themes of the everyday and the intimate is taking place beyond the bounds of this sub-discipline.

Unpacking the intimate everyday Each of our opening scenes is infused with geopolitics of the intimate and everyday in seemingly boundless ways. For the sake of brevity, we highlight a few key threads in each and a selection of relevant literatures: population and territory in the first; war and peace in the second; geo-economics and geopolitics in the third. For Nidal in our first scene, a militarized border crossing highlights the striking way in which the geopolitics of population and territory infuses the most everyday 344

Intimacy and the Everyday of morning routines. The checkpoint, one of 700 that dot the landscape of the West Bank, organizes an intricate architecture of impediment. Checkpoints ensure that the geopolitics of occupation become habit, even as they mediate Palestinians’ access to the necessities of medical care, livelihoods and families. The checkpoint is just one element of the system of curfews, raids, walls, roadblocks and settlement outposts that have only proliferated since the 1993 Oslo Accords. The geopolitics of water also make a brief but important appearance in this scene: villagers’ livelihoods are undermined by the depletion of ancient olive groves as Israeli control of 80 percent of the mountain aquifer located under the West Bank tightens. Meanwhile, persistent struggles over land and water play out in strategies of expropriation and resistance, only the most recent iteration of which is the 110km ‘Separation Wall’ which snakes across the Palestinian territories, separating families and violently constraining everyday life. Territory is one of the oldest stomping grounds of geopolitics, critical or otherwise, and yet recent scholarship emphasizes its intimacy. Elden reminds us of the shared etymology of ‘terror’ and ‘territory’ (2007: 822), concepts wed in practice in the everyday lives, mobilities and familial relations of Palestinians such as Nidal. Struggles over land are thus closely connected to political invocations of terror as well as practices of terror, felt as direct experiences of threat, coercion and violence. Feminist geographers have long argued that territoriality is contingent and constructed but also that territory itself is deeply gendered (Wastl-Walter and Staeheli 2004). For instance, Rose emphasized how women’s bodies have been central stakes in territorial conquests and other struggles over land (1993). Exciting research is underway at the intersections of territory and population. This is not a new connection in itself; key figures in classic geopolitical thought and practice uncritically forged these links. The geopolitics of Friedrich Ratzel and especially his concept of Lebensraum could be said to transfigure a Darwinian struggle for species survival onto the territorial state itself (W.D. Smith 1980: 53; see also Cowen and Smith 2009). In more recent work however, the ways in which territorial and population control are interwoven are subject to critical interrogation. Geopolitical struggle has taken the form of baby-races between states, while eugenics and other efforts at domestic ‘purification’ are key historical forms of what Foucault calls ‘race war’ (1997). Speaking directly to the experience of the Occupied Territories, Abu-Zahra argues that the architecture of checkpoints and the control of identity documents are means of governing population towards the dispossession of territory (2008; see also Zureik 2001; Graham 2003: 67–8). For Abu-Zahra, ‘identity and mobility restrictions are bound together by checkpoints’ which limit where Palestinians can go, but also who they can love and marry (2008: 308). Thus the Israeli fear of Arab population growth as a threat to territorial control translates into an invasive attempt to control the reproductive, familial and intimate life of Palestinians. Many of the themes from this first scene are explored in a growing body of scholarship on urban warfare which investigates the ways in which the seemingly mundane technologies of planning and infrastructure are inextricably implicated in the logistics of organized violence (see Graham 2009; Coward 2009; Weizman 345

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 2007). Much of this literature has explored how violence infuses everyday spaces and routines in Israel and the Occupied Territories (Weizman 2007), though there is a broader literature on the securitization of urban space in many sites around the world (Coaffee 2005; Marcuse 2006). For Weizman, the local and banal technologies of population control and territoriality are not simply ‘political’ but ‘politics in matter’ (2007: 5). Chris Harker similarly warns against the tendency in geopolitical scholarship, even the critical variety, to focus so entirely on capital ‘P’ politics and violence as definitive of the Israeli occupation so as to reproduce the evisceration of Palestinian people themselves, both inside and outside the Occupied Territories. His work on the Palestinian family – its spaces and its ‘spacings’ – attempts instead ‘to think Palestine at the limits of and beyond geopolitics’ (Harker 2011: 308), precisely by restituting the ‘absent presence’ of the family’s everyday rhythms, tediums and dilemmas as relevant epistemological registers for geopolitical study. It is thus that the geopolitics of territory and population are embodied and materialized in the everyday and the level of the everyday where, by implication, critical appraisal must be situated. If our first scene is defined by the conspicuous presence of geopolitics in the intimate and everyday, the second is marked precisely by its invisibility: the geopolitics of white, middle-class suburban life obfuscated by the seeming banality of the morning breakfast routine. Yet, the assumption that this offers any meaningful buffer to violence, imperialism and militarism is exposed as illusion once we scrutinize ‘things’ more closely. Fist of all, and without exception, every commodity and technology in the hands of Kathy and her kids had a military genesis. Sega, originally ‘SErvice GAmes’, was created as a training tool for US military personnel; canning techniques were invented for preserving food for the front; polyethylene (the basis of plastic bags and pop bottles) was invented first for war, as was Saran wrap, instant coffee, margarine and even peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. Many will know that the internet was an invention of the armed forces, but so was the ‘Brownies’, and the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts more broadly were created in Britain after the Boer War to provide children with the physical and mental discipline required for future battles. Kathy’s suburban home demands some additional investigation. A large literature now outlines how the postwar American suburban landscape and the family home at its core were built out of war. Iconic designs for low-cost, homogenous, mass-produced housing were produced first within the US military where the Levitt brothers, of Levittown fame, experimented with prototypes for the navy before revolutionizing the civilian landscape (Brunn and Crosby 1999). Mass suburban housing was targeted at returning soldiers, with the aim of keeping them politically quiescent and literally ‘domesticated’ within the nuclear family (May 1999). Of course, not all veterans were treated equally. Federal subsidies for veteran homeownership and the broader GI Bill are credited with widening the gap between white and African Americans (Katznelson 2005) and combined with restrictive covenants and redlining to literally build the starkly racialized postwar metropolis. At the same time, suburban construction and domestic consumption anchored the repurposing of wartime manufacturing (Beauregard 2006). The 346

Intimacy and the Everyday suburban domestic realm was also an important site of geopolitics in the sense that US competition with the USSR placed the private comforts of the modern home in the spotlight (May 1999). The Cold War also influenced urban planning practice: fear of the nuclear bomb motivated dispersion policies that aimed to de-concentrate the population and industry of large cities (Dudley 2001; Farish 2003). Medical technologies are similarly implicated in the evolution of military activities. Jennifer Terry tracks the development of medical practices and procedures in response to ‘significant injuries’ where significance is assigned according to the state’s need for soldiers (2009). Thus Terry explores the boomerang effect through which development of particular weapons for fighting and killing inadvertently drives the development of techniques and technologies in civilian health care. As the Rand Corporation reports, traumatic brain injuries of the kind that Kathy’s husband, and approximately 320,000 US veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, experienced are the ‘significant injury’ of contemporary warfare, emerging en masse out of the widespread use of IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan (Tanielian 2008). All these examples point towards some broader lessons. Focusing on industrial and commercial technologies, on the one hand, and social and political technologies, on the other, Low and Titmuss have explained the generative nature of warfare as a feature of the violent economy of the modern nation-state (Low 1943; Titmuss 1958). The efficiency of production and the quantity of population become a priority for the warring state, keen to ensure its own survival. More recently, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize this productive role for war in civilian life and, in doing so, questions the binary opposition of war and peace (DeLanda 2005; Enloe 1989; Hardt and Negri 2004; Tilly 1975; Virilio 1977). In different ways, this literature suggests that war is hardly exceptional, but rather a much more persistent experience that cannot neatly juxtaposed to ‘peace’. Neocleous argues that accounts of exceptional warfare, ‘rely on an assumption of a classical age in which war and peace were indeed distinguishable; they assume the destabilization is somehow new’. He posits this classical age where ‘peace is the focal dynamic of civil society, that the state exists in order to realize this liberal peace’, as ‘liberalism’s major myths’ (Neocleous 2010: 8). Indeed, Foucault argues that power relations are anchored in relations of force, that ‘war is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs peace is waging a secret war … peace is itself a coded war’ (1997: 63). Important work is being done which reminds us, meanwhile, that peacemaking activities, done most often on the ground, in the streets or in the bushes as grassroots practice, similarly ‘count’ as geopolitics and should be conceived and appreciated as such (Koopman 2011; Megoran 2011). In our third scene geopolitics is similarly ubiquitous, complicated by its deeply entrenched and sometimes contradictory relationship with geo-economics. Georgia’s morning anxieties are constituted by the tensions between the transnational flows of finance capital that set the context of her relation with her employer and the persistent territorial borders that underpin the uneven labour geographies of her migrant work. Family obligation over intractable distance, precarious labor embodied as physical vulnerability and psychic anxiety, the vicissitudes of time’s compressions and a low-grade fear of arbitrary censure are, in this moment, the sites 347

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics and transpositions of the complex intersection of geo-economics and geopolitics. If geopolitics is concerned primarily with the exercise of power and questions of sovereignty and authority within a territorially demarcated system of national states, then geo-economics emphasizes the recalibration of international space by globalized market logics, transnational actors (corporate, non-profit and state) and a network of capital, goods and human flows (Barton 1999; A. Smith 2002; Sparke 2007). Georgia’s labor migration and her employer’s finance capital both traverse national borders and take on a globalized and networked form, but this is no easy departure from geopolitics. The territorial authority of states still conditions the uneven development that propels her to work so far from home through national policies in trade, defense and aid, and this same authority over migration demands that her children are left behind. A form of geopolitics is arguably at work at the center of the global management of transnational finance; for instance, in the capacity of powerful nations like the USA to isolate and scapegoat weaker ones in efforts to contain financial crisis. The unforgiving elasticity of Georgia’s working day, furthermore, is itself a condition of the shifting global economy, her sense of time as well as of space shaped by fluctuations in the global marketplace. In Georgia’s everyday, these forces coalesce into the production of what Berlant has called ‘“survival-time” – the time of struggling, drowning, holding on to the edge, treading water, not stopping’ (2007: 279), but with futurity itself hobbled to the precariousness with which her labor (upon which her access to social intimacy, shelter and the resources to fulfill her own familial responsibilities are all contingent) has been strategically and rationally positioned. Georgia’s provision of remittances to a family she cannot see, hold or touch physically is juxtaposed to caregiving in the context of a wage relationship with the children under her nanny care, and each complicate, and geopoliticize, conventional notions of the ‘family’ itself. The family – now transnational – as a unit of care thus gives way to the reality of a ‘chain of care’ (Yeoh, Huang and Lam 2005). The subsidy of reproductive labor from women of the Global South to the economy, social order and gender norms of the North has been the subject of extensive transnationalist feminist work (Lan 2003; Parrnenas 2005; Silvey 2004). Speaking of the entanglement of caring labor and affect, and the transfer of this labor from Global South to North, Ehrenreich and Hochschild have coined the term ‘global heart transplant’ (2003). Yet, Manalansan complicates this picture by questioning the presumption that care work and affect go hand in hand. He suggests that Philippine migrants (like Georgia) may resist or act ‘disloyal’ to the ‘mandated emotional regime’ surrounding their labor. In fact, Georgia’s emotional distance from her employer may be read as a form of ‘disaffection’, a concept Manalansan deploys precisely to conjure ‘a more vibrant notion of domesticity – not one resplendent in its heteronormative structurations, but rather, one that is fraught with the intrusions and intersections of contradictory non-maternal feelings, interests and desires that emerge out of the banal repetitive routines of domestic labor’ (2010: 218).

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Intimacy and the Everyday In addition to these negotiations with her home state’s role as broker for the export of gendered and feminized care work, Georgia’s trajectory should also be read in relation to the Philippine state’s status as postcolony in its ongoing entanglement with the USA. The past two decades of market reform have undermined the livelihoods of low-income citizens of the Philippines, while President Arroyo’s military alliance with the USA throughout the 2000s translated into a brutal domestic ‘war on terror’ for dissenting Filipinos (Choudry 2004). If the USA is implicated in some of the ‘push’ of Georgia’s migration, it is also a factor in her pull to New York. As a strategic site for global corporate capital, New York is also a centre for low-paid service work, especially in the domestic sphere. Neoliberal restructuring and the retrenchment of public space and social welfare provisions has seen the labour of social reproduction increasingly privatized and commodified (Katz 2001). In this context, low-wage domestic work is a strategic infrastructure for global capital flows, rendered invisible by both its spatial siting and by the minoritization of the bodies mobilized. Indeed, as both cause and consequence of the invisibility of the social reproduction of New York City, the estimated 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and eldercare-givers who labor there lack even basic labor protections – severance and overtime pay, advance notice of termination, guaranteed time off and healthcare. Such insecurities are built into the geopolitics of citizenship as it structures legal privileges and access to rights and resources, but also highlight the importance of the everyday as the scale at which such insecurities are registered as meaningful. As Berlant reminds us, birthright ‘affects profoundly the citizen’s subjective experience of his/her political rights, but also of civil life, private life, the life of the body itself’ (1991: 20).

Splitting scenes If the entanglement of geopolitics with the intimate and everyday is as pervasive in lived experience and recent scholarship as the preceding discussions suggest, then we must ask two sets of questions. First, how can we explain the ongoing peripheralization of these themes within the bounds of the critical geopolitics literature? There is no shortage of high-quality work that offers insights into the intimate and everyday life of imperialism, warfare and other forms of organized violence (or for that matter, organized peace-making), but why is it that so few of the authors cited in the extrapolation of the scenes above are affiliated with the scholarly enterprise we know as critical geopolitics? Second, what is at stake in the conceptual pairing of these terms? In other words, why does juxtaposing geopolitics and the intimate/everyday merit a chapter in such a collection? We suggest that there is a common answer to all these questions. Pairing these terms remains troubling despite the volumes of recent scholarship committed to undoing these conceptual divides, precisely because of the persistent assumptions the act exposes but also risks reinforcing. The pairing of the intimate and everyday conjures a wide range of relations that have historically been ‘out of place’ in the field 349

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of geopolitics, and which, for many practitioners even of critical geopolitics, by and large remain well outside the frame of analysis. As Pain has recently suggested, it is not the entanglement of geopolitics and the intimate everyday that is startling, but rather, the extent to which ‘the everyday – the feelings, experiences, practices and actions of people outside the realm of formal politics – has become so invisible in the flurry of interest in the globalised geopolitics of fear’ (2010: 2). Likewise, it is not the pairing of the intimate and geopolitics that gives us pause. Rather it is the widespread invisibility of the intimate and related questions of the family, household, social reproduction, domestic labour, hetero- and homonormativity, intimacy, gender and sexuality in the critical geopolitics literature that is extraordinary, given their central place in lived events and relations, and in scholarly work in a number of cognate fields (e.g. Alexander 2002; Enloe 1983; 1989; Loyd 2009; McClintock 1995; Manalansan 2010; Mayer 2000; Puar 2007; Stoler 1995; Weber 1998). This persistent invisibility is even more striking given that it was more than 15 years ago that Dalby critiqued the persistent invisibility of both women and feminized acts and spaces from the heroic accounts of IR and implored critical geopolitics to take a different tack. He asserted that ‘the relationship between the politics of the “private” and the “domestic” spheres intrudes directly into matters of geopolitics and the territorial strategies of war’ (Dalby 1994: 601). Indeed, Pain’s comments above and this chapter follow in a long line of feminist critique of the persistent masculinism in much work in critical geopolitics that yields a body of scholarship where key questions are systemically concealed (see also Dalby 1991; Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2001; Secor 2001; Sharp 2000; 2004; Staeheli 2001). It is precisely a set of pernicious and sometimes taken-for-granted assumptions about what connects ‘the intimate’ and ‘the everyday’ that allows them to be linked together, on the one hand, and juxtaposed with ‘geopolitics’, critical or otherwise, on the other. The everyday is allied with the family specifically on the grounds that both have historically been located in the realm of the quotidian and the commonplace, outside the complex or imperative work of the political (cf. Dyck 2005). While the concept of ‘everyday life’ has been the subject of a varied and expanding literature (de Certeau 1984; Dyck 2005; Roberts 2006; Ross 1995; D. Smith 1987), it is Henri Lefebvre who argues perhaps most thoroughly that the everyday constitutes the fundamental ‘layer’ of social relations, the place where agency and structure fold into each other (1971; 1991; 2002; 2004; 2005). Lefebvre’s work re-established lived experience as a site of critique and asserted the importance of the everyday as a necessary recovery of the ‘concrete’ against the abstractions of philosophy, where philosophy denotes the realm of life worthy of reflection, understanding or deliberation. In a related vein, both the intimate and everyday have been treated as natural. In other words, they are understood as a fact of life rather than something created, which forecloses the interrogation of their constitution. We can see this clearly when it comes to the naturalization of heteronormative conceptions of the family in intimate scenes, but it is often also at play within the everyday, where naturalization can be a powerful means of denying and reproducing unequal and sometimes violent but routine power relations.

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Intimacy and the Everyday The intimate and everyday have been treated as ‘out of place’ not only in metaphorical terms but also because of the imagined geographies associated with these concepts. One of the most pernicious imagined geographies of the intimate and everyday locates them firmly in the local (see Freeman 2001). This localization of intimacy – typically in the body or the household – also serves to peripheralize it in critical geopolitics, as the local is often understood as fixed in place, particular, and thus of less significance than ‘bigger’ scales (Dowler and Sharp 2001). Indeed, the equation of the local with lesser is rooted in a hierarchical notion of spatial scale that simultaneously displaces or diminishes these concerns and juxtaposes them to the traditional scale of geopolitics: the global or international (Marston and Smith 2001). In sum, these assumptions posit the intimate and everyday as quotidian, natural and local, in contrast to geopolitics – understood as strategic, orchestrated and international. These assumptions are tendencies, not absolutes. They are inevitably in flux, historically and geographically contingent, and are not taken up in scholarship evenly. Yet, they are powerful precisely because they are anchored in a set of constitutive binaries of modernity that underpin the nation-state and its systems of law and organized violence that are inseparable from the formation of geopolitical thought and practice. Perhaps most plainly, any conception of (critical) geopolitics rooted in the assumptions above remains trapped in a public/private binary, one of the longest-standing targets of feminist critique. In a well-rehearsed critique of liberal notions, feminists have exposed the deeply gendered assumptions that structure this divide between the public sphere, understood as the realm of the political, rationality and the universal, and the private sphere, understood as the realm of intimacy, affect and particularity. Critics have emphasized how the family operates as something of a ‘supplement’ in this context wherein a set of relations that span these spheres are feminized, privatized and governed differently: be it with regards to social reproduction and the organization of labour in the private sphere as unpaid or de-skilled; the realm of affect where emotion is ‘enclosed’ in private; or with regards to sexuality where normative familial forms are powerfully regulated in public but then naturalized through their relegation to the private realm (Berlant 1997; Cooper 1995; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Fraser 1993; Lister 1997; Valentine 1993; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). A number of scholars have examined the role that normative intimacy, familialism and sexuality play in explicitly geopolitical contexts of war, terrorism and imperialism. Indeed, this has become a large and incredibly vibrant field, so we offer only a few highlights. In the 1980s Cynthia Enloe put the question of the gendered politics of militarism on the agenda in work that transformed conceptions of both the intimate and everyday in relation to organized violence (1983; 1989). More than 15 years ago, in fact in the same year, Ann Stoler and Anne McClintock both published path-breaking work on the colonial politics of race and sexuality (Stoler 1995; McClintock 1995). More recently, a number of scholars have turned their attention to the ‘domestic’ politics of the geopolitical family, transgressing yet another geopolitical binary of ‘inside/ outside’ national space that we explore in more detail below. For instance, Jasbir Puar has exposed how centrally theories of ‘failed families’ feature in the study of ‘terrorist psychology’, a field which increasing includes those ‘homegrown’ and 351

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics from abroad (2007; see also Cowen and Gilbert 2008; McClintock, Mufti and Shohat 1997; S. Smith 2009; Stoler 1995). Assumptions about the national scale tethered to an inside/outside binary inhibit more creative work on the themes of the intimate and everyday. The modern ‘science’ of geopolitics emerged initially as a constitutive technology of the territorially demarcated system of national states (Foucault 1997: 49; Giddens 1985: 192). This nationalization of political life was also a nationalization of modern warfare and the modern political imaginary (Buck-Morss 2000; Cowen 2008), and it forms the basis upon which ‘international relations’ and traditional geopolitical analyses proceed. Indeed, the very distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ was part of the effect of geopolitical thought and practice, even as it was subsequently understood as its foundational architecture. As Cowen and Smith argue, ‘geopolitics was never only about the state’s external relations’; rather, it ‘both crosses and crafts the distinction between inside and outside national state borders’ (2009: 23). These notions have been formative to the field of geopolitics and tend to persist in its critical reworking. Indeed, the fixing of geopolitics in an inside/outside binary also serves to spatially fix our conceptions of organized violence: the inside/outside binary underpins legal distinctions between crime and terror, police and military, and war and peace (Asad 2007; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006). A focus on the international scale is implicitly what differentiates critical geopolitics from other critical approaches in political geography – and this scalar fix imports an inside/outside divide. If geopolitics has relied on, more than interrogated, the spatialized divisions between public/private and inside/outside, we could also say that these spatial fixes are moored in tidy divisions of time. A kind of temporal fix between normal and exceptional time, where peace is typically read as normal and war as aberration or disruption, helps cleave the everyday from geopolitics (Kirby 1994). When we question one, the sanctity of both crumbles. These perennial problems are not only a feature of geopolitics but critical geopolitics as well, which, as Sharp suggests, maintains a ‘focus on dominant texts and elite actors, and a formulation of the political as occurring primarily in the formal arenas of statecraft, rather than a recognition of the topics that feminist enriched theories might attune us to’ (2007: 386). Thus, pairing the concepts of the intimate and everyday works to expose a series of powerful assumptions and the pervasive problems of gendered binaries that are embedded in common conceptions of the geopolitical. Yet, the pairing of everyday and family may also serve to concretize their connection in a way that a pairing like the ‘national family’ or ‘everyday war’ would not. In fact, we suggest that the concept of ‘intimacy’ provides a more fruitful, certainly more fluid, way forward for scholarship on the everyday and the family to proceed.

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Towards a political geography of the intimate and everyday By way of conclusion we ask what this review suggests for the future of an intimate critical geopolitics of the everyday. We use the language of ‘intimacy’ following an interdisciplinary conversation that has emerged over the past decade, precisely because it addresses our key themes without fixing them at any particular scale or on any single side of a conceptual divide. As Berlant suggests, ‘intimacy names the enigma’ of a ‘range of attachments’ that ‘make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities’, which come from ‘within spaces as varied as those of domestic intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises’. For Berlant, intimacy, ‘poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectory of the collective’ (1998: 283). We ask whether critical geopolitics can become more hospitable, if not vital, to the study of the intimate and everyday themes. Moreover, is a critical geopolitics of the intimate and the everyday a promising potentiality? It is not surprising that feminist geography has been oriented to the study of intimacy, both the specific concept as outlined by Berlant (cf. Hunter 2009; Valentine 2008) and more broadly the kinds of relations and practices that this concept denotes. In fact, it is arguably an orientation to ‘intimate’ themes and relations that continues to segregate feminist from critical geopolitical work. Writing in 2007, Jo Sharp asserted that ‘political geography is that part of the discipline that has been least influenced by feminist approaches, and least inclusive of female geographers’ (2007: 382). Despite recent efforts on the part of a number of scholars to challenge and transform this trajectory, this critique could easily be extended to critical geopolitics as well. Hyndman’s insistence on the existence of a significant intellectual and political gap between feminist and critical geopolitics from more than a decade ago remains apt. She argues that ‘feminist geopolitics aims to extend the work of arguably disembodied critical geopolitical analysis by (re)situating knowledge production as a partial view from somewhere’. She furthermore argues that feminist geopolitics re-defines scale, stating that ‘to employ analyses both finer and coarser than that of the nation-state and global economy, different epistemologies are produced and subjects analyzed’ (Hyndman 2004: 309). A form of scalar fixity, centered on the hegemonic actor of geopolitical thought – the nation-state – infuses critical geopolitics and stems largely from the deconstructive methods that heavily inform this field. Indeed, the fixation on dominant geopolitical discourses and their national geographies can be a risky business, as one of the founding scholars of the field suggests. Gerard Toal points out that ‘in seeking to engage certain discourses in order to displace them, one invariably is dependent to a certain degree upon the organizing terms of the discourses, a dependence that can re-invent that which one seeks to problematize’ (2000: 387). A critique of the disembodiment and scalar fixity that dominates critical geopolitics is a necessary starting place for engagement with the intimate and the everyday. But is making critical geopolitics a more thoroughly feminist project, or even investing in a feminist geopolitics, a promising means to deepen analysis of the everyday and the intimate within (political) geography? Perhaps, but we 353

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics are also curious to ask what is at stake in retaining the language of ‘geopolitics’ (see N. Smith 2000). Once the scalar fixity is drained from critical geopolitics, what makes a feminist or critical geopolitics any different than a feminist or critical political geography? Indeed, what distinguishes critical geopolitics from other forms of critical political geography other than the set focus on the nation-state and international relations and a long history of thought and practice marked by that engagement or its critique? Instead, we ask what happens when we shift from a focus on dominant geopolitical discourses to interrogate the logistics of everyday life that enable particular forms of social organization. A field that is defined by a particular scale of analysis risks making questions that should be at the centre of analysis invisible – the very constitution and reproduction of internationally based conceptions of power, organizations of territoriality, visions of futurity, and the calibration of this authority and rule in and through the intimate and the everyday.

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RESEARCH

COMPANION

Spaces of Terror Ulrich Oslender

‘He’s dead’. So ran the headline of the Miami Herald on 2 May 2011. Two and a half words – emblazoned across half a page next to a photo of the man who had become the pin-up face of global terrorism – spelt the end of Osama bin Laden. TV footage that night showed Americans in New York and Washington dancing and celebrating in the streets: images not unlike those that were beamed onto TV screens from the streets of Pakistan, Palestine and other real or imagined Arab geographies, when the news of two planes flying into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 made headlines. It all seemed to have come full circle: the man-monster behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had been brought to justice. Only that it has not, of course, come full circle. While the episode of man-hunting bin Laden may have come to an end, the so-called ‘war on terror’ is simply entering its next round. Eric Hobsbawm referred to the twentieth century as the ‘age of extremes’ (1995). Today, there is a sense that the twenty-first century might come to be known as the ‘age of terror’, as it was proclaimed shortly after 9/11 (Talbott and Chanda 2001). The train bombings of March 2004 in Madrid and July 2005 in London have certainly brought further ‘home’ to Europe the sense that terrorism is with and amongst ‘us’. There is no doubt that the US-led global ‘war on terror’ and its wider implications are significantly reshaping our contemporary life-worlds, and that they will continue to do so for some time to come. On the one hand, we have witnessed a redrawing of international geopolitics, which, according to some, has ushered in a new phase of neo-imperialism accompanied by global processes of dispossession and the curtailing of civil liberties (Chomsky 2004; Harvey 2003). On the other, our collective societal consciousness is instilled with what could be termed a ‘sense of terror’, which is as threatening and fearful as it is vague and hard to grasp. The historian Joanna Bourke has likened the contemporary fear of terrorism to the fear of the plague or the devil in earlier ages (2005). According to her, irrational thinking is bound up in this particular fear. She also worries over the grossly disproportionate official response to the perceived threat of terrorism, precariously side-stepping democratic values such as free movement and free speech. The multiplication of surveillance systems, the strengthening of security services and the tightening of border controls are only some of the infringements of civil liberties that anti-terrorist legislation has brought with it. The persecution

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of asylum seekers (Hyndman and Mountz 2007) and the justification of torture to extract ‘vital’ information (Butler 2007) have even more serious human-rights implications. Amidst the hype of debates over the ‘war on terror’, it is all too easy to forget that terror and terrorism are in fact contested terms that take on many forms in different places and conjunctures. In times when a selectively defined ‘terrorism’ is used to justify all kinds of policies under the cloak of both national and global security concerns, there is a danger that dominant geopolitical discourses exploit this collectively harboured sense of terror for specific political and economic ends. This danger has been addressed by many writers adhering to a critical geopolitics perspective. The latter emerged as a school of thought in the 1980s as recognition that geographies of global politics were constructed culturally and sustained politically by discourses and representational practices of statecraft (Atkinson and Dodds 2000: 9). Critical geopolitics would question taken-for-granted geopolitical assumptions and challenge hegemonic ways of seeing and representing the world such as in foreign policy discourse (Ó Tuathail 1996a). As Ó Tuathail and Agnew suggest, critical geopolitics constitutes an important re-conceptualization of geopolitics as discourse, focusing in particular on two overlapping components (1992). First, there is a formal geopolitics of security intellectuals, strategic institutes and think tanks that provide theories, ‘knowledge’ and strategies to guide foreign policy. Second, a practical geopolitics of everyday statecraft exists that spatializes the world into regions with imagined attributes. For example, certain places or countries are discursively constructed as imminently ‘dangerous’, a ‘threat’ or a ‘safety hazard’ in foreign-policy documents and enunciations. Practical geopolitics thus refers to the geographical language used routinely by political leaders to describe certain regions of the world. It is always a simplification of a more complex reality, often underpinned by ideological motivations. Such geographical references include, for example, the notion of the ‘Iron Curtain’ as a supposedly fixed separation of the capitalist from the communist world during the Cold War period (Dalby 1990). The more contemporary ‘war on terror’ geopolitical discourse is teeming with descriptions of this kind. In his State of the Union Address of January 2002, for example, former US President George W. Bush used the term ‘axis of evil’ to label governments that he accused of sponsoring terrorism and seeking to attain weapons of mass destruction. Initially, Iran, Iraq and North Korea were singled out as making up this ‘axis’. In May 2002 future US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, in a speech entitled ‘Beyond the Axis of Evil’, extended the geographical reach of this label to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. From this perspective, these countries were also referred to as ‘rogue states’. Predictably, this labelling attracted much criticism and outrage, but it was also subject to biting satire and outright laughter. In an act of semantically subversive inversion, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for example, celebrated the emerging new left in Latin America – made up of the countries of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all governed by leftleaning leaders – as the ‘axis of good’. In a geopolitical tit-for-tat (which Chavez just loves), he referred to Washington and its allies as the ‘true axis of evil’. Thus, the

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Spaces of Terror practical geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’ discourse has proved to be a rich field of inquiry for critical geopolitics (Dodds 2005; 2007). A third component to critical geopolitical enquiry emerged in the 1990s that would examine the ways in which the geographical complexity of the world gets reduced to schematic spatial templates through the vehicle of popular culture. Popular geopolitics would interrogate geopolitical cultures of the everyday, such as in film, television, newspapers and novels, and how they produce common sense geopolitical reasoning (Dodds and Atkinson 2000; Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998). One of the earliest contributions to this emerging field was Sharp’s examination of the popular magazine Reader’s Digest and the role of the media in producing popular geopolitical imaginaries in the USA, especially in creating a geopolitical enemy in the Soviet Union as an essentialized Other (1993; see also Sharp 2000). More recently, Shapiro has examined aspects of a geopolitical aesthetic in light of both the post-Cold War and post-9/11 world through what he calls a ‘cinematic geopolitics’ (2009). The post-9/11 climate has produced a flurry of movies and TV series that deal with terrorism and government responses to it. Many of these form part of what some examine under the label of ‘counter-terror culture’, calling for the critical exploration of ‘the reproduction and renegotiation of narratives, images, meanings and performances conventionally associated with the business of countering terrorism’ (Ingram and Dodds 2011: 89–90).1 In this chapter, I will explore some of geography’s engagements with terror and terrorism, particularly from, but not limited to, a critical geopolitics perspective. While the ‘war on terror’ provides an important context within which much critical geopolitical thinking and writing has taken place, it is not the only one. The last section of the chapter therefore focuses on other experiences and geographies of terror and fear and how geographers have tried to make sense of and conceptualize those. Before examining these multiple geographical approaches to terror and terrorism, however, it is useful to reflect on how the latter concepts have been defined.

1

See the theme issue on geographies of counter-terror culture in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011); see also Dodds 2008 for an analysis of how Hollywood studios have approached the issue of terrorism as seen through a number of movies, such as Rendition (2007). The role of the media and in particular the tabloid press, in the production of such a popular geopolitics of terror and war is also analyzed in Debrix 2008. 361

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Defining terror and terrorism Terror: The state of being terrified or greatly frightened; intense fear, fright, or dread. (OED) Terrorism: A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized. (OED) It is common today to trace the emergence of the political concept of ‘terror’ to the period of the French Revolution between 1793 and 1794.2 Known as the Reign of Terror, the ruling faction remorselessly shed the blood of persons whom they regarded as not fitting their idea of virtue. La Terreur has mostly become associated with the figure of Maximilien Robespierre, ‘the Incorruptible’, the dominant force in the Committee of Public Safety that was in charge of restoring order to the French Republic. Terror was the means by which society was to be purified, the guillotine its tool and principal symbol of this phase of the French Revolution. To Robespierre, terror was ‘nothing else than justice, prompt, secure and inflexible’ (Richardson 2006: 19). The extensive use of the guillotine was to help create a ‘Republic of Virtue’, where his principles of terror and virtue would be imposed and applied to the most pressing needs of la patrie, the Fatherland (Scurr 2006). Two important issues arise here. First, the juxtaposition of terror, justice, virtue and purity carries an eerie resemblance to today’s moralizing discourses from both transnational terrorist networks of the al-Qaeda type and the dominant ‘war on terror’ hype. Both Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush (both now ‘retired’) have occupied moral high ground in denouncing their respective nemesis. They have also both invoked God/Allah to be on their respective side (Burke 2004). Bin Laden regarded his own version of terrorism as retributive justice against US imperialism in the Middle East and as a legitimate form of struggle in order to purify the soiled Arab lands from the infidel invaders. As he stated in 1998: Terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible . The terrorism we practise is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah. … Terrorizing those and punishing them are necessary measures to straighten things and to make them right. … The truth is the whole Muslim world is the victim of international terrorism, engineered by America and the United Nations. (Bin Laden quoted in Richardson 2006: 24, 65)

2

Obviously, terror had existed before then. The concept itself can be found in the Latin translation of the Old Testament, for example, where it appears as terrorem, or great fear and dread. There, it frequently refers to the fear caused by the intervention of God in the world (Thorup 2010: 78). Yet, as a political concept, terror is generally understood to have emerged during the French Revolution. 362

Spaces of Terror Arguing from the other side of the spectre, George W. Bush shared this vision of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Rather than bin Laden, however, who readily acknowledged that he was committing acts of terrorism – if only ‘of the commendable kind’ – Bush did not see the actions of his administration as terrorism. To him, ‘terrorism is something the bad guys do’ (Richardson 2006: 19). In 2001 he presented the world with this now infamous option: Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. (Bush 2001) This stark either/or choice in the Bush discourse divided the world up into good and bad. Such binary thinking is a common discursive practice in geopolitical speech (Dodds 2005; Ó Tuathail 1996a).3 Portraying itself as the victim of 9/11, the US administration would not see its state terrorism that was to follow as such. However, as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has argued, ‘every terrorist attack sees itself as a counterattack in a series allegedly always started by the enemy. As a result, terrorism conceives itself in an “anti-terrorist” fashion’ (2009: 27), or, as Graham put it, ‘terrorism and counter-terrorism are umbilically connected’ (2004: 15). A first retribution for the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington was launched in October 2001, initially and tellingly dubbed ‘Operation Infinite Justice’.4 To Bush, the bombing of Afghanistan would be ‘nothing else than justice, prompt, secure and inflexible’. Just as Robespierre wanted his use of terror to be understood. This brings us to the second point worthwhile remembering from the French Revolution: namely that the political term ‘terror’ emerged as a strategy employed by the state to control its national population. In other words, it emerged as state terror. And up to today, state-sponsored terrorism by far outweighs terrorist actions committed by non-state groups in terms of the sheer number of casualties. Obvious examples include the terror regimes in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, where millions of civilians lived in a ‘state of being terrified or greatly frightened’, if we employ the Oxford English Dictionary definition of terror (see above). The Nuremberg Tribunal called this ‘government by terror’, when states are engaged in systematic but arbitrary armed violence against their home 3

4

It can be found, for example, in the above mentioned ‘axis of evil’ figure of speech, as well as in the discursive distinction of an ‘old’ versus ‘new’ Europe, made by then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in January 2003 in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, implying that countries that supported the war were part of a newer, modern Europe, whereas those opposed to the war were from an older, outdated Europe. His remarks were in particular geared at France and Germany, which both vehemently opposed the planned invasion of Iraq. Only later was the military operation renamed ‘Enduring Freedom’, presumably in order to semantically deflect its underlying Crusader zeal, as well as to take into account that to Muslims only Allah can mete out infinite justice. 363

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics populations (Hewitt 2001). The same would apply to the hundreds of thousands of civilians living, suffering, disappearing and dying during the military dictatorships in much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, where terror was employed by the governments as a tool of domination and a strategy to control their populations (Brysk 2003; Hayner 2001; Koonings and Kruijt 1999; Menjivar and Rodriguez 2005). The systematic application of state terror in the Southern Cone military regimes of Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay during this time was so pervasive that it led to a ‘culture of fear’ in those countries, the legacy of which can still be seen today (Corradi, Weiss Fagen and Garretón 1992). In spite of this overwhelming presence of state terror, however, disproportionate attention in the popular geopolitical imaginary – fuelled by the media and the Hollywood film industry (Dodds 2008; Sharp 2000) – has been paid to non-state terrorist actions. As Bourke found, for example, between 1980 and 1985 non-state terrorist groups killed 17 people in the USA, yet the New York Times printed an average of four stories about terrorism in each issue during this period (2005). In her cultural history of fear, Bourke attributes this seemingly disproportionate coverage to groups with vested interests in promoting fear and scare-mongering. Writing about the same period in the 1980s, Edward Said is more specific about these interests: With few exceptions the discourse of terrorism is constituted by an author whose main client is the government of a powerful state opposed to terrorism, but also anxious to shield itself from arguments about perceptions of its own (quite routinely barbaric and violent) behaviour. Why this is so should be obvious, since the disproportion between state violence and (so-to-speak) private violence is, and always has been, vast. Nowhere is this paradigmatic rhetorical combination of client-appeal and blockage more clear than in the work of political scientists in Israel and the USA, states whose recent foreign policy has been staked on the fight against terrorism, a political decision arrived at consciously and therefore ideologically as a method for dealing with resistance to US–Israeli power; in addition this decision made it possible for the government-sponsored outpouring against terrorism either to screen or to legitimize the governmental violence of both countries. (1988: 51) In Said’s interpretation, the failure to address these imbalances has led to terror and terrorism being used as ‘totalizing concepts’: The entire arsenal of words and phrases that derive from the concept of terrorism [is] both inadequate and shameful. There are few ways of talking about terrorism now that are not corrupted by the propaganda war even of the past decade, ways that have become, in my opinion, disqualified as instruments for conducting rational, secular inquiry into the causes of human violence. Is there some other way of apprehending what might additionally be involved when we now unthinkingly use the word ‘terrorism’? (Said 1988: 53)

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Other terrors, other terrorisms It is interesting to note that Said voiced his frustration back in the 1980s in terms that would be quite adequate to describe our current debates. Brainwashed as we are by the ‘war on terror’ aimed at Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, it is easy to forget that other geographies were the focus of the ‘propaganda war’ that Said talks about. As Chomsky has declared on numerous occasions, the ‘war on terror’ was only ‘re-declared’ after 9/11 (Chomsky 2003: 115; 2004: 188–98). The practical geopolitics of the Cold War rhetoric of the Reagan administration in the 1980s promoted the idea of a Soviet-backed international terrorist conspiracy that included Central America. It may be risible today to take serious Reagan’s claim that ‘the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States’ (quoted in Chomsky 2003: 116). Yet his statement set the stage for massive US intervention in Nicaragua by supplying arms to the Contras, which fed a bloody civil war that would finally end in electoral defeat for the governing Sandinistas. If we employ the Oxford English Dictionary definition of terrorism from above – ‘a policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation’ – then the Reagan administration clearly committed acts of international terrorism against the people and the government of Nicaragua. This interpretation would also hold true if we were to go by a US army manual that defines terrorism as ‘the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature … through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear’ (quoted in Chomsky 2004: 188). Moreover, since this definition describes equally well the current US interventions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other places considered a ‘threat’ to the USA, it would be hard to argue against Chomsky, when he affirms ‘that the US is a leading terrorist state’ (2004: 189). This viewpoint is echoed both in George’s analysis of Western state terrorism (1991), and by the British author Harold Pinter who called the invasion of Iraq ‘an act of blatant state terrorism’ in his 2005 Nobel Laureate speech. These critical interventions are all but in name of a critical geopolitics kind, as they disrupt the routine geopolitical language used by political leaders and point to the social construction of a concept such as terrorism. By exposing the underlying ideological construct of the dominant discourses of practical geopolitics, they open up and throw into relief the very definition of terror and terrorism. It can be argued that critical geopolitics as a perspective or frame of thought reaches far beyond the disciplinary confines that associate it as a sub-discipline within political geography. Public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said or Peter Sloterdijk are certainly practicing critical geopolitics (even though they may not know it themselves as such). Their contributions would also fit into the newly emerging field of ‘critical terrorism studies’, which was launched in 2008 through a new journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism. Its aim is described as fostering a ‘more self-reflective, critical approach to the study of terrorism’, including a willingness ‘to challenge dominant knowledge and understandings of terrorism 365

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics [and be] sensitive to the politics of labelling in the terrorism field’ (Breen Smyth et al. 2008: 2). A potentially complementary literature to critical geopolitics seems to be emerging here that could lead to fruitful interdisciplinary engagements in the study of terror and terrorisms.5 Still, most so-called ‘terrorism experts’ shy away from a more critical approach to state terror and instead focus almost exclusively on non-state terrorist groups or actions. State terror is often simply seen as ‘normalized violence’ (Watts 2007: 188), thereby meriting exclusion from the analysis of terrorist activities. Heading the list of usual suspects in studies of terrorism are most likely to be Hamas, alQaeda, and Hezbollah, but also the Basque separatist organization ETA, the Irish Republican Army or the Baader–Meinhof group or Red Army Faction that operated in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. In a recent publication, one of these experts on terrorism is progressive enough to regard the global war on terrorism as ‘a terrible mistake’ (Richardson 2006: 15), but the author deliberately excludes state-sponsored terror from her analysis, adding instead to the above list of nonstate terrorist groups the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Shining Path in Peru, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo and the Kurdish separatist group PKK in her attempt at ‘understanding the terrorist threat’. Some 20 years ago, Herman and O’Sullivan attributed this trend to ignore state terrorism to vested interests of the ‘terrorism industry’, including the multi-billion-dollar security industry, but also right-wing think tanks, government agencies, academics and the media (1989). This claim still seems to hold true today.

Terror and revolution A further issue of contention has arisen over whether revolutionary violence should be considered as terror. It has been argued, for example, that guerrilla movements in the 1950s and 1960s employed terrorism as a means of overthrowing colonial powers. The armed struggle of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) may spring to mind here. The FLN’s fierce resistance to the geopolitical vision of the French imperial project included bombing campaigns in public spaces, mostly 5

In the journal’s second issue, Dodds, for example, draws out the connections between critical terrorism studies and popular geopolitics, arguing that the former should take popular culture more serious (2008). In a parallel publishing venture Routledge has launched a Critical Terrorism Studies series (edited by the same editors as Critical Studies on Terrorism (see Jackson, Breen Smyth and Gunning 2009)). Edited volumes have investigated contemporary state terrorism (Blakeley 2009, Jackson, Murphy and Poynting 2010); the politics of response to terrorist events, in particular following the July 2005 bombings in London (Closs Stephens and Vaughan-Williams 2009); and discourses and practices of terrorism with particular relevance to the consequences of the language of terror for our lives in democratic societies (Brecher, Devenney and Winter 2010). The latter also includes interesting ‘Critique and Response’ sections after each chapter. 366

Spaces of Terror frequented by French settlers in colonial Algeria, known as pieds noirs. These were undoubtedly acts of terrorism, intended to spread fear among the European population in Algiers.6 Yet they were considered by the FLN a necessary and legitimate means of fighting colonial oppression, the original violence that lay at the heart of the conflict in Algeria. It may also be argued that these acts of terrorism sped up the path to Algerian independence, which was finally accorded between France and the FLN in March 1962. The question that arises from this conundrum is does the use of terrorist tactics necessarily make a group a terrorist organization? Accusations of terrorist acts of violence have been made, for example, in the case of the African National Congress (ANC). The Pentagon declared the ANC at one time one of the ‘more notorious terrorist groups’ (quoted in Chomsky 2003: 117). Certainly in the early to mid1980s there was a phase in which the armed wing of the ANC, the Umkhonto we Sizwe or MK, resorted to bombing campaigns. Yet, for the first 50 years after its foundation in 1912, the movement treated non-violence as a core principle. It was only in 1961, when the ANC felt that all political channels were closed to them, that the MK was created to fight against the South African apartheid government. For one of the MK’s co-founders, Nelson Mandela, terrorism was clearly not an option, as he explained in his autobiography: We considered four types of violent activities: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and open revolution. For a small and fledgling army, open revolution was inconceivable. Terrorism inevitably reflected poorly on those who used it, undermining any public support it might otherwise garner. Guerrilla warfare was a possibility, but since the ANC had been reluctant to embrace violence at all, it made sense to start with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm against individuals: sabotage. (Mandela 1994:240) Che Guevara is another iconic revolutionary figure who has been called a ‘terrorist’. It is therefore instructive to read him in his own words in Guerrilla Warfare, as he distinguishes between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution. (1998: 21)

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A magnificent movie has been made on this phase of the independence struggle in Algeria (1954–62) by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo. The Battle of Algiers (1966) includes scenes of the FLN’s bombing campaign as well as French repression in the colony. It also beautifully evokes the sense of fear and resistance that took hold of the Casbah, the Arab quarter in Algiers, during that time. One of the FLN leaders, Saadi Yacef, acts his real-life part in the movie. 367

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Similarly critical of the use of terrorism was Vladimir Lenin. In his well-known pamphlet What is to be Done? he advocates against the use of terror and admonishes the revolutionary-socialist Svoboda group for including terror in its program: It is highly interesting to note here the specific arguments that Svoboda has advanced in defence of terrorism. It ‘completely denies’ the deterrent role of terrorism, but instead stresses its ‘excitative significance’. … The admission that the government cannot now be ‘terrified’ and hence disrupted, by terror, is tantamount to a complete condemnation of terror as a system of struggle. … Svoboda advocates terror as a means of ‘exciting’ the working-class movement and of giving it a ‘strong impetus’ … excitative terror is nonsense. (Lenin 1902: 46, 47, 111) These examples show that within revolutionary movements there has been a thorough engagement with the concept of terrorism and the potential benefits or downfalls of its application in the revolutionary struggle. To simply equate revolutionary violence with terrorism, as happens all too often, is not only factually wrong, but it also illustrates the effects of the ‘propaganda war’ that Said talks about. By portraying any separatist or revolutionary organization as ‘terrorist’, their struggle is discursively de-politicized. In the post-9/11 context, the mantle of terrorism can thus easily ‘be cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power’ (Gregory 2003: 319, emphasis in original). In Colombia, for example, tapping into global concerns over terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, the authorities have pursued a discursive strategy that links the country’s most powerful guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), to illicit crop cultivation and drug trafficking, redefining the guerrillas in the process as ‘narco-terrorists’. The aim has been to discredit the guerrilla’s political project and to cover up the social and historical roots of the country’s ongoing internal conflict. At the same time, however, then-President Uribe’s war against leftist guerrilla groups employed its very own terror strategies. National and international NGOs have continuously denounced the practice of arbitrary mass arrests, targeted killings of trade unionists and social movement leaders, and the continued collaboration between the armed forces and right-wing paramilitary groups, which have created an environment of fear throughout Colombian civil society.7 The discursive magic of practical geopolitics in Colombia – turning a rebel movement into narco-terrorists by the wave of a wand and thus wishing away the politics of the country’s internal conflict – has been challenged by elements of civil society that contest the very meaning of terrorism and the ways in which the spaces of terror are played out in Colombia (Hylton 2003; Oslender 2008a; Uribe 2004).

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The ‘false positives’ scandal, for example, has rattled the country. Army units were encouraged to engage guerrilla groups militarily and rewarded for showing high guerrilla body counts. As a result, many of those units killed thousands of civilians and dressed them up as guerrilla fighters to be rewarded accordingly. 368

Spaces of Terror In the following sections I want to look at some of the specific engagements of geographers with the ‘war on terror,’ and what a critical geopolitics approach to terror more widely might imply.

Geography and the ‘war on terror’ I regard the global ‘war on terror … as one of the central modalities through which the colonial present is articulated. (Gregory 2004:13) Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington of September 2001, geographers considered their role in the ‘war on terror’. This would take many different, at times confrontational, forms. The Association of American Geographers organized a panel on geography and terrorism at its annual meeting in Washington in 2002, which led to the publication of a collection of essays on the topic. Undertaken as part of the National Science Foundation’s call for research associated with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism (Cutter, Richardson and Wilbanks 2003) set out to address the immediate role and ‘usefulness’ of geography and geographical information technologies in emergency management. This included the areas of geo-spatial data, technologies infrastructure research, and vulnerability science and hazard research. The book also proposed a specific policy goal, suggesting the creation of a GeoSecurity Information Office within the Department of Homeland Security (Gallaher 2009: 254). The authors thus positioned themselves within a formal geopolitics of think tanks that would inform national security and foreign policy. While appearing in a timely manner intent on demonstrating geography’s relevance in such debates, the book was quickly lambasted by critical geographers for its technocratic approach and its failure to consider the discipline’s wider significance in helping to understand root causes of terrorism and the histories of places, out of which terrorist acts emerged. A very different kind of geographical imagination lay at the heart of Violent Geographies, an edited collection of essays that wanted to be seen as a direct response from within the discipline of geography to such reductionist and politically highly compromised geopolitical positioning: The immediate provocation for our project was a twin series of responses to the murderous events of 9/11. On one side, there were those who reduced the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to a barbarism that passed all understanding. … Terrorism was located beyond the boundaries of civilization and lodged in the pathologies of those who hammered so destructively at its gates. … On the other side, there were those who proposed a purely technical or instrumental response to 9/11, drawing on political technologies (that were also geographical technologies), to profile, predict, and manage the threat of terrorism as an enduring mode of latemodern government. The emphasis was on geographies of risk assessment, 369

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics on geospatial data management and modeling, and on the vulnerability of biophysical and built environments to terrorist attack. (Gregory and Pred 2007: 1) There have been numerous interventions from both sides of the debate since. A 2003 issue of the journal Professional Geographer, for example, saw two short articles published side-by-side that can be seen as representative of the technocratic geographical engagement with terrorism and a more critical approach respectively. Richard Beck intends to demonstrate in his article the usefulness of environmental remote sensing and GIS as counter-terrorism tools in the war in Afghanistan. Drawing on video footage of a certain rock formation and band-ratio satellite image mapping, he identifies a place in eastern Afghanistan as probably harbouring ‘terrorists’. The author forwarded this information to the US government in October 2001 and somewhat proudly claims that ‘military and news media reports indicate the subsequent successful elimination of a large number of terrorists and munitions at Zhawar Kili in November 2001 and January, February, and April of 2002’ (Beck 2003: 170). Such triumphalism drew the wrath of others, who were deeply concerned over ethical and professional implications of being in cahoots with the US military and bowing to their demands to delay the publication of the article in order to protect their military operations (O’Loughlin 2005). One may also add that we do not know how many presumed ‘terrorists’ and how many civilians were killed as a result of this kind of intelligence having been supplied to the US Army. Colin Flint in the same issue is similarly critical of the analysis of contemporary terrorism and related policy prescriptions, which he accuses of suffering from a lack of geographical understanding. Instead he offers a political-geographic perspective on the causes and consequences of terrorism and counter-terrorism, involving the interaction of power politics and geographic processes. He stresses the importance of the geo-historical context in understanding the causes of contemporary terrorism, and especially the role of the USA as hegemonic power. Moreover, he argues for the need to examine more closely the spatiality of terrorist networks and concludes that ‘no other discipline [than geography] is better suited to synthesize the multiple causes of conflict, understand and give voice to place-based perceptions that both lead to confrontation and define the path towards peace, and show how peace at the local scale and global structures are linked’ (Flint 2003: 166–7). One may add that for precisely these reasons, geography has a lot to offer to the emerging field of critical terrorism studies, as introduced above. The notion of scale has also attracted the scrutiny of other critical geographers. Neil Smith, for example, argues that the events of 9/11 were subject to a politically strategic ‘rescaling’ (2002). While the World Trade Center catastrophe was a profoundly local and also global event, it was produced as a national tragedy. Such a rescaling would force US citizens to see the attacks as a matter of national interest and security. Thus, to Smith, the ‘need to nationalize September 11 arose from the need to justify war’ in Afghanistan and Iraq (2002: 635). Jennifer Hyndman, meanwhile, sees feminist geopolitics as a critical framework for analyzing the 370

Spaces of Terror events and aftermath of 9/11 (2003).8 She seeks to provide a more accountable and embodied understanding of the intersections of power and space at multiple scales, in particular challenging the logic of the either/or reasoning championed by the Bush administration. To Hyndman, ‘a feminist geopolitics demands revisiting the horrific violence of September 11th and its aftermath, especially the casualties. … Reports of civilian deaths in Afghanistan took time to filter back to the US mainstream media, but once they did, an alarmingly visible landscape of death and destruction emerged’ (2003: 8, 9). She thus calls for a ‘geopolitics of body counts [that would] map the silences of the dominant geopolitical position[s] and undo these by invoking multiple scales of inquiry and knowledge production’ (Hyndman 2003: 8, 10). Writing also from a critical geopolitics perspective, Stuart Elden examined the intersections of terror and territory (2007; 2009). He is particularly interested in the ways that territorial integrity and sovereignty have been challenged in the ‘war on terror’. Whereas states such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have nominally preserved borders, they lack effective territorial control within. On the one hand, territorial sovereignty of these states is under threat through external aggression, such as the US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, non-state groups have been able to fill the power vacuum left by the state and established territorial control in certain parts of these countries. Al-Qaeda, for example, rather than a de-territorialized network, as it is often portrayed, has established training camps and operating bases in some of these states. Elden therefore cautions ‘us against seeing al-Qaeda in non-territorial terms or as indicative of some wider deterritorialisation’ (2007: 829). He thereby echoes some of Derek Gregory’s concerns over ‘two peculiar cartographic performances’ by which the Bush administration justified its attack on Afghanistan in October 2001: The first was a performance of sovereignty through which the ruptured space of Afghanistan could be simulated as a coherent state. … The second was a performance of territory through which the fluid networks of al-Qaeda could be fixed in a bounded space. … It was an extraordinary accomplishment to convince a sufficient public constituency that these transnational terrorist networks could be rolled into the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan. (Gregory 2004: 50) To Gregory this was only possible by mobilizing the imaginative geographies of the Orient that Edward Said has so eloquently depicted in his study of Orientalism (1978). Practical geopolitics and foreign-policy discourse, rather than being radically different from previous periods, are merely re-constituted, drawing on the same tropes of Othering and essentializing as in earlier periods of colonial domination. This is why Gregory is quite right in regarding ‘the global ‘war on terror … as one of the central modalities through which the colonial present is articulated’ (2004: 13). 8

On feminist geopolitics and its concern with scale, the body and the ‘on the ground’ experiences of real, often marginalized people, see also Dowler and Sharp 2001. 371

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Summing up: there have been numerous interventions by geographers from all sides in the debates on the ‘war on terror’. Some have sought to prove the discipline’s utility in counter-terrorism efforts and foreign policy. Others, from a critical geopolitics perspective, have deconstructed the dominant war discourses, often angrily, and denounced the construction of contemporary landscapes of insecurity, both home and abroad (Gregory 2011; Ingram and Dodds 2009). Certainly, enquiries into violence and the state are no longer virtually absent from contemporary geographical scholarship, as Ken Hewitt contended a decade ago (2001). As Simon Dalby comments in a recent editorial to a special issue of Geographical Journal marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11: The events of the war on terror have helped to shape the intellectual agendas of the geography discipline over the last decade with a proliferation of special issues, edited books and other outputs; the burgeoning literature on security, the changing meanings of territory, citizenship, technology and identity have been complemented with a series of investigations into warfare and the changing spatialities of violence. … Geography as a discipline remains an eclectic enterprise. (Dalby 2011: 200) Yet most of these interventions have dealt with the notion of terror within the confines of the ‘war on terror’ context. They do not tend to enquire into the nature of terror as such, nor do they propose a radical rethinking of the concept of terror itself. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to review some alternative perspectives to approaching the notion of terror and terrorism, both from within critical geopolitics and beyond. Some of these do so by consciously taking ‘terror’ out of the ‘war on terror.’ Others predate the current ‘war on terror’ debates but should be seen as useful tools to critically re-conceptualize the notion of terror itself. As Said asked: ‘Is there some other way of apprehending what might additionally be involved when we now unthinkingly use the word “terrorism”?’ (1988: 53).

Cultures and geographies of terror and fear Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation. (Arendt 1951: 6) Terrorism is not an opponent but a modus operandi, a fighting method that immediately spreads to both sides of the conflict – which is why ‘War on Terrorism’ is a nonsense phrase. (Sloterdijk 2009: 26–7) Terror is a strategy of war and a tool of domination. It is not so much geared at its most immediate victims but at the survivors. It sends a message. It becomes a communicative strategy. Terror works as embodied spectacle and is enacted in front of the victim’s friends, relatives and neighbours. It thus sends a message to 372

Spaces of Terror the survivors, threatening them with the same fate as witnessed in brutal acts such as public torture and execution. Through the systematic application of terror, the victimizer generates a profound sense of fear among local populations and places are transformed into spaces of fear that dramatically break down local and regional social relations. These are the workings of terror that the anthropologist Michael Taussig traces in the report of Roger Casement on the systematic abuse, torture and killings of indigenous debt peonage workers on the rubber plantations in the Colombian Putumayo region in the early twentieth century (Taussig 1984). In 1909, public outcry arose over a series of articles in the London magazine Truth depicting the brutality of the rubber company, which since 1907 had been a consortium of Peruvian and British interests. As a result, the British government felt obliged to send Casement as its consular representative to the Putumayo region to investigate. Casement’s 136-page Putumayo Report was based on seven weeks of travel in 1910 through the rubber-gathering areas of the jungles of the Caraparami and Igaraparana affluents of the middle reaches of the Putumayo River and on six months in the Amazon basin. In hard-to-read detail Casement describes the terror and torture suffered by the Huitoto Indians at the hands of rubber-company officials and workers. According to Casement, Putumayo rubber would be unprofitable were it not for the forced labour of local Huitotos. For the 12 years from 1900, the Putumayo output of some 4,000 tons of rubber cost thousands of Indians their lives. Deaths from torture and disease had decreased the population of the area by around 30,000 during that time (Taussig 1984: 474). One of the principal forms of punishment were floggings, often until the victims’ bones were visible. Floggings were applied, for example, when an Indian brought in insufficient rubber. They were most sadistic on those who dared to flee. Given no medical treatment, the flogged Indians were left to die after torture, eaten by the company’s dogs. Flogging was mixed with other tortures such as castration or crucifixion with the victim’s head tied down. White workers would also on occasion cut Indians to pieces with machetes and dash out the brains of small children by hurling them against trees and walls. The elderly were killed when they could no longer work. To amuse themselves, company officials practiced shooting, using Indians as targets, and on special occasions, such as Easter Saturday, shot them down in groups or doused them in kerosene and set them on fire to enjoy their agony (Taussig 1984: 475). One particular form of torture still appears to be common today. Near drowning was designed, as Casement points out, ‘to just stop short of taking life while inspiring the acute mental fear and inflicting much of the physical agony of death’ (Taussig 1984: 477). At the time, this practice was not yet known as ‘waterboarding’. These are the spaces of terror that are so rarely reported on, even today. They often occur in remote geographies, hidden away from the public eye. But knowledge of their existence is also systematically ignored and suppressed by the sweeping grand geopolitical narratives, which favour simplicity over complexity and distance over proximity. Taussig summarizes how terror and torture became

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the form of life for some 15 years in the Putumayo region, where effectively a ‘culture of terror’ had developed: Cultures of terror are based on and nourished by silence [and] that the victimizer needs the victim for the purpose of making truth, objectifying the victimizer’s fantasies in the discourse of the other. To be sure, the torturer’s desire is also prosaic: to acquire information, to act in concert with large-scale economic strategies elaborated by the masters and exigencies of production. Yet equally if not more important is the need to control massive populations through the cultural elaboration of fear. (Taussig 1984: 469)

Fear and the everyday Such a cultural elaboration of fear as a strategy to control national populations has for a long time been a focus for studies of Latin American military dictatorships, which saw the emergence of ‘societies of fear’ (Kroonings and Kruijt 1999), ‘cultures of fear’ (Corradi, Weiss Fagen and Garretón 1992) and a ‘system of fear’ combining ‘fear of the known’ – manifest in actual physical repression, torture, threats and control of society – with ‘fear of the unknown’ – primarily instilled through omission, rumors and uncertainty (Garretón 1992). Yet, as the Situationists argued, even in seemingly less violent societies that may appear to be working through desires and pleasure, the instilling of fear acts as primary mechanism of control. This is the society of the spectacle, an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion (Debord 1994). Geographers have been interested in the spatial manifestations of this fearsociety nexus for a while. In examining the geography of women’s fear, Gill Valentine, has argued, for example, that women’s fear can be seen as a spatial expression of patriarchy, controlling women through behavioral restrictions (1989). Fear of crime has been a central theme in much recent geographical research, and in how far this fear is socially constructed and geographically constituted (Pain 2000; Shirlow and Pain 2003), with attention frequently paid to the experiences of children (Nayak 2003) or to parent’s fears for children’s safety in cyberspace (Valentine and Holloway 2001).9 From a critical geopolitics perspective it has been suggested that there has been an explosion of all kinds of fear discourses in Western societies – ranging from cot death to juvenile crime, internet pornography and asylum seekers – that are frequently manufactured and manipulated for specific political ends (Pain and Smith 2008). The ‘war on terror’ context has only exacerbated this trend through the production of spaces of security and insecurity (Ingram and Dodds 2009) and the association of certain spaces and places with 9

See also the special issue of Capital and Class 80 (Summer 2003), Geographies and Politics of Fear. For an interesting philosophical treatment of fear which pays attention to geography, see Svendsen 2008. 374

Spaces of Terror danger. Territorial stigmatization does not only occur in the ghetto (Wacquant 2007), but entire countries and regions have become signalled as ‘dangerous’ and ‘fearsome’ in the post-9/11 world. Afghanistan and Pakistan – or Af-Pak, as it has become known in the incredibly arrogant place-collapsing shorthand neologism of US foreign-policy circles (a different kind of ‘place annihilation’ (see Hewitt 1983)) – are commonly understood to be no-go areas – albeit not for US marines, who know no fear. US air strikes and drone attacks have also produced new spaces of fear among the civilian population in these countries, where ‘terror from the air’ – the quintessential modern form of terror, according to Sloterdijk (2009) – may strike at any time. We do not know much about these spaces of terror and fear in those ‘far away’ places. Different from minutiae accounting of victims of terrorist attacks in the West, not much effort is put into even counting the number of people killed, maimed and terrorized as a result of Western ‘counter-terrorism’ attacks. This is one aspect that feminist geopolitics wanted to see addressed: a counting of the deaths of innocent civilians on both sides of violence (Hyndman 2003). Even though that cannot be enough. As Hyndman recognized later, re-visiting her earlier intervention: The common practices of reporting casualties have become so normalized that they at once obscure and reproduce the workings of geopolitical power that frame these numbers. … Counting bodies is important, but it does not account for the remarkable destruction of lives and livelihoods occurring in Iraq today. (2007: 38) To account for the latter one has to report from those terrains of violence and landscapes of fear. This is partly achieved in Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and Taussig’s critical reading of it, discussed above. Both provide an account of terror as a lived experience. These accounts not only denounce violence and terror as a system of oppression, but transmit at the same time a moral proximity to the people who are subject to terror regimes and attacks. Within the school of critical geopolitics, such a narrating perspective of seeing and representing realities on the ground has sometimes been called the ‘anti-geopolitical eye’. A notion developed well before the current ‘war on terror’ hype, it may provide a vantage point from which to decentre dominant narratives and logics produced under the latter.

The anti-geopolitical eye and feminist geopolitics The term ‘anti-geopolitical eye’ was coined in 1996 by one of the most prolific writers of the critical geopolitics tradition, Gearóid Ó Tuathail (1996b). With it, he refers to an alternative way of seeing and representing that disturbs the all-seeing eye usually evident in geopolitical arguments. The anti-geopolitical eye acknowledges that its view is from somewhere specific. It represents a situated view of the world that rejects the detached perspectives of statesmen. Instead it travels at ground-level 375

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics to observe, feel and transmit a moral proximity to those observed and described. Ó Tuathail considered the anti-geopolitical eye a provisional category, which he introduced to analyze the impassioned reports of the war in Bosnia that the British journalist Maggie O’Kane sent from the frontlines back to the readership in Britain. Her reporting was based on an eyewitness approach of multiple perspectives. The victims of the war in Bosnia and their suffering were present in her visceral descriptions of the horror of the war. They entered graphically into her reporting, which accused, took sides with the victims and did not try to hide behind the high-minded abstractions of traditional geopolitical discourse. The spaces of terror through which ordinary Bosnians lived their lives in constant fear were revealed as such: horrific realities of the everyday that were beyond the imagination of the average newspaper reader in the UK. These are the spaces where terror is experienced as a visceral, everyday reality, and which feel much more real to the victims than the highly exaggerated, if existing, threat of a terrorist attack in the West. The anti-geopolitical eye moreover breaks down the distance between observer and observed. It reveals a moral proximity that accuses and asks awkward questions enquiring about ethical responsibilities that are often ignored. With its emphasis on marginal voices that are usually silenced in the big geopolitical stories and its embodied vision of lived experience on the ground, the category of the anti-geopolitical eye has attracted the attention of feminist geographers. Some consider it a first step in critically addressing the marginalization of such voices and in recovering viewpoints that are otherwise hidden in geopolitical metanarratives. They see the anti-geopolitical eye as a way of embodying geopolitics and to give it that visceral feeling of life histories transmitted from close-up. As Hyndman points out: Feminist geopolitics challenges state-centric dominant geopolitical narratives that reduce dead bodies to fatality metrics by establishing moral proximity between those killed and those watching, and grounding disembodied epistemologies in the suffering and survival of players in the war, making them political subjects alongside states and armies. (2007: 43–4)

Geographies of terror and landscapes of fear Similarly concerned with breaking away from traditional geopolitical perspectives on terror writ large, writers of the critical geopolitics perspective have begun documenting these ‘ordinary’ spaces of terror and landscapes of fear (e.g. Lunstrum 2009, for Mozambique; Oslender 2007, for Colombia). Oslender, for example, proposes a framework he has termed ‘geographies of terror’ as a methodological tool for the systematic study of the impact of terror and its spatial manifestations on local populations, consisting of seven main points:

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Spaces of Terror 1. The production of landscapes of fear. These are a result of the sustained application of terror in a region and are visible in the traces that armed groups leave in their wake after attacks on civilian populations. They may include destroyed houses, bullet holes and graffiti on walls or burnt-to-the-ground plantations. They are also evident in the empty spaces left behind when inhabitants flee and abandon their villages and towns fearful of persecution and massacres.10 2. Restricted mobility and routine spatial practices. Regimes of terror impose restrictions on the everyday movements of local populations. These may be explicitly imposed by armed actors who inhibit local people from entering certain places, or they may be implicit restrictions imposed through fear that advises one not to move around in certain places. The context of terror thus triggers a fragmentation of space and dramatically alters everyday spatial mobility. 3. Dramatic transformation of the sense of place. People begin to feel, think, and talk in different ways about their living places, which are now impregnated with traumatic experiences, memories and fear. More than the homely place they would remember (and talk about) before terror was unleashed upon them, it is now the physical (and mentally registered and stored) site of the massacre, killing, torture or face-to-face encounter with the agents of terror. Individual and collective imaginations give way to a ‘terrorized sense of place’ (Oslender 2008b: 83). 4. De-territorialization. Terror breaks apart existing forms of territorialization. The threats and massacres committed by armed groups bring about the loss of territorial control for local populations. The physical uprooting of individuals or communities is the most visible expression, as people flee violence and terror, abandoning their lands and homes. Yet, de-territorialization also exists when local populations feel restricted in their everyday routine movements around their accustomed spaces. In other words, fear produces ‘mental deterritorialization’ (Oslender 2008b: 83), which sets in when the loss of territorial control is perceived as the result of violence and enacted in practice by the evasion of places where danger may lurk. 5. Physical movements in space. The context of terror triggers physical movements that profoundly reorganize social space. Forced displacement can be on a small scale, with individuals fleeing persecution, or on a massive scale, with the exodus of entire communities and populations. Forced migrations may be short and brief (to nearby villages or towns, sometimes just for a few days until the danger is perceived to be over) or they may be farther and longer (to larger cities or even abroad for months, years, or without ever returning). 6. Re-territorialization. The return of displaced populations to their place of origin is a long process that implies a redefinition of previous social 10 In many ways, Oslender’s approach draws on the classic humanistic proposal of Tuan (1979). However, he goes beyond that and wants to stress the systematic relation that exists between fear and both mental and physical landscapes as they destabilize the existing social space and the embodied practices of everyday life. 377

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics relations imbued with the experience and collective memories of terror and a reconstruction of landscapes of fear as spaces of solidarity and peace. The displaced population that does not return (be it by choice or for lack of safety guarantees) also embarks on processes of re-territorialization, for example, in the new urban spaces of the cities of refuge, where finding work, adequate housing and suitable education for children poses huge problems. 7. Spatial strategies of resistance. People individually and collectively resist the imposition of terror regimes in many ways and on many scales, ranging from the personal and the community level to the national and global scale. At the local level, strategies to confront terror in its place may include hiding in certain places in the event of an imminent attack. On the national level, these strategies are often coordinated with NGOs. Increasingly the global has acquired for many resistance movements an unprecedented strategic importance, as terror and atrocities are denounced with international NGOs, aid agencies and the United Nations Refugee Agency, among others. The seven-point framework of ‘geographies of terror’ should be understood as setting an agenda for approaching terror as a complicated set of spaces, emotions, practices, movements and materialities that work at a range of scales from the body to micro-geographies of the (lost) home, street, forest and region. It pays particular attention to the ways in which people confront terror in its place. While Oslender applies this framework to the case of Colombia’s black communities on the Pacific coast region, who live under constant threat to their lives and who have been violently uprooted from their lands over the last 20 years, he stresses its wider applicability to the situation of local populations in Palestine, Sudan and Sri Lanka, amongst others (2008b). Together with the notion of the anti-geopolitical eye and the feminist geopolitics perspective, it may be seen as a contribution towards a critical engagement with the very concept of terror and an antidote to the ‘totalizing concepts’ that terror and terrorism have become, according to Said (1988: 53). This may not be an easy venture in today’s ‘age of terror’ that is dominated by a simplistic binary discourse of the world. Yet, it is necessary to keep insisting that the spaces of terror are manifold and to be found in many, often unsuspected, places. As for a ‘simple way to reduce the threat of terror: stop participating in it’ (Chomsky 2004: 198).

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Gallaher, C., 2009. ‘Terrorism’. In C. Gallaher et al., Key Concepts in Political Geography. London: Sage, pp. 247–59. Garretón, M.A., 1992. ‘Fear in military regimes: An overview’. In J. Corradi, P. Weiss Fagen and M.A. Garretón (eds), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 13–25. George, A. (ed), 1991. Western State Terrorism. Cambridge: Polity. Graham, S., 2004. ‘Introduction’. In S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–25. Gregory, D., 2003. ‘Defiled cities’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24: 307–26. —— 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. —— 2011. ‘The everywhere war’. Geographical Journal 177: 238–50. —— and A. Pred (eds), 2007. Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. New York: Routledge. Guevara, E. [Che], 1998 [1960]. Guerrilla Warfare. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Harvey, D., 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayner, P., 2001. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. New York: Routledge. Herman, E., and G. O’Sullivan, 1989. The ‘Terrorism Industry’: The Experts and Institutions that Shape our View of Terror. New York: Pantheon. Hewitt, K., 1983. ‘Place annihilation: Area bombing and the fate of urban places’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73: 257–84. —— 2001. ‘Between Pinochet and Kropotkin: State terror, human rights and the geographers’. Canadian Geographer 45: 338–55. Hobsbawm, E., 1995. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus. Hylton, F., 2003. ‘An evil hour: Uribe’s Colombia in historical perspective’. New Left Review 23: 50–93. Hyndman, J., 2003. ‘Beyond either/or: A feminist analysis of September 11th’. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2: 1–13. —— 2007. ‘Feminist geopolitics revisited: Body counts in Iraq’. Professional Geographer 59: 35–46. —— and A. Mountz, 2007. ‘Refuge or refusal: The geography of exclusion’. In D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. New York: Routledge, pp. 77–92. Ingram, A., and K. Dodds (eds), 2009. Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror. Farnham: Ashgate. —— and —— 2011. ‘Counterterror culture’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 89–97. Jackson, R., M. Breen Smyth and J. Gunning (eds), 2009. Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda. New York: Routledge. —— E. Murphy and S. Poynting (eds), 2010. Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Koonings, K., and D. Kruijt (eds), 1999. Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America. London: Zed Books. 380

Spaces of Terror Lenin, V., 1902. What is to be Done?, trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna. Marxists Internet Archive, . Lunstrum, E., 2009. ‘Terror, territory, and deterritorialization: Landscapes of terror and the unmaking of state power in the Mozambican “civil” war’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99: 884–92. Mandela, N., 1994. Long Walk to Freedom, Boston, MA: Little Brown. Menjivar, C., and N. Rodriguez (eds), 2005. When States Kill: Latin America, the US, and Technologies of Terror. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nayak, A., 2003. ‘“Through children’s eyes”: Childhood, place and the fear of crime’. Geoforum 34: 303–15. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996a. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge. —— 1996b. ‘An anti-geopolitical eye: Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992–93’. Gender, Place and Culture 3: 171–85. —— and J. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’, Political Geography 11: 190–204. —— and S. Dalby, 1998. ‘Introduction’. In G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics. London; Routledge, pp. 1–15. O’Loughlin, J., 2005. ‘The war on terrorism, academic publication norms, and replication’. Professional Geographer 57: 588–91. Oslender, U., 2007. ‘Spaces of terror and fear on Colombia’s Pacific coast: The armed conflict and forced displacement among black communities’. In D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. New York: Routledge, pp. 111–32. —— 2008a. ‘Colombia: Old and new patterns of violence, accumulation and dispossession’. in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2009: Violence Today: Actually Existing Barbarisms. London: Merlin, pp. 181–98. —— 2008b. ‘Another history of violence: The production of “geographies of terror” in Colombia’s Pacific coast region’. Latin American Perspectives 35: 77–102. Pain, R., 2000. ‘Place, social relations and the fear of crime: A review’. Progress in Human Geography 24: 365–88. —— and S. Smith (eds), 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate. Richardson, L., 2006. What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Terrorist Threat. London: John Murray. Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. —— 1988. ‘Identity, negation and violence’. New Left Review 171: 46–60. Scurr, R., 2006. Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. London: Metropolitan Books. Shapiro, M., 2009. Cinematic Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Sharp, J., 1993. ‘Publishing American identity: Popular geopolitics, myth and the Reader’s Digest’. Political Geography 12: 491–503. —— 2000. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity 1922–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 381

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Shirlow, P., and R. Pain, 2003. ‘The geographies and politics of fear’. Capital and Class 80: 15–26. Sloterdijk, P., 2009. Terror from the Air. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Smith, N., 2002. ‘Scales of terror and the resort to geography: September 11, October 7’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19: 631–7. Svendsen, L., 2008. A Philosophy of Fear, trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion Books. Talbott, S., and N. Chanda (eds), 2001. The Age of Terror: America and the World after September 11, New York: Basic Books. Taussig, M., 1984. ‘Culture of terror – space of death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the explanation of torture’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 467–97. Thorup, M., 2010. An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State. New York: Routledge. Tuan, Y.-F., 1979. Landscapes of Fear. Oxford: Blackwell. Uribe, M.V., 2004. ‘Dismembering and expelling: Semantics of political terror in Colombia’. Public Culture 16(1): 79–95. Valentine, G., 1989. ‘The geography of women’s fear’. Area 21: 385–90. —— and S. Holloway, 2001. ‘On-line dangers? Geographies of parents’ fears for children’s safety in cyberspace’. Professional Geographer 53: 71–83. Wacquant, L., 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity. Watts, M., 2007. ‘Revolutionary Islam: A geography of modern terror’. In D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. New York: Routledge, pp. 175–203.

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PART III AGENTS Introduction: Human Agency in Geopolitics Merje Kuus

Human agency or capacity to act occupies an ambiguous position in geopolitical analysis. On the one hand, mainstream accounts of international politics pay keen attention to statesmen and diplomats – the Churchills, Kissingers and Clintons of modern times – and can be genuinely illuminating of the contingency and messiness of power relations. One the other hand, such framing of geopolitics as a theatre of inter-state competition tacitly discounts the diversity of human interests and identities. Even today, explicitly ‘geopolitical’ accounts deal in the ‘objective’ material interests of states or their alliances. Paradoxically, human beings and their political institutions matter a great deal, but only a few human beings and few kinds of institutions – mostly those associated with the sovereign state. The rest are to be considered as context but not as the principal focus of analysis. Critical geopolitics seeks to move beyond this statist framing of power and spatiality in an effort to produce more nuanced analyses of the daily practices and performances of global politics. That effort is an integral part of a broader ‘practice’ turn – a closer consideration of the informal and the socio-cultural alongside the formal and the politico-institutional – in international relations, sociology and related fields. Studies of both individual and collective actors in, and agents of, geopolitics have mushroomed over the last 20 years. This greater attention to actors in addition to actions does not contradict the non-instrumentalist conceptualization of power in critical geopolitics – conceptualization in which actors and identities do not exist prior to practice but come into being through political practice. The effort in much of the critical work is to untangle the practices and discourses through which agency is constituted. It is to investigate the role of individual and collective actors in producing, resisting and transforming the practices that supposedly happen over their heads, and to thereby open up our analysis of what constitutes geopolitics and how it matters in everyday life. Through such accounts, critical geopolitics has consistently challenged the view that these are principally statesmen and state officials, or political and cultural elites more generally, who

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics write and perform geopolitics. The broader point is not simply to add actors to the existing catalogue – women’s movements or artists alongside foreign ministers, for example – but to enhance our understanding of the inherent diversity of geopolitical practice. This Companion builds on this body of scholarship to illuminate the role of a wide range of institutions and social groups in the practice of geopolitics. The contributors start from the position that the territorial state is not the only or even the principal agent of geopolitics, but they do not end there. Their objective, rather, is to examine how specifically we could analyse political agency beyond the state and what progressive possibilities this would open up. To do so, the chapters review the work that exists already and push the field to think more carefully about political subjects that have hitherto received little attention. The organization of the section reflects this departure from the conventional accounts that start with the state, gradually move outward from that analytical centre, and end with a motley crew of ‘other’ actors. The effort here is not to frame any group of actors as self-evidently ‘first among equals’. The section rather seeks to illuminate the diverse bodies of work in geography and cognate disciplines and to bring them into conversation with each other. Although the contributions are arranged to start with formal institutions and political groups, then move through professional and otherwise semi-organized groups to even less formalized alliances and solidarities, the section presents no implied hierarchy of importance. The intellectual project here is to stimulate further thinking on political agency in geopolitical analysis. The section starts with three chapters on institutions and organized groups outside formal state structures. Alex Jeffrey (‘Non-Governmental Organisations’) reviews the burgeoning work on non-governmental organizations to argue that ‘state-like activities’ are increasingly performed by agencies at a reach from formal government, be it development agencies, human rights groups or a wide range of other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The task, Jeffrey argues, is to examine the growing power of these NGOs without either valorizing them or conflating formal NGOs with an idealized civil society as the set of institutions that operate ‘between’ the family and the state’. Veit Bachmann (‘International Organizations’) focuses on another set of non-state institutions – international organizations (IOs). He points out that there are an astonishing 35,000 active IOs today and another 29,000 inactive or ‘dormant’ ones, and yet even critical geopolitics has paid little systematic attention to them. This is in part because of the methodological difficulties of studying these opaque quasi-diplomatic institutions. The task ahead is conceptual as well as methodological: to study IOs as geopolitical actors and to do so by making use of broadly ethnographic institutional analysis. Bachmann shows how a sustained consideration of more actors does not simply add another variable to existing analytical frameworks but also changes these very frameworks conceptually and methodologically. Chris Gibson (‘Indigenous Geopolitics’) examines actors traditionally not considered geopolitical players – indigenous groups. He explicitly resists any attempts to single out some properly indigenous politics in terms of its locations, goals or methods. Indigenous politics, Gibson notes, is ‘a tangle of territorial, cultural, environmental and representational 384

Part III: Agents claims, challenges, and counter-discourses’ and research is necessarily situated in that same tangle. Studying indigenous groups is therefore in part an effort to ‘decolonize the discipline [of geography] from within’. The subsequent four chapters turn to a set of professional and cultural groups – journalists, artists, evangelicals and intellectuals of statecraft – that have received varying degrees of attention in critical geopolitics. Thus, Alasdair Pinkerton (‘Journalists’) notes that journalistic accounts are powerful geopolitical scripts because it is through such accounts that most people receive information on world affairs: journalists go to hot-spots, they attend summit meetings and they represent world events to us. Their specific role in telling the stories of international politics has indeed lead to considerable debate among journalists themselves. Pinkerton fleshes out the dynamic nexus between journalists and policy-makers, underscoring the role of journalists in both bolstering and challenging mainstream geopolitical discourses. Alan Ingram (‘Artists’) takes stock of an emerging body of work on contemporary artistic practice to investigate how critical geopolitics and contemporary art might further inform each other and how such engagements might contribute to more progressive forms of geopolitics. As examples, Ingram considers in particular artistic responses to the ‘war on terror’ and the geopolitical scripts that legitimize it. Jason Dittmer (‘Evangelicals’) turns to evangelical Protestants as a group with distinct geopolitical visions and strategies. He notes that the interest in evangelicals is a part of a broader engagement with religion in human geography, but the group merits specific attention because of their emphasis on missionary work around the world. Evangelicals operate with and popularize particular geopolitical scripts, which have had substantial influence on contemporary geopolitics. Dittmer argues that sustained study of evangelicals would widen the scope of the work on religious experience in its many forms and political implications. Mathew Coleman (‘Intellectuals of Statecraft’) discusses the group that would have started discussions of geopolitics and agency even 10 years ago. Given the large amount of critical geopolitical writing on these professionals, Coleman uses the chapter to take a critical look at what has been achieved. His argument is far from celebratory: Coleman indeed posits that critical geopolitics has been too focused on foreign policy and should approach state-security practices more broadly. This is an important reminder that criticism must always include self-criticism. The final two chapters share a strong anti-essentialist argument. Both start with problematizing the terms themselves. Jennifer Fluri (‘Women’) shows that a rigorous consideration of ‘women’ in geopolitical practices requires that we address the ways in which women and are constituted in relation to socioeconomic categories. A key task in such an effort is to avoid ‘reductions of gendered complexities into a performative construction of the category of “women”’. Kye Askins (‘Activists’) likewise stresses the need to avoid easy categorizations of the political and the non-political and to think carefully about the categories produced and reified in scholarly analysis. In particular, Askins calls for closer consideration of the everyday and sometimes unnoticed agency of activists alongside more ‘traditional’ social movements. A critical geopolitics of activism must be alert to 385

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the necessarily ambiguous and seemingly mundane ways of becoming an activist or being one. All of the chapters stress the complex processual nature of subject-making and all problematize the commonsense distinctions between the international and the domestic, political and non-political, public and private. To study agents and their practices here is not to look for autonomous agents with interests or identities formed independently from their social context. Rather, the effort is to carefully unpack the entanglements of agency and structure, doers and deeds in geopolitical analyses and to thereby illuminate the contingency, instability and importance of political agency.

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Non-Governmental Organisations Alex Jeffrey

Introduction Analysing the incorporation of the attitudes, voices and practices of non-state actors into the study of critical geopolitics requires consideration of a series of interlinked political and intellectual trends. The project of critical geopolitics has been concerned with identifying the spatial assumptions and assertions that have infused the practice and enunciation of foreign policy, an approach that emerged in a particular political and intellectual context. The closing years of the Cold War saw a remilitarisation of US foreign policy that was presented by US policy elites as a response to the threat of Soviet expansionism and the prospect of Communist regimes being established in Central America (see Ó Tuathail 1986). By drawing on the conceptual vocabulary of Michel Foucault, this body of work began to explore geopolitics as discourse, a strategy that directs attention to the entanglement of knowledge and power in articulation of geopolitical ideas (see Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992). It is this political and intellectual basis that has set the context for much of the scholarship in critical geopolitics we have seen in the intervening years, focusing in particular on the iterations of formal political actors or their intellectual sponsors. In particular scholars have drawn on poststructural theoretical devices to deconstruct these texts, images and practices in order to reveal underlying spatial and political assumptions (Campbell 1998a; 1998b; Ó Tuathail 1996). While much of this work has focused on the domain of formal politics there has been a growing trend within scholarship concerning critical geopolitics to widen the range of actors implicated in the production of geopolitical imaginations (see Hyndman 2003; Kuus 2009; Slater and Bell 2002). We can see two interlinked motivations lying behind this work. The first is a broad move within political geography, international relations and development studies to question the centrality of the state to the operation of government (see in particular Dalby 1999). The emergence of neoliberal forms of governance in the post-Cold War world has seen scholars focus on the actions of sub-state agencies such as social movements or small-scale non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and those of transnational agencies such the United Nations or European Union (Jeffrey 2008; Kuus 2007; Mercer 2003; Mohan 2002; Sidaway 2001). What we can see from this

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics work is a broad dissatisfaction with an assumption that the state constitutes the primary locus of political power and exploring instead how state-like activities are increasingly performed by agencies at a reach from formal governing agencies. Second, the diversification of agencies within the study of critical geopolitics reflects the shift away from the study of geopolitics exclusively through discourse analysis to include the study of the circulation of geopolitical ideas in everyday life (see Pain and Smith, 2008). Feminist concerns of subjectivity, embodiment and human agency have influenced a move towards thinking about the gendered nature of both geopolitical imaginations and the practice of writing critical geopolitics (Hyndman 2004). This work has prompted an engagement with anthropological methodologies of ethnography, including participant observation and long-term residential fieldwork (see e.g. Secor 2001). Consequently scholars in critical geopolitics have begun to investigate the micro-situations through which geopolitical ideas are received, interpreted, reworked and re-communicated. Necessarily this approach has often looked beyond formal state agencies to investigate the individuals and agencies that are implicated in the production of geopolitical imaginaries. This chapter explores these two manoeuvres through an examination of the incorporation of NGOs into critical geopolitics scholarship. It does so across three sections. In the first the chapter considers the political context through which NGOs have risen to prominence within developmental, post-conflict and humanitarian interventions. This historical context performs an important function: it illuminates the fact that the prominent placement of NGOs within these political manoeuvres is a consequence of neoliberal forms of governance that have valued these institutions as autonomous agencies that reflect the will of the people. This discourse of non-governmental action often conflates formal NGOs with an idealised ‘civil society’ as that body of institutions operating ‘between’ the family and the state. The second section of the chapter examines how scholars within political geography and critical development studies have sought to understand the geopolitical potential of NGOs. Two specific intellectual pathways are staked out: one where scholars have seen NGOs as an extension of existing neoliberal forms of government and a second where NGOs are understood as offering alternatives to existing geopolitical power relations. The conclusion assesses the extent to which this work challenges existing scholarship within critical geopolitics. Simon Dalby has recently questioned the diversification of critical geopolitics from its roots in the study of the militaristic nature of state foreign policies (2010). Certainly the scholarship examining NGO agency and practice shifts attention away from some of the classical themes of empire and military force, but it simultaneously opens vistas through which attempts to mobilise forms of justice and cooperation are being practiced within contemporary international relations.

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The rise of non-governmental organisations Over the course of the last 30 years NGOs have become key institutions within the delivery of developmental, humanitarian and social welfare programmes across the world (see Bebbington, Hickey and Mitlin 2008). Estimates vary, but in a review Anheier, Glasius and Kaldor suggest there are over 40,000 international NGOs in existence, while individual states hosted many more (2001). For example, in 2010 India Express estimated there were over 3.3 million NGOs registered in India, equating to one for every 400 members of the population (India Express 2010). One of the key challenges to establishing the number of NGOs is the absence of any consensus on the nature or character of such organisations. Indeed, Vakil explores in detail what she terms the ‘classification problem’, illustrating in the process the wide range of governmental, grassroots and not-for-profit organisations that have been subsumed under the moniker ‘NGO’ (1997). As suggested above one of the key points of distinction are the scale at which NGOs are working, from community and national organisations on the one hand (sometimes imperfectly referred to as ‘indigenous organisations’) and international NGOs (or INGOs) on the other (see Bratton 1989). Scholars such as Desai and Mercer have suggested a set of criteria to define an NGO: including legal registration, social-welfare orientation, non-profit making and non-political (in the sense of non-party political) objectives (Desai 2002; Mercer 2002). In contrast, Elliott seeks to classify NGOs by their ‘orientation’, either towards ‘welfare’ (or service delivery), ‘developmental’ (working towards improving a community’s capacity to provide for its own basic needs) or ‘empowerment’ (enabling communities to participate in political processes) (1987). Understanding the current significance of NGOs as political agents requires an engagement with their emergence in discourses of development and security over the latter part of the twentieth century. While the dominant paradigm of development in the postwar period was one of modernisation through state-based interventions, the 1970s and 1980s saw new approaches that sought to channel aid and development funding through non-state agencies such as NGOs. For Mark Duffield, this process is more than an institutional switch: it reflects a changing approach to security amongst powerful states in the post-Cold War period (2001). Throughout the 1980s, policy-makers questioned whether the states of the developing world commanded the authority to effectively govern their territory and, if they could, whether those in control of state functions were concerned with addressing social inequalities within their state borders (Leftwich 1995; Slater and Bell 2002). International institutions became critical of what were perceived as ‘profligate’ or ‘inefficient’ states, in particular as a result of the growing international debt crisis of the 1970s (Corbridge 1986). The World Bank, headed by former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, shifted towards a more neoliberal ideology, rejecting Keynesian approaches of fiscal management and instead advocating development guided by Adam Smith’s notion of the ‘free hand of the market’. This approach is typified by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, operating in the neoliberal partnership of the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Corbridge 1999). 389

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics As low-income countries suffered crippling debts in the wake of oil price rises in the late 1970s, ‘solutions’ were offered in the form of SAPs that focused on the reduction in the state’s role in shaping economic affairs. The SAPs encouraged countries to abandon protectionism of infant industries and instead establish primary commodity exports, particularly agricultural goods, as the centrepiece of economic strategy (Pender 2001: 399). As Mkandawire (1998: 1) points out in reference to Africa, ‘the state was vilified for its weaknesses, its over-extension, [and] its interference with the smooth functioning of the markets’. The SAP model therefore fostered the notion of aid ‘conditionality’, where financial assistance was linked to the adoption of a particular set of ‘weak-state’ policies recommended by the World Bank. Scholars have traced a shift in the development model from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the economic interventions of SAP towards more political objectives of institutional engineering (Pender 2001). This new agenda, entitled ‘good governance’, was first outlined in the World Bank’s report Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (1989). The attention of these global development institutions shifted to the operation of power within the state, and in particular on aspects of ‘accountability’ and ‘participation’. While seemingly vague, ‘good governance’ was variously defined to include some or all of the following aspirations: an efficient public service; an independent juridical system and legal framework to enforce contracts; the accountable administration of public funds; an independent public auditor, responsible to a representative legislature; respect for the law and human rights at all levels of government; a pluralist institutional structure; and a free press (Leftwich 1995: 427). Subsequently, Jenkins suggested ‘good governance’ could be operationalised by restructuring state bureaucracies, reforming legal systems, supporting democratic decentralisation and creating accountability-enhancing civil society (Jenkins 2002: 485). The shift towards a ‘governance’ agenda re-orientated the geopolitics of development. Most crucially, the broader political remit of this new development discourse has clear implications for state sovereignty as this change of emphasis indicates disillusionment amongst policy-makers with the developmental potential of the state (Howell 2000). In place of a range of macro-economic issues, the ‘good governance’ initiative brought a wide range of public and private functions into the gaze of organisations such as the World Bank and IMF (Kiely 1998; Woods 2000). While critics have suggested that this reflects a politicisation of aid, the World Bank viewed the new agenda as ‘correcting sub-optimally designed institutions which were ruining otherwise sound policy initiatives’ (Jenkins 2002: 487). Thus, the World Bank cast this ‘corrective’ approach as merely managerial as opposed to containing any political substance. Such managerialist rhetoric suggested the problem lay with how the policies were implemented rather than the political underpinnings of the policies themselves, justifying the continued use of structural adjustment policies despite statistics suggesting their failure at solving problems of social welfare. In addition, the inclusion of the adjective ‘good’ has enabled the raising of evaluative questions about ‘proper’ procedures, issues of transparency and the quality and process of decision-making (Doornbos 2001: 101). There are clear issues 390

Non-Governmental Organisations of power in the ability to label what governance is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, dependent as it is on seemingly subjective criteria established by the same global organisations that formulate interventions. Consequently, ‘good governance’ initiatives have been criticised for politicising aid conditionality while eroding the sovereignty of individual low-income states (Kiely 1998). In addition, Mercer suggests that ‘good governance’ is merely a ‘performance’ which, while involving a range of new actors, masks a continued commitment to neoliberal policies (2003: 743). The primary institutional change heralded by the critique of structural adjustment and the associated discourse of ‘good governance’ was the emergence of NGOs as the primary partners in development initiatives. Jennifer Hyndman (2003: 261) gives the example of Canadian government assistance to Sri Lanka which, since 1991, has exclusively directed its aid programmes through NGOs with the aim of addressing the underlying political, social and economic causes of conflict. ‘Partnership’ has become a key discourse of developmental interventions as nonstate actors were enrolled in projects designed and funded by both state and nonstate development organisations. Salamon describes the effects of this policy shift as an ‘association revolution’, as neoliberal development strategies facilitated the emergence of NGOs operating outside either the state or the market (1994). Fisher suggested that NGOs were perceived by development organisations as ‘magic bullets’, for such was the faith that they would ‘mysteriously find their target’ (1998: 442). This conception of NGOs as a panacea is echoed by Stiles, who notes that NGOs offered donors ‘a relatively safe and convenient means of avoiding both public and private sector dangers’ (2002: 836). Hulme and Edwards outline two ways in which NGOs were vital to what they call the ‘new policy agenda’ of neoliberalism coupled with discourses of ‘good governance’. Firstly, while the market is perceived as the most effective route to economic growth and service provision, NGOs are considered vital for accessing those groups that the market fails (Hulme and Edwards 1997: 5). Secondly, NGOs are seen by intervening agencies as vehicles for democratisation and the establishment of a sound ‘civil society’ (Jeffrey 2007a). In this way, dominant development discourses have perceived NGOs as a realm of ‘autonomous’ organisations that can improve participation in the process of governing while also articulating the demands of the citizenry. This historical narrative illustrates the ways in which changing development agendas have shaped the practice of international development. In doing so, NGOs have become key agents in the design and execution of foreign policy both in terms of international development and, more recently, global security (Duffield 2007). For example Merje Kuus has explored the role of international and national NGOs in popularising NATO within and beyond member states. Crucially, rather than talking about ‘local’ or ‘global’, ‘state’ or ‘non-state’ organisations Kuus identifies a ‘transnational archipelago’ of NGOs that vary in scale and influence where ‘contacts, ideas and money flow freely’ (2009: 554). This account illuminates the spatial implications of these processes, where the established scalar hierarchies or organisational boundaries are challenged by a new institutional politics. In order to understand these spatialities scholars have

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics worked across critical development studies and political geography to chart what could be termed a ‘geopolitics of NGOs’.

The geopolitics of NGOs The politics of NGOs has long been a topic for debate by critical development scholars. Often grouped under the heading ‘post-development’, this work has sought to challenge the presentation of development knowledge as a technical fix and explore instead the forms of intervention and dependency fostered under the banner of ‘development’ (Corbridge 1998; Escobar 1995; Pieterse 2000). At the forefront of this field has been the work of Arturo Escobar. Just as Ó Tuathail and Agnew sought to understand geopolitics-as-discourse (1992), so Escobar has similarly drawn on the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault to argue that development should be understood discursively. This optic allows the critical scholar to explore the asymmetry in the production of development knowledge, where governmental and non-governmental institutions based in wealthy states sought to set the terms of what constituted legitimate development goals, and in doing so marginalising the expertise of those living in ‘developing’ countries (Escobar 1995; see also Agnew 2007). Perhaps more importantly, Escobar argues that underdevelopment did not pre-exist the postwar development project: it was development itself that produced the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’. Therefore ‘development’, Escobar argues, is a form of knowledge that produces ‘permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible’ (1995: 5). Here we can see a direct parallel with the language of critical geopolitics, which has sought to explore how geopolitical discourse has ‘framed’ political debate ‘in such a way as to make certain policies appear reasonable and feasible while marginalizing other policy options as unreasonable or unfeasible’ (Kuus 2007: 10). Studies under the banners of post-development and critical geopolitics have orientated attention to the importance of deconstructing the symbolism that legitimises political interventions (see Sidaway 2001). Both approaches are seeking to analyse the entanglement of power/knowledge in the enactment of global politics. In practical terms this has led to a range of studies trying to understand the role of non-state agents within the production and circulation of geopolitical and development knowledge. Rather than simply viewing NGOs as the product of a post-Cold War policy environment, scholars have drawn inspiration from critical geopolitics and post-development studies to examine the production of this sphere of institutional activity purportedly separate from the state. In this way the focus of geopolitical knowledge production is pluralised, away from formal political agents working in the interests of the state (the ‘intellectuals of statecraft’) to include a diverse array of institutions that are implicated in the practice of intervention in ‘developing’ states. We can discern two broad approaches to this incorporation of non-state actors. In the first, the activities of NGOs are considered as an ‘extension’ 392

Non-Governmental Organisations of existing geopolitical arrangements, where their ‘non-state’ status has been questioned through processes of funding, regulation and professionalisation. In the second, scholars have sought to examine how NGOs and social movements are attempting to convey explicitly ‘anti-geopolitical’ perspectives that unsettle the existing geopolitical order and seek to advocate normative arguments for potential alternatives. This dualism of both ‘extension’ and ‘anti-geopolitics’ should encourage reflection on the plural ways in which non-state agencies have been considered within scholarship on geopolitics. I will consider both in turn.

Extension of governmental power One of the most influential accounts of the politics of development comes from the work of James Ferguson, in particular his influential text The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (1990). His study examined the institutional character of development programmes in Lesotho, arguing that the focus of such programmes on poverty alleviation masked their governmental effects. Drawing again on the ideas of Foucault, he explains: ‘Development’ institutions generate their own forms of discourse, and this discourse simultaneously constructs Lesotho as a particular kind of object knowledge, and creates a structure of knowledge around that object. Interventions are then organised on the basis of this structure of knowledge, which, while ‘failing’ on their own terms nonetheless have regular effects, which include the expansion and entrenchment of state power. (Ferguson 1990: xv) Hence in Ferguson’s terms, partner organisations such as NGOs form ‘cogs’ in a ‘development machine’, expanding the reach of the state through specific anti-poverty programmes. Such an account challenges a neoliberal narrative of development that has celebrated the retreat of the state and explores instead new forms of (often transnational) governmentality that are established through development programmes (see also Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Within this account NGOs are not a separate category to ‘states’ but are rather examples of the forms of discourse and practice required to achieve state sovereignty (see Radcliffe 2001). The governmental function of NGOs is further explored by Jeffrey in a study of international intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina both during and after the 1992–95 conflict (2007b). This research identifies the power of geopolitical imaginaries of Bosnia as a site of danger and uncertainty in shaping the nature of the subsequent intervention in the violence (see also Campbell 1998; Ó Tuathail 2002). Crucially, framing the violence as a ‘humanitarian disaster’ ensured that NGOs (as key humanitarian agents) performed a central role in the subsequent intervention. Where agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) considered NGOs crucial partners in the distribution of humanitarian aid during the conflict, in the post-conflict period these institutions 393

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics were recast as central to – and illustrative of – Bosnia’s good governance and democratisation. The study explores how funding and regulatory frameworks shaped the activity of NGOs in Bosnia, in particular charting how certain traits and competences are valued within the donor funding system. Drawing on the vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu (1984; 1986), Jeffrey conceptualises these traits as different forms of cultural and social ‘capital’ that the NGOs accumulate and deploy in order to secure funding, resources or political respect. The evidence suggested the emergence of professionalized NGOs, where financial survival is predicated on defending institutional boundaries and replicating donor priorities. These practices have had profound political implications for the position of NGOs. Rather than acting as spaces of alternative political action or communal participation, these organizations have forged close links either to international organizations or to nationalist political parties in attempts to secure funding and legitimacy. (Jeffrey 2007b: 269) This conclusion speaks to the concerns of scholars of both post-development theory and critical geopolitics. In development terms this work illustrates the ways in which non-state agencies are bound in to the priorities of powerful intervening agencies. Rather than reflecting autonomous associative life, as some of the more optimistic policy statements would suggest, NGOs struggled to conform to donor agendas and fulfil the requirements of state registration processes (see Bolton and Jeffrey 2008). Of course, there was space to challenge and subvert mainstream interventions, but this agency was constrained through the need to survive financially. In geopolitical terms, this work suggests a paradox: that the presence of a large number of professionalised NGOs is entrenching forms of state power into communities through systems of funding and regulation. Just as NGOs are considered outside the formal structures of the state, a more nuanced understanding of the practice of sovereignty suggests that these institutions may normalise forms of internationally sponsored statehood. The relationship between states and NGOs is examined by Rebecca Dolhinow in the context of organisations working on colonias, communities comprising largely of Mexican immigrants in southern New Mexico (2005). Methodologically this work uses ethnographic approaches to explore the impacts of NGO interventions in these communities that are materially poor and are struggling to receive basic services. This approach allows Dolhinow to evoke the complex politics that surrounds NGO activity that does not neatly equate with a realm of autonomous activity detached from the state. Theoretically the author uses the work of Foucault (in particular his concept of governmentality) and Gramsci (on hegemony) to explore the plural ways in which power relationships are constructed and reproduced through NGO activity. While Dolhinow stresses that there are various different types of NGOs (and stresses that some are performing an extremely important function in attending to the needs of the residents of colonias), the empirical material gathered

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Non-Governmental Organisations for this research was suggestive of a governmental function performed by the NGOs active in these communities: As a mediator between state-based or state-financed donors and grassroots activists, NGOs in the colonias often present neoliberal solutions, such as self-help, to address the colonias’ resource deprivation. In this way, NGOs can obscure and limit the discussion of alternative discourses of development and social change, such as those that acknowledge the economic, political, and social marginalization of Mexican immigrants and make demands on the state to improve their situation. (Dolhinhow 2005: 559). Unlike Jeffrey’s account, which focused on funding and regulation (2007b), Dolhinhow’s work explores the governmental role of professionalisation of NGO work. This approach centres particularly on the changing nature of NGO activity as they internalise a particular form of competitive bureaucratic behaviour in order to secure donor funding. Dolhinhow ties this in to a form of neoliberal governmentality: The accountability, professionalism, and development of expertise that currently occupy much of the time and energy of NGOs (including those discussed here) are part and parcel of the neoliberal project. These ‘technical’ concerns of governmentality can be just as important as ideology. (Dolhinow 2005: 568) This analysis follows others in development studies (Howell 2000; Hulme and Edwards 1997) and geography (Mawdlsey et al. 2002) in identifying the ways in which NGO behaviour may normalise and embed neoliberal forms of government. Crucially Dolhinow suggests this function is obscured behind formal development discourses of humanitarian intervention and self-help. This work suggests looking beyond this formal role to illuminate the other functions that NGOs perform in the colonias: They tie colonia residents to the neoliberal state through their position in civil society, often propagate dominant neoliberal discourses of leadership and activism, and at times reinforce dominant and marginalizing forms of social governance. (Dolhinow 2005: 575) The accounts set out in the work of Jeffrey and Dolhinow are suggestive of the incorporation of NGOs into wider geopolitical practices through processes of funding, regulation and professionalisation. The inclusion of NGOs into wider critical geopolitical scholarship has therefore extended the range of institutions under scholarly investigation and the forms of methodology used to assess their role. But understanding the role of NGOs in the production and circulation of geopolitical imaginaries extends beyond these accounts. Specifically scholars have sought to present the actions of NGOs as offering alternative geopolitical 395

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics imaginaries that challenge and rework hegemonic visions of geopolitics. Whether challenging states, neoliberalism, private corporations or imperial subjection, scholars have positioned NGOs as providing alternative geopolitics, structured around normative principals of rights, equality and fairness. It is to this work the chapter now turns.

Alternatives In Geopolitics and Empire Gerry Kearns suggested that NGOs have the potential to shape new ‘egalitarian networks’ where issues relating to development may circulate from residents in poor parts of the world to concerned parties in richer ones (2009: 270, drawing on McFarlane 2006). His claim is part of a normative commitment to advancing what he terms a ‘progressive geopolitics’ that looks beyond a preoccupation with force and states and instead foregrounds the possibility for non-state agencies (such as NGOs, multilateral organisations and transnational bodies) to foster cooperation and interdependency. Kearns argument challenges critical geopolitical analysis that focuses exclusively on the practice of imperialism and imperialists. He argues that critical scholars must look to alternatives, to ‘the sorts of international relations that sustain a realistic hope that there is more to human relations than the tragedy of Empire’ (Kearns 2009: 295). Kearns’ rallying cry reflects a wider body of work within critical geopolitics that presents NGOs as operating outside, beyond or against dominant geopolitical discourses. In this sense NGOs are perceived less as professionalised institutions striving to conform to hegemonic concerns of development or humanitarianism and are instead spaces of critique and action that actively seek social and political transformation. Paul Routledge has examined the role of NGOs in resisting hegemonic geopolitical imaginaries of progress, security and the state. He suggests the name ‘anti-geopolitics’ to reflect political strategies and representations that challenge dominant understandings of the relationship between space and power, structured around the state and capital. The term echoes dissident Hungarian scholar George Konrad’s concept of ‘anti-politics’, a radical political philosophy that sought to challenge the militaristic politics that characterised the Cold War (2006). Similarly Routledge’s conception of anti-geopolitics is structured around radical alternatives to mainstream geopolitical assumptions: Anti-geopolitics represents an assertion of permanent independence from the state whomever is in power, and articulates two interrelated forms of counter-hegemonic struggle. First, it challenges the material (economic and military) geopolitical power of states and global institutions; and second, it challenges the representations imposed by political and economic elites upon the world and its different peoples, that are deployed to serve their geopolitical interests. (Routledge 2003a: 236–7)

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Non-Governmental Organisations Within Routledge’s work anti-geopolitical movements involve an array of institutions loosely organised into wider political struggles. For example, in the case of activism against the Narmada River valley project in India, Routledge has examined the network of NGOs and activists who sought to resist the construction of over 3000 dams in the Narmada river valley flowing through and between the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. This programme of construction has involved the forced movement of large numbers of residents in the estimated 248 towns and villages that were to be submerged in the construction process (Routledge 2003a: 242; Sangvai 2000). Resistance to the construction has been coordinated by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a network of institutions and individuals that have sought to resist the construction process and limit environmental and social harm as construction has taken place. The NBA’s work qualifies as ‘anti-geopolitics’ on account of its resistance to discourses of development and progress mobilised by the Indian state and World Bank. Routledge identifies this resistance as both material and discursive, mirroring his typology of anti-geopolitical struggle outlined above (2003a; 2003b). In material terms, activists have challenged the optimistic projects of the Narmada dam project leaders and have instead advocated sustainable irrigation alternatives to mass reservoirs. Alongside these material concerns, activists have challenged the conceptualisation of progress encoded within Indian government policy. Following Escobar’s identification of international development as a discursive enterprise (1995), Routledge charts the forms of discursive resistance attempted by the NBA. Discursive resistance, like its material counterpart, acts as a political disruption in the unanimity implied by state discourses regarding development. In India, development is coded within a moral idiom; being equated with a prosperous, civilised, advanced society. However, through various discourses, the NBA critiques state and corporate sponsored development, and articulates alternative forms of development. (Routledge 2003b: 260) The conception of anti-geopolitics, as set out by Routledge, positions (some) NGOs outside the geopolitical calculations of hegemonic actors, such as state governments and intergovernmental organisations. Rather than viewing NGOs as conduits of state power, as illustrated in the work of Jeffrey (2007b) and Dolhinow (2005), this approach views these agencies operating to unsettle dominant spatialisations of power. But this articulation of NGO agency has been questioned by some who feel it underplays opportunities for alternatives. Sara Koopman has critiqued the term ‘anti-geopolitics’, since she argues that it focuses on resistance and opposition rather than the more productive concept of building an alternative to hegemonic geopolitics (2008; 2010; 2011). Koopman explains: Many grassroots groups are not only pushing back against hegemonic policies of (in)security (anti-geopolitics), but also nurturing other types of non-violent security in connection with what they do want – what I have 397

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics been calling alter-geopolitics. Grassroots groups are not waiting for (or trusting) the state, but coming together on their own, non-violently, for safety. (Koopman 2011: 277) There is much that Koopman’s concept of alter-geopolitics shares with Routledge’s notion of anti-geopolitics. They both articulate a form of activism that operates outside conventional academic sites and forms of practice. For example, both authors are committed activists within the movements they are examining and seek to blur the boundary between the roles of academic and activist through the use of participatory forms of research. This leads Koopman to use a strategy of ‘collaborative theorizing’ to draw ‘research participants’ into the process of building theory and drawing conclusions (2008). This approach suggests that the practice of thinking critically about contemporary geopolitics requires styles of research, writing and acting that circumvent established scholarly practices, which themselves could be seen as reproducing established hierarchies of power. Both these perspectives have also been shaped by the perspective of feminist geopolitics that has sought to situate geopolitical struggles in particular spaces and bodies. This approach seeks to reverse a tendency within studies of critical geopolitics to present geopolitical knowledge as disembodied texts that can betray their secrets to the skilled critical analyst (see Dowler and Sharp 2001). The research practices of both Routledge and Koopman have involved long-term fieldwork that seeks to explore the grounded and contested ways in which ideas about space and power are produced and negotiated. As a consequence of these activist feminist traits, these approaches seem to be attending to Megoran’s criticism of the relative absence of normativity within critical geopolitics, where moral judgements ‘tend to be almost be throw-way remarks, rhetorical gestures that are neither elaborated nor critically grounded in any form of justification or explication’ (Megoran 2008: 474). Instead, work on (and in) NGOs within anti- and alter-geopolitics seems driven by a strong normative concern, and this shapes the design, methods and theoretical frameworks of these studies.

Conclusion John Agnew advises caution when considering the production of knowledge concerning world politics (2007). Counselling against adopting a simple positivist universalism or a celebratory cultural relativism, his work has illuminated the plural ways in which geography is incorporated into knowledge production and circulation. Over the course of this chapter I have charted the ambiguous position of NGOs within such processes. On the one hand, this has provided an illustration of the vestiges of colonial thought in development paradigms, where singular narratives of human progress are conceptualised through the iterations of Western ‘experts’. On the other, the chapter has explored the many voices that exist in the circulation of geopolitical knowledge, as non-governmental organisations have 398

Non-Governmental Organisations used their agency to resist hegemonic performances of power. This narrative illuminates the confluence of theoretical perspectives within critical development studies and critical geopolitics, which have both drawn inspiration from poststructural approaches to challenge dominant discourses of (respectively) global progress or international relations. In order to understand the practices of NGOs scholars have looked to combine traditional methods within critical geopolitics of discourse analysis with qualitative approaches that have emerged in other disciplines, such as anthropology (Megoran 2006), or participatory approaches developed in other areas of human geography (Kindon, Pain and Kesby 2007). The ambiguous position of NGOs outlined in this chapter stems from fundamental distinctions in the definition of what constitutes non-governmental action. In some senses these ambiguities reflect the inadequacy of the signifier ‘NGO’ to meaningfully capture a discernable group of institutions that share significant traits. Instead, we can see the term NGO used to sanitise neoliberal state reforms as somehow democratising, as service provision is presented as moving ‘downwards’ to the communities it serves rather than emerging from a centralised state bureaucracy. Of course, as the evidence in this chapter has demonstrated, this manoeuvre does not appear as democratising in practice, where state, intergovernmental or corporate control over NGO activity is enacted through funding processes, demands for professionalisation or new regulatory structures. In geopolitical terms this work illuminates the ways in which geopolitical discourses of threat shape subjectivities, as neoliberal norms are communicated through NGO aspirations. But this view limits NGOs to professionalised institutions seeking to secure institutional survival, rather than more decentred networks that are working to establish more progressive forms of geopolitical practice. The work of Paul Routledge and Sara Koopman presents a more hopeful politics, where nongovernmental action can challenge and reverse militarised and exclusionary geopolitical discourses. Of course, this work does not engage with questions concerning the governance of NGOs and the networks within which they have embedded, but this absence may be taken as a sign that this was not a factor that significantly shaped the individual agency of NGO practitioners. This work illustrates the significance of the role of micro-spatial practices of protest and accompaniment within the reproduction of geopolitical imaginaries. One final consideration regards a second definitional point: the extent to which this work can be identified as ‘critical geopolitics’. The broadening of interests and approaches conducted within this sub-discipline may be considered a strength. Certainly critical geopolitics workshops and conference sessions always attract a wide diversity of scholars and research topics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. But Simon Dalby offers a note of caution. While he is supportive of research conducted from feminist and activist positions, he wonders whether this diversity of work can still be gathered under the title ‘critical geopolitics’. Instead he argues for a narrower focus on geostrategy, examining what can be termed the classical roots of critical geopolitics:

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Perhaps the time has come to recognise that ‘critical geopolitics’ is simply too loose a catchall category to be much use if it incorporates all this. … Nonetheless the narrower focus on the geostrategic knowledges used to legitimize warfare, and more generally security, remains a task for geographers interested in how geography is used ‘for war’ and how this might be changed. (Dalby 2010: 286) Of course, the study of NGOs does not preclude a focus on questions of security or conflict as the work of Kuus (2009) and Duffield (2001) has illustrated. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the concept of critical geopolitics is acting as more than a disciplinary label, but rather the departure point for a range of disparate scholarly practices that seek to illuminate and challenge existing dominant imaginaries concerning space and power. Where neat thematic consensus may be limited (or even absent), the alternative seems to be a range of grounded studies that are seeking to explore how discourses of security, progress and justice are being reworked through everyday life outside and beyond the state.

References Agnew, J., 2007. ‘Know-where: Geographies of knowledge of world politics’. International Political Sociology 1: 138–48. Anheier, H., M. Glasius and M. Kaldor (eds), 2001. Global Civil Society 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolton, M., and A. Jeffrey, 2008. ‘The politics of NGO registration in international protectorates: The cases of Bosnia and Iraq’. Disasters 32: 586–608. Bebbington, A., S. Hickey and D. Mitlin (eds), 2008. Can NGOs Make a Difference? The Challenge of Development Alternatives. London: Zed Books. Bourdieu, P., 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— 1986. ‘The forms of capital’. In J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenword Press, pp. 241–58. Bratton, M., 1989. ‘The politics of government–NGO relations in Africa’. World Development 17: 569–87. Campbell, D., 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1998. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Corbridge, S., 1986. Capitalist World Development: A Critique of Radical Development Geography. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. —— 1998. ‘Development ethics: Distance, difference, plausibility’. Ethics, Place and the Environment 1: 35–53. —— 1999. ‘Development, post-development and the global political economy’. In P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds), Introducing Human Geographies. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. 400

Non-Governmental Organisations Dalby,  S., 1999. ‘Against “globalization from above”: Critical geopolitics and the World Order Models Project’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17: 181–200. —— 2010. ‘Recontextualising violence, power and nature: The next twenty years of critical geopolitics?’ Political Geography 29: 280–88. Desai, V., 2002. ‘Role of non-governmental organisations’. In V. Desai and R. Potter (eds), The Companion to Development Studies. London: Arnold, pp. 495–9. Dolhinow, R., 2005. ‘Caught in the middle: The state, NGOs, and the limits to grassroots organizing along the US–Mexico border’. Antipode 37: 558–80. Doornbos, M., 2001. ‘“Good governance”: The rise and decline of a policy metaphor’. Journal of Development Studies 37: 93–108. Dowler, L., and J. Sharp, 2001. ‘A Feminist Geopolitics?’ Space and Polity 5: 165–76. Duffield, M., 2001. Global Governance and New Wars. London and New York: Zed Books. —— 2007. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. London: Polity. Elliott, C., 1987. ‘Some aspects of relations between the north and the south in the NGO sector’. World Development 15(Sup. 1): 57–68. Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, J., 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and A. Gupta, 2002. ‘Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality’. American Ethnologist 29: 981–1002. Fisher, J., 1998. Non-Governments: NGOs and the Political Development of the Third World. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Howell, J., 2000. ‘Making civil society from the outside: Challenges for donors’. European Journal for Development Research 12: 3–22. Hulme, D., and M. Edwards, 1997. NGOs, States and Donors Too Close for Comfort? Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hyndman, J., 2003. ‘Aid, conflict and migration: The Canada–Sri Lanka connection’. Canadian Geographer 47: 251–68. —— 2004. ‘Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics’. Political Geography 23: 307–22. India Express, 2010. ‘First official estimate: An NGO for every 400 people in India’. India Express, 7 July. . Jeffrey, A., 2007a. ‘The politics of “democratization”: Lessons from Bosnia and Iraq’. Review of International Political Economy 14: 444–66. —— 2007b. ‘The geopolitical framing of localized struggles: NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Development and Change 38: 251–74. —— 2008. ‘Contesting Europe: The politics of Bosnian integration into European structures’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 428–43. Jenkins, R., 2002. ‘The emergence of the governance agenda: Sovereignty, neoliberal bias and the politics of international development’. In V. Desai and R. Potter (eds), The Companion to Development Studies. London: Arnold, pp. 485–9. 401

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Kearns, G., 2009. Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kiely, R., 1998. ‘Neo liberalism revised? A critical account of World Bank concepts of good governance and market friendly intervention’. Capital and Class 22: 63–8. Kindon, S., R. Pain and M. Kesby (eds), 2007. Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods. London: Routledge. Koopman, S., 2008. ‘Imperialism within: Can the master’s tools bring down empire?’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7: 283–307. —— 2010. ‘Making space for peace: International accompaniment as altergeopolitics’. Antipode 42: 231–5. —— 2011. ‘Alter-geopolitics: Other securities are happening’. Geoforum 42: 274–84. Konrad, G., 2006. ‘Antipolitics: A moral force’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, 2nd edn, pp. 259–62. Kuus, M., 2007. Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. —— 2009. ‘Cosmopolitan militarism? Spaces of NATO expansion’. Environment and Planning A 41: 545–62. Leftwich, A., 1995. ‘Governance, democracy and the development of the Third World’. In S. Corbridge (ed.), Development Studies: A Reader. London: Arnold, pp. 427–38. McFarlane, C., 2006. ‘Crossing borders: Development, learning and the North– South divide’. Third World Quarterly 27: 1413–37. Mawdsley, E., et al., 2002. Knowledge, Power and Development Agendas: NGOs North and South. Oxford: INTRAC. Megoran, N., 2006. ‘For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and reimagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures’. Political Geography 25: 622–40. —— 2008. ‘Militarism, realism, just war, or nonviolence: Critical geopolitics and the problem of normativity’. Geopolitics 13: 473–97. Mercer, C., 2002. ‘NGOs, civil society and democratization: A critical review of the literature’. Progress in Development Studies 2: 5–22. —— 2003. ‘Performing partnership: Civil society and the illusions of good governance in Tanzania’. Political Geography 22: 741–63. Mkandawire, T., 1998. Encouraging Developmental States in Africa. United Nations University Working Paper. . Mohan, G., 2002. ‘The disappointments of civil society: The politics of NGO intervention in northern Ghana’. Political Geography 21: 125–54. Ó Tuathail, G., 1986. ‘The language and the nature of the “new” geopolitics: The case of US–El Salvador relations’. Political Geography Quarterly 5: 73–85. —— 1996. Critical Geopolitics. London: Routledge. —— 2002. ‘Theorizing practical geopolitical reasoning: The case of the United States’ response to the war in Bosnia’. Political Geography 21: 601–28. —— and J. Agnew, 1992. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’. Political Geography 11: 190–204. 402

Non-Governmental Organisations Pain, R., and S.J. Smith, 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pender, J., 2001. ‘From “structural adjustment” to “comprehensive development framework”: Conditionality transformed?’ Third World Quarterly 22: 397–412. Pieterse, J.N., 2000. ‘After post development’. Third World Quarterly 21: 175–91. Radcliffe, S., 2001. ‘Imagining the state as space: Territoriality and the formation of the state in Ecuador’. In T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 122–45. Routledge, P., 2003a. ‘Anti-geopolitics’. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 236–48. —— 2003b. ‘Voices of the dammed: Discursive resistance amidst erasure in the Narmada Valley, India’. Political Geography 22: 242–70. Salamon, L., 1994. ‘The rise of the non-profit sector’. Foreign Affairs 73: 109–22. Sangvai, S., 2000. The River and Life. Mumbai: Earthcare. Secor, A., 2001. ‘Towards a feminist counter-geopolitics: Gender, space and Islamist politics in Istambul’. Space and Polity 5: 191–211. Sidaway, J., 2001. ‘Iraq/Yugoslavia: Banal geopolitics’. Antipode 33: 601–9. Slater, D., and M. Bell, 2002. ‘Aid and the geopolitics of the post-colonial: Critical reflections on New Labour’s overseas development strategy’. Development and Change 33: 335–60. Stiles, K., 2002. ‘International support for NGOs in Bangladesh: Some unintended consequences’. World Development 30: 835–46. Vakil, A., 1997. ‘Confronting the classification problem: Toward a taxonomy of NGOs’. World Development 25: 2057–70. Woods, N., 2000. ‘The challenge of good governance for the IMF and the World Bank themselves’. World Development 28: 823–41. World Bank, 1989. Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. Washington DC: World Bank.

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21

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

International Organizations Veit Bachmann

Introduction In its Yearbook of International Organizations, the Brussels-based Union of International Associations (UIA) provides profiles of 34,995 currently active international organizations (IOs) and further information on an additional 28,998 dormant or inactive ones.1 Naturally, there is a large variety in the size, scope, mission and field of activities between these international organizations, ranging from smaller thematically specified IOs to globally influential ones such as the United Nations and even ones with profound supranational elements like the European Union. These are entities with considerable influence on global politics. Described in very general terms as ‘a form of institution that refers to a formal system of rules and objectives, a rationalized administrative instrument’ (Archer 1992: 2), international organizations are here conceived of as actors on their own right that ‘help to determine the kind of world that is to be governed and set the agenda for global governance’ (Barnett and Finnemore 2004: 7). The study of IOs as geopolitical agents has, however, been a long-neglected research topic in political geography. This is particularly surprising given that, with the emergence of critical geopolitics in the late 1980s, a conceptual approach developed that sought to move geopolitical analysis beyond state-centrism to include a range of other agents, structural conditions and ways of policy conduct (see below and e.g. Ó Tuathail 1996). In many ways critical geopolitics thus attuned to the modi operandi of international organizations, be it the early identification of the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew 1994; Agnew and Corbridge 1995) or the suggested shift away to the focus on alternative modes of governance, for example through conceiving of geopolitics as a ‘complex phenomenon embedded in multiple, overlapping networks of power’ (Ó Tuathail 1996: 256). Yet, systematically looking at IOs as primary agents in such networks has not featured prominently in critical geopolitical research. As for the discipline of international relations (IR), a shift in the approaches towards studying IOs came about in the late 1990s, exemplified by key publications 1

See .

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics taking very different standpoints on the agency of IOs in global politics. In 1998 Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal described the reasons for states acting through IOs from a rationalist–institutionalist perspective. IO agency is thereby seen as being granted by nation-states, IOs are tools for ‘enabling nation-states to achieve their ends’ (Abbott and Snidal 1998: 3), not actors sui generis. In contrast, in 1999, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore called for a more sociologically informed, constructivist approach towards the study of IOs. They argue: [The] rational-legal authority that IOs embody gives them power independent of states that created them. … They define shared international tasks (like ‘development’), create and define new categories (like ‘refugees’) and transfer new models of political organization around the world (like markets and democracy). (Barnett and Finnemore 1999: 699) Barnett and Finnemore questioned the ‘adequacy of a statist ontology in an era of globalization and political change’ and suggested more attention should be paid to the day-to-day operations of IOs (1999: 726). They thus laid the foundations for more sociologically oriented work in IR regarding the study of international organizations: research that is concerned with what happens inside the organization and the particular social dynamics at play, yet that is still relatively rare. In the same context, Barnett and Finnemore argued that ’by opening the black box of international organizations and examining how they are constituted and use their authority, we can begin to understand their power, their capacity for pathological behaviour, and the way they evolve’ (2004: 9). Following this suggestion and drawing on more recent work of human geographers, such as Thrift (2000), Müller (2011; 2012) and Kuus (2011a; 2011b), this chapter lays out an approach that suggests studying IOs by examining the mundane processes and social constellations within an organization as well as through situating the particular organization within a wider array of its constituting elements and external cooperation partners. This is not to argue against research looking at formal relations, structural conditions as well as legal and political frameworks, it is rather to suggest that these are not the only factors that count and to argue for a more reflexive engagement with the social intricacies that exist in any form of human interaction. In this context, critical geopolitics has accentuated a conceptual and methodological toolbox that is of fundamental relevance for studying non-state actors as key agents in the international system. In particular the emphasis on the social and discursive construction of geopolitical conditions through examining language and practice of geopolitical articulations and actors allows us to conduct more thorough research and gain deeper insights on both the inner functions and the geopolitical role of international organization. The argument is laid out in three sections. I first highlight the importance of addressing the internal dynamics of an organization for understanding how they reach a (more or less) coherent position to be projected externally. The subsequent section illustrates how critical geopolitical conceptualizations of the international system provide useful approaches to the study of IOs and their preferred ways 406

International Organizations of external agency. In the following, I present a strong plea for ethnographic research as a key approach for developing an in-depth understanding of both the internal dynamics of an organization as well as of its situatedness in the external environment.

International organizations as actors, bureaucracies and sites of social interaction All organizations are in important respects social networks and need to be addressed and analyzed as such. (Nohria 1992: 4) The call to look more intensely at the social aspects and internal dynamics of organizations, or more generally geopolitical actors, and the way they influence their positions, missions and roles is not new, as the quote above illustrates. Yet most of the literature, in particular in international relations, has focused on the external roles of IOs, how they are used, how they position themselves, how they interact and what role they occupy (for useful overviews, see e.g. Abbott and Snidal 1998; Hawkins 2008). As for political geography, research on international organizations is generally limited: exceptions include Dahlman and Brunn’s work on organizational discourse (2003), studies on religious geographies (e.g. Agnew 2010; Megoran 2006), external organizations’ inference (Jeffrey 2007; Strüver 2007) and a growing number of work on the EU (for an overview, see Bialasiewicz 2011). Beyond Kuus’ work on the EU (2011a; 2011b) and Müller’s studies of the production of docile subjects at a Russian elite university (2009; 2011), systematic research on the internal dynamics of organizations and the ways they produce their positions and mission has largely been absent. I thus argue for engaging more seriously with these aspects through looking at the little, mundane practices and human relationships within an organization and its personnel. More than a decade ago, Nigel Thrift suggested looking at the ‘little things’ of geopolitics (2000). Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour (1993), Thrift argued for the investigation of ‘the world of bureaucratic procedure’ in order to examine how mundane practices within an organization affect its external agency (2000: 382). In this context Müller draws on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that expanded the Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis beyond language by suggesting how meaning is constructed by signifying practices (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Müller 2008). Attention to details, to the mundane practices and interaction within an organization is thus essential for capturing its internal dynamics and for understanding how an organization’s external mission and agency is being developed. John Law therefore suggests a baroque view, one that looks down at the small, non-coherent and complex that together constitute a whole instead of looking up in the search for large-scale coherence (2004). This baroque view, Kuus argues, ‘thus directs us to look within, into specificities, uncertainties, and discrepancies 407

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics that are brushed over in big picture accounts’ (2010: 383). In the context of her work on EU policy-making procedures Kuus therefore suggests an investigation not of ‘the large systems but the small, the irregular, and the baroque; not to enumerate power struggles among the member states, but to study the mundane bureaucratic practices in Brussels through which these struggles are codified’ (2010: 383). Whilst these power struggles are clearly also a very relevant research endeavour, I want to reiterate Thrift’s and Kuus’ calls to pay more attention to the ‘little things’ and the dynamics that exist within an organization and that form a – however loose – coherence for the external interaction of an organization. These dynamics depend more on people and their social relations with each other than they do on the official doctrine or policy documents that commonly stand in the focus of international relations research. These individuals, Duffield argues, ‘will generally possess an identity that is distinct from that of any other entity and an interest in promoting the well-being of the organization and its membership’ (2007: 13). They develop different actor strategies with which they seek to pursue their own interests (or those of whoever pays them). In the context of her work on the EU in Brussels, Kuus suggests an analysis of ‘the operation of a social alchemy whereby a social hierarchy dissimulates itself no less to those it dignifies than to those it disenfranchises’ (2010: 383). Some individuals operate more smoothly and efficiently than others, some have more experience in how the processes work, other have more expertise on a certain topic. This multitude of people with different backgrounds and interests as well as varying strengths and weaknesses is to be found in each international organization. Despite the diverse composition of many IOs, they constitute an entity – an organization – and not just an arbitrary agglomeration of individual components. An organization is therefore more than the co-existence of its constituent parts, it develops agency through a ‘pattern of recurring linkages among its parts’ (Lincoln 1982: 26). Drawing on Callon and Latour, Müller argues that ‘organizations derive their agency by enrolling a multitude of people and things and making them work towards a mission’ (2012: 382; see Callon and Latour 1981). It is precisely the myriad ways of enrolling this multitude of people and things that often gets neglected in the study of international organization and to which I seek to point attention to. In this context Karns and Mingst remind us that when we speak of IGOs as actors, we are often referring to the IGO secretariat members who, as international civil servants, play key but often invisible roles in persuading states to act, coordinating the efforts of different groups, providing, the diplomatic skills to secure agreements, and ensuring the effectiveness of programs. (2010: 16) If ‘nameless, faceless bureaucrats are running the world’, as Mathiason claims (2007: xii), is debatable, however, the influence of bureaucratic structures and social relations in them on how policies are developed and implemented has long been identified:

408

International Organizations Equally important is that formal or prescribed relations (such as those that show up on organizational charts or on input–output tables) do not entirely capture the network of relationships that shape an organization. Informal or ‘emergent’ relationships … are just as important … . Identifying and analyzing these ‘hidden’ networks can be of great significance in understanding organizations. (Nohria 1992: 5) As outlined above, neither in human geography nor in international relations, have calls for such research approaches been applied extensively to in-depth case studies. The works presented above offer inspirations from a variety of disciplines that allow for an initial framing of research through a critical geopolitical lens. It is through this openness towards including various disciplinary backgrounds that critical geopolitics provides a suitable frame for incorporating such approaches into the study of international organizations.

International organizations and their external environment: Networks, interactions and diversity Two decades ago Nohria and Eccles called for conceiving international organizations not only as networks with respect to their internal dynamics, but also as operating externally predominantly, or at least preferably, through networked structures (1992). Networks are thereby thought of as ‘sets of relations that form structures, which in turn may constrain and enable agents’ (Hafner-Burton, Kahler and Montgomery 2009: 560), or more generally as ‘negotiation systems’ (Marin and Mayntz 1991, see also Börzel 2010: 194). In many ways conceiving of IOs as networks is a useful point of departure for analysing how IO agency often differs substantially from that of states. Viewing IOs as bureaucracies raises the problem of justifying their existence. Bureaucracies do not exist on their own right but for a certain purpose. Barnett and Finnemore point out: To be authoritative, ergo powerful, they must be seen to serve some valued and legitimate purpose, and, further, they must be seen to serve that purpose in an impartial and technocratic way using their impersonal rules. The authority of IOs, and bureaucracies generally, therefore, lies in their ability to present themselves as impersonal and neutral – as not exercising power but instead serving others. (Barnett and Finnemore 2004: 21) This different understanding of agency in the international system moves analysis away from a state-centric focus to also include other actors and thus causes a ‘shift from government (state power on its own) to governance (a broader configuration of state and key elements of civil society)’ (Harvey 2005: 77). Critical geopolitics has opened an arena for the analysis of such actors as IOs as key agents. It thereby 409

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics offers not only a less state-centric understanding of the international system in terms of agents, but also in terms of structure. A powerful notion at a relatively early point in these debates was Agnew’s identification of a ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew 1994; Agnew and Corbridge 1995). The argument is that ‘a changing global economic geography is exploding the fixity of the territorial states and is thereby creating a trap for those who want to build timeless models upon rapidly shifting foundations’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 8). Even though the nation-state remains a central component of the geopolitical system, they argue, the territorial fixation loses relevance in favour of a historicalstructural conception of space more concerned with processes, interactions and flows. Agnew’s ‘territorial trap’ thus pointed to the dual problematic assumptions of state-centricity and territorial fixation and suggested abandoning the exclusive focus on states as geopolitical actors and including other actors and different definitions of international spaces of interaction. IOs are an example for such actors, and their international role is an example for geopolitical agency in a global political space not exclusively determined by territoriality. Agnew thus contributed to a conceptual–analytical shift of focus from territoriality to spatiality whereby geopolitical space is conceived of including several spatial dimensions, such as for instance networks, place and scale, next to territory (see Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008). In this context, Ó Tuathail points to a ‘gradual dissolution of national economic space’ and places that ‘are denationalized and globalized by transnational flows’ (1996: 229–30). Territorial economies are thus beginning to ‘come apart and bifurcate into zones connected to global webs and flows … and zones outside and disconnected from legal global webs and flows’. Accordingly the territoriality of global affairs, in Ó Tuathail words, is ‘no longer one of competing, segmented, and discretely sovereign nation-states but a territoriality shaped by global flows’ (1996: 238). In the literature on policy-network analysis similar processes are described as a ‘system of deterritorialized regulation’ (Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch 2004: 109), referring to the detachment of power and spheres of influence from territory. Any actor seeking to exercise power in such a system of geopolitical space needs to focus on the ability to influence transnational flows and through them the processes and structures that construct and project such geopolitical space. The structure of the international system thereby sets the framework for certain processes constituted by a variety of flows within them. Within such a system it becomes ‘a crucial attribute of power, perhaps as vital as juridico-legal sovereignty’ to have ‘open and unconstrained access to flows, not closed domination of places’. Such flows ‘form new sites or project new spaces, beyond political jurisdiction, where now ideas, techniques, symbols, images of money speak in their own structuralizing codes’ (Luke 1993: 238–9). The conceptualization of structures, processes and flows as key categories for geopolitical analysis thus provides a framework of agency in the international system that is conducive to the modi operandi of international organizations conceived of as networked bureaucracies and sites of social interaction. The ‘territorial trap’ and critical geopolitical texts thus offer a better understanding of the geopolitical environment within which IOs operate. Simultaneously, IOs can 410

International Organizations serve as empirical examples of agents and agency of the conditions described in these texts. One particularly interesting institution to study in this context is the European Union. In spite of a general lack of critical geopolitical research on international organizations, the EU has received some attention in recent years (Bialasiewicz 2011). The EU is a very specific, but also highly illustrative, case for researching IOs. Due its supranational elements, it has achieved a level of independent agency that most IOs are striving for. The internal (social) dynamics of an IO, the negotiation mechanisms and processes of positioning and decision-making, as well as their impact on the IO’s external role are especially of interest when the IO is the sole authority for its constituents’ external agency – as is the case, for instance, with respect to EU trade policy. Moreover, for the EU, the shift towards the specific type of international system described above is particularly pronounced. The practised realities of EU governance and interaction within the EU have traditionally defied exclusively state-centric, realist analysis. During the second half of the twentieth century a particular system for political-economic organization has developed within the EU that is characterised by supranational integration, multilateralism, the rule of law, international institution building and the restrictions of the use of force as a means for international policy (Maull 2005). The system of governance that has been internalized by the EU eventually also became the foundation for the conduct of its external relations and the international promotion of such structures as key geopolitical objectives of the EU. In this context, Hettne and Söderbaum point out that ‘the civilian power employed in the EU’s own region-building is also being projected in its external relations as the preferred world order model’ (2005: 538). Through its various external relations frameworks, the EU thus attempts to promote interaction structures similar to its internal ones (see e.g. European Commission 2007). Whilst the EU is clearly a specific type of international organization, the attempt to promote internal ways of interaction also externally is not exclusive to the EU but common practice for (larger) IOs. This is rooted in the expertise they acquired while developing these practices. In the case of the EU regional integration, for instance. Through its history of European integration, the EU has developed an expertise in regional integration that is unmatched by any other geopolitical actor. The EU is widely seen as a model and its expertise is generally sought after for regional integration endeavours elsewhere. It is thus in a potentially very powerful position to shape these processes around the world. Consequently it attempts to increase demand for its expertise by promoting regional integration as a key geopolitical objective in its external relations (Bachmann 2011a). It is a matter of extending its global reach and influence on key structures in the international system and of shifting the international system more towards similar actors – that is, regional communities – amongst which the EU is the primus inter pares. In line with the argument for conceiving of structures, processes and flows as the key categories for geopolitical analysis as discussed above, Andrew Barry argues that ‘the European sphere of influence is to be extended by networking, externally as well as internally’. ‘New spaces of flows [thereby] dominate old spaces of places 411

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics … because they provide a flexibility in activity that can simply by-pass fixed assets in territories’ (1996: 35). Geographically, social interaction then takes place in hubs and nodes which is where ‘transnational social organization is constructed’ (Taylor 2004: 267). The attempt of constructing such ‘social organization’ through a policy in which they have (or claim?) global expertise is thus a common strategy for IOs to enhance their international influence vis-à-vis other actors in the international system – the EU is no exception. The external action of an IO, however, is not always coherent and homogenous. Just as it is important to recognize their internal dynamic, it is equally important to recognize the diverse and multifaceted interests that govern their external missions and that often result in differing perceptions of an organization’s identity and role as a geopolitical agent. In the case of the EU, for instance, Carbone has shown how internal fragmentation between different directorates general of the European Commission influences the commission’s authority and leadership on questions of international development policy (2007). An international organization of the EU’s scope naturally comprises varying internal positions and interests: those also appear in its interaction with others and their external perceptions. Recognizing and acknowledging these diversities within an organization and also with respect to its external interaction is essential for studying them. In terms of methodology this requires an approach that accounts for the internal social dynamics of an IO as well as for the external environment within which the organization operates. Clearly the institutional framework and formal relations are important: they set the structure. However, looking at the mobile and evolving processes and flows is equally important: they are the interactions. Unfortunately such a diversified approach to the study of IOs has rarely been taken. Most work on IOs is done in political science and focuses on formal relations of the institution or aims to test pre-formulated hypotheses, thus leaving no room for in-depth fieldwork or unexpected cognition. The conceptually and methodologically integrative toolbox of critical geopolitics, however, offers promising possibilities for gaining deeper and more theoretically informed insights into both the internal dynamics as well as the external situatedness and informal links of international organizations. In the next section I make the argument for researching these aspects through engaging with different spectres and angles of the organization and its environment as well as with various individuals exposed to the organization’s agency, both internal and external.

Researching international organizations: Ethnography and pragmatism I have learned most about the research methods from the people whose social circumstances and cultural understandings I have studied. (Davies 2008: vii)

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International Organizations Having conceptualized IOs as networked bureaucracies and sites for social interaction, I argue for moving in-depth fieldwork and ethnography to the centre of critical geographical research approaches to studying IOs. Inclusive and integrative research approaches accentuating the importance of field work and ethnographic research practices have a long tradition in the discipline of geography. However, a more systematic and conceptual engagement with such research practices only emerged over the past two decades along with a wider practice turn in the social sciences (Schatzki Knorr-Cetina and von Savigny 2001). This practice turn promises new insights into IOs’ functioning and geopolitical role. The discipline of geography, with its practice-oriented and diverse research tradition as well as its openness to different methodological approaches, is well positioned to contribute to such insights.2 Focusing on methodologies in critical geopolitics, Müller’s call to move beyond textual analysis and include the analysis of geopolitical practices needs to be emphasised (2008; 2010). This applies in particular to the study of IOs, their inner dynamics and external networks. Ethnographic research approaches thereby play a key role, however, they must be understood in a more holistic sense including a variety of research methods through which the researcher ideally immerses him or herself in the environment studied. Doing so is not only a matter of research methodology but of acquainting oneself as a person with a new environment. Consequently it is essential to employ pragmatism and common sense for mastering such – admittedly difficult – endeavours (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009). Ethnography, in Davies’ words, is ‘a research process based on fieldwork using a variety of mainly (but not exclusively) qualitative research techniques but including engagement in the lives of those being studied over an extended period of time’ (2008: 5). Critical geopolitical research should therefore not only go beyond textual analysis, but also beyond participant observation and include other methods, such as interviews. Clearly participant observation is a key ethnographic research method and a useful way for gaining in-depth knowledge of an organization, its dynamics, characteristics, working procedures and external agency, however, in addition interviews can most usefully be employed to fulfil a triple purpose. First, they can be used to gather general information about the organization in question. Second, they can be used to get a deeper understanding of particular issues related to the organization. Third, interviews conducted with its external cooperation partners allow the researcher to situate the organization in the wider networks within which it operates. It is such interplay between breadth and depth, teased out through a combination of methods, that can provide the researcher with a deeper understanding of the situation/object researched whilst at the same time maintaining a critical lens for situating the obtained information in wider contexts. In human geography, there is a wide literature that assists the researcher in preparing for such research, for framing the obtained data, for dealing with possible problems encountered in the process and in situating his or her own positionality 2

See e.g. special issues of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(2) (2003) or Geographica Helvetica (2012). 413

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics as well as those of the researched. In particular on issues of positionality and reflexivity, the work of feminist geographers has contributed significantly to sharpening awareness of issues, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, social status and so on, and their effects on the research process and the data obtained (England 1994; Moss 2002; Rose 1997). The research process thus always has to be contextualized within the social relations of both the researcher and the researched as well as with those between them. Cook and Crang emphasise the difficult and creative nature of conducting ethnographic research because of the complexities of the social world and the problems researchers encounter when trying to analyse it. The focus should then be to address those problems instead of avoiding them. Ethnographies might not produce concrete results, such as proven or discarded hypotheses, but, as Cook and Crang argue, ‘an honest and serious engagement with the world is not a failure because it admits that things are messier than that and tries to think through the various complexities and entanglements involved rather than deny them’ (1995: 92). In this context, Gillian Rose advocates that we ‘inscribe into our research practices some absences and fallibilities while recognizing that the significance of this does not rest entirely in our own hands’(1997: 319). I found Cook and Crang’s engagement with ethnography particularly helpful for preparing for fieldwork, precisely because they do not claim to develop a holistic methodological concept for doing ethnographies. Instead they leave room for the unexpected – which is of fundamental importance to critical geopolitical research on the discursive and social construction of geopolitical agents and agency – and emphasise the messiness every researcher has to negotiate and navigate through themselves. This accounts especially for participant observation. Despite its being recognized as a key research method in human geography and the array of writings on it (for an overview, see Bachmann 2011b), any researcher doing participant observation needs to take into account that there is no precise instruction manual for how to do it. In this context Gans recalls that ‘when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago just after the Second World War, no one talked much about participant observation; we just did it’ (1982: 53). Whilst the methodological literature has grown a lot since Gans’ graduate studies, participant observation certainly remains a way of data acquisition more based on commonsense and ad hoc practices than specific training. More recently, the political scientists Friedrichs and Kratochwil suggested in the influential journal International Organization that more pragmatic research approaches modelled on ‘real-world’ experiences of knowledge generation should be employed. They criticize the discipline of International Relations because: Some scholars pursue the accumulation of law-like statements as if positivism had never been rocked. Independent, intervening, and dependent variables are tossed around as if the social world resembled a bowling alley. (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009: 702) Instead they argue that we should conceive of ‘knowledge generation as a social and discursive activity’ and acknowledge that ‘at the bottom of our hearts, we all 414

International Organizations know that the way we produce knowledge in our everyday social practice has advantages over standard scientific methods’ (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009: 701–2). In particular for social science such a pragmatic approach to knowledge generation is useful. The purpose of social science knowledge, according Friedrich and Kratochwil, is to ‘enable orientation in the social world. Its utility consists of helping us to understand complex social phenomena and/or to explain social regularities’ (2009: 706). Consequently, the generation of such knowledge is less abstract and should be oriented more around the social world and the interaction of individuals and institutions in it. Understanding ourselves and arranging our position and life in this social world is thus a prerequisite for enabling us to generate knowledge about it. Social science, Friedrichs and Kratochwil argue, ‘is, or should be, above all a more conscience and systematic version of the way by which humans have learned to solve problems and generate knowledge in their everyday lives’ (2009: 710). These ways and skills of ‘real world’ problem solving are thus to be used for research and also acknowledged as such by the researcher. Adapting this to critical geopolitical research on international organizations is to make a strong plea for ethnography to study the social and discursive constitution of geopolitical agency. The goal for the researcher should be to become immersed in the ‘field’ and to develop a sound understanding of the situation, the organization and its dynamics as well as of the environment both the researcher and the organization operate in. There is no clear-cut way of doing this, as it always depends on the researcher’s personality and positionality, consequently every researcher has to find their own way to approach such fieldwork. Yet it almost always involves longer periods of fieldwork and intercultural capabilities. Doing ethnographies is thus a process where a strict separation between research and non-research is difficult. It is a matter of getting access to groups of peoples, to live and/or work with them, spend time with them, but also to study them. Evans suggests identifying certain significant individuals – ‘gatekeepers’ – and attaching oneself to them and building other field-relationships based on the relationship with the gatekeeper (1988). Ideally the researcher should then position him or herself both ‘inside and outside the group’, thus being able to provide ‘an insider’s account with an outsider’s detachment’ (Eyles 1988: 9). This, however, raises the tremendously difficult problem of finding a balance between complementing the roles enough to obtain a maximum of useful information and data and merging the roles too much, thereby risking compromising the researcher’s detachment – a general problem of employing participant observation as a research method. In this context, I emphasise the importance of reflecting critically on one’s own position and role towards the researched in order to make the best possible use of data obtained in this way. The danger is becoming too absorbed in the participating role, thereby neglecting the observing role. Critically reflecting about these issues in advance helps to avoid losing sight of the research goals. Here again I draw on Friedrich and Kratochwil. Employing pragmatism and commonsense has long been the practice of most researchers in the social sciences, yet researchers hardly subscribe to it as a philosophical and methodological 415

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics position. This is not to abandon academic rigour in the conduct of fieldwork. Friedrich and Kratochwil argue: Pragmatic researchers will not uncritically impose their own categories, nor will they become enmeshed in interpretive or ethnographic research to such an extent as to surrender all critical judgment to the practitioners in the ‘field’. … What we need, therefore, is a compromise between some rockbottom standards of scientific methodology and the way we produce knowledge in everyday social practice. (2009: 714) My suggestions here are offered as a starting point for critical geopolitical researchers to think about how such a compromise between pragmatic approaches and scientificity could look in their individual case in order to use the information obtained in the most rewarding and academically sincere way.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to outline three main points regarding the study of international organizations through the lens of critical geopolitics. First, following Thrift’s suggestion to look at the ‘little things’ (2000), I argue for examining the mundane practices within organizations that affect the way it exercises external agency. IOs are thereby conceived as networked bureaucracies and sites of social interaction, not exclusively as technical tools for achieving objectives determined by nation-states (Mathiason 2007; Nohria and Eccles 1992). In this context Müller calls for developing a ‘concept of organization as the ordering of socio-material networks – arrangements of human and material elements that work together towards a shared mission’ (2012: 382). The material elements do not make decisions, the humans working within the structure of the organization and standing in particular relations with each other do. Müller further refers to organizations as black boxes and suggests that ‘scholars of critical geopolitics [should] open these black boxes and render visible the arrangements contained within them’ (2012: 386). Following Müller’s call I suggest excavating the internal dynamics of organizations and the social constellations embedded in them. Second, I claim that the conceptual approach of critical geopolitics provides an analytical arena for the study of IOs by shifting focus away from state-centric, territorialized power politics towards more inclusive forms of governance operating in an international system where structures, processes and flows are key categories of geopolitical analysis. These assumptions are particularly suitable for a more detailed understanding of IOs as they are better able to capture the modi operandi of most IOs than traditional IR approaches and allow the inclusion of a variety of actors as well as an engagement with their internal composition and relations with each other. By moving the discussion from territoriality to spatiality,

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International Organizations critical geopolitics also provides a structural–conceptual view of geopolitical space that is more attuned to the networked agency of IOs. Third, I lay out a strong methodological plea for ethnography. This is based on a more holistic understanding of ethnography comprising various methodological approaches such as participant observation and interviews to look at both an organization’s internal dynamics as well as its external positioning and interaction practices. Following Friedrichs and Kratochwil (2009), I stress the use of pragmatism and commonsense in the conduct of fieldwork, employing ways of generating knowledge and immersing oneself in the ‘field’ that follow ‘regular’ human behaviour and experiences in ‘real’ life. Whilst academic debates provide useful guidance for preparing for the research and for situating the research endeavour in a wider context, there is no standard instruction manual for conducting fieldwork. In other words: Let us recognize that neither lofty theory bashing nor clueless research activism can provide secure foundations for our knowledge, and let us instead seek knowledge that will enable us to deal with relevant problems and, ultimately, to find our way through the complexities of the social world. (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009: 726) Clearly, looking at the formal relations and structural conditions as well as the legal and political frameworks that determine an IO’s official position and role in the international system is important. Yet these aspects are not the focus of my contribution. Instead I seek to emphasize more banal aspects, such as the internal dynamics and social constellations that govern how the organization defines, develops and articulates its geopolitical agency. These are not the exclusive factors determining an organization’s geopolitical agency, however, neither are rigid frameworks. What Ó Tuathail and Dalby refer to as the ‘irredeemable plurality of space and the multiplicity of possible political constructions of space’ (1998: 3) thus allows for critical geopolitics’ conceptual inclusion of both a variety of actors and of spatial dimensions other than territory. Through this lens, actors such as IOs exercise agency in, for instance, a networked geopolitical space. Moreover, critical geopolitics’ methodological flexibility allows for the combination of pragmatism with various research approaches such as textual analysis and holistic ethnography. Critical geopolitics thus provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for studying IOs that promises a deeper understanding of both an IO’s inner functioning as well as its geopolitical role and environment. At the same time IOs and their international influence serve as examples for the kind of alternative agents exercising agency through myriad and discursively constructed geopolitical spatiality long hinted at in critical geopolitics. As such IOs, their inner functioning and geopolitical role offer a long-neglected empirical arena for the applicability of the conceptual assumptions of critical geopolitics.

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Indigenous Geopolitics Chris Gibson

This chapter discusses indigenous peoples as agents of geopolitical change. It reviews strands of work in geography that discuss indigenous peoples and geopolitical issues of territory, identity and subject-formation. As I hope to show here, indigenous people are more than merely agents of a parochial form of geopolitics – this is no ‘niche’ form of ‘minority studies’ within the political geographical tradition. Rather, manifold engagements with indigenous peoples – in colonial encounters, in government policy, in the spaces of contemporary everyday life – have deeply shaped the world we now know. Examinations of indigenous peoples and geopolitics bring into sharp relief questions of land and control, resources and livelihoods, agency and cultural identity – processes that as Glassman argued, affect literally billions of people (2006: 609). In more subtle ways, too, the manner in which indigenous people have been conceptualized historically has shaped both geopolitical relations globally and the broader handling of human cultural and geographical difference. Discussion of indigenous peoples in the context of geopolitics has been influenced by various political–intellectual positions in humanities and social science scholarship since the 1970s: Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism and especially postcolonialism. At points throughout the chapter I draw on these various traditions – and in so doing purposefully resist temptations to prioritize a singular theoretical position or reading of indigenous geopolitics. Indigenous scholars writing from places as distant as New Zealand and Arctic Canada have critiqued Western knowledge’s presumed capacity to know the world in totality, the Western prioritizing of reason and subsequent atomizing of the world, through science, into constituent parts. Western knowledge positions itself ‘as the fiduciary of all knowledge with authority to authenticate or invalidate other knowledge (when it gets around to it)’ (Doxtater 2004: 618). As the author of this chapter I cannot avoid my own enmeshment in Western systems of academic validation that deliver to me authorial benefits (Sidaway 2000a), but in light of above critiques I have consciously chosen to avoid assuming a definitive speaking position. I am similarly reluctant to proffer a preferred theoretical stance. Even postcolonialism – an enormously influential and empowering movement in academia aiming to facilitate voices of the subordinated – can ‘become yet another colonizing discourse

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics and practice directed from northern centres of global power, one which plays to the political rhetoric of inclusion within the academy while adding further layers of delusion and amnesia of the material and emotional legacies of exclusion within and beyond it’ (Noxolo, Raghuram and Madge 2008: 147). Such are the perils of hoping to generalize about indigenous peoples or about what it means to suffer colonialism or be post- or anti-colonial. Instead I seek to review here some strands of critique, predominantly emanating from geography in the last 25 years, which I bring together here somewhat loosely, in a spirit of epistemological plurality and inclusivity (Howitt and Suchet 2006; Noxolo, Raghuram and Madge 2008). Many of the examples chosen are from Australia, where I live, but I have also sought to incorporate views from other parts of the world. That may mean that this chapter is lopsided or that the research strands reviewed here jostle uncomfortably or even contradictorily in theoretical terms. But such is indigenous geopolitics itself a tangle of territorial, cultural, environmental and representational claims, challenges and counter-discourses – a tangle in some ways knowingly replicated here.

Colonialism as expropriation of indigenous territory Important foundations for this discussion are provided by Marxist-inspired critiques of how European capitalists expropriated the lands and lives of indigenous peoples for their own economic and geopolitical gain in the colonial period (broadly understood as the years 1600 to 1900, though present-day colonialisms of different sorts nevertheless continue). In the 1970s, at a time in which indigenous land-rights struggles rose to national prominence in countries such as Australia, the USA and Canada, academic geographers, historians, anthropologists and political economists began to explore critically the historical and contemporary mechanisms through which indigenous people were dispossessed of their lands and environmental resources – especially for mining, pastoralist and industrial expansion (Howard 1988; Howitt and Douglas 1983; Reynolds 1989). Marx himself wrote about the brutality of colonial exploration in the service of European industrial growth: ‘The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’ (1976 [1887]: 915). Through violence and theft, capitalism emerges ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Marx 1976 [1887]: 926). Marx himself was dismissive of a political response framed around peasant movements in the colonies; instead he prioritized the urban industrial workingclass in Europe as the formative agents of change – a position communists in the twentieth century were later forced to reconsider as the magnitude of struggles in the colonies became more apparent (Glassman 2006: 612). From the 1970s onwards, critiques of Eurocentrism and increased awareness of the need to respect indigenous cultures encouraged a revised neo-Marxist politics. 422

Indigenous Geopolitics Many more dispersed groups whose livelihoods and cultures had been damaged by capitalism – including peasants and indigenous peoples – were acknowledged by the left as potentially part of a broader coalition of anti-capitalist social movements. This saw, for instance, coalitions form in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s made up of indigenous activists, unionists, students, environmentalists and socialwelfare lobby groups – around major campaigns to stop mining on Aboriginal land, recognize Aboriginal land rights and Aboriginal deaths in state custody. Capitalism (and the capitalist state) was blamed for the continued dispossession of Aboriginal people (and its social consequences), for greedy support of mining, for the ensuing environmental damage brought about by resource extraction industries. Similar campaigns were fought elsewhere, in Latin America (see M. Nash 1970); Melanesia (Brookfield 1972) and Africa (Markovitz 1977). Academic geographers both documented and contributed to this struggle (e.g. Howitt and Douglas 1983), though less within the frames of political geography than within a Marxian political economy or a Third World development focus, hence weaving stories of oppression of indigenous peoples into a wider critique of capitalism. Such accounts described oppressed indigenous groups, with their complex and sensitive cultural connections to traditional country, caught in struggles for development, against the capitalist state, colonial mercenaries and later transnational mining companies, with their devouring interests in minerals and land. Rare engagements by political geographers with indigenous issues in the period before the emergence of critical geopolitics (e.g. Davis and Prescott 1992) tended to use a more traditional political geographical frame, studying for instance geographical elements of indigenous customs, territoriality, boundaries and borders.

Self-determination: A geopolitical challenge ‘from below’? During the 1980s and 1990s indigenous claims for recognition of their rights in land, resources, sovereignty and self-governance emerged as fundamental challenges to the political and economic hegemony of the nation state – a geopolitics ‘from below’ (Boldt and Long 1985; Coe 1994; Deloria and Lytle 1984; Engelstad and Bird 1992; Gilbert 1993). Since then ‘First World’ nation-states have to varying degrees begun reassessing the legitimacy of their colonial histories, the security of national identities and institutions and the appropriateness of internal political structures. By the 1990s ‘self-determination’ would become a key catchphrase in many colonized First World nations, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Broadly, self-determination represented the various strategies of indigenous groups to regain control over their own destinies, after imperial histories of oppression and dispossession (Gilbert 1993; Knight 1988). In practice, self-determination became a multivalent term – laden with implications, strategies and interpretations which could be mobilized by different groups to suit varied political purposes (Gibson 1998). Self-determination simultaneously evoked an array of competing meanings, particularly for indigenous groups and governments 423

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics – who deployed often conflicting regimes of knowledge and identity construction, sovereignty and political control over land and cultural property. Indigenous movements for self-determination remain diverse, but in conceptual terms articulate strongly with the first article of the United Nations charter, which decrees that: ‘all people have the right to self determination; by virtue of that right they may freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (United Nations 1960). As former communist nation-states fractured, ‘self-determination’ was a phrase used to legitimize the (re) establishment of new, regionally organized and separate nation-states. Elsewhere, self-determination was incorporated into the cessionary strategies of regions with particular historical and linguistic differences from their formal host state (such as in Quebec and East Timor). While many of these forms of self-determination imply the replacement of monolithic state structures with new, separated sovereign entities, the term ‘self-determination’ was increasingly mobilized by indigenous groups in the 1990s in ways that attempted to combat histories of internal colonialism but did not infer complete cession from formally recognized nationstates. The overarching flavour was one of recognizing the ongoing survival and sovereign interests of indigenous peoples – as distinct cultures within otherwise accepted borders of Western nation-states, addressing the co-existence of (and the consequent need to reconcile) otherwise divergent sovereign claims (Manus 2005). Indigenous sovereignty became a key conceptual, practical and legal battleground involving the revisiting of original treaty documents; important legal test cases; and local as well as national negotiations over resource use, environmental management, political representation and cultural policy (Howitt, Connell and Hirsch 1996; Jull 1994; Lawrence and Adams 2005). For political geographers energized by the critical geopolitical ‘turn’, indigenous claims powerfully illustrated the processes, technologies and supposed ‘truths’ through which the ontological status of the nation-state became ‘known’. Articulation of indigenous political challenges illuminated the constructedness of the Western nation-state and the calculated projects entailed in imposing a capitalistic economy on colonized space: the systems of land tenure, cartography, jurisdiction and policing that were necessary to naturalize possession and control of colonized territory (Bridge and Frederiksen forthcoming; Harley 1988; Huggan 1989; Jacobs 1993; Mitchell 2002). Hence the historic ‘Mabo’ decision, handed down by the Australian High Court in June 1992 in favour of the Meriam people of Murray Island (Mer), overturned one of the ideological cornerstones of the Australian nation-state – the concept of terra nullius (empty land) that underpinned Australian pastoral expansion and territorial dispossession (Mercer 1997). Indigenous sovereignty is now at least implied in Australian native-title law as a result, in that it recognizes customary law as a means for sustaining cultural traditions (the latter considered prime evidence for continuation of native title over land under various legal acts). The expectation is now that Aboriginal traditional owners and nonAboriginal interests negotiate agreements on a regional basis regarding resource use, land tenure and access – in effect quasi-treaties (see Gibson 1999a).

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Indigenous Geopolitics Geographers, anthropologists and indigenous studies specialists have traced the particularities and pathways shaping the tenor of indigenous self-determination campaigns in different countries. In the circumpolar North, where nation-states in the Cold War struggled with each other for strategic territorial dominance, indigenous connections to land and cultural heritage, as well as maintenance of cultural traditions with their own sense of nationhood, provided a challenge to those nation-states, from below (Nicol 2010). As Shields deftly summarizes: Indigenous sense of belonging and identity is more strongly affiliated with local communities and a unique cultural heritage, not the distant southern centres of states from which they have been traditionally disenfranchised and relegated to the status of internal colonies. For the Sami as much as for the Innu, this sense of social citizenship extends to a sense of territory which is at root proprietary, lived and topological. Arctic and circumpolar regions, the states that lay claim to them and which base their identity in part on a northern chorography, are thus contested from below, as well as having to face challenges from other states, for example over the unresolved status of control over arctic waters which are ever more accessible. (Shields 2003: 209) In Scandinavia, indigenous Sami people reside in a flexible system of villages, siidas, which is based on a different approach to territoriality than that of the nationstates within which their lands are now incorporated (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Sami homelands are utterly fragmented by imposed administrative borders, yet in Scandinavia ‘it is possible for these different territorialities to meet and co-exist’ using flexible territorial arrangements and transborder rights agreements around salmon fishing and reindeer migration routes (Karppi 2001). And yet the interests of nation-states continue to disrupt Sami homelands – through declaration of national parks for conservation, which disempower traditional owners (Riseth 2007), and through the timber and paper industries, who continue to operate in state-controlled lands and privately owned plantations within Sami territory (Lawrence 2007). In the USA, legacies of forced movements onto reservations and tribe-by-tribe treaties both complicate self-determination agendas and provide opportunities for resistance and negotiation – but the status of Native American tribes as ‘minority nationalisms’ (Kymlicka 2000) is rendered opaque by a powerful public discourse about cultural difference. In the USA a liberal tradition favours an ‘open, fluid and voluntary conception’ of multiculturalism. Indigenous claims to territory and sovereign status struggle for legitimacy amidst a largely antinationalist multiculturalism. One strategy has been to focus on the regional scale as a locus of action, to emphasize ‘decentred diverse democratic federalism’ (Young 2000: 238). Regional agreements and indigenous self-government structures have underlined negotiations with Native American communities for governance over reserve lands, and have been central to indigenous geopolitical aspirations also in Canada (Bartlett 1991; Richardson, Craig and Boer 1995) and Aotearoa/New Zealand (Cant 1995; Levine and Henare 1995). 425

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Complicating this picture is the extent to which indigenous self-determination movements have been contained and accommodated by non-indigenous governments Since the early 1970s, as indigenous geopolitical claims have intensified, successive governments in Australia, the USA, Canada and Scandinavia adopted ‘self-determination’, ‘co-existence’ and ‘empowerment’ as official policies. Federal bureaus and ministries of native/Indian/First Nations/ Aboriginal affairs subsequently granted a degree of legitimacy to indigenous claims – but always within a purview acceptable to the nation-state and which provided minimum threat to the nation-state’s ontology (Gibson 1999b). Landrights mechanisms within the established Western/capitalist system of property ownership and systems of indigenous representative bureaucracy in the image of parliamentary democracy came to dominate. Meanings for ‘self-determination’ were thus constrained through aspects of government policy that were defined and pursued within the state’s own ideological framework. A key difference in geopolitical culture therefore remains stark: the holistic, topological, political geographical and cultural articulations of indigenous self-determination, on the one hand, and the ‘bureaucratic’ reduction of indigenous self-determination by governments to administrative arrangement, on the other (Gibson 1999b). Even in Scandinavia, where flexibility and the co-existence of state and indigenous jurisdictional systems enable a comparatively enlightened measure of empowerment, self-determination is only tolerated ‘if the state’s interests are not compromised’ (Karppi 2001: 394). Here, and elsewhere including Australia (Gibson 1999b), Western governments quickly typecast indigenous movements as separatist when mining, forestry and other resources were in question, excluding the possibility that returning indigenous control of territory might invoke instead new fluid sovereignties that both affirmed indigenous interests and a form of ‘“openness” to outside relations and constituencies’ (Castree 2004: 137; see also Nicol 2010). Constrained by domestic political possibilities, many indigenous groups have sought complementary strategies, building geopolitical links instead across the imposed borders of Western nation-states. Indigenous political consciousness is growing steadily on a global scale, with new communications channels and cultural exchanges between minority nations, and the formation of norms and rights for indigenous groups in international law (Feldman 2002). This is a new scale of indigenous geopolitics – a new political ontology born in response to the hegemonic forces of Western imperialism (Stewart-Harawira 2005) and with a networked, cosmopolitan, topological character. ‘Indigenism’, as Castree describes it (2004), is a ‘resistance identity’: both territorially rooted and a prime instance of translocal solidarity.

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Post-colonialism and feminism: Finding space for indigenous voices By the 1990s other intellectual influences such as feminism and poststructuralism had filtered through political and academic circles. Anthropologists such as Nicholas Thomas explored the complexities and particularities of colonial encounters – which were not always about violence and capitalist appropriation (1994) and were more accurately a series of multiple projects (Sidaway 2000b) underscored by the actions and positions occupied by a host of actors – elites, missionaries, tribal leaders, military officials, intellectuals, explorers. In Brazil, for instance, the national government contradictorily sought to assimilate Xavante Indians into modernity and processes of capital accumulation and at the same time celebrated Indians as ‘primordial Brazilians’, as ‘nationalist icons’ (Garfield 2001). The Brazilian government sought to eradicate Indians’ cultural differences, while simultaneously exaggerating them. Opportunities for resistances emerged and were capitalized upon in the cracks and chasms, the intimate power plays enacted in policy moves such as these, foregrounding indigenous agency amidst the violence of colonialism. Thus, as Pollard et al. argued, ‘a postcolonial perspective pushes us to go further than traditional geographies of the Left which, though often sympathetic to the needs and experiences of the subaltern, tend to focus on systemic critiques of capitalism … to the detriment of vivid, complex and embodied accounts of lives and livelihoods’ (2009: 138). Other geographers of postcolonial persuasion have sought to document the movements, behaviors and encounters of diplomats, businesspeople and experts in the colonial setting as part of efforts to trace ethnographically the embodied manner in which US and European economic and political expansion took place (Domosh 2010). Such actors – experts, peasants, colonists, elites, businesspeople – were, as Timothy Mitchell has argued, imbricated in the very origins of the ideas and practices of capitalism: John Maynard Keynes, James Mill, Robert Malthus and John Stuart Mill all held senior positions in the India Office in London (the successor to the East India Company) – thus ruling India played a key role ‘in the formation of modern British political theory’ (Mitchell 2002: 6). In this regard there is a real point of connection only beginning to be explored between political geographers of Marxist persuasion, poststructuralists interested in the origins and genealogies of governing practices, and postcolonial researchers concerned with the intricacies of empire (Bridge 2006). Meanwhile postcolonial writers such as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak broadened the scope of critique of colonial mentalities, tactics and legacies. As Iris Marion Young argued, postcoloniality grew as a project, with ‘an interpretative and institutional aspect’ (2000: 237). Subject to critique was not just the damage of colonialism, but Western thinking itself. Western knowledge was revealed as chimera, and decentering it was a prelude to creating new spaces for subaltern voices, knowledges and worldviews.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics One focus has been on representations of indigenous peoples and the manner in which discourses of Aboriginality and indigeneity informed colonial projects. Indigenous people were positioned as ‘Other’ to the civilizing forces of colonization (government, missions, bureaucrats, industrialists) and a chorus of denigratory representative practices buttressed ideas of indigenous people as lacking the necessary deportment to succeed in modern life. This was a feature of colonial discourse globally, with variations and intensities across continents. In Australia, constructions of indigenous people as ‘backward’, prone to drunkenness, lacking respect for private property and welfare dependent were powerful and still are in some quarters deeply ingrained – constructions of an unchanging, homogenous Aboriginality that underpinned racism, fear, subjugation and attempts at cultural extinction (Langton 1993). At the same time, non-Indigenous academic anthropologists themselves studied indigenous communities as if they were museum specimens – through structuring frames of ‘race’ (Cowlishaw 1999). Nation-building and modernist industrial expansion in the early twentieth century were coupled with cultural discourses of indigenous people – both denigratory and quasi-scientific – that were a means to assimilation and further dispossession. Kay Anderson’s important work on ‘race’ in Antipodean colonial encounters has since taken such scholarship a step further, exploring an intimate genealogy of nineteenth-century thought about indigenous peoples in order to provide historical specificity to the idea of ‘race’, ‘in the hope of splintering the heavy baggage and over-generalized narrative that has been woven around this term, and which arguably serves to reinscribe its very tenacity both within and beyond the academy’ (2007: 191). For Anderson, colonial stereotyping of indigenous bodily and behavioral characteristics ‘was not always a matter of asserting a keen sense of superiority’ – rather it was a form of conjecture: ‘speculative leaps that were fraught with uncertainty more so than confidence’ (Anderson 2007: 199). In the colonial encounter with indigenous peoples colonists struggled to make sense of indigenous peoples within a frame of understanding ‘humanity’: ‘Race ceased to be regarded as a superficial human variation and came to be seen as a permanent and significant difference’ (Anderson 2008: 470). Political geographers would be wellserved by engaging more with this kind of genealogical work – for ‘race’ pervades the manner in which international affairs are imagined and played out, and yet its exact purchase and effects are often poorly or simplistically understood. In this respect ‘indigenous’ now constitutes an increasingly contested claim on genetic heritage, caught up in a ‘semantic swirl of race, tribe, culture, ethnicity, ancestry, kinship, nation and now genes’ (C. Nash 2008: 465). In South Africa and Zimbabwe, indigenization has been the preferred route to handle restoration of sovereignty to Africans, with contradictory politicizations of space (Andresson 2010), while in Europe right-wing movements can position themselves as representatives of ‘indigenous’ peoples rallying against the ‘colonization’ by immigrants – a perverse appropriation of the discourse of postcoloniality in the service of xenophobia. Not all ‘indigenous’ movements share the same conceptions of indigeneity or concord with a left-leaning, liberatory political agenda (Castree 2004).

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Indigenous Geopolitics Through examining indigenous colonial encounters, it also becomes clear how one of the most pervasive philosophical binaries in Western thinking – the ontological assertion of human distinctiveness from ‘nature’ – came into being. Postcolonial work inspired by the ‘more-than-human’ turn in geography has sought to explode the ‘fragile circular argument’ (Suchet 2002:141) surrounding Western knowledge’s hyper-separation of nature and culture, in for instance wildlife and river management – instead affirming the multiple ways of knowing and connecting people, animals, plants and landscapes in indigenous ontologies (Suchet 2002; Weir 2009). In Australia, indigenous geopolitical strategies were thus deeply embodied and more-than-human: they stemmed from holistic epistemologies linking moral responsibility with territory, affirming systems of kinship and law. Aboriginal geopolitical orientations are towards ancient origins and ceremonial reproduction of responsibilities to country, inherited from this legacy, written in the landscape – from ‘relationships of moral responsibility, binding people into the country and the generations of their lives’ (Rose 2004: 57). In the USA, Native American scholars have promoted ‘native science’ as a ‘lived and creative relationship with the natural world’ (Cajete 2000: 20) – an attempt to ‘begin healing the disenchantment caused through the rupture between culture and nature in Western science’ (Johnson and Murton 2007: 121). Inspired by Foucaultian approaches, researchers have also explored the governmentalities that informed colonial relations with indigenous people – for example, rationing on Australian mission settlements from the 1880s to 1960s, a practice that ‘brought donors and receivers into close and even habitual contact without requiring their mutual understanding’ (Rowse 1998: 5) but that provided colonizers with moments in which to ‘test’ understandings of indigenous people. This had a spatial, micro-geopolitical dimension: hence a town like Alice Springs ‘could be conceived as an island of civility surrounded by the more or less uninstructed Indigenous people, a people deserving of management and tutelage, by missionaries and pastoralists, until they were fit to enter and use the town’ (Rowse 1998: 6). Of interest to critical geopolitics more broadly, governmental discourses and spatial practices combined to produce a colonial micro-geopolitics of surveillance and control. Somewhat alarmingly, Rowse’s analysis of the logic of rationing could apply equally well to some contemporary indigenous affairs policies. In the mid 2000s Australia’s conservative Federal Government sought to reorient Aboriginal affairs away from debates about rights and inheritances, to the ‘responsibilities’ that communities must accept in order to be provided with infrastructure and services from government. The Federal Government created new ‘Shared Responsibility Agreements’ that obliged Aboriginal communities to conform to a series of specified disciplinary practices (such as improving personal hygiene, maintaining clean households and preventing school truancy) in order to receive access to health care and other basic social services and supplies (Lawrence and Gibson 2007). Such agreements constitute a technology of citizenship whereby indigenous subjects are rewarded for fulfilling and performing a particular role in their relationship with government. 429

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics There is a spatial dimension to this too: in Australia (and with some parallel in Canada) remote Aboriginal settlements – ex-reserves once designed to confine Aboriginal people under colonial rule and civilize them through assimilation – have become ‘slums in the bush’, likened to Third World villages and enclaves of social problems (particularly domestic violence, vandalism, alcohol abuse and petrol sniffing). In Australia such settlements are the target of Shared Responsibility Agreements – problematized as ungovernable, as the failed projects of assimilation. Governmental imaginaries of distance and scale are deeply embedded in the idea of the remote ‘problem’ Aboriginal community: they are ungovernable places on the margins, distant both physically and metaphorically from the civilized world and are named individually as notorious or unruly. Counter to these topographies of ‘problem’ Aboriginal subjects and spaces, a means of re-territorializing indigenous space has been the appropriation of maps within indigenous communities to document sacred sites, burial grounds, archaeological sites, oral histories of environmental management and cultural knowledge of place (Chapin, Lamb and Threkleld 2005). In other words, the map is reconceptualized as an ‘open’ construct, rather than one that by definition requires containment, subsequently allowing more possibilities for indigenous and other voices to shape alternative strategies to re-territorialize space. These are often practical initiatives, emanating from within indigenous communities (and sometimes in partnership with academic geographers and anthropologists), using geographic information systems (GIS), mental mapping and participatory mapping techniques – counter-mapping projects that seek to appropriate technologies of state surveillance to produce alternative ways of depicting and thus legitimizing indigenous territorial connections (Sletto 2009). Yet as Sparke illustrates through two Canadian examples (the first a legal case over native sovereignty; the second the production of a major national atlas, which sought to incorporate First Nations cartography into its depictions of the Canadian nation), the ‘the chronic persistence into the present of colonial assumptions about cartography’ served to reproduce ‘the ambivalent (post)colonial power relations of cartography’ (1998: 463). In South Africa, mapping efforts undertaken as part of post-1994 land reforms (with the intention of contributing to the decolonization of the nation) contradictorily also changed the nature of communal rights in land, effectively promoting privatization and the encroachment of Western systems of property ownership (Benjaminsen and Sjaastad 2008). Maps work both for and against colonialism. Such initiatives around GIS technologies sit within an increasingly creative field of methodological and empirical diversity spawned by postcolonial and feminist influences in geography. Community radio, music, film and visual art have been discussed as ‘popular geopolitical’ manifestations of indigenous selfdetermination movements (Dunbar-Hall and Gibson 2004). Meanwhile the related, feminist assertion that researchers must articulate their relationality in research has triggered much debate about how to proceed with research on indigenous issues or themes (Howitt and Suchet 2006; Lawrence and Adams 2005). A semi-formal boundary has been drawn around indigenous methodologies – as a way of doing 430

Indigenous Geopolitics research that prioritizes indigenous worldviews and diverse means of knowledge construction, which emphasizes collaboration and benefit-sharing with research subjects (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999).

Conclusions: From self-determination to relations of care? It could be argued, as does Glassman (2006), that there is no end to the processes of primitive accumulation Marx assumed would be complete once the entire world had been subjugated to systems of industrial production: indigenous peoples, peasant communities and artisans worldwide continue to suffer the politics of appropriation of their land and resources for capitalist expansion. As Shaw, Herman and Dobbs succinctly argued, ‘issues of dispossession – particularly of lands – remain largely unresolved’ (2006: 267). As a matter of urgency critical geopolitics ought to do more to explore issues pertaining to material resources, cultural survival and the means of sustenance and livelihood for indigenous peoples (such as hunting, grazing, harvesting rights to access ceremonial sites), within a geopolitical framework of continued dispossession of land (Lawrence and Adams 2005). Indeed, new forms of dispossession have been made possible by advanced technologies of capitalism, such as biopiracy – which entails the corporate copyrighting and trademarking of plant genetic material and traditional knowledge about environmental resources for industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, food and arts and crafts (D. Robinson 2010). Even in the case of the European Union, which seeks to embrace philosophies of ‘grass roots’ empowerment of indigenous peoples through its intellectual property policies, it nonetheless pursues intellectual-property reform in a manner that necessitates that indigenous peoples conform with the regimes for intellectual-property protection that favour European corporate interests (D. Robinson and Gibson 2011). When not subject to direct theft of cultural and biological resources, indigenous communities from as far afield as the American West and Fiji now also must negotiate aggressive commercialization and appropriation of their ‘native’ iconography and creative arts, turning customary expressions into artifact and commodity manufacture – from t-shirts to rugs, didgeridoos to totem poles (Meyer and Royer 2001). The struggle indigenous peoples face against exploitation of their land and cultural resources by others is as real and current as ever. Such struggles beg analysis from political geographers, but not just as territorial contestations ‘on the periphery’. Indigenous questions could more frequently capture attention within critical geopolitics more generally, as part of broader attempts to engage with visions for alternative political spaces (see Dodds, Kuus and Sharp, ‘Introduction’, above). Claims to indigeneity underscore political and territorial claims, and indigenous peoples are actors who spatialize local, national and international geopolitics, and in so doing shape power and politics at these scales. Claims to indigeneity are also woven into broader geopolitical transformations in the sense of ‘who belongs’ to particular territorialities (within 431

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics debates as diverse as refugees, multiculturalism and the return to majority rule in South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa). To be indigenous is therefore an important ontological supposition upon which sovereignty more broadly is conceptualized. Efforts to dissect the operation of state power over territory thus need to acknowledge the variable and mutable geopolitics of indigenization strategies. Additionally, there is much to learn from current postcolonial debates about the embodied nature of academic knowledge production, including that of critical geopolitical knowledges. Indigenous scholars have insisted on efforts to decolonize the discipline from within, but this agenda has barely begun. Noxolo, Raghuram and Madge argue that geography has – even within its imperial ‘core’ in Britain – become a postcolonial discipline par excellence (2008: 156). But old positionalities of power and validity remain stubbornly in place – reflected in research assessment exercises, journal ranking and citation lists, and criteria for academic promotion. The discipline now accommodates women and people of colour – ‘but on what terms?’ Indigenous geographical scholars have to be schooled, to ‘follow the rules’, to ‘change’, or they will ‘remain vulnerable’. The investment that academic geography has in reason, control, and rationality means that the seepages, the filtrations, and the flows … must be controlled and rationalized. The filters change as do the vectors of inclusion but the terms of inclusion are already set. The ‘infiltrators’ must follow the rules. (Noxolo, Raghuram and Madge 2008: 156) There is, in other words, a geopolitics of academic knowledge production itself, in which distant and seemingly marginal ‘case studies’ of indigenous peoples struggle for visibility against knowledge about critical geopolitics produced in the ‘heartlands’ of the UK and North America, from which seemingly ‘universal’ theoretical advances emanate (J. Robinson 2003). It remains imperative to address the indigenous question at the heart of empire – in US and British critical geopolitics, for instance – as part of fledging attempts to decenter the persistent colonial topography of knowledge production. Deep within the centers of geopolitical power, the ghosts of conquest linger. Could critical geopolitics become one place from which to vanquish such ghosts? Postcolonial geographers argue for dialogue between forms of knowledge generated not from or beyond a gravitational centre of geographical scholarship, but from multiple positions, rhizomatically, emphasizing the ‘locatedness’ of theories (J. Robinson 2003). This sense of locatedness strikes me as implicit in much critical geopolitics, even if indigenous peoples remain problematically overlooked. Serious integration of analysis of indigenous questions into Anglo-American critical geopolitics is both possible and necessary, if the discipline is to move decisively beyond its conceptual primitivism and empirical flatness (see Dodds, Kuus and Sharp, ‘Introduction’, above). But even then, as Richa Nagar argues, acknowledging positionality itself is not enough: instead she calls for a form of feminist and postcolonial practice 432

Indigenous Geopolitics that enrolls collaboration beyond and across difficult political and intellectual borderlands (2003). Collaboration is, Nagar argues, difficult – and complicating this is a politics of identity and identification within indigenous communities: who is indigenous? Who speaks for this indigenous community? Such politics have in some cases become traumatic (as in Australian native-title and land rights campaigns), bound up in legal hearings and questions of authority and speaking positions. Wary of how this might thwart redressing injustices past and present, Raghuram, Madge and Noxolo offer an alternative way forward, focused less on definitions and problems of identity and category politics, and more on care and responsibility as modes of understanding the relational interdependency between people, temporally and spatially, in a postcolonial world (2009). This encourages project-based coalitions, based on recognition of commonality among indigenous groups as well as accommodation of difference – much like the anticapitalist campaigns of the 1970s. It involves deploying strategic essentialisms at times, where necessary (Cox 1993), but also exploring what Deborah Bird Rose calls ‘forms of countermodernity’ informed by mutuality, connectivity, relational entanglements and care. This is an ethics for decolonization premised on ‘engaged responsiveness in the present’ that seeks nothing less than ‘the unmaking of the regimes of violence that promote the disconnection of moral accountability from time and place’ (Rose 2004: 213–14). Indigenous peoples are, through diverse political movements over land, cultural identity and sovereignty, already doing exactly this, providing a blueprint that awaits deeper recognition within the field of critical geopolitics.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Brookfield, H.C., 1972. Colonialism, Development and Independence: The Case of the Melanesian Islands in the South Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cajete, G., 2000. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers. Cant, G., 1995. ‘Reclaiming land, reclaiming guardianship: Role of the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal in Aotearoa/New Zealand’. Aboriginal History 19: 79–108. Castree, N., 2004. ‘Differential geographies: Place, indigenous rights and “local” resources’. Political Geography 23: 133–67. Chapin, M., Z. Lamb and B. Threkleld, 2005. ‘Mapping indigenous lands’. Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 619–38. Coe, P., 1994. ‘The struggle for Aboriginal sovereignty’. Social Alternatives 13: 10–12. Cox, L., 1993. Kotahitanga: The Search for Maori Political Unity. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Cowlishaw, G., 1999. Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Davis, S.L., and V. Prescott, 1992. Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Deloria, V., Jr., and C.M. Lytle, 1984. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. Austin: University of Texas Press. Domosh, M., 2010. ‘The world was never flat: Early global encounters and the messiness of empire’. Progress in Human Geography 34: 419–35. Doxtater, M.G., 2004. ‘Indigenous knowledge in the decolonial era’. American Indian Quarterly 28: 618–33. Dunbar-Hall, P., and C. Gibson, 2004. Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places. Sydney: UNSW Press. Engelstad, D., and J. Bird (eds), 1992. Nation to Nation: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Future of Canada. Ontario: Anansi Press. Feldman, A., 2002. ‘Making space at the nations’ table: Mapping the transformative geographies of the international indigenous peoples’ movement’. Social Movement Studies 1: 31–46. Garfield, S., 2001. Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians 1937–1988. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gibson, C., 1998. ‘“We sing our home, we dance our land”: Indigenous selfdetermination and contemporary geopolitics in Australian popular music’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16: 163–84. —— 1999a. ‘Rebuilding the Jawoyn Nation: Regional agreements, spatial politics and Aboriginal self-determination in Katherine, NT’. Australian Aboriginal Studies 1: 10–25. —— 1999b. ‘Cartographies of the colonial and capitalist state: A geopolitics of indigenous self-determination in Australia’. Antipode 31: 45–79. Gilbert, K., 1993. Aboriginal Sovereignty: Justice, Law and Land. Canberra: Burrambinga Press.

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Indigenous Geopolitics Glassman, J., 2006. ‘Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by “extra-economic” means’. Progress in Human Geography 30: 608–25. Harley, J.B., 1988. ‘Maps, knowledge and power’. In D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277–312. Howard, M.C., 1988. The Impact of the International Mining Industry on Native Peoples. Sydney: University of Sydney. Howitt, R., and J. Douglas, 1983. Aborigines and Mining Companies in Northern Australia. Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative. —— and S. Suchet, 2006. ‘Rethinking the building blocks: Ontological pluralism and the idea of “management”’. Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography 88: 323–35. —— J. Connell and P. Hirsch (eds), 1996. Resources, Nations and Indigenous Peoples: Case Studies from Australasia, Melanesia and Southeast Asia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Huggan, G., 1989. ‘Decolonizing the map: Post-colonialism, post-structuralism and the cartographic connection’. Ariel 20: 4. Jacobs, J.M., 1993. ‘“Shake ’im this country”: The mapping of the Aboriginal sacred in Australia: the case of Coronation Hill. In P. Jackson and J. Penrose (eds), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. London: UCL Press, pp. 100–118. Johnson, J.T., and B. Murton, 2007. ‘Re/placing native science: Indigenous voices in contemporary constructions of nature’. Geographical Research 45: 121–9. Jull, P., 1994. ‘Indigenous progress abroad: Self-determination, sovereignty and self-government’. Social Alternatives 13: 25–8. Karppi, K., 2001. ‘Encountering different territorialities: Political fragmentation of the Sami homeland’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92: 394–404. Knight, D.B., 1988. ‘Self-determination for indigenous peoples: The context for change’. In R.J. Johnston, D.B. Knight and E. Kofman (eds), Nationalism, Selfdetermination and Political Geography. London: Croom Helm, pp. 117–34. Kymlicka, W., 2000. ‘American multiculturalism and the “nations within”’. In D. Ivison, P. Patton and W. Sanders (eds), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 216–36. Langton, M., 1993. ‘Rum, seduction and death: “Aboriginality” and alcohol’. Oceania 3: 195–206. Lawrence, R., 2007. ‘Corporate social responsibility, supply-chains and Saami claims: Tracing the political in the Finnish forestry industry’. Geographical Research 45: 167–76. —— and M. Adams, 2005. ‘First Nations and the politics of indigeneity: Australian perspectives on indigenous peoples, resource management and global rights’. Australian Geographer 36: 257–65. —— and C. Gibson, 2007. ‘Obliging indigenous citizens? Shared responsibility agreements in Australian Aboriginal communities’. Cultural Studies 21: 650–71. Levine, H., and M. Henare, 1995. ‘Mana Maori Motuhake: Maori self-determination’. Pacific Viewpoint 35: 193–208. 435

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Manus, P., 2005. ‘Sovereignty, self-determination, and environment-based cultures: The emerging voice of indigenous peoples in international law’. Wisconsin International Law Journal 23: 553–642. Markovitz, I.L., 1977. Power and Class in Africa. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Marx, K., 1976 [1887]. Capital, vol. 1. London: Pelican. Mercer, D., 1997. ‘Aboriginal self-determination and indigenous land title in postMabo Australia’. Political Geography 16: 189–212. Meyer, C.J., and D. Royer (eds), 2001. Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mitchell, T., 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nagar, R., 2003. ‘Collaboration across borders: Moving beyond positionality’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24: 356–72. Nash, C., 2008. ‘Book review symposium: Race and the Crisis of Humanism’. Progress in Human Geography 32: 463–72. Nash, M., 1970. ‘The impact of mid-nineteenth century economic change upon the Indians of Middle America’. In M. Mörner (ed.), Race and Class in Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 170–83. Nicol, H.N., 2010. ‘Reframing sovereignty: Indigenous peoples and Arctic states’. Political Geography 29: 78–80. Noxolo, P., P. Raghuram and C. Madge, 2008. ‘“Geography is pregnant” and “geography’s milk is flowing”: Metaphors for a postcolonial discipline?’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 146–68. Pollard, J., et al., 2009. ‘Economic geography under postcolonial scrutiny’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34: 137–42. Raghuram, P., C. Madge and P. Noxolo, 2009. ‘Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world’. Geoforum 40: 5–13. Reynolds, H., 1989. Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Richardson, B.J., D. Craig and B. Boer, 1995. Regional Agreements for Indigenous Lands and Cultures in Canada. Darwin: Australian National University. Riseth, J.A., 2007. ‘An indigenous perspective on national parks and Sámi reindeer management in Norway’. Geographical Research 45: 177–85. Robinson, D., 2010. Confronting Biopiracy: Challenges, Cases and International Debates. London: Earthscan. —— and C. Gibson, 2011. ‘Governing knowledge: Discourses and tactics of the European Union in trade-related intellectual property negotiations’. Antipode 43: 1883–1910. Robinson, J., 2003. ‘Postcolonialising geography: Tactics and pitfalls’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24: 273–89. Rose, D.B., 2004. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: UNSW Press. Rowse, T., 1998. White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Indigenous Geopolitics Shaw, W., R.D.K. Herman and R. Dobbs, 2006. ‘Encountering indigeneity: Re-imagining and decolonizing geography’. Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography 88: 267–76. Shields, R., 2003. ‘Geopolitical spatialisations, critical geopolitics and critical cultural studies’. Geopolitics 8: 204–11. Sidaway, J., 2000a, ‘Recontextualising positionality: Geographical research and academic fields of power’. Antipode 32: 260–70. —— 2000b. ‘Postcolonial geographies: An exploratory essay’. Progress in Human Geography 24: 591–612. Sletto, B., 2009. ‘“Indigenous people don’t have boundaries”: Reborderings, fire management, and productions of authenticities in indigenous landscapes’. Cultural Geographies 16: 253–77. Sparke, M., 1998. ‘A map that roared and an original atlas: Canada, cartography, and the narration of a nation’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88: 463–95. Stewart-Harawira, M., 2005. The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization. Wellington: Huia Publishers. Suchet, S., 2002. ‘“Totally wild”? Colonising discourses, indigenous knowledges and managing wildlife’. Australian Geographer 33: 141–57. Thomas, N., 1994. Colonialism’s Culture. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Tuhiwai-Smith, L., 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. United Nations, 1960. Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonized Countries and Peoples, General Assembly Resolution 1514 (xv), 16 Dec. Weir, J.K., 2009. Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Young, I.M., 2000. ‘Hybrid democracy: Iroquois federalism and the postcolonial project’. In D. Ivison, P. Patton and W. Sanders (eds), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 237– 58.

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23

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Journalists Alasdair Pinkerton

Introduction Journalists occupy an ambiguous position in the popular imagination. On one hand, they exist in perennial competition with politicians, lawyers and estate agents for the dubious distinction of being the most distrusted and disliked profession. Successive polls conducted in the UK, for example, place journalists at the very bottom of a league table when measured by perceived ‘trustworthiness’. On the other hand, the exploits of journalists in exposing corruption, highlighting humanitarian catastrophes and reporting from war zones, have been (and continue to be) revered and celebrated. Individual correspondents are valorised, often by the profession itself, as modern-day adventurer-heroes dedicated to bringing news stories to the attention of domestic and international audiences in a dispassionate and objective manner (Knightley 2004). Journalists have shown themselves perfectly capable of mobilising a view of the reporter, especially the foreign correspondent, as a hyper-mobile agent of knowledge gathering and dissemination, and even agent provocateur of public opinion. One hardly need look beyond the televised reports of CNN’s Anderson Cooper following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haitian earthquake in January 2010 or those of the veteran BBC World Affairs Editor, John Simpson – who, dressed in a burka, ‘slipped easily behind enemy lines’ in Afghanistan during 2001 – for evidence of journalists whose exploits in ‘getting the story’ have become as much part of the popular imagination as the events they sought to report (Simpson 2001). But while Cooper’s reporting from Haiti has been subject to criticism from some quarters for transgressing the line between ‘coverage’ and ‘exploitation’, others, including the New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley, argue that journalists of his ilk should be praised as ‘the heralds of the fund-raising effort’ and as ‘pillar[s] of the rescue mission, on the scene to do more than just gather information’ (Stanley 2010). Cooper’s Haiti reports – for all their macho aesthetic, lapses in judgement and self-promotion – have been credited with sustaining US public attention on the humanitarian consequences of natural disaster (often in graphic detail) and also for ‘goading’ government into action (Martin 2010). This is by no means a straightforward claim: it brings into question individual and

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics institutional subscription to the principles of objectivity, neutrality, detachment and impartiality, which have often been used to define ‘journalistic tradition’ (Hanitzsch 2007: 372). More fundamentally it assumes a journalistic power to act upon public and elite audiences and even a capacity – one might say an ‘agency’ – to influence public perceptions of events, government policies and geopolitical frameworks. Given that the academic sub-discipline of critical geopolitics has been forged, notes Dalby, through its desire to ask ‘fundamental questions of how power works and might be challenged’ (1991: 266), this seems to be a productive intellectual position from which issues of power and agency – and their reciprocal relationship with journalism – may be tackled. In pursuance of this aim, this chapter begins by locating journalists within the established critical geopolitics literature and, initially, within the growing corpus that examines so called ‘professionals of geopolitics’. This elite group is composed of academics, policy consultants and pundits ‘who regularly participate in and comment on international affairs’ and who ‘command the institutional and cultural resources to project particular geopolitical arguments as informed and authoritative’ (Kuus 2008: 2062). It is proposed that this group could be usefully expanded to incorporate journalists. But our understanding of who and what constitutes ‘a journalist’ is under constant assault, and this chapter explicates (i) the increasingly dynamic and mobile nexus between journalists and policy-makers / journalistic practice and public statements of ‘geopolitics’, and (ii) the role of mainstream journalists in challenging official geopolitical doctrine, particularly those journalists who subscribe to more active, interventionist ideologies. The chapter subsequently engages with a range of conceptual models that examine the ‘politico-media complex’ and, in particular, those interactions between journalists (and the media more generally), governments and foreign policy priorities. The nature of this interaction has been long debated within critical media studies and elsewhere but has, so far, had little resonance within geography, a disciplinary lacunae that this chapter seeks to redress. The chapter then concludes by sketching a research agenda for exploring geopolitical agency in a rapidly shifting journalistic/media environment.

Journalists and geopolitical discourse Since the emergence of ‘critical geopolitics’ as a research perspective during the early 1990s, the news media in its various different guises has been subject to sustained scholarly attention from political geographers. Newspapers (Dittmer and Parr 2011; Falah, Flint and Mamadouh 2006; McFarlane & Hay 2003; Robison 2004), editorial cartoons (Dodds 1996; 2007), television news (Luke and Ó Tuathail 1997), photojournalism (Campbell 2007) and radio broadcasts (Pinkerton 2008; Pinkerton and Dodds 2009) have each been examined so as to better understand their role in constructing, reinforcing, undermining and sometimes satirising spatial representations of global politics. Running through much of this work has 440

Journalists been an interest in examining, as Rachel Hughes identifies, ‘geopolitical ‘visions’, ‘images’, international political ‘scenes’ and ‘imaginative geographies’ to show how these representations and constructions are integral to the functioning of geopolitical orders’ (2007: 991). But while the material output of journalistic endeavour (the texts, the photographs and the audio-visuals) have provoked considerable scholarly interest, the crucial role of journalists (among others) in their production, interpretation and circulation has been somewhat occluded behind a kaleidoscope of geopolitical ‘visions’ and ‘imaginaries’. Instead, presidents, prime ministers, security intellectuals and public servants have dominated as actors, although Gerard Ó Tuathail’s examination of Maggie O’Kane’s ‘anti-geopolitical eye’ during the Bosnian war (Ó Tuathail 1996b) and Francois Debrix’s analysis of inter alia the journalist-cum-‘pundit of statecraft’, Bill O’Reilly, post-9/11 (2008) are some notable exceptions (see also Farish 2001). As Kuus’ recent reviews of critical geopolitics have noted, ‘if we understand geopolitics as the study of the geographical assumptions and designations that enter into the making of world politics … we need to examine carefully those who make and popularize these designations and assumptions’ (Kuus 2008: 2062, emphasis added). Through an examination of (i) the institutions and traditions of journalism, (ii) contemporary journalistic practices and (iii) the experiences of individual journalists – particularly those with a brief to cover ‘foreign affairs’ – the interpretation/production of just such everyday geographical ‘assumptions’ (by journalists) may be brought into elision with strategic geopolitical analyses (mediated through journalists) and, ultimately, the determination of official foreign policy responses (in interaction with journalists). In this context, it is important to question the extent to which journalists – whether dedicated ‘war correspondents’ or those with a broader remit in covering international events – might be considered ‘mediators’ for, ‘watchdogs’ of, or embedded within, institutionalised (geo)political power. Whichever it may be, the seeming capacity of journalists to (inter)act within and between the three inter-related ‘spheres’ of geopolitical discourse – the formal, the practical and the popular (Dittmer 2010; see Ó Tuathail 1996a; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 2006) – challenges their straightforward ‘location’ as actors within this model, while reinforcing how porous the three ‘distinctions’ remain. As Kuus and Dittmer suggest, these categories are as broad as they are indistinct from one another, but have nonetheless been considered heuristically ‘useful’ in interpreting ‘multiple intertwined levels of geopolitical discourses’ (Kuus 2008: 2063; see also Dittmer 2010). In the particular case of journalists, these ‘spheres’ highlight a multilayered agency in the assembly/disassembly of geopolitical discourses.

Objectivity, attachment and anti-geopolitics The 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, between 1992 and 1995, was one of the more important of our contemporary ethical crucibles. It was a time when, in Martin Bell’s words, journalism became a ‘moral 441

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics profession,’ and when journalism won a decisive battle against its great rival, politics. Neither profession has fully recovered its equilibrium: many of the politicians who think about these matters still feel guilt, and many of the journalists still feel smug. (Lloyd 2004) If journalism in the post-9/11 world has experienced an ‘explosion of commentary’ and the rise of the journalist–pundit, the 1990s were marked by a crisis of journalistic ethics that led some journalists to abandon traditional ‘objectivity’ and, instead, embrace, a moral, campaigning, ‘attached’ journalism. Almost a decade before FOX News and Bill O’Reilly campaigned for US military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, Western journalists operating in Bosnia sought to persuade their governments to do the same in the Balkans. The ideological motivations underlying these respective campaigns were radically opposed (as we will see), and yet each sought to mobilise ‘media power’ to advance their adopted foreign policy priorities. These case studies—which, together, are responsible for much of the scholarly work on journalists within the sub-discipline political geography—bring into question journalistic adherence to concepts of ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ and highlight the role of ‘frontline’ journalists and correspondents in sustaining and reinforcing powerful geographical framings of people of places. Writing in 1998 – notably before the meteoric rise of FOX News – David Minditch, in his study of US journalism declared: ‘if American journalism were a religion, as it has been called from time to time, its supreme deity would be “objectivity”’ (1998: 1). Objectivity has hardly been immutable in the modern experience of US journalism, however: the Watergate scandal and the political obfuscation around Vietnam engendered, by the mid-1970s, a more nuanced understanding of journalistic practice and rendered objectivity as an ethical framework with certain important delimitations. ‘The parameters of modern journalistic objectivity’, as Cunningham has recorded, ‘allow reporters quite a bit of leeway to analyze, explain, and put news in context, thereby helping guide readers and viewers through the flood of information’ (2003: 27). In the European context, the Bosnian War (1992–95) was critical in convincing Martin Bell, the veteran BBC war and foreign correspondent, that even delimited notions of an informed but dispassionate objectivity was contributing to a kind of ‘bystander journalism’ that had shown itself to be ‘unequal to the challenges of the times’ (1998b: 102). Judging the objective journalism of his training to be ill equipped to deal with the level of brutality and violence he witnessed, Bell engaged in a self-proclaimed ‘heresy’ against professional journalistic discourses. ‘I see nothing object-like in the relationship between the reporter and the event’, he admitted. ‘Rather, I use my eyes and ears and mind and store of experience [from Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola, Nigeria and Northern Ireland] which is surely the very essence of the subjective’. The alternative he proposed was a less passive, more engaged model that rejected the bystander/observer approach to journalism, and instead acknowledged the journalist as an active agent in the alleviation of suffering and the production of news as a moral truth. The ‘journalism of attachment’, as Bell called it, also inscribed distinct geographies of care and moral obligation: 442

Journalists It doesn’t take sides, any more than the Red Cross takes sides. It doesn’t back one people or army or faction against another. It is not in the backing business, but the truth-telling business. It is a journalism that is aware of the moral ground on which it operates, that cares as well as knows, and that will not stand neutrally between good and evil, the victim and oppressor. It knows that, especially in television, we are not apart from the world. We are part of it. What we do has consequences … . The relatively benign and altered landscape that we present in TV news is one which the old style of neutral and dispassionate journalism can operate quite comfortably. No need to be unflinching because nothing is left that it has to flinch from. No need to be compassionate because nothing is left that it has to care about. What remains? Neither violence nor bloodshed not suffering nor grief, but only a passing show, an acceptable spectacle. Is this what we want from our window on the world, that it also be our filter? (Bell 1998b: 103) Bell’s censuring of his own profession is all the more pointed given parallel condemnation of UK and international foreign policy responses (or perceived lack thereof) during the Bosnian conflict: mainstream journalists and politicians each tainted by seeming inattentiveness, inaction and a failure to acknowledge a moral commitment to the (mainly) Muslim victims of the war. ‘Attached’ journalists have sought to redress this apparent moral imbalance by pressing Western governments and institutions to act responsibly on the world stage and through the mobilisation of alternative geographical framings of particular places. The CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour came to define this kind of moral challenge during a live discussion programme when she berated US President Bill Clinton for his perceived failure to articulate a strong policy on Bosnia. The Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy was equally critical of official responses to the Bosnian crisis. ‘Neutrality is still the currency of the Western response to calamity and genocide’, he noted, although he also conceded that, ‘nowhere [is this] more evident than in the media’ (Vulliamy 1999). And yet, this apparent ‘neutrality’ has, it is argued, become a canvas onto which dominant topes can be projected. As has been observed of other conflicts – including Vietnam (Hallin 1986), El Salvador (Pedelty 1995) and the Gulf War (Jensen 1992) – news reporting may broadly accord with the principles of objective journalism, and yet ‘views of official [government and military] sources’ are subtly, often unintentionally, privileged and enacted as a frame for journalistic representations of conflict (Hammond 2002: 178). For Bell, the majority of reporting from Bosnia retreated to a techno-scientific caricature of war and genocide that was concerned more with discussion of military formations, strategies, tactics and weapons systems than with the people who provoked, fought and suffered (1997: 15–16). Bell, however, appears less sensitive to the power of geopolitical framings of Bosnia and the Balkans, although his BBC colleague, Allan Little, has described with bewilderment the general consensus ‘that had taken hold among British – and Western European – people in general’ during the early 1990s:

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics That the Balkan tribes [sic] had been killing each other for centuries and that there was nothing that could be done. It was a lie that Western governments at the time liked. It got the Western world off the hook. When I and others argued that you could not blame all sides equally, the moral implications were that the world should – as it later did – take sides. We were denounced – derided even – by government ministers as laptop bombardiers. (Little 2001) In challenging Western geopolitical scripts of the Balkans – as a site of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ and ‘a cauldron of historic resentments and violence’, among numerous others (Ó Tuathail 1996b; Robison 2004) – attached journalists have been accused of supplanting their own geographical scripts that have sought to (i) simplify, stereotype and reduce the conflict into a more manageable, consumable morsels of news fodder; while (ii) making a compelling case for international humanitarian intervention. In the Netherlands, for example, a ‘good guys versus bad guys’ binary in the media between 1991 and 1995 is said to have resonated with latent memories of Nazi concentration camps, albeit with Serbian forces in the role of the Nazis (Ruigrok 2008: 293). Similar resonances played out on the front pages of British newspapers, as rival geographical and geopolitical imaginaries collided on the newsstands and coffee tables of the UK. As the political geographer Bridget Robison has noted, the Daily Mirror (7 Aug. 1992) reproduced the now iconic image of Fikret Alic, a Bosnian Muslim behind barbed wire at the Trnopolje camp, under the banner headline ‘Belsen 92’. The associated article went further: ‘Now the names Omarska and Trnopolje have been carved alongside Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz on the bloody tombstone marking man’s inhumanity in war’ (Robison 2004: 388). While the image of Fikret Alic subsequently attracted international controversy (see Campbell 2002), these and other headlines had the effect of continually producing and reproducing Bosnia as a ‘permanent policy dilemma’ – a place ‘between a holocaust and a quagmire’ – in the Western imagination (Ó Tuathail 1996b: 173). Drawing upon reports dispatched from Bosnia by Guardian journalist Maggie O’Kane (1992–95), Gearóid Ó Tuathail has referred to the evolution of an ‘antigeopolitical eye’ as ‘a way of seeing that disturbs the enframing of Bosnia in Western geopolitical discourse as a place beyond our universe of moral responsibility’ (1996b: 171). O’Kane’s direct, personal, moral and often angry style gave power to her reporting, gave voice to the victims and emphasised the human consequences of war. They equally, challenged, according to Ó Tuathail, the hegemonic visions of the ‘geopolitical eye’ which sought to structure visions of Bosnia (and elsewhere) through the contemporary discourses of foreign policy. In much the same way as ‘attached journalists’ resist the hegemonic straightjacket of hard-nosed objectivity (and the representational restrictions that this enforces), ‘anti-geopolitics’ similarly resists and challenges dominant ‘geopolitical interests’, ‘states’, ‘elites’ and their geopolitical representations of place and space (Kuus 2010: 694; Routledge 2006; 2008). By resisting representations of the Balkans as a ‘quagmire’ and by frequently addressing her dispatches directly to the then prime minister, John Major, O’Kane

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Journalists (and other attached journalists) intensified the moral proximity between an increasingly permeable ‘them’ and ‘us’ (Ó Tuathail 1996b). While the practical geopolitical consequences of O’Kane’s dispatches (and those of other attached journalists) are far from clear, there was a coincidental build-up in public support for military intervention (Ruigrok 2008). Ruigrok provides little evidence of the extent to which news reportage (which is analysed for evidence of stereotyping and good/bad framing) influenced public or elite reactions to the Bosnian conflict, although her work is suggestive of (attached) journalists desires to provoke particular foreign policy reactions – in this case military intervention in support of the Bosnian Muslims – through their reporting. This goes beyond traditional interpretations of journalistic practice, and even that of ‘attached’ journalism, by suggesting a functional and goal-oriented model in which geopolitical agency is necessarily (if not explicitly) inscribed. But even if we retreat from suggesting that a ‘clear goal’ was pursued by all attached journalists as part of some kind of coordinated campaign in the Bosnian context, we are nonetheless confronted with a model of journalistic agency that, inter alia, (i) sought to interpret, codify and apportion moral responsibility for perceived atrocities, (ii) challenged official policies and geopolitical framings imposed on Bosnia and the Balkans, (iii) was unafraid to demonstrate emotional responses – often anger – towards unfolding events and, in so doing, (iv) clearly delineated ‘an unknown region’ through a lens and lexicon of geopolitics to the pubic. But while classical ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ may draw their discursive authority from a range of institutional and cultural investments – membership of think tanks, the possession of titles suggestive of academic distinction and so on (Kuus 2008; 2010) – the authority of attached journalists (as with other frontline correspondents) rests on their ‘presence’, on ‘being here’, and their ‘truth-telling’ as ‘eyewitnesses’. Although issues of ‘vision’ and representational practice are important here, this distinction goes beyond the simple juxtaposition of a “god’s eye view”, an oftclaimed asset of intellectuals of statecraft (Ó Tuathail 1996a), and the “frontline view” of journalists. As Ó Tuathail observed, O’Kane’s writings exposed, if nothing else, ‘the moral quagmire within the West’s own imagination of itself’ (1996b), but they also reveal an anti-geopolitical imaginary of journalists, journalism and moral representations of space and place which are grounded, quite literally, in the embodied experiences of journalists themselves.

Journalists as ‘professionals’ and ‘pundits’ of geopolitics ‘The notion of “intellectuals of statecraft”  refers to a whole community of state bureaucrats, leaders, foreign policy experts and advisors throughout the world who comment upon, influence and conduct the activities of statecraft’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 2006: 96). This is a community that has, during the twentieth century, expanded beyond the realm of statecraft ‘practitioners’ to include those who ‘strategise’ and those who claim to be able to inform policy-makers about ‘how 445

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the world is’ and how a state’s power and influence may be maximised (Dittmer 2010:13). Mapping this development onto the spheres of critical geopolitics, we can see that intellectuals of statecraft reside within, and reciprocally buttress, ‘formal’ and ‘practical’ geopolitical discourses, while simultaneously blurring these definitional boundaries. As Dittmer observed, this porosity goes beyond ‘the rhetorical’, as evidenced by Condoleezza Rice’s transformation from Stanford University political scientist into George W. Bush’s second Secretary of State and now back again (2010). While many of the practices of modern nation states have permeated through everyday life and everyday people, specialised elites retain ‘a disproportionate power’ over foreign policy (Kuus 2007; 2008: 2064). These elite assemblages have proven to be adaptable and mobile and have extended beyond the realm of ‘elected politicians and appointed government officials’ to include figures ‘who gain social acceptance for their presumed expertise in international affairs’ (Kuus 2008: 2064). An increasing number of journalists appear to operate within this influential elite, and while this may be suggestive of a latent journalistic agency in the formal practices of statecraft, it may also be reflective an increasingly mobile and unstable definition of ‘the journalist’ as divisible from ‘the pundit’ and ‘the commentator’. There is also a growing sense that journalists and policy-makers are, increasingly, defying straightforward and discrete definition, as individuals move – that is to say relocate themselves professionally and geographically – between the political establishment and the institution of journalism. In the UK, both Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy) and Boris Johnson (Mayor of London and former Conservative MP) were journalists before entering frontline politics. Moving in the other direction, the former Republican congressman, Joe Scarborough, now hosts a popular morning politics programme on US cable channel, MSNBC. These are just a few high-profile examples of a phenomenon observed by Deborah Potter in American Journalism Review: The line between journalism and politics has been fuzzy for a long time. So many people have crossed it, some of them more than once, that’s it’s obvious there is nothing like a firewall between the two professions. (Potter 2005) In place of a firewall, Potter suggests that a ‘revolving door’ might be a more appropriate visual allusion, one ‘though which politicians and journalists have passed on occasion, changing roles as they moved from side to side’. While this might not be an unusual pattern of behaviour for policy-makers – and particularly elected politicians – who have frequently moved between the political establishment, academia, industry and media punditry (often managing to do all at once), journalists attempting similar manoeuvres are particularly open to suggestions of partisanship and a loss of journalistic objectivity (see previous section). Scholars of critical geopolitics have shown a keen interest in exploring the journalism–policy nexus and particularly those self-identified journalists who occupy the murky middle ground between professional journalism, policy and (geo)political discourse. Susan Roberts, Anna Secor and Matthew Sparke examined 446

Journalists and critiqued the ‘populist, pompous and reality-repudiating rehearsals’ of The New York Times ‘Foreign Affairs’ correspondent, Thomas Friedman, as an example of, among other things, how neoliberal geopolitical discourses are reproduced widely within the public sphere (Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003; Sparke 2007a: 121). Robert Kaplan, a national correspondent for Atlantic Monthly magazine, whose musings are frequently published in a range of newspapers and journals, ranging from the New York Times to the Washington Post, via Foreign Affairs, has also come under the scrutiny of scholars of critical geopolitics. Simon Dalby has paid critical attention to Kaplan’s Atlantic Monthly cover story from February 1994, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, in which Kaplan engages in a neo-Malthusian reading of international relations, with particular reference to resource depletion and the dissolution of global order and justice (Dalby 1996). As Dalby notes, Kaplan’s article – and other publications including his book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History – became highly influential within the Clinton administration and were frequently cited in Congressional Committee hearings during the mid-late 1990s. But if Balkan Ghosts is rumoured to have influenced Clinton’s non-interventionist stance over the Balkans, his book from 2003, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, provided a crutch to Anglo-American interventions following 9/11 by suggesting the inevitability of war, conflict and violence and the USA’s need to embrace a warrior/pagan ethos. Kaplan’s thesis, according to Debrix, amounted to the ‘glorification of war’ (2005: 1162), while Dalby has critiqued Kaplan through a more specific reading of ‘warrior geopolitics’ in the context of popular Hollywood movies (2008b). Kaplan’s influence over popular and elite interpretations of contemporary geopolitical issues (including war) and his designation as a ‘journalist’, is made all the more intriguing and problematic by his parallel careers as a consultant to the US Army’s Special Forces Regiment, the US Air Force and the US Marines and as pseudo-academic with fellowships at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and the influential Center for a New American Security (CNAS). His influence was recognised in 2009 with his appointment by Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, to the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. Thomas Barnett has been similarly influential within US government circles. While not a journalist in the traditional sense (he claims to be a ‘geo-strategist’), Barnett has nonetheless employed journalistic practices in the promotion of his world visions and global security interpretations (Dalby 2007; 2008a). First, his work regularly features in mainstream publications, most famously the March 2003 edition of Esquire magazine in which his Mackinder-inspired ‘Pentagon’s New Map’ was revealed (Barnett 2003). Secondly, he writes with a seeming journalistic desire to translate a complex set of events and processes for non-specialist audiences, in much the same way as a foreign correspondent may do while reporting from a war zone or the site of a natural disaster. Debrix uses the journalistically inspired metaphor, ‘tabloid geopolitics’, to describe the practice (employed by Barnett) of cynically setting commonsensical textual explanations alongside spectacular maps, a technique with the potential to invoke ‘a sense of fear and inevitable danger’ and lead audiences to ‘accept certain “truths” that geopolitical experts seek to impose’ (2007: 932). 447

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Barnett and others like him (who operate within a journalistic register, but who have neither journalistic training nor professional affiliation) complicate our notions of who/what constitutes a journalist, while Kaplan and Friedman demonstrate the contemporary influence of journalist–pundits on popular and elite interpretations of global affairs. Facilitated by their access to vast audiences (through the print and broadcast media), these ‘geo-pundits’ are sustained as master storytellers who deploy sensationalism and particular news ‘framings’ (often with striking geographical consequences: Africa as a ‘dark continent’ or the Arctic Ocean conceived of as region undergoing a ‘scramble for resources’) to inform and ‘move’ audiences in particular ways (see Sparke 2007b). Indeed, Debrix’s reference to a ‘sense of fear’ hints at the role that affective registers might play in inspiring fear and uncertainty among listening, reading and watching populations. In a mediascape already unsettled by the events of 9/11, the US-based television station, FOX News, and ‘pundits of geopolitics’, such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, became the ultimate pedlars of a kind of ‘tabloid terror’ in the USA. O’Reilly’s reporting of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath deployed an unrelenting focus on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) capability and literally scared many American viewers into uncritically accepting that Iraq was a clear and present danger. ‘By producing and manipulating anxiety on his show and depicting a dangerous and often terrifying world out there O’Reilly has put himself in the position of the number one tabloid pundit of statecraft in the United States today’ (Debrix 2008: 146). This is not an altogether contemporary phenomenon, however. As the work of Joanne Sharp reminds us, the journalism contained within Reader’s Digest magazine was instrumental in creating and sustaining a culture of threat and danger in the USA during the Cold War and, in so doing, reinforced the Manichean geopolitical framings that positioned the Soviet Union as a threatening Other (Sharp 2000). Perhaps less well known, however, was the involvement of the Reader’s Digest founding editor, DeWitt Wallace, in, among other things, several important defence and national-security-related committees under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, including ‘The Campaign of Truth’ that sought to both contain and undermine Soviet propaganda, using the power of media and communications.

Foreign policy and models of journalistic agency The extent to which journalists shape, determine and limit political policies and geopolitical doctrine has long been debated, particularly in the Anglo-American context. Hudson and Stainer, to take one example, point to the Crimean War (1854–56) when William Russell, erstwhile of The Times, appeared as the first war correspondent to really have had, they judge, an impact on the course of events (Hudson and Stainer 1997). In the context of the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict is often cited as a crucial, if not uncontested, moment in the emergence of a (geo) politically influential media in the USA (Hallin 1986). It was not until the 1990s, 448

Journalists however, that political scientists, media scholars, politicians and journalists really started to question and debate the influence of the media on the ‘political establishment’ in a sustained way – prompted largely by (i) the rise of CNN and other international television news channels during the early 1990s and (ii) US foreign-policy responses to events in, inter alia, Somalia (1992), Rwanda (1994), Bosnia (1992–95) and Kosovo (1999). This debate, which reached its crescendo during the mid-late 1990s, was characterised by its lively dialogue in academic journals, political biographies and policy documents and the stark dichotomy that divided the two prevailing school’s of thought: one which asserted that journalists and the news media possess significant power to ‘affect’ geopolitical outcomes through direct and indirect influence on governments’ policies (the so called ‘CNN effect’); the other claiming that the media reflected pre-established government policy by ‘manufacturing consent’ for elite interests and opinion. These conceptual models, which resonate in post 9/11 media–policy interactions, are examined and critically interpreted in this section, alongside other conceptual endeavours that seek to bridge the debate.

‘The CNN effect’ On 30 September 1993 the New York Times published an extract from the diary of the noted foreign policy expert, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and Princeton academic, George F. Kennan. The diary extract – penned while Kennan watched on television the beginnings of Operation Restore Hope (the US military operation to support the delivery of humanitarian aid to southern Somalia) in December 1992­– amounted to an excoriating commentary on US foreign policy, President George H.W. Bush and the fundamental geopolitical calculations that underpin the principle of humanitarian intervention. Many of the issues raised were classic targets of Kennan’s own brand of political realism, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he also sought to question the ‘general acceptance by Congress and the public’ of what was being done in their names in Somalia. ‘There can be no question’, Kennan surmised, ‘that the reason for this acceptance lies primarily with the exposure of the Somalia situation by the American media, above all, television. The reaction would have been unthinkable without this exposure. The reaction was an emotional one, occasioned by the sight of the suffering of the starving people in question’ (Kennan 1993). While Kennan’s statements have been subsequently criticised in scholarly journals for overstating the media’s influence on policy-making, political/media commentators have continued to attribute enormous power to individual journalists and the news media in general, claiming they possess the capacity ‘to move and shake governments’ (Cohen 1994: 9; see also Robinson 2001: 524). Dispatches from the US-based British journalist Christiane Amanpour typified this style of emotional and emotive reporting, and it is perhaps little surprise that the name of Ms Amanpour’s Atlanta-based former employer (CNN) has become associated with

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the ‘unwanted intrusion of the Fourth Estate into the policy process’ (Robinson 1999: 302). Senior statesmen and government officials, in not inconsiderable numbers, have acknowledged and reflected upon the interaction between journalism and foreign policy formation (Gilboa 2005). Asked about problems caused by the media in an interview with Time magazine in 1995, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the Secretary General of the United Nations, stated: ‘We say we have 16 members in the Security Council: the 15 members plus CNN.’ Boutros-Ghali went on to criticise journalists for their short-termism and for pandering to the limited attention span of the public. ‘Out of 20 peacekeeping operations’, he continued, ‘you are interested in one or two. Two years ago, it was Mogadishu. Now it is Sarajevo. Tomorrow it will be Haiti. And because of the limelight on one or two, I am not able to obtain the soldiers or the money or the attention for the 17 other operations’ (Ferrer 1995). Reflecting on a similar period, the former British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, criticised journalists reporting on the unfolding crisis in Bosnia for advocating Western military intervention in the regional civil war and for fashioning the public demand that ‘something must be done’ (see above) without correspondingly instilling ‘any particular willingness to risk lives or assume the thankless role of umpire or emperor’ (Hurd 1997: 11; see also Dixon 2000; Gilboa 2002). While anecdotal evidence for the CNN effect proliferated and was exaggerated during the 1990s — as communications scholars now acknowledge (see Robinson 2011) — the nature of this so-called journalistic ‘intrusion’ was under-conceptualised and the definition stretched and mangled in academic and popular discourse. One of the main issues has been the rather monolithic deployment of terms such as ‘foreign policy’ and ‘effect’, without sustained consideration for the contingent and conditional interactions between specific policy types/objectives and journalistic agency (a concept which is also bound up with issues of institutional affiliation, access, personality etc.). Steve Livingston offered a more nuanced model that envisaged three distinct modes of media– policy interaction and journalistic agency (1997, summarised in Figure 23.1).

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Journalists

Accelerant

• News media foreshortens (accelerates) decision-making response

Impediment

• Journalism reveals the often ‘grisly’ realities of foreign policy

Agenda setting

• ‘Emotional’ journalism (e.g. ‘attached’ journalism) of atrocities

times within formal institutions of statecraft as well-placed journalists are often better networked (and more responsive) than traditional ‘professionals of geopolitics’. This poses potential security/intelligence risks, particularly during periods of military conflict (e.g. CNN effect). • News media and journalists act as a conduit for formal diplomatic exchanges (media/television diplomacy) and public diplomacy initiatives, facilitating real-time interaction.

decisions, with the potential to undermine national resolve and political solidarities (e.g. Vietnam syndrome). • Due to widespread monitoring of the international media, journalistic reporting and/or speculation has the capacity to undermine the security of planned operations/policy initiatives.

and/or humanitarian crises has the potential to reorder and reshape formal policies of statecraft (e.g. inventions in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti). • Journalists challenge dominant geopolitical discourses.

Figure 23.1 Modes of journalistic agency (adapted from Livingston 1997: 2) Notwithstanding Livingston’s sensitivity to geopolitical contingencies, the complaints of Douglas Hurd, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and others may reveal more than simply a concern over the ‘global media machines’ as foreign policy ‘catalysts’ or ‘drivers’ of global politics. Rather, as Luke and Ó Tuathail observe, they also suggest ‘a fear of some loss of control over their institutional ability to envision global space and organize it into official maps of prescribed scenes and dramas’: The steady visionary symbolics of statesmen lose focus as the voyeuristic frenzy of the more-visible-than-visible captures the eyes of the audience. Official scenes lose out to the televisual obscene, because people have ‘seen’ what is really happening on TV. Global media machines can expose the unfixed seams in the official organization and presentation of global political space by international institutions and actors, creating, as Kofi Annan notes, public relations disasters. Their potential power of exposure renders the envisioning of global space into an ongoing geopolitical struggle twenty-four hours a day. (Luke and Ó Tuathail 1997: 719)

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics In this context, the CNN effect might be considered to represent more than just a series of media–policy interactions and/or provocations (not uncontested in the case of Kennan’s initial statements), however nuanced and subtly variable in their conceptualisation. Rather, what Luke and Ó Tuathail identify is nothing short of a crisis within the structures, cultures and reasoning of those who traditionally practice statecraft (within ‘practical geopolitics’) – the senior politicians, civil servants and diplomats who have long been considered as the professionals of geopolitics. The CNN effect destabilises their ‘geopolitical vision’, as the official lenses of diplomacy and foreign policy are both exposed to public examination and selectively re-focused through the mediated gaze of an observant audience.

Manufactured consent The (geo)political agency ascribed to journalists by the CNN effect theory has been brought into question by a range of journalists, academics and policy-makers. Colin Powell, while he was still Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed a less straightforward relationship between the media and the construction of foreign policy. ‘Live television coverage doesn’t change the policy’, he is quoted as saying, ‘but it does create the environment in which policy is made’ (McNulty 1993: 80). Paralleling research into media violence and youth behaviour, Powell’s observations challenge direct causality while pointing to the construction of an ‘environment’ in which policy is rendered more susceptible to influence (see C.A. Anderson and Murphy 2003). ‘Environment’, in this context, is not an unproblematic term (and could undoubtedly be the subject of further scholarly consideration), but is does seem to speak to recent conceptualisations of ‘media cultures’ and an evolving sense of mediated public spheres; although in this particular case it may be more useful to think about a mediated public–(geo)political sphere (Stevenson 2002). Alternatively, Powell may have sought to evoke a kind of affective, even excessive, atmosphere – sustained in the live (that is to say immediate and unfolding) interaction of the media, public opinion and political elite – that gives shape to geopolitical priorities and policy responses (see B. Anderson 2009). In their detailed academic study of the media–policy interaction prior to US intervention in Somalia, Livingston and Eachus went further than Powell in minimising media power, and noted that US foreign policy ‘was the result of diplomatic and bureaucratic operations, with news coverage coming in response to those decisions’ (1995: 413). Jonathon Mermin, meanwhile, has analysed news coverage and journalistic practices during the same period, and concluded that ‘journalists worked closely with governmental sources in deciding when to cover Somalia, how to frame the story, and how much coverage it deserved. The lesson of Somalia is not just about the influence of television on Washington; it is equally about the influence of Washington on television’ (Mermin, 1997: 389). Institutionalised collusion between journalists and policy-makers may seem a near-conspiratorial claim, but it is one advanced by other scholars, most particularly Herman and Chomsky (1988) and Bennett (1990). In Manufacturing 452

Journalists Consent, Chomsky and Herman examine how and why journalistic coverage of US foreign policy tends to conform to the interests of political, social and commercial elites within the United States and other ‘Western’ economies. The ‘propaganda model’ identifies five interacting ‘filters’ which are considered to determine the type of news that is presented in the news media, namely; (i) media ownership, (ii) funding of the media, (iii) sourcing, (iv) flak and (v) ideology (Herman and Chomsky 1988). Whereas ‘ideology’ broadly corresponds with well-rehearsed concepts of ‘geopolitical framing’, the first two filters bring into question the independence of the media, given that media organisations – the supposed watchdog of the elite – are owned, funded (through advertising revenue) and guided by institutions and individuals with vested interests, whether commercial or political, in the very news stories that are printed or broadcast. This, it is argued, has lead to the constricted delivery of news deemed to be too critical, too controversial or so disturbing that the ‘buying mood’ of audiences might be interfered with (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 17). As Herring and Robinson neatly put it, ‘money does not only talk: it also silences’ (2003: 556). In terms of journalistic practice and geopolitics, the issue of ‘sourcing’ is of crucial importance. Here, it is noted that in order to satisfy an increasingly 24-hour media (particularly on television) with a steady stream of news copy, journalists have, overwhelmingly, become dependent on elite sources of information. Government press conferences and media briefings, invited interviews with ministers and officials, or corporate product launches have the power – thanks to the journalists who rely upon them – to dominate the so-called ‘news cycle’, often to the exclusion of more critical, controversial investigative journalism. Bennett’s ‘indexing norm’ theory almost directly corresponds with Herman and Chomsky’s ‘sourcing filter’, and he is critical of the established mass media and individual journalists for their reliance on ‘government officials as the source of most of the daily news they report’ (1990: 103). Bennett argues that journalists ‘from the boardroom to the beat’ index voices, viewpoints and storylines not according to their own merit, but according to parameters established in mainstream government debates about a given topic. In other words this media–government complex establishes the accepted ‘norms’ of acceptable political thought and seeks to compress pubic opinion into this ideological bracket. The effect, according to Bennett, is a compromised journalistic establishment and a ‘world that is, culturally speaking, upside-down. It is a world in which governments are able to define their own public and where ‘democracy’ becomes whatever the government ends up doing (Bennett 1990: 125). Finally, Herman and Chomsky suggest that when controversial stories are aired or printed, government spin doctors (and others) have become practised at putting up ‘flak’ as a means of criticising, condemning and curtailing journalistic intrigue.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Media–policy interaction The media analyst and scholar, Piers Robinson, has attempted to bridge the conceptual gap in his proposal for a ‘media–policy interaction model’ that is sensitive to the two main theses outlined above (the CNN effect and the manufacturingconsent model) but which also recognises their political contingencies. In particular, the hypothetical influence of journalistic practice on official doctrine (policy) when (i) the tone of media coverage becomes broadly critical of those policies (rather than strictly observing ‘objectivity’) and (ii) executive policy is uncertain, is tested in reference to ‘real world’ situations. It is under these circumstances, Robinson suggests, that ‘the possibility for media coverage playing a key role in policy formulation occurs’ (2000: 614; see also Figure 23.2).

Official policy position

Direction of influence

News media coverage

Policy–media relationship

Media influence

Uncertain

←

Extensive and critical of government

In the absence of a clear and consistent policy position from government (due to political, geographical uncertainties, etc.), journalists are able to advocate particular courses of action, in dialogue with the public. Government forced to act or face accusations of dithering and/or inattentiveness. Under these conditions, media can significantly influence the policy process.

No media influence

Certain

→

Indexed to ‘official agenda’

When the government has clear and well-articulated objectives it has the capacity to set the news agenda (journalistic output becomes ‘indexed’ to official narratives). With the executive decided on a particular course of action, media coverage is unlikely to influence policy.

Figure 23.2 Media–policy interaction model (adapted from Robinson 2000: 615)

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Journalists While this proposal seems commonsensical, even straightforward, it nonetheless raises questions regarding the multiplicity of policy areas upon which governments act and legislate: do all ‘policies’ lead to similar kinds of interactions with the media? And to what extent do some kinds of policy areas inspire greater/lesser levels of official ‘certainty’ and, hence, greater/lesser media influence? It is interesting to note that in order to illustrate the efficacy of his model, Robinson examines policy–media interactions in the context of US ‘humanitarian interventions’ in Bosnia and Kosovo during the mid and late 1990s. In doing so, he invites a more spatialised interpretation of his model, one that questions the certainties/uncertainties of Western officials in responding to foreign policy crises in ‘mysterious places’, as opposed to policy responses in more ‘certain’ – that is to say ‘known’ – domestic arenas. If indeed, journalists experience an excess of agency in response to moments and places of uncertainty – as this model seems to suggest – then we should take their role in constructing geopolitical narratives and discourses much more seriously and be prepared to subject them to a similar level of critical analysis as other ‘professionals of geopolitics’.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the role of journalists, and the practices of journalism, in constructing, interpreting and challenging geopolitical discourses. Initially this has been done in relation to the conceptual lens of ‘intellectuals of statecraft’, through which the increasingly dynamic interactions between journalists and ‘policy’ come into relief. This was set alongside anti-geopolitical readings of journalistic agency that emerged in the context of the Bosnian War during the mid-1990s, with particular attention paid to journalistic adherence to ‘objectivity’ and what has come to be known as the ‘journalism of attachment’. Theories of journalistic influence on foreign policy that have been developed within the scholarly context of media studies have also been reviewed and contrasted with critical geopolitics literatures. What emerges is the sheer complexity involved in trying to explicate the role of journalists as geopolitical ‘agents’. Occupying a critical, but curious, position between (i) practical and popular geopolitical discourses, (ii) elites and ‘the everyday’, (iii) geopolitical ‘frontline’ events (wars, natural disasters, etc.) and (iv) domestic/ international audiences, journalists defy straightforward conceptualisation, particularly so given the geographical, professional and rhetorical mobilities enabled by an active media–policy nexus. In other words, as the ‘silos’ that have traditionally contained strict definitions of, for example, ‘journalists’, ‘politicians’, ‘pundits’, ‘strategists’ and ‘audiences’ have been eroded, so our understanding of journalists’ geopolitical influences have necessarily become more complex, contested and contingent. Technologies are playing their part in this process. Recent events in North Africa and the greater Middle East remind us that audiences have become more than simply consumers of journalistic output; they are also 455

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics news makers, news players and so-called ‘citizen journalists’ (Hughes 2007) and are exercising significant geopolitical influence. As Donald Kochan suggests, the rise of (micro)blogging technologies and the communities they frame and inform (through the blogosphere) are suggestive both of new modes of journalistic coauthorship, but also point to the re-engagement with the campaigning journalistic tropes of eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘pamphleteers’ (2006). It has long been argued that we are living in an increasingly ‘mediated’ age. More news and information is available to us than to any previous generation. We consume radio, television and web-based sources with a seemingly limitless appetite and have, in turn, become audiences for the journalistic practices of an elite group of professionals (of statecraft) who translate, interpret and re-present the world to us. But is the era of Bell and Amanpour, the BBC and CNN, coming to an end? It certainly seems that the fairly stable geography of the international media is facing considerable challenges, not least from organisations such as Al Jazeera and PRESS TV (Iran). More fundamentally, perhaps, we are seeing a new multiplicity of journalisms. One immediately thinks of ‘Riverbend’ and her blogging on Iraq, and the use of Twitter and Facebook in sharing news and information during the Arab Spring and the London Riots (2011), and yet, on the other hand, the dispatches and analysis of established journalists like the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen from Gaza and the broader Middle East remain profoundly influential. The same global media that inspired talk of a CNN effect during the 1990s has, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, responded to the technological challenges posed by the internet. Previously mono-media journalists are now polymorphous bloggers, Facebookers and Tweeters. Even those journalists cut loose from their institutional life-support (like Glenn Beck, whose off-screen activities proved too much even for his former employers at FOX News) are enabled, in the internet age, to continue broadcasting and pedalling their own brand of geo-punditry. Scholars of critical geopolitics need to remain sensitive to these technological and definitional challenges if we are to come to terms with media-policy interactions and journalistic agency in an era of social networking, citizen journalism and technological change.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Farish, M., 2001. ‘Modern witnesses: Foreign correspondents, geopolitical vision, and the First World War’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26: 273–87. Ferrer, J., III, 1995. ‘The U.N. has been a success’. Time, 23 Oct. . Gilboa, E., 2002.  The Global News Networks and U.S. Policymaking in Defense and Foreign Affairs,  Harvard University research report 6-2002. Cambridge, MA: Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Gilboa, E., 2005. ‘Global television news and foreign policy: Debating the CNN effect’. International Studies Perspectives 6: 325–41. Hallin, D.C., 1986. The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. Hammond, P., 2002. ‘Moral combat: Advocacy journalists and the new humanitarianism’. In David Chandler (ed.), Rethinking Human Rights. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 176–95. Hanitzsch, T., 2007. ‘Deconstructing journalism culture: Toward a universal theory’. Communication Theory 17: 367–85. Herman, E.S., and N. Chomsky, 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon. Herring, E., and P. Robinson, 2003. ‘Too polemical or too critical? Chomsky on the study of the news media and US foreign policy’. Review of International Studies 29: 553–68. Hudson, M., and J. Stainer, 1997. War and the Media. Stroud: Sutton. Hughes, R., 2007. ‘Through the looking blast: Geopolitics and visual culture’. Geography Compass 1: 976–94. Hurd, D., 1997. The Search for Peace. London: Little, Brown. Jensen, R., 1992. ‘Fighting objectivity: The illusion of journalistic neutrality in coverage of the Persian Gulf War’. Journal of Communication Inquiry 16: 20–32. Kaplan, R.L., 2002. Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennan, G.F., 1993. ‘Somalia, through a glass darkly’. New York Times, 30 Sept. . Knightley. P., 2004. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and MythMaker from the Crimea to Iraq. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kochan, D.J., 2006. ‘Blogosphere and the new pamphleteers’. Nexus Law Journal 11: 99–109. Kuus, M., 2007. Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —— 2008. ‘Professionals of geopolitics: Agency in spatializing international politics’. Geography Compass 2: 2062–79. —— 2010. ‘Critical geopolitics’. In R. Denemark (ed.), The International Studies Encyclopedia. Oxford: Blackwell, vol. 2, pp. 683–701.

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Journalists Little, A., 2001. ‘Viewpoint: The West did not do enough’. BBC News, 29 June. . Livingston, S., 1997. Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention, Research paper R-18. Cambridge, MA: The Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government. —— and T. Eachus, 2000. ‘Rwanda: U.S. policy and television coverage’. In H. Adelman and A. Suhrke (eds), The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, pp. 209–28. Lloyd, J., 2004. ‘Martin Bell: By proposing a ‘journalism of attachment,’ Bell led lesser reporters down a false trail’. Prospect Magazine, 20 Feb. . Luke, T., and G. Ó Tuathail, 1997. ‘On videocameralistics: The geopolitics of failed states, the CNN International and (UN)governmentality’. Review of International Political Economy 4: 709–33. McFarlane, T., and I. Hay, 2003. ‘The battle for Seattle: Protest and popular geopolitics in The Australian newspaper’. Political Geography 22: 211–32. McNulty, T., 1993. ‘Television’s impact on executive decisionmaking and diplomacy’. Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 17: 67–83. Martin, J., 2010. ‘Does CNN go too far?’ America Magazine, 15 Jan. . Mermin, J., 1997. ‘Television news and American intervention in Somalia’. Political Science Quarterly 112: 385–403. Minditch, D., 1998. Just the Facts: How ‘Objectivity’ Came to Define American Journalism. New York: NYU Press. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996a. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1996b. ‘An anti-geopolitical eye: Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992–1993’. Gender, Place and Culture 3: 171–95. —— and J. Agnew, 2006. ‘Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 94–102. Pedelty, M., 1995. War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents. New York: Routledge. Pinkerton, A., 2008. ‘A new kind of imperialism? The BBC, Cold War broadcasting and the contested geopolitics of South Asia’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28: 537–55. —— and K. Dodds, 2009. ‘Radio geopolitics: Broadcasting, listening and the struggle for acoustic spaces’. Progress in Human Geography 33: 10–27. Potter, D., 2005. ‘Conflicts of interest: The revolving door between politics and journalism is spinning out of control’. American Journalism Review 26, Dec–Jan. . Roberts, S., A. Secor and M. Sparke, 2003. ‘Neoliberal geopolitics’. Antipode 35: 886–97. 459

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Robinson, P., 1999. ‘The CNN effect: Can the news media drive foreign policy?’ Review of International Studies 25: 301–9. —— 2000. ‘The policy–media interaction model: Measuring media power during humanitarian crisis’. Journal of Peace Research 37: 613–33. —— 2001. ‘Theorizing the influence of media on world politics: Models of media influence on foreign policy’. European Journal of Communication 16: 523–44. —— 2011.  ‘The CNN effect reconsidered: Mapping a research agenda for the future’. Media, War and Conflict 4: 3–11. Robison, B., 2004. ‘Putting Bosnia in its place: Critical geopolitics and the representation of Bosnia in the British print media’. Geopolitics 9: 378–401. Routledge, P., 2006. ‘Introduction to part 5’. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 234–48. —— 2008. ‘Transnational political movements’. In K.R. Cox, M. Low and J. Robinson (eds), The Sage Handbook of Political Geography. London: Sage, pp. 335–49. Ruigrok, N., 2008. ‘Journalism of attachment and objectivity: Dutch journalists and the Bosnian War’. Media, War and Conflict 1: 293–313. Sharp, J., 2000. Condensing the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simpson, J., 2001. ‘Simpson on Sunday: Dressed as a woman I slipped easily behind enemy lines’. The Daily Telegraph, 23 Sept. . Sparke, M., 2007a. ‘Everywhere but always somewhere: Critical geographies of the Global South’. Global South 1: 117–26. —— 2007b. ‘Geopolitical fears, geoeconomic hopes, and the responsibilities of geography’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97: 338–49. Stanley, A., 2010. ‘Broadcast coverage: Compassion and self-congratulation’. New York Times, 15 Jan. . Stevenson, N., 2002. Understanding Media Cultures. London: Sage, 2nd edn. Vulliamy, E., 1999. ‘Neutrality and the absence of reckoning: A journalist’s account’. Journal of International Affairs 52: 603–20.

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24

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Artists Alan Ingram

Introduction Until recently, the pathways of critical geopolitics and artistic practice and theory have tended to run in parallel rather than to intersect. While geographers have given considerable attention to the critical geopolitical productions of cartoonists, comicbook writers, movie makers and journalists, the ways in which our understandings of geopolitics might be extended by an engagement with the rich spatialities of art practice have largely been overlooked. This is beginning to change, however, with geographers increasingly turning their attention towards, and, in some cases contributing to, an upsurge in what might be called artistic engagements with the geopolitical. With critical spatial practices being deployed to explore the fuzzy zone between academic geography, statecraft and art (e.g. Paglen 2007; 2008; 2009; Paglen and Solnit 2010), geographers and others are also beginning to consider the implications of contemporary art practice for critical understandings of geopolitics (Amoore 2006; Demos 2006; 2008; Graham 2010; Gregory 2010a; Ingram 2009). In this chapter I survey this emerging field and consider how critical geopolitics and contemporary artistic practice and theory might further inform each other. Artistic practice is always already geopolitical in the broadest sense, because it involves the reconfiguration of spaces and relations. But more specific genealogies could also readily be traced in relation to the historical geographies of state formation, nationalism, imperialism and war, exploring the role that artists and art practice have played in aestheticizing and questioning domination and violence. A focus of particular interest to critical geopolitics might be the emergence of ‘modern art’ as a radical response to the experience of modernity, domination and violence. However, this chapter focuses more specifically on what is commonly called ‘contemporary art’. I shall explore the meaning of this contested term further, but in a provisional sense it is possible to say that contemporary art is that which comes ‘after’ modern art and evinces a further radicalized reflexivity towards aesthetics, politics and the meaning of art itself. It is here, I suggest, that we can find some of the most vibrant and challenging critical responses to geopolitics today. To some extent this vibrancy and relevance can be traced to the emergence of space as a central theme in contemporary art practice and theory, with a multitude

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of art works, exhibitions and writings in recent years engaging reflexively with ideas of site, location, space, place and boundaries (e.g. Bishop 2006; Cherry and Cullen 2007; Dean and Millar 2005; Deutsche 1996; Groys 2008; Kaye, 2000; Kwon 2002; Rogoff 2000; Rugg 2010). This spatial turn can be traced in part to the intersections between art theory and practice with poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism and postcolonialism and attendant concerns with experiences of globalization, de-territorialization, diaspora and exile (Demos 2008). It has also been infused and transformed by new sources of theoretical inspiration (for example, nonrepresentational theory, neo/post-Marxism and ideas of assemblage, affect and biopolitics). However, such concerns have also been inflected with a desire to explore and confront questions of violence, militarism, security and state power. It is thus immediately obvious that while few explicit connections have been made between critical geopolitics and contemporary art practice, there are many resonances between them in terms of theoretical and conceptual underpinnings and in terms of a concern to develop critical modes of intervention in the production and reproduction of global political space. A critical geopolitical focus on contemporary art connects with work on geopolitics, popular culture (Carter and McCormack 2006; Dittmer 2010; Dodds 2008) and visuality (Campbell 2007; MacDonald 2006; MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds 2010) but is not easily subsumed within any of them. Contemporary art is not equivalent to a type of media (for example, film, literature, cartoons or comics). Though visuality provides important keys to thinking about contemporary art, this is only one (albeit important) analytical approach or sensory dimension that might be emphasized. Furthermore, contemporary art, which often draws upon and is couched in terms of highly developed theoretical frameworks, is not easily contained within the category of popular culture. To appreciate what the potential for greater engagement between critical geopolitics and contemporary art practice might be, it is important to consider what is often called the specificity of contemporary art. In short, contemporary art is that which operates in relation to the discourse of contemporary art. If that seems circular and self evident, this is a reflection of the extent to which contemporary art is not reducible to any definition or criteria other than its own. The discourse of contemporary art, I suggest, is not defined by any particular media, institution, theory or approach but through situationally variable and multiply performed networkings of subjectivities (the pathways by which people come to be recognized as ‘artists’ are important, as are the roles of critics, curators, commissioners and dealers), sites (art schools, galleries, museums and, increasingly, the biennale circuit, play privileged but contested roles), theoretical and political inspirations and practices (particular modes of making and doing, exhibition, patronage, commissioning, criticism, evaluation, advertisement, commodification and exchange). However, contemporary art also often manifests itself in the negation, denial or rejection of these constitutive elements. The discourse of contemporary art is frequently and perhaps axiomatically ambiguous, paradoxical and contested. Here I briefly explicate some of these ambiguities, paradoxes and contestations before adopting a more thematic and illustrative 462

Artists approach in which I connect examples of contemporary art practice with themes in critical geopolitics. In conclusion I begin to consider how an engagement with contemporary art practice might inform moves to develop alternative, more progressive forms of geopolitics.

The specificity of contemporary art As the influential theorist Jacques Rancière has argued, successive interventions in art practice and theory have done away with the idea of any essential criteria at all by which ‘art’ might be identified and distinguished from ‘politics’, even as art continues to be maintained as a separate category and field of practice (2006). For Rancière, a corollary of the emergence (over the course of 200 years) of a single field designated by the term ‘art’ is the possibility that ‘art’ can appear in any number of ‘non-art’ guises. Indeed, over the last two decades in particular, much contemporary art has been articulated through discourses and sites other than those of art, not least those of research, documentary, field work, laboratory, experiment, museum exhibition and archive. But what is it that distinguishes contemporary art? As a label of convenience, ‘contemporary art’ is problematic and difficult to pin down (Aranda, Kuan Wood and Vidokle 2010). The critic and theorist Boris Groys argued that contemporary art functions according to a logic of contradiction: as soon as some conceptual framework, mode of practice or exhibition is identified, established and codified, counter-responses to it are immediately mobilized (2008). In general terms, the term signals something of a break with ‘modern’ art (Medina 2010); that is art undertaken in terms of a commitment to a particular vision of human subjectivity and emancipation, conventionally traced through art and antiart movements such as Dada, Cubism and Surrealism through to Situationism. Indeed, the Situationists, who deployed critical spatial practices in their effort to surpass distinctions between art and life, may be taken as emblematic of a kind of experimental modernism that sought to construct new ways of living that would emancipate humanity from domination by capital and the state. While their influence can be traced in recent articulations of ‘experimental geography’ (Thompson and Independent Curators International 2008), such aspirations have been both destabilized and reconstructed in critical interventions and practices stemming from poststructuralism, feminism and postcolonialism and the ending of the Western monopoly on modernity (Medina 2010). Their viability has also been called into question by the incessant incorporation and commodification of all forms of resistance or critique into neoliberal capitalism (Rosler 2010; Stallabrass 2004). While ‘contemporary art’ may signal a shift towards a more tactical and mobile set of critical practices, for many the term signifies recuperation and postpolitical stasis. For Aranda, Kuan Wood and Vidokle, unpacking the implications of the term ‘contemporary’ requires a pursuit of its ‘evasive maneuvers’. The first of these is a split ‘between the term’s de facto usage, which momentarily holds your attention 463

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics by suggesting the obvious parallel with “current,” with its promise of flexibility and dynamism, while simultaneously building a museum collection along very specific parameters – masking ideology. … The contemporary suggests movement, yet itself does not budge’ (2010: 7). They thus trace what can be a problematic form of geopolitics within contemporary art (despite its radical pretensions): a Eurocentric discourse that emerges out of, and in response to, modernization, capitalism and the state as well as the European disciplines of artistic representation, incorporating other cultures and zones as exotic Other, reducing them to a variant of the same through characteristic procedures of production, curation, exhibition, criticism, marketing, career building and so on, articulated around the international biennale and art show circuit. As they observe: ‘This contemporary museum is acutely aware of other contemporary museums in other places. It is a node in a network of similar structures, and there is a huge amount of movement between them’ (Aranda, Kuan Wood and Vidokle 2010: 7). This network, furthermore, is expanding most rapidly where ‘emerging economies’ and ‘rising powers’ are to be found (China and East Asia, Russia, the Middle East, India, South America, Africa). The emerging ‘global’ contemporary art scene can therefore be understood as an expression of and conduit for flexible accumulation. At the same time, Aranda, Kuan Wood and Vidokle discern a second evasive maneuver, which positions the contemporary as ‘a de-centered field of work: a field of contemporary art that stretches across boundaries, a multi-local field drawing from local practices and embedded local knowledge, the vitality and immanence of many histories in constant simultaneous translation’ (2010: 8). As they argue, though this is not without its pitfalls and dilemmas (and echoes of Hardt and Negri notwithstanding), ‘this is perhaps the contemporary’s most redeeming trait’ (Aranda, Kuan Wood and Vidokle 2010: 8). As Medina argues, contemporary art, for all its failings, is still a repository of critical and radical consciousness and practice. I therefore want to resist such lines of thought that might lead us to dismiss contemporary art as an extension of colonial modernity, the society of the spectacle or transnational neoliberalism, precisely because while art is not fully autonomous from other spheres, nor is it fully reducible to them. Nor, contra modernist critical strategies, is it simply a matter of ‘revealing’ reality or shocking spectators into a recognition of it. Nor is art simply a tool for whomever might wish to use it instrumentally. For all its problems and dilemmas, contemporary art can be understood as a field in which it is possible to ask questions, to think and act differently and to imagine how the world might be otherwise. Following Rancière, we can think of contemporary art as a mode of aesthetic and (geo)political intervention, which, while it takes shape within distinct, situated horizons, is characterized by ‘contingent regimes organizing a field of possibilities’ (2006: 52). What we are concerned with are perhaps what he, in an interview exploring the meaning of ‘political art’, calls disturbances in the ‘fabric of the sensible’, of situations where ‘a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a network of meanings, an expression does not find its place in the system of visible coordinates where it appears’ (Rancière 2006: 63). As Rancière argues, these disturbances gain 464

Artists their meaning and potential powers not from art’s supposed autonomy, but from the complexity of its relations to itself and to other fields: any artistic intervention might be both art and more-than-art, art and politics, or geopolitics and art. In a similar vein, Drucker, rethinks the classic modern art tactic of de-familiarization (which relied on inducing a revelatory experience of shock) as re-familiarization, a practice which re-situates artistic production, participation and interpretation in terms of relational connections, in an effort to bring forth a sense of responsibility and accountability for our implication in current conditions (2008). These attempts to develop a radical politics of art beyond postmodernism are, I suggest, productive for attempts to forge alternative forms of geopolitics. In what follows I describe a series of artistic interventions in relation to key themes in critical geopolitical research, considering the difference that contemporary art might make to the critical understanding of geopolitics. This approach is illustrative rather than comprehensive, and the chapter reflects my own location and research on contemporary art, particularly as it engages with questions of war, militarism and security. I suggest that contemporary artistic practice can be understood as dualistic with regard to geopolitics: as being ‘about’ geopolitics but also as itself enacting geopolitics. Playing in the fuzzy zones between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ and between representation and performance, contemporary art, I suggest, allows ways of engaging with geopolitics that are of relevance to critical geopolitics research. In particular, I suggest that in addressing the question of how geopolitics might be done otherwise (and what the limits to this might be), an engagement with contemporary art practice may be productive in terms of efforts to develop alternative forms of geopolitical intervention.

Constructed in/visibilities An obvious starting point for exploring the resonances and intersections between critical geopolitical and artistic interventions is cartography and the cartographic imagination. As Ó Tuathail and many others have discussed, cartography has widely been considered a paradigmatic technology of power for what Michel Foucault called the governmentalization of the state, for colonial administration and for the conduct of war (see Ó Tuathail 1996). It has also been a central tool for the performance of geopolitics, materializing the Cartesian, Olympian gaze problematized in the first wave of critical geopolitics scholarship. Indeed, it should be no surprise that artists have returned time and again to practices of cartography as a field for critical interventions concerned with the relationships between power and space. Recent years have seen a wave of publications, broadcasts and events exploring and re-evaluating the role of maps and mapping in world history, imperialism, state building and war. Notable among such interventions have been the Atlas of Radical Cartography (Mogel and Bhagat 2007) and the Atlas of the Conflict (Shoshan 2010), where highly aestheticized presentation is harnessed with critical spatial imaginations to revision a series of 465

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics geopolitical conjunctures (see also Harmon 2009). Maps have been rendered as jigsaws (e.g. Oraib Toukan, The New(er) Middle East (2007), Khalil Rabah, I Will Never Fight with Other Boys Again (2007)), or with place names transposed (Jeremy Deller, between the UK and US and Iraq, in Twin Towns for Memorial to the Iraq War (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2007) and It Is What It Is: Conversations about Iraq (New Museum, New York, 2009)), or altered to display the effects of militarized violence (elin o’Hara slavick, Places the United States has Bombed (2007), Hana Malallah in maps of Baghdad after 2003 or Athena Tacha, The Dead of Iraq 19/3/2003) or used to imagine alternative homeland security scenarios (as in work by the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory). Such examples could be rehearsed almost indefinitely, so common has the map become as a site for critical intervention. But it is perhaps more useful to situate maps in terms not just of their production and formal properties, but in terms of a wider field of relations and effects (Gregory 2010b; Kitchin and Dodge 2007). Maps, after all, are enabled by certain kinds of powers and actions and in turn enable or induce others. More particularly, they are a certain kind of intervention into the visual field, rendering some things visible while leaving others invisible: cartography as an epistemology of the in/visible. Here the work of the geographer, photographer and artist Trevor Paglen (2007; 2008; 2009; Paglen and Solnit 2010; Paglen and Thompson 2007) is particularly notable. Though his work is not located explicitly in terms of critical geopolitics, it is concerned with the spatialization and visualization of the state and with how the kinds of technologies mobilized by the USA in the service of imperial power can also be turned to produce countercartographies that render its invisible infrastructures and practices visible, albeit in a manner that is both provisional and problematic. One strand of Paglen’s research has dealt with the CIA-operated system of extraordinary rendition (Paglen and Solnit 2010; Paglen and Thompson 2007). Research that began with tracing the movements of civilian planes into and out of restricted military airspace in the south-western USA gradually connected with the activities of plane-spotters who were logging unusual flight plans connecting the US with Guantanamo Bay with stopping off points and destinations in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond, and with the work of journalists investigating US counter-terrorism policies after 9/11 and lawyers representing people who had been abducted, incarcerated and tortured as a result of those policies. Collectively, and supported by research that uncovered a web of front companies and false identities, such efforts forced the extraordinary rendition system into public view. As part of this work, Paglen, working with John Emerson, produced a remarkable map of CIA flights from 2001 to 2006 (Paglen and Emerson 2008) that represented and dramatized the global extent of US counter-terrorism policies after 9/11. This map was subsequently published in the Atlas of Radical Cartography (Mogel and Bhagat 2007) and displayed on an advertising billboard in downtown Los Angeles, placing the schematics of the secret imperial state in full public view. Working with the Institute for Applied Autonomy, data on CIA flights were also used to create Terminal Air, a website that mimicked airline booking pages and enabled users to track rendition flights. Using advanced photographic technology, Paglen has also 466

Artists imaged restricted military bases and secret satellites and brought the fabric patches and coins produced for secret US military programs into public view. Such tactics of exposure, which call attention to the geopolitical construction of visibility (Gregory 2004), are also evident in the work of photographers and video artists like Simon Norfolk, whose work has included photography of British security installations in Northern Ireland and on Ascension Island. Like Paglen, Norfolk links his visual interventions with accounts of security policies and infrastructures such as the ECHELON global surveillance network operated by the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. This tactic has also been deployed more recently in the project entitled A Field Users Guide to Dark Places: South Edition, which involved the construction of a database of sites within the ‘techno-scientific and industrial/military complex’ in the UK. This work draws inspiration in part from the work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which, by pursuing the ostensibly straightforward project of exploring how land is used in the United States, brings forth many complex environmental, political and ethical questions about how space is appropriated, used, envisioned and regulated. Such interventions are frequently undertaken as part of a critique of the implications of secret geographies and covert power for democracy. Drawing attention to some of the spaces through which the state of exception is materialised, such interventions provide new ways of questioning the practices upon which liberal political community and state sovereignty rest. While Paglen’s work appears to bring the geographies of the secret state and its foreign policies into public view – calling attention to some of the ‘blank spots on the map’ – he is acutely aware of the epistemological limits and dilemmas associated with such undertakings. While certain things are made visible, others remain invisible, though their existence may be inferred. Furthermore, his work is concerned not just with things that we do not see, but those that we do see but do not recognize – the things hiding in plain sight, or the ‘unknown knowns’ (Solnit 2010: 13, borrowing from Slavoj Žižek, borrowing from Donald Rumsfeld). As Paglen writes: In all of my work, I am interested in the limits of the visible world, in the nature of evidence, and the fuzzy and contradictory relationships between vision, imaging, knowing, belief and truth. I embrace the epistemological and visual contradictions in my work and am most compelled by images that both make claims to represent, and at the same time dialectically undermine, the very claims they seem to put forth. I think about the images in this book [Paglen and Solnit 2010] as making claims on both sides of the murky boundaries separating fact and fiction, empiricism and imagination, and literature and science, while insisting on underlying sociological, cultural, and political facts. (Paglen 2010: 151) In embracing such contradictions rather than seeking to resolve them, Paglen articulates a motif for much contemporary art that addresses technologies of documentation, witnessing and the production of truth in the wake of the ‘crisis of 467

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics representation’. While it rejects postmodern ideas of reality as a constructed series of floating signifiers or images in favour of a materialist, embodied epistemology that is all too aware of the devastating, intimate relationships between power, inequality and suffering across and through space, such an approach questions the idea that we can simply ‘reveal’ that reality and, that having revealed it, change will follow. Rather it is more a matter of constructing relationships, situations and tactics that will allow or induce other experiences and interventions, orchestrating the contingent regimes of art and geopolitics to structure a field of possibilities that would not otherwise exist.

Staging security The place of advanced technology in the constitution of the geopolitical has been of concern to a wide range of theorists of interest to critical geopolitics (Der Derian 2009; Graham 2010; Virilio 1989), as well as work on surveillance (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) and the biopolitics of security (Amoore 2006; Van der Ploeg 1999). Questions of technology, security and space have likewise emerged as a prime concern in contemporary art. A particularly useful example here is the 2009 exhibition Embedded Art: Art in the Name of Security at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste which explored the ways in which security technologies increasingly saturate architecture, urban space and everyday life. The siting of this exhibition was significant in that it materialized technologies, performances and spaces of security just meters from the Brandenburg Gate (that iconic site of Cold War geopolitics), Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial and a host of embassies (including the new, bunker-like British embassy). The exhibition was staged in a way intended to replicate or at least to simulate the increasingly secured nature of urban, social and geopolitical space. It brought together projects by 41 artists who were commissioned to work ‘embedded’ ‘with defence and security companies, in danger zones and perusing archives on global security issues’ (Arndt, von Rappard, Schönenbach and Wee 2009: 11) . Entering the gallery, the visitor approached a desk extending out above the floor at mezzanine level, at which sat functionaries wearing uniforms and surrounded by crosshatched tape, warning signs and other paraphernalia of security. The exhibition itself was not situated in the main gallery space, however, but in a series of secure basement spaces which visitors could not access on their own. Rather they had to be accompanied by another ‘security guard’, who, also wearing a uniform and stab vest and adopting a brusque manner, guided visitors through the exhibition, allowing only a fixed period of time in each. The experience of the exhibition was thus structured by strict temporalities and spatialities that were in many respects highly arbitrary. It would be easy to critique the limits of Embedded Art as a simulation of security: while unsettling, the experience involved no real discomfort or negative consequences for visitors, nor did it push them to recognize the differential 468

Artists application of security practices to different groups or populations. However, its highly staged and reflexively self-aware nature suggests a link to the critical concept of security theatre. This suggests that, rather than providing real protection from the supposed threats they are meant to counter, security measures often satisfy (in a highly profitable way) political, bureaucratic and psychic needs for ‘something to be done’ and for it to be seen to be being done without actually achieving their ostensible goals, while obviating spending and actions that could save lives or achieve other social goods (Mueller and Stewart 2011). On this line of argument, the performance of the ‘security guards’ at Embedded Art is perhaps no less stagey than that of workers at airport security checkpoints, border posts and other sites where practices of security constellate with particular density. There were further layers to Embedded Art. As well as the secured bunker space, a parallel exhibition in the main gallery contained a collection of monitors and imaging technologies showing reproductions of the works on display below. The main space thus formed a kind of control room for surveillance over the exhibition, albeit one detached from any actual monitoring or intervention function. Adjacent to this area was an installation by Andrée Korpys and Markus Löffler, comprising wooden office furniture, within which was located a television showing a looped video. The installation was a product of their project on ‘Taser function tests’ and the video showed slowed-down footage of a Taser training exercise run by a German police unit, in which the police officers took it in turns to taser and be tasered. As Korpys and Löffler write, ‘the idea behind this procedure is that the police should experience the effects themselves so they can estimate the effects when using it on others, similar to the way psychologists have to undergo analysis themselves before they are permitted to offer it to others’ (2009). The film exerts a strange kind of fascination, its slowed-down temporality enabling close examination of the faces of the policemen (they are all male) as they prepare to take part, to inflict pain, to experience it, to assist the person being tasered and to witness the process. Stationing himself alongside the exhibit was a well-dressed representative of the company that manufactures the Taser, who was keen to explain to visitors the company’s technical and ethical arguments for this piece of equipment as a tool of ‘conflict resolution’. If the Taser is an exemplary instrument of neoliberal violence, which compels obedience first by working on the mind, inducing compliance by its very presence, then, if applied, on the body, producing the desired effect while leaving no visible traces, then the integration of its marketing with an ostensibly critical exhibition at an academy of art is perhaps a sign of the success with which technologies and performances of security are being infiltrated into new spaces and continually tested and refined to maximize their acceptability among the public. Might it be that at such moments, art too becomes co-opted into what James Der Derian calls the ‘military–industrial–media–entertainment network’ (2009)? At the same time, the appearance of the Taser company representative at Embedded Art by no means necessarily works in favour of the arguments in support of such technologies. Alongside all of the other instances of security in action at the exhibition, it only

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics confirms its place among the rapidly proliferating suite of technologies for social control. A counter-point to such stagings of security can be found at the increasingly common trade fairs for security technologies and expertise. Such events are a sign of how the ‘homeland security’ industry has constituted itself as a distinct market from the more established, militarized arms industry, even though they are deeply intertwined with each other. Feeding off the expo-economy that increasingly serves as a focal point for neoliberal urban growth strategies, these events often emphasize security technologies in their own marketing and staging. They thus perform their own aesthetics of security. Exemplary of this is Counter-Terror Expo, an event now held annually in London. A flyer for ‘CTX’ notifies those considering attendance – which is restricted to people ‘engaged in bona fide areas of the security industry, the armed forces, government, equipment procurement organisations, specifiers, operators/end-users, trade media, or research establishments’ (CTX website1) – that advance registration will enable them to ‘avoid on-site security verification’. Where Embedded Art featured ‘installation’, CTX offers ‘demonstration’. For 2011 the event included The Surveillance Darkroom, in which visitors would ‘have the opportunity to experience and use a wide array of Night Vision (IR) and Thermal Imaging capability ranging from cameras and weapon sights to goggles and pocket scopes’ (CTX flyer). Featuring a highly-stylized logo (a target sight centered on an image of the globe), a series of photographic images of police, soldiers, SWAT agents and so on, as well as the logos of sponsoring companies and agencies, the marketing material for CTX is instantly legible to anyone familiar with contemporary counter-terror culture and serves as a reminder that it is by no means only ‘art’ practices that are involved in the aesthetic design of figures of community (Rancière 2006). Counter-Terror Expo is predicated on a neoliberal rationality of security, where public and private sectors come together in the enterprise of ‘protecting people and crowded place[s] from the growing threat posed from those intent on doing harm’ (CTX marketing email). Such formulations are indicative of the post-political normalization of homeland security, and it is this that exhibitions like Embedded Art seek to problematize. What distinguishes Embedded Art from The Surveillance Darkroom is less the critical intent of the former than the very fact of its location with regard to art. At Embedded Art the Taser exercise is rendered more, rather than less, strange and problematic by the presence of a manufacturer’s representative. Rather than a process of co-optation, within the frame of contemporary art security may be made to appear strange, bizarre and contingent.

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Performing borders Border studies have long been a part of political geography, but borders and bordering practices have more recently been explored within critical geopolitics, for example in the close ethnographic and qualitative research of geographers such as Megoran on the Kyrgyz–Uzbek border, in which he trekked through border villages and regions, revealing the border to be a socially and politically constructed form of geopolitical violence (2006), and Barker’s work on New Zealand’s biosecurity regime, which reveals the intertwining of ecology with nationalism and governmentality (2009). Coleman, Mountz and Vaughan-Williams further document and critique the kinds of power exerted by border agencies and the manner in which this is increasingly disseminated within and beyond the nation-state as well as at its physical limits (Coleman 2007; Mountz 2010; Vaughan-Williams 2009). These studies resonate with a series of contemporary artistic interventions in and around borders and bordering. In this section, I highlight the work of artists, who, often drawing on in-depth research, have enacted highly performative interventions, where they construct, transgress or otherwise interact with borders and bordering. Border interventions have been conducted by a wide range of artists, including Yto Barrada, who has worked around the Strait of Gibraltar (see A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project; see also Demos 2006); Ron English, who on April Fool’s Day 2011 constructed a US– Mexico border sign suggesting that entrants would be selected based on skin colour; Santiago Serra, who, for the Spanish Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, installed a walled concrete space that only Spanish citizens were allowed to enter; and Heath Bunting, who has conducted and documented illicit border crossings in BorderXing Guide (see Amoore 2006). Here I highlight the work of Christian-Phillip Müller for the Austrian pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. As described on his website, Müller’s contribution brought together a wide variety of archival, photographic, botanic, horticultural and cartographic practices and materials in a ‘reinstallation of the biological and geopolitical features of the green borders of the pavilion’ (Müller n.d.). For the exhibit (entitled Green Border), Müller and an assistant hiked along and across Austria’s borders with neighboring countries, sending post-cards to friends and art dealers from each crossing (in the Czech Republic they were arrested and banned from re-entry for three years). At the pavilion, Müller installed an air-conditioning system to control temperature, a security camera and monitor, landscape drawings of iconic border regions, eight photos of the regions he had crossed with documentation, and eight trees representative of each site, accompanied by ‘information on their botanical as well as geo-political origin’. This was an extensively researched, painstakingly plotted but decidedly odd showcasing of Austria that unsettled a range of geopolitical practices that act to normalize sovereignty and territory as the foundation of political life. This work enacts the very practices and spaces that have been of key interest in recent critical work on borders, geopolitics and security. We can see in Müller’s intervention, I suggest, a creative assemblage and performative enactment of border technologies, spaces and environments, a replication of the nation-state-in-miniature 471

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics that reflexively highlights there geopolitical constitution rather than natural existence as such. So Green Border is art ‘about’ geopolitics, but to stop here would be to overlook the geopolitical intervention conducted by the artwork as such. Müller is not a citizen of Austria but of Switzerland, and, rather than being commissioned directly, he, along with the American artist Andrea Fraser, was invited to do so by the Austrian artist Gerhard Rockenschaub. This violated the principle of national competition underlying the Venice biennale and caused controversy in the Austrian press. The artists responded to this with a poster for the pavilion showing them ‘in traditional folkloric costume at the table of a stereotypical Austrian pub’ and by producing of a catalogue containing essays by leading critical theorists on nationalism and Austrian history. At a time when a right-wing backlash was gathering against immigration into Austria and the European Union (EU), and the EU was developing an extensive infrastructure for the registration, surveillance and control of mobility, the co-optation in this manner of a high-profile site for the reproduction of nation-state identity is, I suggest, a significant geopolitical act in its own right.

Conclusions: Art as geopolitics The particular relevance of contemporary art for critical geopolitics rests, I suggest, on its dualistic nature. First, there now exists a great body of contemporary art practice ‘about’ geopolitics in the sense that it ‘addresses’ or, a somewhat better, ‘deals with’, the ways in which global political space is structured. This is important and interesting and ought to be explored, but stopping at the formulation of ‘art about geopolitics’ runs the risk of confining a critical geopolitical engagement with art to an illustrative, exemplary mode, whereby particular interventions or exhibitions are taken as a demonstration of some point that is already established in the critical literature on geopolitics. Such an approach may be valuable and can help to dramatize analysis. This may be particularly useful for pedagogical purposes, but merely adding contemporary art to the list of areas of interest to critical geopolitics does little to extend it as a field of research and fails to do justice to the full import and potential of an engagement with art as art or with art and geopolitics. A more productive engagement with art in terms of critical geopolitics comes, I suggest, when we also begin to consider art as geopolitics; that is, to take seriously the spatial tactics, properties and effects of art works as interventions in the formation of global political space in their own right. In this way we might begin to qualify the idea of art as revelation. We might also begin to recognize and work with contemporary art as always simultaneously both art and not-art, art and more-than-art, art and geopolitics. Such moves, I suggest, have the potential to inform agendas emerging around the idea of alternative geopolitics. These aim to shift critical geopolitics towards a much more active mode, in focusing on, allying with and contributing to efforts to practice geopolitics in better ways. These projects (Kearns 2008; Koopman 2008a; 472

Artists 2008b; 2010; Megoran 2008; 2010), which find much inspiration in feminist political geographies (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2004; Sharp 2007) and which have been articulated in terms of progressive, pacific and alternative geopolitics, represent a much more interventionary mode of critical geopolitical practice. In this sense they have their own duality, as they explicitly stage themselves as both theory and praxis, academic discourse and radical activism. To be sure, self-consciously aestheticized practices have long been a central component of critical and radical projects, but the synergies and dissonances between radical politics and artistic practice have yet to feature within the rubric of critical geopolitics. Contemporary art is a field in which geopolitics may be represented, performed, experienced and reflected upon differently and which may therefore inspire, parallel or, to borrow a term from Rancière, corroborate alternative geopolitical praxis. At the same time, we must be careful, I suggest, not to over-invest in the geopolitics of contemporary art or to expect things from contemporary art that orthodox politics fails to achieve. Surveying works by a number of artists who are confronting the integration of military–security practices and technologies within projects for the management of urban space, Graham has voiced concern about their ephemeral nature, suggesting that what is required is the stitching together of multiple radical interventions into a larger project of transformation (2010). But whether we conceive of resistance, transformation or alternatives in more systemic or more localized terms, the value of contemporary art practice may often lie in highlighting the limits to or pitfalls of an ostensibly progressive geopolitics. The relationship of contemporary art practice to alternative geopolitics may not always be comfortable, but in such discomforts may lie the potential for further critical reflection.

References Amoore, L., 2006. ‘Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror’. Political Geography 25: 336–51. Aranda, J., B. Kuan Wood and A. Vidokle (eds), 2010. What is Contemporary Art? An Introduction. Berlin: Sternberg. Arndt, O., M. von Rappard and C. Wee (eds), 2009. Embedded Art. Berlin: Argobooks. Barker, K., 2009. ‘Garden terrorists and the war on weeds: Interrogating New Zealand’s biosecurity regime’. in A. Ingram and K. Dodds (eds), Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 165–84. Bishop, C., 2006. ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’. Artforum 2: 178–83. Campbell, D., 2007. ‘Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict’. Geopolitics 26: 357–82. Carter, S., and D. McCormack, 2006. ‘Film, geopolitics and affective logics of intervention’. Political Geography 25: 228–45. Cherry, D., and F. Cullen, 2007. Location. Oxford: Blackwell. 473

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Coleman, M., 2007. ‘Immigration geopolitics beyond the Mexico–US border’. Antipode 39: 54–76. Dean, T., and J. Millar, 2005. Place. London: Thames & Hudson. Demos, T.J., 2006. ‘Life full of holes’. Grey Room 24: 72–88. –— 2008. ‘Image wars’. In T.J. Demos (ed.), Zones of Conflict. New York: Pratt Manhattan Gallery, pp. 3–11. Der Derian, J., 2009. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military–Industrial–Media– Entertainment Network. London: Routledge, 2nd edn. Deutsche, R., 1996. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. London: MIT Press. Dittmer, J., 2010. Popular Culture, Geopolitics and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dodds, K., 2008. ‘Have you seen any good films lately? Geopolitics, international relations and film’. Geography Compass 2: 476–94. Dowler, L., and J. Sharp, 2001. ‘A feminist geopolitics?’ Space and Polity 5: 165–76. Drucker, J., 2008. ‘Making space: Image events in an extreme state’. Cultural Politics 4: 25–45. Graham, S., 2010. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso. Gregory, D., 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. —— 2010a. ‘War and peace’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 154–86. –— 2010b. ‘Seeing red: Baghdad and the event-ful city’. Political Geography 29: 266– 79. Groys, B., 2008. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haggerty, K., and R. Ericson, 2000. ‘The surveillant assemblage’. British Journal of Sociology 41: 605–22. Harmon, K., 2009. The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Hyndman, J., 2004. ‘Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics’. Political Geography 23: 307–22. Ingram, A., 2009. ‘Art and the geopolitical: Remapping security at Green Zone / Red Zone’. In A. Ingram and K. Dodds (eds), Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 257–77. Kaye, N., 2000. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge. Kearns, G., 2008. ‘Progressive geopolitics’. Geography Compass 2: 1599–620. Kitchin, R., and M. Dodge, 2007. ‘Rethinking maps’. Progress in Human Geography 31: 331–44. Koopman, S., 2008a. ‘Alter-geopolitics: Another geopolitics is possible’. Paper presented at the Critical Geopolitics Conference, Durham, 23–4 Sept. 2008. —— 2008b. ‘Imperialism within: Can the master’s tools bring down empire?’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7: 283–307. –— 2010. ‘Making space for peace: International accompaniment as altergeopolitics’. Antipode 42: 231–5. Korpys, A., and M. Löffler, 2009. ‘Taser function tests’. Embedded Art . 474

Artists Kwon, M., 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacDonald, F., 2006. ‘Geopolitics and “the vision thing”: Regarding Britain and America’s first nuclear missile’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31: 53–71. —— R. Hughes and K. Dodds, 2010. Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Medina, C., 2010. ‘Contemp(t)orary: Eleven theses’. In J. Aranda, B. Kuan Wood and A. Vidokle (eds), What is Contemporary Art? An Introduction. Berlin: Sternberg, pp. 10–21. Megoran, N., 2006. ‘For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and reimagining Ferghana Valley boundary enclosure’. Political Geography 25: 622–40. —— 2008. ‘Militarism, realism, just war, or nonviolence? Critical geopolitics and the problem of normativity’. Geopolitics 13: 473–97. —— 2010. ‘Towards a geography of peace: Pacific geopolitics and evangelical Christian Crusade apologies’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 382–98. Mogel, L., and A., Bhagat (eds), 2007. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. Mountz, A., 2010. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mueller, J., and M. Stewart, 2011. ‘Terror, security, and money: Balancing the risks, benefits, and costs of homeland security’. Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 1 Apr. Müller, C.-P., n.d. Green Border. . o’Hara slavick, e. 2007. Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography. New York: Charta. Ó Tuathail, G., 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Political Space. London: Routledge. Paglen, T., 2007. ‘Groom Lake and the imperial production of nowhere’. In D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. London: Routledge, pp. 237–54. —— 2008. I Could Tell You but then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World. Brooklyn: Melville House. —— 2009. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentaton’s Secret World. New York: Dutton. —— 2010. ‘Sources and methods’. In T. Paglen and R. Solnit, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. New York: Aperture, pp. 144–51. —— and J. Emerson, 2008. ‘Selected CIA aircraft routes, 2001–2006’. . —— and R. Solnit, 2010. Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. New York: Aperture. —— and A.C. Thompson, 2007. Torture Taxi. Icon: Thriplow. Rancière, J., 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockwell. London: Continuum. 475

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Rogoff, I., 2000. Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Rosler, M., 2010. ‘Take the money and run? Can political and socio-critical art “survive”?’ In J. Aranda, B. Kuan Wood and A. Vidokle (eds), What is Contemporary Art? An Introduction. Berlin: Sternberg, pp. 104–40. Rugg, J., 2010. Exploring Site Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism. London: I.B. Tauris. Sharp, J., 2007. ‘Geography and gender: Finding feminist political geographies’. Progress in Human Geography 31: 381–7. Shoshan, M., 2010. Atlas of the Conflict. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Solnit, R., 2010. ‘The visibility wars’. In T. Paglen and R. Solnit, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. New York: Aperture, pp. 6–15. Stallabrass, J., 2004. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, N., and Independent Curators International, 2008. Experimental Geographies: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography and Urbanism. New York: Melville House. Van der Ploeg, I., 1999. ‘The illegal body: “Eurodac” and the politics of biometric identification’. Ethics and Information Technology 1: 295–302. Vaughan-Williams, N., 2009. Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Virilio, P., 1989. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso.

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Evangelicals Jason Dittmer

Introduction The literature on political geography and religion has slowly taken shape over the past decade, with James Proctor as recently as 2006 arguing in a special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers that geography was lagging behind other strands of academia in its consideration of the topic. In political geography, it is difficult to sustain the claim that the sub-field has not engaged with religion, with analyses of the geopolitics of the Catholic Church (Agnew 2010) and the Muhammad cartoon controversy (Ridanpää 2009) as examples of the recent range of engagements in the field. This chapter is, however, particularly interested in the literature on evangelicalism and geopolitics. Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement that originated in the UK during the eighteenth century but rose to contemporary prominence in the USA, where about 30 to 35 per cent of the population identify themselves as evangelical. In the American context, evangelicalism occupies a middle ground between more liberal denominations (Lutherans, Episcopalians and so on) and fundamentalist non-denominationalism, although in some colloquial usages fundamentalists are considered evangelicals. Evangelicalism is characterized by a commitment to biblical authority, a belief in personal change through commitment to Jesus Christ and the need to engage in missionary work. Because of this, evangelicals are of particular interest to critical geopolitics. Unlike the cultural isolationism of fundamentalists, evangelicals believe in engagement with the entire world through missionary activity, and consider it their duty to bring the Bible to all the peoples of the world. This requires the production of geographical knowledges, which are ultimately infused with power stemming from both political and financial networks. The rise of evangelicalism to political prominence during the 2001–2009 Bush administration sparked a flurry of engagements by political geographers with evangelical geopolitical imaginations, although more recent work has highlighted the progressive potential found within evangelical subjectivities. It is to this recent efflorescence that this chapter speaks, first by tracing the historical engagement of geopolitics and religion, especially evangelicalism. This is

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics done with a particular emphasis on the agency of believers, which is increasingly emergent in the literature as attention turns to practices rather than texts. In its conclusion, this chapter suggests both widening the scope of analysis to include traditions other than evangelicalism and also paying attention to the religious experience itself. Despite there being an air of novelty about all this, religion has long been of the basis for geopolitical practice. For instance, religion is at the root of the interstate system that those studying critical geopolitics have spent so much time dissecting. The Treaties of Westphalia were fundamentally about religious belief and the spatial delimitation of these pre-national collective identities (Morgenthou 1960). The emergence of ‘Europe’ from ‘Christendom’, as the continent’s former unitary opposition to its Islamic ‘Other’ fragmented, roughly coincides with the emergence of the original texts now labelled as the foundations of international relations (Kant 1917 [1795]; Machiavelli 1961 [1515]). ‘Geopolitics’ of course does not emerge until the turn of the twentieth century. While it is of course tempting to cast backwards in time for examples of geopolitical thinking of the sort described above, it is important to maintain a historicized notion of geopolitical discourse that considers it as a specific discourse that emerges in a particular spatio-temporal context (Heffernan 2000). In this regard, then, scholars of geopolitics have paid remarkably little consideration to religion. Classical geopolitical scholars worked within a context in which the discipline of geography was seen as part of a secular onslaught: Geography and related earth sciences had been central to successive revolutions in exploration and Biology, both of which pushed religion from the centre of explanations of the world and of our place in it: the geography of seas and continents did not attest to the centrality of the Holy City; the geographical diversity of forms of life questioned the idea of a singular Creation; the environmental regulations of plants suggested a harmony that was automatic and not subject to divine intervention; the age of the earth stretched way back before human occupation; and, finally, species, including humans, evolved rather than being permanent features of the Divine Plan. (Kearns 2009: 66) This context, in which Darwinism and environmental concerns dominated, was hardly one likely to generate serious scholarship on the relationship between religion and geopolitics. Later incarnations of geopolitics, concerned with political economy or Realpolitik, eschewed the cultural dimension that would be so closely linked to critical geopolitics. Looking back from this cultural perspective, it is nevertheless possible to excavate the role of religion as a discursive dimension of Cold War identity, with the official atheism of the Soviet Union a marker of an irreconcilable alien civilization to an otherwise secularizing West (Crampton and Ó Tuathail 1996; Ó Tuathail, 2000). Another cause for the late start in studying religion and geopolitics can be traced to the modernization thesis, which posited that religion 478

Evangelicals would become increasingly marginal to social life as modernity globalized. The third factor is that most geographers are unfamiliar with the theology of world religions, and are generally unprepared to immerse themselves in it. Finally, the crude treatment of religion (especially Islam) in most post-9/11 strategic analysis made most political geographers wary of taking up the topic. As mentioned above, however, the twin events of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the rise of what William Connolly has called the ‘evangelical–capitalist resonance machine’ (2005) drew attention, especially in the USA, to the seeming persistence of religion in global politics. The ‘evangelical–capitalist resonance machine’ refers to the assemblage that sustained the Republican Party during the Bush administration. It is a complex formed not of common doctrines, but of common sensibilities: The complex becomes a powerful machine as evangelical and corporate sensibilities resonate together, drawing each into a larger movement that dampens the importance of doctrinal differences between them. At first, the parties sense preliminary affinities of sensibility; eventually they provoke each other to transduct those affinities into a massive political machine. And the machine then foments new intensities of solidarity between these constituencies. (Connolly 2005: 871) This powerful conceptualization of religion’s role in maintaining the Bush coalition was key in turning the attention of political geographers to the various engagements between religion and politics. The current engagement builds on this intellectual heritage, but can be meaningfully traced to a 2006 special issue of Geopolitics, which reflects a varied engagement with the topic. The ‘war on terror’ figured in some of the papers: Nick Megoran considered the 9/11 attacks from the perspective of the stateaffiliated Church of England (2006), while W. Jefferson West examined the dissident geopolitical discourse of Fethullah Gülen, the leader of an Islamic social movement who countered the dominant rhetoric of the post-9/11 era (2006). More to the point, Iain Wallace considered the use of scriptures in the legitimation of George W. Bush’s foreign policy (2006). However, the war on terror was, at most, background for the other papers. Another theme that emerged was the centrality of religious metaphor and tradition for a range of geopolitical cultures: Dmitrii Sidorov examined the contemporary revival of ‘Third Rome’ metaphors in Russian Orthodoxy and nationalism (2006), while Cathelinje de Busser traced the shifting emphases in the speeches accompanying the annual offering of the Spanish state to St James (2006). While overwhelmingly based on the USA and West Eurasia, the special issue nevertheless contained a remarkable variety of engagements. Paradoxically, as the topic of religion and geopolitics began to coalesce into a research theme, the topic itself began to narrow until research on US evangelical Christianity dominated the field. This paradox is understandable first through the crisis of representation and the overwhelmingly US and Western European bias in critical geopolitics: simply put, scholars of critical geopolitics are more 479

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics familiar with Christianity and are unhappy (or generally unprepared) to engage in critique of non-Christian traditions and practices. A second factor was the broader circulation of Connolly’s resonance machine thesis, which purported to connect the Bush administration’s geopolitics with the heated domestic politics, offering exactly the kind of deconstruction of the domestic/international politics boundary on which critical geopolitics has thrived for two decades. As a result of this burst of work over the past several years, a sustained engagement with evangelicalism has emerged within critical geopolitics. This treatment has, however, neither been exhaustive, nor is it fully concluded. The next two sections of this chapter will review this body of literature in relation to the notion of evangelicals’ agency. In the final section, this chapter lays out a future agenda for work on evangelicalism and geopolitics that emphasizes agency, pluralism, and the distinctiveness of the religious experience.

Theology and belief The literature on evangelical geopolitics has maintained a consistent strand of research that emphasizes scriptures and non-sacred texts as proxies for beliefs. This is a natural jumping-off point for critical geopolitics to engage with evangelicalism because of the theoretical emphasis of critical geopolitics on discourse and representation. Therefore, just as scholars of critical geopolitics have traditionally dissected policy papers, speeches and popular culture in order to triangulate the larger geopolitical discourses in which those media artefacts are embedded, here scholars engaged with the texts that were available in order to compose an ‘evangelical geopolitics’. However, just as critical geopolitics has understood discourses as circulating and always in contestation, evangelical geopolitics has been interpreted as mixing and interpenetrating with other geopolitical discourses, such as American exceptionalism, and also as splintering internally among different theological understandings. This brings into existence a (near) global tapestry of evangelical particularisms, composed by particular theologies intersecting with particular nationalisms – and other geopolitical discourses, such as neoliberalism (see Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003). Understanding this tapestry requires the tracing of the particular discursive locations of texts. One group in particular, however, has received the lion’s share of attention during this flurry of research activity because of its connection to the Bush administration and its demographic strength in the USA: premillennial dispensationalists comprise roughly two-thirds of the US evangelical population, which numbers in total roughly 60 million (Barrett 1998; Weber 2004). Scholars of critical geopolitics have taken an interest in premillennial dispensationalism because of its emphasis on, and resonance with, current events in Israel/Palestine and other places of geopolitical interest. This is not to say that other doctrines are not geopolitical: missionary action is always predicated on geographical knowledges, and even the hoped-for universalism of Christianity 480

Evangelicals peacefully triumphant around the world is a type of geopolitical vision. Rather, premillennial dispensationalism more obviously resonates with other knowledges existent within academia and without, such as primordial nationalism and the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. Because of this, politically progressive academics have tended to level their critique on this doctrine rather than others. None of this emphasis, however, should occlude the diversity of perspectives held within the ‘big tent’ of evangelicalism, some very progressive. In their analysis of premillennial dispensationalism, scholars of critical geopolitics have divided their interest between the writings of theorists/theologians and evangelical popular culture. This is a slightly false distinction as there is some overlap between the producers of these two groups, and theologians often describe the earth as a stage being set for the performance of God’s script, thus blurring the line between theory and its mediation. Premillennial dispensationalism is an eschatology (knowledge of the end times) that has several fundamental tenets that virtually all advocates agree on. Believers argue that the world has been in a steady moral decline since the resurrection of Jesus Christ nearly 2,000 years ago. This will continue until a prophesied, but otherwise unforeseen, event called the Rapture in which Jesus will lift all true-believing Christians bodily into the air and sequester them in Heaven during the final stages of the epoch. Shortly thereafter the earth will enter a stage called the Tribulation, from which the Rapture is explicitly intended to spare true-believing Christians. Following this, it is generally believed that the Antichrist, a figure meant to be a dark mirror-image of Jesus, will rise to political prominence, unifying the world under a single government and also inspiring the forging of a single ecumenical world religion. The Antichrist’s world government is understood to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which marks the beginning of the Tribulation. From this point on, it is prophesied that it will be seven years until the return of Jesus Christ to battle the forces of the Antichrist at Har [Mount] Megiddo (hence, the Battle of Armageddon) in today’s Israel. That seven years will be full of disaster, war, disease and supernatural events, each of which is prophesied in various books of the Old Testament (mainly Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation). These curses are sent by God as final warnings for non-believers to turn to Christianity before the Battle of Armageddon. This chronology is primarily about these cosmic events, but they play out on, and are seen as temporally linked to the emergence of, particular spatial formations on today’s (or the near future’s) earth. For instance, at some point during this end time scenario (the exact timing is a matter of dispute) Israel1 is attacked by a collection of enemies: Gog, the king of the North, allied with Magog,2 Meshech, Tubal, Rosh, Gomer and Beth-Togarmah. They are joined by the kings of the South: Persia, Cush and Put. Given the parlous state of relations between Israel and its neighbours for the past 60 years, identifying who the modern-day equivalents are of these oftenopaque place names has become one of the primary activities of prophecy-minded 1 2

Here the scriptural ‘Israel’ is understood as the modern State of Israel. Sometimes Magog is understood as the country which Gog rules. 481

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics premillennial dispensationalists. It is through this discernment that our ‘present’ location on the apocalyptic timeline can be found. However, at the mid-point of the Tribulation the Antichrist will violate the peace treaty with Israel, establish his hegemony and declare himself God by taking his seat in the newly rebuilt Solomon’s Temple. Therefore, another general tenet of premillennial dispensationalist geopolitics is a distrust of peace treaties, indeed one might say that geopolitical pessimism is de rigueur for this eschatology. The world is in decline and nothing can be done about this. The only resolution is the second coming of Jesus, returning at the end of the Tribulation with his Raptured believers to unseat the Antichrist and establish a 1,000-year kingdom of peace on earth (hence the term ‘premillennial’). If this brief sketch indicates some of the ways in which premillennial dispensationalism is explicitly geopolitical in that it relies on spatializing discourses of power and place, it does justice neither to the internal variation of this discourse nor the variety of ways in which it can be encountered. Tristan Sturm has analysed the work of premillennialist theologian Mark Hitchcock, who is both a pastor in Oklahoma and the author of over 20 books connecting prophetic scriptures with current events (Sturm 2006; 2010). In his analysis Sturm categorizes Hitchcock’s work as ‘tabloid geopolitics’ (Debrix 2008), using theatrical metaphor to dramatize his interpretation of prophecy and generate anxiety (and therefore the possibility of new, more Christian subjectivities among his readers). Sturm also traces the ways in which Hitchcock, and other prophetic writers such as Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Walvoord, continually update the spatial referents of their writings in order to maintain a perpetual sense that the Rapture and Tribulation are imminent. Sturm finds that a key strategy of these writers is ‘citationality’, which he defines as: ‘a complex web of overlapping references that give veracity to prophetic events, places, and representations but change from their original intended meanings and uses as they are employed in different cultural, historical, and (geo)political contexts’ (2010: 138). Sturm’s attention to the processes through which premillennialist knowledges about the end times are legitimated within this community stretches between the realms of formal and popular geopolitics. My own work in this area3 has focused more clearly on the elaborations of premillennial dispensationalism in popular geopolitics. Indeed, the two most common ways through which non-premillennialist North Americans are likely to have encountered premillennialist ideas are the cartoon tracts of Jack Chick and through the best-selling novels of the Left Behind series (Dittmer 2007; Dittmer and Spears 2009). Jack Chick, arguably the most published living author (Chick has sold over 500 million copies of over 150 different cartoon tracts in over 100 languages), is little-known outside evangelical circles but many people have encountered his cartoon tracts, which are meant to be left in public spaces such as phone booths, public restrooms and hotel lobbies. The tracts are, like the tabloid geopolitics of Mark Hitchcock, intended to destabilize readers’ sense of self and open them up 3

One of these papers was written with Zeke Spears. 482

Evangelicals to new, more Christian, subjectivities. However, they also incorporate a particular geopolitical imagination. In particular, Chick has emerged as an ardent critic of the Catholic Church, Arabs/Muslims (they are generally conflated in his work), and the United Nations (which is associated with the one-world government to be led by the Antichrist). Chick also traces a rather conventional premillennial expectation of end-time events (although the Vatican is seen as the particularly likely avenue for the Antichrist’s rise to power). Of course, Chick does not work through the same medium as the writers whom Sturm studies: his choice of cartoons speaks to a different strategy than citationality: The union of text and image inherent to the medium is amenable to cheap production and maximum literacy by people of different languages and literary abilities. In fact, the tracts are available in 117 languages, in part because of the ease of digitally modifying tracts for re-publication with different text. The visual production (choice of images, text, and perspective) of Chick’s geopolitics is critical, [because] there is a substantial degree of nuance to each image, packing a lot of detail into a small space. … In addition, the use of cartoons enables Chick to create images that allow readers to fill in the details. (Dittmer 2007: 299–300) Another avenue of popular mediatization of premillennial geopolitics has been the best-selling Left Behind novels. These 12 books tell a fictionalized account of the Tribulation, as witnessed by the recently ‘born again’ Tribulation Force. There are now also prequels, sequels, a graphic novel, a video game and 12 books (set contemporaneously) written from the perspective of young people. Over 65 million copies of Left Behind novels have been sold thus far, and they have probably been read by many times, given the evangelical practice of handing the books to family, friends and fellow parishioners (Frykholm 2004) as a method of either bringing them to Christian belief or of buttressing existing Christian subjectivities and community bonds. Left Behind does not pretend to be prophetic in its specifics, but rather sees its particular narrative as being one possibility available from co-author Tim LaHaye’s extensive study of biblical prophecy. For instance, the rise of the Antichrist (Nicolae Carpathia) from Romanian domestic politics, as portrayed in Left Behind, is not meant to be indicative of the real Antichrist’s future origins. Nevertheless, the narrative of the books actualizes these potentialities into one particular spatio-temporal imagination. Similarly, LaHaye and his co-author Jerry Jenkins locate Gog and Magog in today’s Russia, make Babylon (in today’s Iraq) the headquarters of the Global Community (the one-world government of prophecy) and have the USA suffer nuclear strikes early in the narrative in retaliation for US opposition to the Global Community, thereby embedding US exceptionalism in the narrative yet explaining away the absence of the USA in end-times scripture. Central to their narrative, as with most premillennialist narratives of the end times, are Israel and the Jews, which as God’s chosen people (and, in this interpretation

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics of scripture, God’s chosen state) serve as the people and place most contested by the Antichrist’s plans. The Left Behind books manifest an ambivalent relationship between evangelicalism and globalization, linking the decline of traditional state sovereignty with the oppression of religious particularism (most concerningly, evangelical Christianity). Emerging forms of global governance and ecumenicalism are seen as homogenization and dissolution. This is, of course, seen as an inevitable process that is part of God’s plan for the end times. However, the technological aspects of globalization are seen as emancipatory – the Tribulation Force continually subverts the ‘beast system’ of surveillance and communication to their own purposes. A ‘global’ cell-phone system becomes co-opted so that the Tribulation Force can maintain contact with one another wherever they may be; the internet becomes a tool for evangelism, allowing them to witness to the unsaved all over the world. At times the books become a virtual advertisement for technology as the basis of US power (the Tribulation Force is primarily American). Therefore, the Left Behind books bolster the elements of globalization that promote US interests while shunning those which are seen to hold the USA back (for example, global governance). Interest in the popular geopolitics of premillennialism have not been limited to these cases. Simon Dalby has also intervened in this field, looking at the interpenetration of premillennial geopolitical imaginations with the discourse of American exceptionalism (2010). Empirically, he is concerned with the technothriller genre, perhaps best exemplified by the popular novels of Tom Clancy: In these novels the knowledgeable subject and the bearer of virtue is the hero in these times, one possessed of superior detailed information, and … the common sense understanding of the world that can interpret intelligence information to put the technological tools of the secret agent to good use fighting evil and saving the virtuous victims in a dangerous world. (Dalby 2010: 101) This genre has spilled over into the realm of religious fiction (in some ways Left Behind can be understood as a technothriller), and it is this blending of literary traditions that concerns Dalby. His comparison of Tom Clancy’s Teeth of the Tiger and Joel Rosenberg’s The Ezekiel Option is rooted in their common post-9/11 geopolitical framing; Dalby finds that many of the generic conventions are carried over from Clancy to Rosenberg, but with some key differences, such as a female co-protagonist. Further: Here [in The Ezekiel Option] religious knowledge of God’s various plans for the planet now complements the merely geopolitical analysis available to CIA agents and other functionaries of the War on Terror. Coupled to the superiority of the born again who know the truth, and with the promise of Rapture and salvation as an additional sanction for violence illegality, the techno-thriller now embodies violent technological geopolitical mayhem as the apotheosis of the genre in which the saved are triumphant. (Dalby 2010: 108)

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Evangelicals Dalby extends the popular geopolitical analysis of premillennial popular culture: clearly the avenues in which these ideas are disseminated are plural, and the form of mediation matters. The kinds of narrative that can be told in a book of prophecy interpretation are different than the narratives conveyed in cartoon tracts. Similarly, the fictionalizing of the future represented by Left Behind and The Ezekiel Option actualizes particular futures while leaving others aside: generic conventions become key mediators of prophetic geopolitics, emphasizing some viewpoints and shunting others aside. While the textual approach to evangelical geopolitics has been effective at tracing the contours of premillennial dispensationalism and its geopolitical implications, it does so through an effacement of both evangelicals’ agency and the diversity of their lived experiences. Inscribed within this textualism has been an implicit theory of audiences, one in which elites inscribe their beliefs on their followers through discourse (Dittmer and Dodds 2008). These readers consume popular media, whether cartoon tracts or books, and are presumed to be acted upon by the text: the ideas of the text inserted into their consciousness as if by hypodermic needle. This of course leaves little room for any evangelical agency except for those with access to publishing equipment or other forms of mass mediation (for a contrary analysis of how fans deployed Left Behind in their understandings of current events, see Dittmer 2008). This recognition has sparked a second strand of research on evangelical geopolitics that considers evangelical practices in both the everyday context and during explicitly geographical evangelism (for example, missionary work).

Practising evangelicalism While this focus on texts as indicative of belief systems is fruitful, particularly when those belief systems are not assumed to be monolithic, notions of doctrinaire orthodoxy have fallen out of favour in the social sciences because there is often a gap between what people say they believe and what they really believe; further, there is a gap between what people believe and how they act. For this reason a trend in the social sciences has been away from ‘beliefs’ and towards ‘practices’ (Asad 1993). A similar move has emerged in political geography (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007; Hyndman 2004). This distinction emerged as key in an exchange between Hannes Gerhardt (2008a; 2008b) and Tristan Sturm (2008) over the role of eschatology in US evangelicals’ interventions in ‘foreign affairs’, in this case the conflict between the Sudanese government and the largely Christian population of southern Sudan. Gerhardt’s assertion that US evangelicals had developed an ethics of care for the ‘Other’ attributed a more fleshed-out geopolitical imaginary than that ascribed to evangelicals in the above literature. Further, rather than originating in US evangelical discourses, this ethics of care is seen as imported from the field: missionaries in southern Sudan had shifted their attention from conversion to the security needs of those among whom they lived. 485

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics This translocation of care is precisely what happened with US evangelicals and their personal connection to southern Sudan; the local experiences in the field were eventually transposed across the Atlantic, giving rise to a much broader emotional connection between evangelical communities in the US and those in southern Sudan. (Gerhardt 2008a: 923–4) Sturm, while broadly approving, objected to the implication that this ethics of care was distinct from evangelicals’ eschatological concerns: ‘Not tackling eschatological complexities sequesters any analysis of the role of prophetic belief. In this way, it is argued that Gerhardt’s evangelicals are concerned with Sudan as an act of altruism or caring absolved of prophetic significance’ (Sturm 2008: 930). Sturm goes on to argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the distinctions not only between evangelicals but also between their eschatologies. Critiquing the larger body of literature on evangelical geopolitics (including his own prior publications), Sturm emphasized that the ‘ethic of care’ is only surprising if it is assumed that US evangelicals are all right-wing premillennialists who see the world as in decline. Sturm posits that postmillennialism, a rival eschatology to premillennialism, could serve as a theological template for exactly the ethics of care that Gerhardt observed. According to postmillennialism, the world will slowly get better, with more and more of the world’s people becoming Christian until finally a tipping point is reached and a millennium of peace is begun. At the end of that millennium Jesus returns and sorts the righteous from the unrepentant. Where premillennialism is a fundamentally pessimistic worldview, postmillennialism believes in the ability of people to make change in the world. For postmillennialists, Gerhardt’s ethics of care is not a ‘foreign’ development, but rather a variation on a ‘domestic’ theme. Overall, Sturm’s critique might be understood as a prioritization of discursive knowledge over practice; however, Gerhardt rejected this approach. There is a belief in the various stages leading up to the second coming of Christ, yet there is not the doom and gloom usually associated with devout premillennialism. Most of my sources, for example, offered some premillennial beliefs, which are generally considered to be more widespread among evangelicals than outright postmillennial interpretations of the Bible, yet these same sources were also very committed to world evangelization. (Gerhardt 2008b: 936) Gerhardt’s commitment to the place of missionary work as a key site for the production of new subjectivities emphasizes place-based practices as trumping meta-narratives and offers an implicit critique of previous work on evangelical geopolitics. Indeed, a strong strand of research has emerged looking at evangelical practices ‘in the field’ and how those experiences can alter subjectivities and consequently geopolitical orientations. For example, Carolyn Gallaher has studied the ‘Middle East mission paradox’: ‘Fatalism crashes into optimism. The idea that war in the Middle East is inevitable, 486

Evangelicals that Christians should not stand in the way of prophecy, collides with the evangelical mission to convert the unsaved and by doing so improve the politics and economies of the societies in which they live’ (Gallaher 2010: 211). Gallaher sees performance as the way to approach these conflicting subjectivities: her interviews with leaders of three missionary organizations trace the policies that missionaries are expected to implement in the field. All three leaders acknowledged that in practice premillennial dispensationalism was often soft-pedalled in missionary circles, because missionary organizations often accept missionaries from a wide range of expectations for the end times. Therefore, avoiding conflict within the organization trumps any particular eschatology. Gallaher attributes this ambiguity to the ambiguity of the missionary identity, which is performed differently for different audiences: while one elite denied the role of prophecy in his political views on the division of Jerusalem in his interview, he explicitly made that link to prophecy when writing in his book for an evangelical audience. Perhaps this indicates that no singular claim should be taken at face value, either of evangelical discourse or of evangelical practice. If the insights of Gerhardt’s work on place-based practice can be combined with the missionary context found in Gallaher’s research, the product might be Nick Megoran’s research on the Reconciliation Walk (2010). Megoran interviewed three elites from Youth With A Mission (YWAM). He also engaged in ethnographic and archival research with YWAM. This organization led a group of largely US and European Christians on a Reconciliation Walk through Europe from 1995 to 1999 that replicated the First Crusade, and which was timed to coincide at each destination with the arrival of those Crusaders exactly 900 years earlier. The key difference between these two perambulations was that while the first group was raiding and pillaging in the name of the (Western) Christian God, the second group was apologizing for the first. This ‘way of being’ produced a space in which, after the initial apology, the walkers expected to listen to whatever those receiving them (usually local religious elites) had to say in response. This orientation reversed the usual neocolonial relationship between the predominantly Western Christians and those to whom they apologized. Further, being in the Middle East exposed the largely Christian Zionist walkers to perspectives they otherwise could not possibly have encountered. One Reconciliation Walk leader remembered a particular moment: They began the trip on the city wall in East Jerusalem, and suddenly came across a group of angry Palestinian teenagers chanting and shouting. It transpired that an Israeli air-raid had hit the wrong target, massacring many families in Gaza. The Israeli authorities arrived and, without even attempting to calm down or disperse the crowd peacefully, began beating and arresting them. [The RW leader] relayed that the visitors were shocked to see the actions of the state they supported. (Megoran 2010: 390–91) Megoran argues, like Gerhardt, that ‘being-in-place’ matters in regards to the ability to empathize with the ‘Other’. However, Megoran explicitly pushes this point by arguing that it is not simply being there (like a tourist) that enables this empathy, it 487

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics is definitively the apology that opens up space not only for the diffusion of tension but also the possibility of changing quite fundamental political perspectives. The leaders of the Reconciliation Walk started as Christian Zionists but had their views challenged by what they saw and heard. Subsequent tours led by Reconciliation Walkers have reported similar changes in attitude. The effect of Gallaher, Gerhardt and Megoran’s work is to demand closer attention to actual practices on the ground and, in some cases, to see those practices as being transformative of evangelical (and other) attitudes and subjectivities. The idea of evangelical subjectivities as produced through social interaction and practice (rather than being ‘downloaded’ from eschatology) influenced internetbased ethnography of evangelical prophecy-watchers on the Rapture Ready website and discussion board (Dittmer 2009). This research looked at the ways in which prophecy-watchers perform their faith in communal digital spaces. In this setting it is common to express your desire for the Rapture and return of Jesus. In this scenario the decline of the world’s morality is seen, somewhat paradoxically, as a sign of personal security: the worse it gets, the sooner it will all be over and the poster will be reunited with Jesus. The discussion board serves as a venue for mutual assurance and story-telling. Nevertheless, many posters expressed profound insecurity, often because they were concerned that loved ones who were not ‘born again’ would be sent to hell or have to suffer through the Tribulation, or because they simply want to experience more in this life before beginning the next. Some stopped working and lived off their savings because they were sure that the Rapture was near but then worried that they had made a mistake; others professed a desire for the Rapture and a belief in its imminence, but then continued to make long-term plans. The sense of selfcontradiction and ambiguity links up with Gallaher’s application of performance in her research on missionaries. It is clear that the forum was a site in which evangelical identities were performed and faithfulness was valued. Nevertheless it is equally clear that the actual evangelicals’ practices of everyday life varied quite widely from what was publicly expected. In this research on practices, the evangelicals’ agency is emphasized and the doctrinaire aspects of evangelical geopolitics are played down. This theoretical shift has uncovered a layer of complexity beyond the already complex world of eschatology and prophetic futures. In regards to the agency of evangelicals, this strand of work has opened up new vistas, but it must be said that this agency has still, more often than not, been located with elites rather than everyday believers. For Gallaher and Megoran, it is the elite leaders of evangelical organizations that setup the transformative experiences in which their missionaries and Reconciliation Walkers participate (see also the elite rationalities of missionary work in Han 2010). For Gerhardt, it is a relatively passive experience of place that introduced the ethic of care to the evangelical community. Even in my own online research on the everyday (in)security of evangelicals, posters are seen as responding to both current events and the discursive expectations of community cohesion. It is clear that there is yet more room for improvement in regards to researching evangelical agency.

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Critique and the future This arc within the literature, from textualism to practice, while incomplete and always more subtle than presented here, provides an intriguing entry point to the question of agency both within critical geopolitics and the broader social sciences. Martin Müller recently re-introduced this question within a specifically Foucauldian context, although the question has been emanating from debates within feminist geopolitics for far longer (2008; see Pain 2009; Secor 2001). It is therefore impossible to distinguish this debate within evangelical geopolitics from that which is going on outside the narrow confines of this sub-field. Having said that, there are two particular directions in which this sub-field has room to grow without re-tracing this textualism versus practice debate. The first, and most obvious, is to look at the possibilities of 2006 and compare them to the reality of now. The 2006 special issue of Geopolitics covered a range of topics within religious geopolitics, from its intersection with a variety of nationalisms to the relatively wide range of religions it approached (Mormonism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism), the issue offered a great deal more than what has been taken from it. From that ecological diversity has come a monoculture of evangelical geopolitics. This narrowing of our research efforts had good reason: timeliness in regards to current events, political engagement and so on. Further, this narrowing has led to a relatively advanced understanding of one facet of religious geopolitics. But it has probably been detrimental to the development of the sub-field. Where is our broader understanding of, and engagement with, other forms of religious geopolitics, such as Judaization (Falah 1989; Yiftachel 1999) or Hindu nationalism (Grant 2005; Simpson and Corbridge, 2006)? These topics have been equally timely but have not received the extensive coverage by scholars of geopolitics (although they have been treated by geographers). The possibility of a wider frame of analysis than that of a solely ‘evangelical’ geopolitics is not only tantalizing but an ethical imperative, lest we reproduce evangelicalism (and places associated with it, such as the USA or, more specifically, the ‘Bible Belt’) as ‘Other’ (Jansson 2003; 2010). A second way forward is to take up a point of Gertjan Dijkink on the topic of religious geopolitics: we ought to not forget what makes religion a distinct form of human experience in comparison to other collectivities, such as nationalism (2006). Whereas much of the research on evangelical geopolitics has dealt with religion as a discourse (regardless of whether the emphasis is on textual discourse or on their bodily performance), a lacuna has formed around the religious experience. Some hints at what this research trajectory might look like can be found in burgeoning literature on non-representational theory and geopolitics (Carter and McCormack 2006; 2010) as well as in the work on affect and geographies of religion (Holloway 2006). This work provides an entirely different purchase on the topic than that which has come before and, contrary to a focus on discourse, offers the possibility of examining the ways in which affects, and the spaces in which they are shared, produce groups of people who are predisposed to one kind of (geo)political relationship or another. In other words, religious geopolitics needs to approach 489

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the religious experience itself in order to really appreciate the role of religion in geopolitical outcomes. With these two research directions in mind, it is clear that the future of the study of evangelical geopolitics as well as the broader field is bright with possibility even after the recent efflorescence.

References Agnew, J., 2010. ‘Deus vult: The geopolitics of the Catholic Church’. Geopolitics 15: 39–61. Asad, T., 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bialasiewicz, L., et al., 2007. ‘Performing security: The imaginative geographies of US strategy’. Political Geography 26: 405–22. Barrett, D., 1998. ‘A century of growth’. Christianity Today, Nov.: 50–51. Carter, S., and D. McCormack, 2006. ‘Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention’. Political Geography 25: 228–45. —— and —— 2010. ‘Affectivity and geopolitical images’. In F. McDonald, K. Dodds and R. Hughes (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Taurus, pp. 103–22. Connolly, W., 2005. ‘The evangelical–capitalist resonance machine’. Political Theory 33: 869–86. Crampton, A., and G. Ó Tuathail, 1996. ‘Intellectuals, institutions and ideology: The case of Robert Strausz-Hupé and “American geopolitics”’. Political Geography 15: 533–55. Dalby, S., 2010. ‘Apocalyptic exceptionalism: Rosenberg, Clancy, and the prophecy of Americanism’. In J. Dittmer and T. Sturm (eds), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 99–118. De Busser, C., 2006. ‘From exclusiveness to inclusiveness: The changing politicoterritorial situation of Spain and its reflection on the national offerings to the apostle Saint James from the second half of the twentieth century’. Geopolitics 11: 300–316. Debrix, F., 2008. Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics. New York: Routledge. Dijkink, G., 2006. ‘When geopolitics and religion fuse: A historical perspective’. Geopolitics 11: 192–208. Dittmer, J., 2007. ‘Of Gog and Magog: The geopolitical visions of Jack Chick and premillennial dispensationalism’. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 6: 278–303. —— 2008. ‘The geographical pivot of (the end of) history: Evangelical geopolitical imaginations and audience interpretation of Left Behind’. Political Geography 27: 280–300. —— 2009. ‘Maranatha! Premillennial dispensationalism and the counter-intuitive geopolitics of (in)security’. In K. Dodds and A. Ingram (eds), Spaces of Security

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Evangelicals and Insecurity: New Geographies of the War on Terror. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 221– 38. —— and K. Dodds, 2008. ‘Popular geopolitics past and future: Fandom, identities and audiences’. Geopolitics 13: 437–57. —— and Z. Spears, 2009. ‘Apocalypse, now? The geopolitics of Left Behind’. GeoJournal 74: 183–9. Falah, G., 1989. ‘Israeli “Judaization” policy in Galilee and its impact on local Arab urbanization’. Political Geography Quarterly 8: 229–53. Frykholm, A.J., 2004. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallaher, C., 2010. ‘Between Armageddon and hope: Dispensational premillennialism and evangelical missions in the Middle East’. In J. Dittmer and T. Sturm (eds), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 209–32. Gerhardt, H., 2008a. ‘Geopolitics, ethics, and the evangelicals’ commitment to Sudan’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 911–28. —— 2008b. ‘The role of ethical conviction and geography in religiously informed geopolitics: A response to Sturm’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 935–8. Grant, W.J., 2005. ‘The space of the nation: An examination of the spatial productions of Hindu nationalism’. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 11: 321–47. Han, J.H.J., 2010. ‘Reaching the unreached in the 10/40 window: The missionary geoscience of race, difference and distance’. In J. Dittmer and T. Sturm (eds), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 183–207. Heffernan, M., 2000. ‘Fin de siecle, fin du monde: On the origins of modern geopolitics’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: Critical Histories of a Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 27–51. Holloway, J., 2006. ‘Enchanted spaces: The séance, affect, and geographies of religion’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96: 182–7. Hyndman, J., 2004. ‘Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics’. Political Geography 23: 307–22. Jansson, D.R., 2003. ‘Internal Orientalism in America: W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the spatial construction of American national identity’. Political Geography 22: 293–316. —— 2010. ‘“What would Lee do?” Religion and the moral landscapes of southern nationalism in the United States’. In J. Dittmer and T. Sturm (eds), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 27–47. Kant, I., 1917 [1795]. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. London: George Allen and Unwin. Kearns, G., 2009. Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Machiavelli, N., 1961 [1515]. The Prince. London: Penguin.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Megoran, N., 2006. ‘God on our side? The Church of England and the geopolitics of mourning 9/11’. Geopolitics 11: 561–79. —— 2010. ‘Towards a geography of peace: Pacific geopolitics and evangelical Christian Crusade apologies’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 382–98. Morgenthou, H., 1960. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf. Müller, M., 2008. ‘Reconsidering the concept of discourse for the field of critical geopolitics: Towards discourse as language and practice’. Political Geography 27: 322–38. Ó Tuathail, G., 2000. ‘Spiritual geopolitics: Father Edmund Walsh and Jesuit anticommunism’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: Critical Histories of a Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 187–210. Pain, R., 2009. ‘Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics’. Progress in Human Geography 33: 466–86. Proctor, J., 2006. ‘Introduction: Theorizing and studying religion’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96: 165–8. Ridanpää, J., 2009. ‘Geopolitics of humour: The Muhammed cartoon crisis and the Kaltio comic strip episode in Finland’. Geopolitics 14: 729–49. Roberts, S., A. Secor and M. Sparke, 2003. ‘Neoliberal geopolitics’. Antipode 35: 886–97. Secor, A., 2001. ‘Toward a feminist counter-geopolitics: Gender, space and Islamist politics in Istanbul’. Space and Polity 5: 191–211. Sidorov, D., 2006. ‘Post-imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox geopolitical metaphor’. Geopolitics 11: 317–47. Simpson, E., and S. Corbridge, 2006. ‘The geography of things that may become memories: The 2001 earthquake in Kachchh-Gujarat and the politics of rehabilitation in the prememorial era’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96: 566–85. Sturm, T., 2006. ‘Prophetic eyes: The theatricality of Mark Hitchcock’s premillennial geopolitics’. Geopolitics 11: 231–55. —— 2008. ‘The Christian right, eschatology, and Americanism: A commentary on Gerhardt’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 929–34. —— 2010. ‘Imagining apocalyptic geopolitics: American evangelical citationality of evil Others’. In J. Dittmer and T. Sturm (eds.), Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 133–54. Wallace, I., 2006. ‘Territory, typology, theology: Geopolitics and the Christian scriptures’. Geopolitics 11: 192–230. Weber, T., 2004. On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend. Ada, MI: Baker Academic. West, W.J., 2006. ‘Religion as dissident geopolitics? Geopolitical discussions within the recent publications of Fethullah Gülen’. Geopolitics 11: 280–99. Yiftachel, O., 1999. ‘“Ethnocracy”: The politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine’. Constellations 6: 364–90.

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COMPANION

Intellectuals of Statecraft Mathew Coleman

Introduction In this chapter I will provide a broad overview of how critical geopolitics scholars have tackled the problem of ‘intellectuals of statecraft’, the community of ‘state bureaucrats, leaders, foreign-policy experts, and advisors throughout the world who comment upon, influence, and conduct the activities of statecraft’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 193). My argument is that critical geopolitics scholars effected a much-needed double displacement of the notion of intellectuals of statecraft. On the one hand, critical geopolitics scholars shook up the sedimented core of intellectual expertise at the heart of mainstream international relations research by bringing insights from a broader field of poststructural theory-building to bear on the latter’s account of the state and statecraft. On the other hand, critical geopolitics scholars opened up the concept of geopolitical intellect to focus on myriad everyday intellectuals of statecraft. However, I also propose that critical geopolitics scholars have not entirely succeeded in their treatment of geopolitical intellectuals. Specifically, critical geopolitics scholars are too focused on foreignpolicy intellectuals and could approach state-security practices and their experts much more broadly. What is an intellectual? Any essay on the topic is almost certainly obliged to start by pointing out, following Williams, that individuals described as intellectuals should not be thought of as possessing the more general quality of intelligence (1976). For Williams, the problem of intellectuals is instead about the production of knowledge which buttresses specific interests. This broadly Gramscian approach to intellectuals has figured importantly in critical geopolitics. For example, critical geopolitics scholars have in general understood intellectuals of statecraft in terms of the geographical and historical situatedness of the knowledges they produce (e.g. Agnew and Corbridge 1995). That said, a sustained engagement with poststructuralist insights about power and subjectivity has led many critical geopolitics scholars to a less explicitly interest-based approach to geopolitical intellect. The most important theoretical inspiration here is Michel Foucault. Foucault is often cited in relation to the problem of power/knowledge, or the notion that relations of power require the production of knowledge and

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics vice-versa. But this should not be confused with the problem of interest, as per Williams. Indeed, Foucault warned against the intellectual as a titular subject or as a ‘representing and representative consciousness’ and instead treated the intellectual in anonymous terms as part of a ‘system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts’ (Foucault and Deleuze 1996 [1972]: 75). This take on intellect finds expression in Foucault’s work in two basic ways. On the one hand, Foucault drew attention to the positivity of discourse and, moreover, criticized authorship as the creative production of meaning, insight, knowledge and so on. For example, in his early work on archaeology, Foucault proposed that rather than authors we have ‘discoursing subjects’ who belong to a ‘discursive field’ constituted by rules of expressibility, conservation, memory, reactivation and appropriation (Foucault 1996 [1968]). On the other hand, and as Foucault wrote in his later scholarship, discursive formations are birthed, contested and transformed within social, political and institutional spaces of practice. Accordingly, through the concept of genealogy, Foucault turned to ‘the subject who is speaking’ as a ‘subject of war’ and not just as a rule-bound speaker (2003: 52). This brief account of Foucault’s shift from anonymous rules of discourse to the non-subjective emergence of knowledge in specific places and times in order to understand the problem of intellectuals has left an important mark on critical geopolitics, or so I will argue below. My claim is that critical geopolitics’ significant contributions to our understanding of intellectuals of statecraft has been forged at an archaeological and genealogical crossroads. Indeed, there is something of an early and late critical geopolitics, with the former more influenced by Foucault’s archaeological insights and the latter more influenced by Foucault’s genealogical insights. This is, of course, not an easy distinction. On the one hand, critical geopolitics is not well described as comprising two waves of scholarship. Many of the early authors are still in the thick of critical geopolitics research and debate, which in fact points to the gap which exists between the fairly modest numbers of scholars in the field and the otherwise significant conceptual space that critical geopolitics has been allotted in human geography. On the other hand, the first wave of critical geopolitics scholars never bracketed their analyses of geopolitical discourse from the practised social world in, for example, the way that Foucault did meta-theoretically in his discussion of language. Nonetheless, there has been an important shift in emphasis over the course of the critical geopolitics experiment – from an early focus on geopolitical intellect in terms of Orientalism and the production of otherness in state-security discourse to more grounded accounts of geopolitical intellect in terms of the everyday lives of statecraft. The former emphasizes how intellectuals of statecraft were bound by particular linguistic and metaphysical commitments, whereas the latter attends to geopolitical expertise through the lens of nitty-gritty, embodied and place-specific practice. For some, it should be noted, this shift is insufficient, and more continues to be needed to wrench critical geopolitics out of its analyses of ‘terms without materiality’ (Agnew 2000: 98; Müller and Reuber 2008). In the first section below I explore the challenge that critical geopolitics posed to neo-realist international relations scholarship in their engagement 494

Intellectuals of Statecraft with poststructural theory. In a second section I explore how critical geopolitics subsequently prised open geopolitics as a spatially extensive sphere of intellectual practice mediated through formal, practical, popular and structural contexts. In the third section I examine the ‘deconstructive paradox’ at the heart of critical geopolitics and follow feminist geographers’ criticisms that too often the usual intellectual suspects occupy centre-stage in critical geopolitics research. Finally, I argue that critical geopolitics’ has not thought geopolitics beyond foreign policy and as such could do more to take into account a range of non-foreign policycentric intellectuals and knowledges of statecraft.

Neo-realism as Orientalism Critical geopolitics emerged as a response to the re-militarization of US–Soviet relations during the late 1970s through to the mid-1980s. The immediate goal was to question the socio-spatial structures of intelligibility or ‘architectures of enmity’ (Gregory 2004) animating specifically US foreign policy. As Dalby explained, the sudden cooling of US–Soviet relations during the 1980s and in particular the explosion of heated US rhetoric about the dangers posed by communism as well as the growth in US support for counter-revolutionary forces across the globe, suggested the need to carefully examine ‘how the political systems that threaten war came to be constructed in the first place, rather than simply taking them for granted’ (1990: 168). An important early reference point for this project was the ascendency of neo-realist thought in post-Vietnam, US-based internationalrelations scholarship. Whereas classical realists were essentially political sociologists interested in the Realpolitik of foreign-policy executives and planners, neo-realists – or structural realists – stressed that statecraft resulted disinterestedly from the systemic and authorless demands placed on states by virtue of external shifts in the balance of power between states. Neo-realists discounted the role of domestic politics and/or leadership differences as factors underlying states’ foreign policies, and emphasized instead the non-place specific ‘anarchic’ and ‘self-help’ foundations of the international system. In so doing, neo-realists placed an emphasis on the genericness of states’ military strategies. Moreover, neo-realists’ billiard-ball modelling of states as undifferentiated, indifferent and ultimately unlived chunks of geostrategic space dovetailed in a practical sense with US foreign policy during the 1980s. As Dalby argued in his Creating the Second Cold War (1990), the major producers of geopolitical knowledge at the time, such as the US-based Committee on the Present Danger, drew explicitly on the neo-realist worldview by virtue of their emphasis on the structural inevitability of conflict as well as their emphasis on international relations through the lens of balance-of-power politics. In order to interrogate the neo-realist socio-spatial structures of intelligibility underwriting US foreign policy, critical geopolitics scholars turned to an array of poststructural thinkers, including Jacques Derrida (e.g. Ó Tuathail 1994), Jean Baudrillard (e.g. Sidaway 1994; Clarke, Doel and McDonough 1996) and. especially. 495

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Michel Foucault (e.g. Dodds and Sidaway 1994). Certainly there were many reasons why these thinkers were taken up in critical geopolitics, but overall their interest in the politics of knowledge helped critical geopolitics scholars examine the ‘social construction’ of mainstream, and especially neo-realist, scholarship. Although this term is generally used to refer to the idea that knowledge is relative to those who are producing it and as such could mean the disclosure of specific interests behind particular forms of knowledge (as per Williams, above), the emphasis was slightly different in the early critical geopolitics research. Indeed, social construction was approached largely through an archaeological lens. As Dodds and Sidaway argued in their early review, critical geopolitics scholars were concerned to deconstruct the ‘narratives, concepts, and signifying practices that reside within geopolitical discourses’ in order to ‘understand something of the power of those discourses to shape international politics’ (1994: 516), or, as Ó Tuathail put it, ‘the task of the critical [geopolitics] theorist is to write on the maps of meaning [of statecraft], to write over that which is reputedly already written and disrupt the legibility of maps, the techniques of observation which make them possible’ (1994: 531). This initial concern for the social construction of geopolitical knowledge resulted in a significant re-evaluation of neo-realism. In particular, that neo-realism might be a system of thought or a discursive field governed by rules rather than a levelheaded mapping of conflict allowed neo-realism to be reappraised as a generally unthought and unacknowledged mode of political theorizing about the spatial and temporal horizons of political community and identity (for a similar analysis in critical international relations, see Ashley 1984; Walker 1993). Agnew called this the constitutive, yet almost never recognized, ‘domestic/foreign polarity’ of institutionalized international relations research on the state and statecraft (1994). Indeed, the emerging consensus among critical geopolitics scholars was that neorealists engaged in literally ‘earth-writing’ self- and other-citing acts which enabled state-based groups to know and celebrate themselves spatially in relation to other state-based groups. For example, critical geopolitics scholars zeroed in on the ‘Orientalizing’ identity/difference ‘geo-graphs’ – or spatialized discourses about self and other – that inhered in neo-realist thought (and in power-politics statecraft more generally) and which reduced complex global political economic realities to simplistic state-based strategic mappings of identity here and difference there (e.g. Dalby 1988; 1991).

The everyday of statecraft If critical geopolitics’ major early accomplishment – one that still resonates today – was to tease out the performativity of a power-politics lens on international relations, this insight was not unquestionably embraced by critical geopolitics scholars. Indeed, that critical geopolitics cannot easily be understood as a ‘field’ or ‘school’ (Power and Campbell 2010) is due in part to debate during the 1990s over the promises and pitfalls of specifically a performative approach to geopolitical 496

Intellectuals of Statecraft research. In a 1996 special issue of Political Geography, for example, Dalby and Ó Tuathail disagreed about how critical geopolitics scholars might go about looking at states and statecraft. For Ó Tuathail, an identity/difference formulation of geopolitics, while useful, threatened to replace a neo-realist ontology about conflict with a ‘new transhistorical … metanarrative … about the perpetual struggle of states to secure their identity’ (1996b: 650). Moreover, in response to the largely textual basis of emerging critical geopolitics research, Ó Tuathail warned about the gap between what states said about themselves in official policy documents and pronouncements and what states did on the ground. Dalby agreed with Ó Tuathail but also restated the fundamental importance of geopolitical language and its articulations of identity and difference to geopolitical practice. He underlined that ‘unraveling how power works’ requires investigating the ‘particular discursive tropes and related reasoning’ that animate statecraft (Dalby 1996: 658; see Dalby 2010). Ó Tuathail’s reply, the last in this exchange, was that the ‘patterned mess’ of statecraft was not well understood through overarching philosophical insights about Orientalist language, maps and invocations of Otherness but instead required grounded research into the practice of geopolitics. He also warned that ‘deconstructions inevitably [reproduce] even as they [challenge] the very project of “theories of international relations”’ (Ó Tuathail 1996c: 663). I will return to Ó Tuathail’s critique of deconstruction qua repetition below. For the moment, I want to suggest that Dalby and Ó Tuathail’s exchange, almost never mentioned in the subsequent critical geopolitics scholarship, marks a moment of transformation in the field. Without overplaying it, Dalby and Ó Tuathail’s discussion can be seen as representing a sort of coming-of-age of critical geopolitics, which up until that point had been a mostly theoretical enterprise. What came next for critical geopolitics, and which would have been impossible without the huge theoretical leaps made in the early 1990s, was a sustained engagement not just with the representations of self and other that inhabit geopolitical texts but with the specific institutional and other sites through which geopolitical representations are shaped and deployed. To refer crudely back to my remarks about Foucault above, the shift can be conceptualized as one from an archaeology to (also) a genealogy of geopolitics. It is noteworthy, for instance, that Dalby and Ó Tuathail turned to the language of ‘representational practice’ in their 1998 edited collection, based on the special issue of Political Geography, when discussing ‘geopolitical representations of self and other’ (Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998: 5). Although Dalby and Ó Tuathail did not state explicitly what this phrase means, I suggest that it can be profitably read as a critique of representation as a sort of asocial stability or presence that can be deconstructed by critics ‘from the outside’. Indeed, ‘representational practice’ suggests that representations are never self-present in and of themselves and legible as such to critics but are instead continually unfolding according to the contingent, practised specifics of place and time. The effect is to move from deconstructing language to studying already and always decentred representations that are mistaken as stable by critics but which on closer inspection reveal themselves as always in the process of de- and re- contextualization (for a provocative discussion, see Rose 497

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics 2002). Or as Thrift argues in his oft-cited ‘It’s the little things’ critique of the early critical geopolitics project: ‘What we see is not some extraordinary, hermetically sealed apparatus of representation but an ordinary, hesitant set of practices shot through with doubts and phantoms. … Practices make correspondences, but the correspondences are never perfect’ (2000: 383). Perhaps the best example of this shift is how Dalby and Ó Tuathail went on to explore the question of ‘where’ critical geopolitics scholars should go looking for statecraft. The question of who was to count as an intellectual of statecraft was here front and centre. Rather than simply a specialized knowledge generated by foreign-policy elites, Dalby and Ó Tuathail pointed to a wide range of official (and unofficial) knowledges of statecraft, dispersed in a not necessarily additive fashion across a range of institutional as well as everyday sites: Geopolitics saturates the everyday life of states and nations. Its sites of production are multiple and pervasive, both ‘high’ (like a national security memorandum) and ‘low’ (like the headlines of a tabloid newspaper), visual (like the images that move states to act) and discursive (like the speeches that justify military actions), traditional (like religious motifs in foreign policy discourse) and postmodern (like information management and cyber war). While its conventionally recognized ‘moment’ is in the dramatic practices of state leaders (going to war, launching an invasion, demonstrating military force, etc.), these practices and the much more mundane practices that make up the conduct of international politics are constituted, sustained and given meaning by multifarious representational practices throughout cultures. (Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998: 5) In a subsequent publication Ó Tuathail built on this discussion by outlining four major ‘types’ of geopolitics: formal, practical, popular and structural (1999). There is not sufficient space to delve into each in detail here, nor is there space to do justice to how these terms have been taken up by others. I will instead make reference to a partial sample of relevant research in parenthetical form with the hope that this will be a review for most readers. Formal geopolitics refers to the realm of geopolitical thought, mostly in academic settings, but not exclusively. For example, Robert Kaplan, the travel writer, has generated considerable attention by resuscitating Halford Mackinder’s geographically and environmentally determinist ‘heartland’ map to explain world politics (see critique in Dalby et al. 2009). Practical geopolitics refers to actually existing foreign policies in specific settings and includes work critical of both conventional practices typically associated with statecraft (e.g. Megoran 2005, on the historical and geographical specificities of state-based discourses of danger; Ó Tuathail 2008, on Russian–Georgian geostrategy; Parsons and Salter 2008, on Israel’s territorial fragmentation of Palestine; Power and Mohan 2010, on China’s resource strategies in Africa) as well as other practices not conventionally understood as geopolitical (e.g. Graham 2004, on the militarization of urban planning and governance; Hyndman 2010, on child soldiering; Katz 2007, on the everyday banality of the post-9/11 security state). 498

Intellectuals of Statecraft Popular geopolitics includes the roles of mass media, religion and popular culture, for the most part on an affective register, in the production and reproduction of geopolitical representations of self and other (e.g. Dittmer 2008, on evangelical Christian geopolitical imaginations; Dittmer 2011; Dodds 2008, on geopolitical production at the box office; Falah, Flint and Mamadouh 2006, on newspapers and the production of geopolitical identity; Pain et al. 2010, on emotional geographies and geopolitical change; Sharp 1996, on the popular construction of danger in media; Sidaway 2009, on the traces of war in the built urban environment). Finally, structural geopolitics includes what Ó Tuathail calls ‘processes and tendencies that condition how all states practice foreign policy’ (1999: 110; see e.g. Luke and Ó Tuathail 1998, on the ‘global flowmations’ that structure state geopolitics). The result of this four-part expansion in critical geopolitics’ objects of study was a conceptually very rich genealogical implosion of the traditionally pyramidal structure of geopolitical intellect. Rather than intellectuals of statecraft consisting of a few privileged voices at the top of a vertical foreign policy decision-making structure in elite institutional settings (academic or state-based), whose discourses can be interrogated for their Orientalist productions of space, the problem of geopolitical intellect was horizontally dispersed across a complex landscape of ‘minor’ and ‘major’ geopolitical sites, emphasizing the prosaic as much as exceptional constitution of statecraft (Painter 2006). The point was not that elite thought is somehow unimportant to geopolitics, nor that ‘big picture’ self/Other mappings are irrelevant, but that such productions of geopolitical knowledge are part of a much larger, churning field of geopolitical intellect where a multitude of voices count in the production of geopolitical knowledge. Indeed, the formal–practical–popular– structural quadruplet recognized that geopolitical intellect is as much of the masses as of the elite, and as such implicates a variety of sites of practice.

Critical geopolitics’ deconstructive paradox In his Critical Geopolitics, Ó Tuathail proposed a hyphenation of geopolitics as geo-politics. This move was a ‘tactic of play whereby an old name is retained and subverted to designate the previously invisible problematic of its own functioning’ (1996a: 67). Ó Tuathail’s description of critical geopolitics as tactical is not inconsequential. In contrast to strategies, which concern a declarative establishment of territory and title, tactics are a form of guerrilla warfare: they are always dependent on an-other and do not, as Ó Tuathail puts it, ‘delimit an exteriority’. As such, critical geopolitics ‘works within the conceptual infrastructures that make the geopolitical tradition possible and borrows from it the resources necessary for its deconstruction’ (Ó Tuathail 1996a: 68). Ó Tuathail noted this dynamic early in the critical geopolitics experiment by remarking that a non-orthodox critical geopolitics ‘is not an act that takes place outside of the texts, institutions, and figures under investigation. … In displacing, we are consorting with a philosophical tradition, an historical code, a geographical map, an order of places’ (1994: 542). He added that 499

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the phrase ‘critical geopolitics’ itself reflects this close, cramped fraternity: it is ‘an awkward oxymoron, an attempt to force together a word usually associated with the questioning of power with another whose very mode of being has been power and the calculated use of it for reactionary ends’ (Ó Tuathail 1994: 525). Critical geopolitics’ dependence on its mainstream counterparts raises several important questions about critical geopolitics as a form of knowledge. First, if critical geopolitics’ conditions of possibility as critique lies in the fact that it is a tactical engagement with mainstream geopolitics, it is itself not generative of meaning. Indeed, critical geopolitics’ built-in anti-normativity with respect to mainstream geopolitics – in the sense of being first and foremost an interrogation of normative and non-normative categories – explains why some have found the field frustratingly thin from the perspective of social-justice-oriented research (Koopman 2010; Megoran 2008). Second, the tactical nature of critical geopolitics arguably sidelines the ways in which critique too can be generative of that which is being criticized. For example, in Critical Geopolitics, Ó Tuathail refers to the relationship as parasitical, with specifically critical geopolitics qua geo-politics as an almost prostrate mode of knowing. An important intervention here, albeit not specific to critical geopolitics, is Hardt and Negri’s ‘imperial’ inversion of Marx in the form of capital as parasitic on labour (2004). Whatever one might think of their larger corpus, Hardt and Negri do at least offer a comprehensive understanding of geopolitical knowledge as a kaleidoscope of meaning with multiple generative centres that feed off one another in often unpredictable ways. In other words, we might consider parasitism as a two-way street, with centres of power feeding off its critics. However, I am most interested in a third consequence of critical geopolitics’ general problem of displacing-yet-consorting. This is a problem of inheritance: if critical geopolitics problematizes statecraft as well as mainstream research about it, it does so largely through logics, maps and languages provided by the latter. This is indeed what Ó Tuathail signalled in his exchange with Dalby as regards deconstruction as a mode of repetition which (albeit unintentionally) recentres analysis on that which is being decentred. This problem is of immense importance. Much of the debate within critical geopolitics about its shortcomings (for example, the 2000 special issue of Political Geography) can be traced to a core ‘up take’ problem, or how certain aspects and/ or objects of study in mainstream geopolitical scholarship get taken up and then reproduced by those apparently most critical of them. That critical geopolitics – heeding but a few scattered early warnings (e.g. Dalby 1994; Sparke 1994) – only began to systematically tackle the intersection of gender and geopolitics in the wake of Hyndman’s barely decade young call for an explicitly feminist geopolitics is a significant case in point (2001). Indeed, critical geopolitics is in many ways a masculinist science. The number of critical geopolitics articles which feature some sort of interrogation of a mainstream ‘founding father’ is testament to this charge. As Sharp has argued, although useful in the sense of teasing apart the possible inconsistencies and problems in canonical geopolitical intellectuals, the result of this sort of scholarship is that the ‘big men’ who authored geopolitics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are recentred in the critical scholarship 500

Intellectuals of Statecraft (2000; see also Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Kofman 1996). The ‘newness’ of critical geopolitics, perhaps, is only insofar as it too orbits around ‘old’ intellectuals of statecraft, or, as Dowler and Sharp suggest, what we get is ‘a genealogy of heroic men, significantly not just when discussing the masculinist history of geopolitical strategies of elite practitioners, but also in the interventions of critical geopoliticians themselves’ (2001: 167).

Critical geopolitics’ foreign-policy-centrism In this last section I want to briefly expand on critical geopolitics’ deconstructive paradox in order to reconsider not so much where geopolitics is located, as above, but what counts as geopolitics. Specifically, I want to suggest that, even as critical geopolitics scholars have displaced the socio-spatial insides and outsides of state territoriality through an examination of statecraft as a geographical performance of identity and its differences and even as they have pluralized the study of geopolitics to incorporate a range of productions and reproductions of the geopolitical beyond intellectuals of statecraft at the top of a pyramid of geopolitical power, they have more often than not treated geopolitics as equivalent to foreign policy. The bulk of critical geopolitics scholarship – and particularly that focused on theory-building or programmatic statements of purpose – is grounded explicitly in foreignpolicy analysis, be it about foreign-policy strategy, domestic political contest over foreign policy, foreign-policy bureaucracies, foreign-policy institutions and agencies, foreign-policy think tanks, foreign-policy ventures and/or relevant media productions of the latter. Despite drawing attention to the problematic self/Other or internal/external geographical specifications of state-based geopolitical conflict and thus in essence questioning any meaningful epistemological distinction between the domestic and the foreign in terms of political logics and spaces, foreign policy remains arguably at the core of the critical geopolitics project, and this gives a particular spin to how we conceptualize the content of geopolitics. To be clear, my point is not that critical geopolitics scholars have neglected statecraft as an everyday practice. As noted above, a recent and very productive trend in contemporary critical geopolitics research is the investigation of specific institutional and bureaucratic environments – as well as popular spheres – that constitute geopolitical practice. Dodds has called this an examination of ‘how geopolitics works in everyday life’ (2001: 473). Similarly, Kuus calls attention to the focus on ‘micro-level capillaries of power’ in recent critical geopolitics research (2010). Rather, my point is that so-called ‘low politics’ – typically distinguished as a sphere of second-order policies and practices in relation to a first-order suite of primarily national-security-relevant policies and practices – has been generally neglected in critical geopolitics research. Indeed, for the most part critical geopolitics researchers have accepted the division between ‘low’ and ‘high’ politics in the sense that the focus has been on high-military matters such as states’ mobilization and justification for war, diplomatic controversy, international border disputes, foreign 501

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics intelligence gathering, nuclear arms proliferation, large-scale territorial strategies and so on. There are some important exceptions to critical geopolitics’ foreign-policycentrism. Due to space constraints a detailed account and review is not possible. An example which warrants explicit mention, however, is Ó Tuathail and Dahlman’s research on the geopolitics of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia–Herzegovina. In general, Ó Tuathail and Dahlman’s point is to insist on the place-specificity of geo-strategic conflict and as such to warn that any analysis of geopolitics based on ‘traditional verticals of power and governance’ is bound to miss out on geopolitical practice as mediated by and constituted through local ‘entrepreneurial fields’ (2011: 10). But in making this claim about the importance of place to geopolitical research, Ó Tuathail and Dahlman are not simply re-scaling geopolitical research, or opening geopolitical study to ‘the empirical complexities of particular places, to their localized power dynamics and spaces, their localized systems of identifications, and their situatedness within larger networks of geopolitical power’ (2011: 15). They are also opening up what counts as geopolitics. Their discussion of the war itself (2011: 112–41), for example, highlights the centrality of demographic tactics (rape and forced population displacement) as well as local criminality and long-standing family- and/or neighbourhood-based grievances to Serbian military strategy. Moreover, Ó Tuathail and Dahlman’s extended discussion of the postwar return process (2010: 167–292) foregrounds a range of issues not usually understood as geopolitical: property rights and property-law implementation, corruption and patronage in local government, discriminatory public-service provision, inadequate public safety, biased law enforcement, daily violence, housing construction, job creation, education, the development of transport and communication infrastructures, electoral politics and so on. Indeed, Ó Tuathail and Dahlman’s analysis of the postwar return process highlights precisely the private ‘political ineffectual’ spaces and practices that feminist geopolitics scholars 10 years ago correctly identified as wanting in critical geopolitics’ basic emphasis on geopolitics as a public practice in apparently ‘political effectual’ spaces and policies (Hyndman 2001; 2004; Sharp 2000). Some readers might see my critique as an instance of category confusion; that is, that I am mistaking properly political geographic phenomena for geopolitics. One potential response would be that the sub-disciplinary differentiation between the two fields is better thought of as reflecting the state of human geography after 1945 than any significant difference in subject matter – big ‘G’ and small ‘g’ geographies, for example. Indeed, the division of labour and subject matter between political geography and geopolitics is in large measure the product of a specifically AngloAmerican disciplinary strategy to ‘brick a high wall between geopolitics and political geography’ in the Cold War context – itself a deeply geopolitical move (Smith 2003: 289). Second, and more pragmatically, actually existing geopolitics have never been narrowly about foreign policy; as in Ó Tuathail and Dahlman’s work, geopolitics implicates a broad field of more or less undifferentiated domestic and foreign policies and practices. I come specifically at the problem of the undifferentiatedness of the domestic and the foreign by virtue of having been schooled in critical 502

Intellectuals of Statecraft geopolitics literature on power and space but having also developed an empirical research focus on the history and geography of detention and deportation politics in the USA. There is not much in critical geopolitics on immigration (cf. Hyndman 2000), perhaps because to study immigration requires explicitly ‘studying up’ the state (Mountz 2002) in its lived everyday specificities rather than looking to largescale events of notable inter-state importance. Nonetheless, immigration is clearly about foreign policy – and more. For example, well before the 9/11 attacks, indeed since the inauguration of the modern period of immigration enforcement with the late-nineteenth -century Chinese Exclusion Acts, US immigration policy has operated as a complex merger of domestic policy and foreign-policy interests and as such has welded together an array of otherwise disparate ‘policing’ practices related to eugenics, sexuality and gender, political subterfuge, anti-communism, race and demographic change, class, community policing, counter-terrorism, welfare entitlements, schooling, labour permitting, anti-gang enforcement, driver’s licensing laws, narcotics and arms smuggling, people trafficking and so on. The point is that a geopolitics of migration control implicates both conventional foreignpolicy topics and spaces (borders and border control) as well as those typically relegated to a lesser status in the geopolitics literature (spaces of social reproduction and the biopolitical management of immigrants and minority populations within state borders) (on the ‘geopolitics of immigration’, see Nagel 2002); or, put slightly differently, immigrants are made objects of statecraft at the crossroads of a range of ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing initiatives and knowledges and moreover are arguably interpreted as threats insofar as they undo what are often thought of as distinct domestic and foreign logics and spaces. Accordingly, Campbell’s insight about foreign policy as both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ inscriptions of danger as well as policing practices, which in turn challenge exactly the inside/outside pedagogical account of state territoriality that mainstream geopolitics supposes as its starting point (1998), strikes me as a commonsensical starting point for any discussion of what constitutes geopolitics. What does this mean for how we define intellectuals of statecraft? It means that those identified as such need not necessarily be associated with the realm of national security politicking, whether ‘high up’ or ‘low down’ in states’ decisionmaking structures. Indeed, by making the differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’, as noted above, I do not mean simply a scalar argument about where geopolitical intellect takes place. Rather, the point is to expand the category of intellectuals of statecraft by thinking more expansively about what practices and policies count as geopolitics in the first place. Foucault provides an excellent starting point for such a project. For example, in a recently translated Collège de France lecture, Foucault argues strongly against the likes of Hobbes on the topic of war because of the way his contract theory approach to sovereignty leaves war at the doorstep of civil society: war is made a very narrow series of extra-civil practices in contrast to a broad sphere of apparently non-warring, political practices (2003; see Elden 2002; Philo 2007). In response, Foucault inverts Clausewitz: ‘politics is the continuation of war by other means’. By this Foucault means simply that the practices constitutive of civil peace ‘on the inside’ are properly belligerent, even if they do not look 503

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics immediately like war: ‘We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions’ (Foucault 2003: 16). If we take our cues from Foucault on war, what counts as geopolitics would have to undergo something of an exponential expansion, as would the question of who counts as an intellectual of statecraft. A good point of contrast with regards to critical geopolitics’ foreign-policycentrism is the proliferating research across the humanities and social sciences on state biopolitics, also deeply informed by Foucault’s work, in which the provision of state security is understood as the management of risks associated with the social and economic reproduction of human populations (e.g. Amoore 2009; Huysmans 2006; Ingram 2008; Vaughan-Williams 2009; Walters 2006). This work stresses state security as the power to make populations live in particular ways rather than narrowly as the power to take life, and as such draws attention to the ways in which policies related to sexuality, education, health, housing, transport, language, immigration, labour, mobility, food, assimilation, culture and so on are inextricably about shoring-up as well as projecting state security. Another way of putting it is that the biopolitics literature does not mistake security studies for strategic studies (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). There are some important difficulties in the biopolitics literature, such as the predilection to draw a stark difference between spatial and population-based strategies of governance, and as such to see geopolitics as an antiquated territorial power (e.g. Dillon 2007). Such moves have in general been resisted by geographers, who insist on the ongoing importance of the socio-spatial dialectic (in its specifically territorial form) to the exercise of power (e.g. Elden 2009; Sidaway 2005; Sparke 2005) as well as on how biopolitics and geopolitics work together rather than differently (e.g. Gerhardt 2009; Hyndman 2010; Morrissey 2011; Tyner 2009). But on the whole what is remarkable about the biopolitics literature is that it opens up an enormous terrain of possible intellectuals of statecraft well beyond the formulation and implementation of foreign policy per se.

Conclusion I have argued that critical geopolitics scholars undertook a very productive doubledisplacement of the notion of intellectuals of statecraft. The first move was to shift considerably the terms of debate within (and with) neo-realist international relations by introducing a range of dissident intellectuals to the study of states and statecraft, including many who previously would have been considered at best tangential to the study of geopolitics. The second move was to open up the study of geopolitical intellect to a multitude of sites throughout the ganglia of the state and beyond the official halls of statecraft. At the same time, I submit that critical geopolitics has not gone far enough when it comes to its delineation and analysis of intellectuals of statecraft. Part of the difficulty, as argued by feminist geopolitics scholars, is that the critical geopolitics project is as much a ‘boy’s town’ as its mainstream interlocutors, at least in terms of the ongoing focus on deconstructing nineteenth504

Intellectuals of Statecraft and twentieth-century canonical practitioners of statecraft. But the bigger point that I want to drive home here is that critical geopolitics’ embedded foreignpolicy-centrism has limited how critical geopolitics scholars have conceptualized geopolitical practice and subsequently how they have assessed who counts as an intellectual of statecraft. The focus on specifically foreign policy intellectuals in the critical geopolitics scholarship misses out on a range of other intellectuals of statecraft whose knowledges may be no less important to state geo-strategy.

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Parsons, N., and M.B. Salter, 2008. ‘Israeli biopolitics: Closure, territorialisation and governmentality in the occupied Palestinian territories’. Geopolitics 13: 701–23. Philo, C., 2007. ‘Bellicose history and local discursivities’. In S. Elden and J. Crampton (eds), Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography. Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 341–67. Power, M., and D. Campbell, 2010. ‘The state of critical geopolitics’. Political Geography 29: 243–6. —— and G. Mohan, 2010. ‘Towards a critical geopolitics of China’s engagement with African development’. Geopolitics 15: 462–95. Rose, M., 2002. ‘The seductions of resistance: Power, politics, and a performative style of systems’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 383–400. Sharp, J.P., 1996. ‘Hegemony, popular culture and geopolitics: The Reader’s Digest and the construction of danger’. Political Geography 15: 557–70. —— 2000. ‘Remasculinizing geo-politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’. Political Geography 19: 361–4. Sidaway, J., 1994. ‘Geopolitics, geography, and “terrorism” in the Middle East’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12: 357–72. —— 2005. ‘Empire’s geographies’. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 3: 63–78. —— 2009. ‘Shadows on the path: Negotiating geopolitics on an urban section of Britain’s South West Coast Path’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 1091–116. Smith, N., 2003. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sparke, M., 1994. ‘Writing on patriarchal missiles: The chauvinism of the Gulf War and the limits of critique’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 1061–89. —— 2005. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thrift, N., 2000. ‘It’s the little things’. In K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge, pp. 380–87. Tyner, J.A., 2009. War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count. New York: Guilford. Vaughan-Williams, N., 2009. ‘The generalised bio-political border? Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power’. Review of International Studies 35: 729–49. Walker, R.B.J., 1993. Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walters, W., 2006. ‘Border/control’. European Journal of Social Theory 9: 187–203. Williams, R., 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

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ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Women Jennifer L. Fluri

Prior to any consideration of ‘women’ as a social or political category, it is necessary to address the ways in which women are constituted by additional social, political and economic categories such as race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, education level, location, political affiliations and sexual identity. Alacron, Kaplan and Moallem argue that the subjectivity of a person identified as a ‘woman’ assumes a social (and political) construction solely by gender (1990). While the subject positions of those identified as ‘women’ often include multiple intersections of identity and other social categorization. Grewal’s critique of universalisms in the framing of women’s rights as human rights underscores the inherent pitfalls of a limited gender categorization and the specificities associated with a narrow conceptualization of gender identity, norms, and roles that are expected to constitute a ‘universal’ understanding of women (1999; see also Mohanty 1991; 2004). In consideration of, and support for, these critiques, this chapter draws on critical and feminist geopolitical scholarship in order to consider ‘women’ as agents of geopolitics. This includes the complex and complicated milieu of gender as it intersects with various social, political and economic framings. It is imperative to address the ways in which the reduction of gendered complexities into a discursively defined category, ‘women’, also operates as an agent of geopolitics. The category ‘women’, which is contextually and situationally defined through social constructions and gender performances (Butler 1990), often becomes subsumed into the geopolitical terrain of the nation as well as nationalist, revolutionary and counter-political movements. Additionally, the categorical framing of ‘Third World women’ has become the subjective image of entrepreneurial labor, discursive empowerment claims and the focus of micro-enterprise within the global political economy and part of what Roberts, Secor and Sparke define as ‘neoliberal geopolitics’ (2003; see also Roy 2010; Wright 2000; 2006). This chapter on ‘women’ as agents of geopolitics summarizes feminist geopolitical research. This includes the important work by feminist geographers who destabilize gendered dichotomies of space, which have posited the private– domestic sphere as female and the public–political sphere as male. This is followed by an overview of recent feminist scholarship that highlights the work of women within male-dominated geopolitical projects. In addition to the unknown

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics or ‘invisible’ work of women within the engines of statecraft, the symbolic representations of women as the face or body of the nation are explored through studies of nationalism, colonialism and postcolonial struggles. At the site of resistance to grand geopolitical narratives lie significant tensions between women and geopolitical agency. The position and legitimacy of ‘women’ within a particular political site and situation may be altered by women’s collective organizing and actions that resist this framing, or rewrite the discourse of their subject positions as a form of counter-geopolitics. The discursive definitions and expectations of women’s bodies as part of geopolitics are also discussed. This includes public and symbolic representations of female corporeality within national and international narratives that map concepts such as modernity, tradition, secularism or religion onto the body. Women’s corporeality is also addressed as part of the geopolitics of violence and the varied forms of women’s participation in and resistance to political violence as well as the spatial maneuvers of ‘women’s’ subject positions.

Feminist political geography and geopolitics Feminist geographers in the 1990s addressed the need for more spatialized understandings of gender in the study of political geography and geopolitics. Some of this important and seminal research includes both speaking out against the lack of women in the study of political geography specifically, and the complexities of gender more broadly (Kofman 1996; Kofman and Peake 1990; Massey 1994; Rose 1993; Staeheli 1994; 1996; 2001; Staeheli and Martin 2000). Some additional examples of research in the 1990s focused on women’s collective organizing in relation to the state (Sparke 1996); the contextual and localized shape of political identity across the diversity of women’s lived experiences as integral to their engagement with local politics (Pratt 1993); critiques of women’s assumed geopolitical vulnerability (Dalby 1994); and the gendering of women within the nation (Radcliffe 1996). In the past decade, feminist geographers further defined and placed the work of women and feminist theory within geopolitics. This includes several key articles by Jennifer Hyndman (2001; 2004; 2007), a special issue of Space and Policy on feminist geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Secor 2001; F.M. Smith 2001; Staeheli 2001), Mapping Women, Making Politics (Staeheli, Kofman and Peake 2004), and the 2011 special issue of Gender, Place and Culture on feminist geopolitics (Chiang and Liu 2011; Dixon and Marson 2011; Fluri 2011a; L. Martin 2011; Mills 2011; S. Smith 2011). Defining feminist geopolitics suggests a process and method rather than a specific focus on women as geopolitical subjects (Dowler and Sharp 2001). The personal, private and everyday scales of resistance to existing power hierarchies and the role and power of reproduction remain significant for both general and nuanced understandings of geopolitical projects (P.M. Martin 2004). Exploring politics within the spaces and scales not generally considered political or powerful remains central to feminist critiques of geopolitical research (Hyndman 2007). 510

Women Feminist geopolitics includes the everyday, invisible, private and seeming apolitical spaces as a key aspect of analysis, which in many cases examine the categorical ‘women’ as an agent for dominant geopolitics and as a method for analyzing women’s geopolitical agency (implicit, explicit and hidden). Feminist geopolitics seeks to address the institutional structures that construct and maintain the illusive boundaries and binaries such as political and non-political spaces (Kuus 2008). In order to situate the work of feminist political geography in the study of women as agents of geopolitics, it is necessary to review the ways in which certain aspects of the geopolitical terrain have been gendered. Cynthia Enloe’s work (1989; 1993; 2000) illustrates women’s diverse roles as actors, targets and subjects of geopolitics and critiques the erasure of women from traditional geopolitical analysis (see also Sharp 2000). Feminist geographers further critique and destabilize the binary divisions of public and private spheres, which situate the public as the political sphere and private spaces as reserved for domestic–home life and subsequently apolitical. Feminist scholarship includes the home and other private spaces as key sites of resistance to or escape from public scrutiny, abuse or violence experienced in public spaces by groups that have been targeted as a racial, ethnic, sexual or ideological ‘Other’ (Rose 1993; Sibley 1995). The role of the private in relation to the public and the importance of informal politics remain critical to feminist geopolitics and examinations of counter-geopolitics (Secor 2001). For example, Dowler’s research in Northern Ireland, examines women’s political resistance methods within the private sphere (1998; 2001). She argues that the assumptive construction of the home as an apolitical space and women’s roles within the home as mother and nurturer provided an opportunity for female Irish Nationalists to resist the British State and their socially expected placement within the domestic sphere, by transgressing political borders and the threshold of their homes respectively (Dowler 2001: 158). Informal spaces and methods of political participation and influence are integral for understanding geopolitics at multiple scales (Secor 2001). In addition to including both public and private spaces in the study of geopolitics, geographers have examined the ways in which geographic scale is socially and politically constructed (Delany and Leitener 1997; Herod and Wright 2002; Marston 2000, Marston and Smith 2001). Feminist political geographers refocused geopolitical analysis in order to address informal and seemingly apolitical spaces as a part of critical geopolitical inquiry, even when women are not ‘visibly’ present in public and macro-scales of geopolitical analysis (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Fluri 2009b; Mountz and Hyndman 2006; Secor 2001; 2004; Sharp 2000; Staheli, Kofman and Peake 2004). Feminist geographers elucidate disparate political situations and motivations in order to include alternative understandings and experiences of place and politics (Rose 1997; Staeheli and Kofman 2004). Integral to the study of gender and geopolitics are the corporeal and lived experiences of place and space, which remain central to reworking theoretical understanding of the nation, nationalism, territoriality, and geopolitics (Cowen and Gilbert 2008; Hyndman 2004; Mayer 2004; Roberts 2004; Wastl-Walter and Staeheli 2004).

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Women, state, nation, territory Much of feminist scholarship on the nation, state and nation-state examines the binary gender construction of the nation (female) and the state (male). The seminal works by feminist scholars such as Grewal and Kaplan (1994), Kaplan, Alarcón and Moallem (1999), Mayer (2000), McClintock (1993) and Yuval-Davis (1993; 1996; 1997) examined the ways in which a nation’s women were both physically and symbolically defined as reproducers. This dichotomy positioned men as producers who conduct the public ‘work’ of maintaining the state, while women were representative of, but not ‘active’ participants in, the nation (Sharp 1996). The conceptualization of the homeland as a particularly gendered nationalist narrative positioning women at the crux and site of reproduction is also critiqued by Cowen and Gilbert, who examined the material and ideological struggles at work in the making of nations as well as counter, revolutionary and resistance frameworks (2008). Feminist scholars have also analyzed different forms of feminist nationalism and state-sponsored forms of feminism (Chen 2003; Fluri 2008; West 1997). Additional scholarship critiques the heterosexual assumptions associated with the nation as family (Mayer 2000). The representation of the feminine nation also evokes specific heteronormative representations of the national family (see Paur 2006). Several women’s groups have also used the ‘nation as family’ assumption as a counter-geopolitical tool to protest the actions of the state. European and American women’s groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries adopted maternal rhetoric as the political framework for peace movements such as European Women’s Peace League (mid-nineteenth century), Women’s Peace Party (1910s), Women Strike for Peace (WSP, 1960s), and the Greenham Common Peace Camp (1980s) (Jetter, Orleck and Taylor 1997; see also Cresswell 1996). Other geopolitical aspects of women’s maternal positions have included women’s activism and the use of motherhood as part of eco-feminism (Domosh and Seager 2001; Seager 1993). Some examples of eco-feminisms include Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement in Kenya; Winona LaDuke’s activism at the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, USA; Vananda Shiva’s campaign in India against genetically modified foods and her focus on women’s roles in sustainable agriculture (see Trauger 2004); and academic–activist Sandra Steingraber. In several of the cases presented below, there are distinct uses of public and politically sanctioned locations as strategic sites for enacting gendered performances as a counter-geopolitical act. These performances often incorporate signs and signifiers of ‘womanhood’ and motherhood (such a breast milk, diapers, images of children attached to the body of their mother– protesters and the performance of domestic chores in public space). Madres of Plaza de Mayo is a women-based resistance movement formed by mothers and grandmothers of men and women who were abducted and ‘disappeared’ by the State of Argentina during the era known as the Dirty War (1976– 83). The Madres reworked the established sanctity of motherhood to publically and politically mobilize as geopolitical agents of resistance to the state (see Bosco 2001). Both Greenham Common and the Madres created a ‘sense of place’ through their public response to militarism/war and state tyranny respectively. 512

Women Similar spatial reasoning operates across the globalized movement of Women in Black (WiB). WiB was founded as an effort to protest against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. WiB was not limited to a particular framework of motherhood, while ‘women-only’ remains the purview of their embodied protest and highlights a specific female-gendered representation of resistance to war through peaceful protests (Blumen and Halevi 2009). This is not to suggest that men are not also involved in peaceful protests or peace movements, but rather to highlight the specific forms of agency and countergeopolitical actions by ‘women’ who employ a specific, socio-political and often spatially contextual category of ‘womanhood’. In these examples, women reorchestrated their subject positions as the biological and social reproducers of the nation to resist or counter the political actions of the state. These movements remain significant for their transnational (and decentralized) networks of support and spin off groups worldwide. These examples of women’s geopolitical agency also operated within the expected spatial location of women’s traditional reproductive roles and expected placement within the home by bringing the private and seemingly apolitical in stark contrast to the public and masculinist spaces of the state. More recent examples of the politics of motherhood include the efforts of Cynthia Sheehan to resist the Bush administration’s war in Iraq (Enloe 2007). Women have also used their subject positions as ‘vulnerable’ subjects marginalized from politics in order to protest male domination within politics. The Liberian Women’s Peace Movement is an example of women re-tooling their subject positions and strategically placing their bodies in public to pressure the male power base to broker a peace agreement, which led to the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as Liberia’s first female head of state. Conversely, the geopolitical ‘Othering’ of a particular group through the representation of women as a single collective also occurs in the state in order to situate minority or marginalized groups as the ‘Other’. For example, the political use of Mother India as an iconic figure of Indian womanhood became an important signifier for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu political party (which was in power from 1998 to 2004). One of the BJP’s political strategies included situating the Mother India icon as under threat from Islam (Corbridge 1999). Women’s groups have also used their socially constructed placement within the nation in order to organize and respond to or counter the actions of the state. Other examples of women’s participation and agency within the operations of geopolitics highlight the ‘invisible’ work of women within the central apparatus of statecraft (Enloe 2004; Sylvester 1998). Women’s geopolitical work has been crucial to the practice of geopolitics, while both the identification of this labor and its importance remain hidden ‘as a result of their textual invisibility’ (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004: 124). Both the symbolic and physical bodies of women perform specific and often gendered work for a dominant geopolitical agenda, while women (as a collective) may be simultaneously marginalized from certain political sites and situations. Women’s political positions within the state or as the head of state (as president, prime minister or monarch) are significant for feminist politics. However, one 513

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics woman occupying a position of power at the federal/national level does not by definition advance feminist causes or women’s collective positions within a given society. This may provide important symbolic and inspirational support for women’s collective organizing – while, socio-political and socio-economic hierarchies among women often remain. Examples of women’s participation in politics at the ‘highest’ levels in comparison to women’s collective organization and political struggles presents important areas for feminist geographers to examine. For example, what are the important divisions and departures between a woman’s rise to power within a male-dominated political system in comparison to ‘critical mass’ theory, which suggest a minimum (35%) percentage of women is necessary to have a significant gendered impact on a political system? There are also pitfalls associated with critical mass theory because it assumes a common political agenda for/by women rather than the diverse participation of women from heterogeneous rather than homogenous social groups (Bratton 2005). Thus, the tensions and fissures between women who attempt to work collectively both within and outside the structures of the state must be examined (Sangtin Writers Collective and Nagar 2006). This further underscores the practical and theoretical problems associated with categorizing women based solely on their gender. For example, many of the most ardent spokespersons against feminist political movements have been women who subsequently invoke their subject positions as women to ‘legitimize’ anti-feminist rhetoric.1 Women’s roles as agents of geopolitics in conservative, counter-feminist and right-wing organizations highlight women’s positions of influence and power that are not necessarily progressive, critical of patriarchy, liberal or feminist (Blee 1991; Fluri and Dowler 2002; 2003; Jeansonne 1996). The categorical positioning and framing of women as emblems for national causes was also used as part of European colonialism and in post-independence nationalist movements. The symbolic representations of women as nation in opposition to colonialism were exemplified as part of several modernist–nationalist movements in Southern Asia, North Africa and the Middle East (Badran 1995; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kandiyoti 1991; Najmabadi 1997; Sinha 1999). In some cases feminist concerns and independent feminist organizations were subordinated for the ‘greater’ cause of winning the nation (Kaplan, Alarcón and Moallem 1999). For example, in the late 1960s Iraq’s Ba’ath Party created the General Federation of Iraqi women, and the Algerian National Liberation Front developed the National Union of Algerian Women (Taraki 2008). Women in the professional and upper classes remained socio-economically, and in many cases spatially, removed from women in lower classes or outside their own ethnic groups. 1

For example, Phyllis Schaffly’s role in countering the Equal Rights Amendment campaign in the 1970s and women’s anti-feminist and conservative representations of women as reproducers within white nationalist organizations from the Klan to contemporary white separatist groups. 514

Women Gender politics within the processes of modernization and women’s location in public space within the ‘Third World’ have been riddled with essentialized discourses of oppression by ‘local traditions’ and ‘cultures’ as well as negative stereotypes (Narayan 1997), which have served to position Third World women within a single category of analysis (Mohanty 1991; 2004). The social, economic, religious and political factors that shape women’s lives at different times and locations provide a more complete picture of the diversity among women in the ‘Third World’ and the social and political systems of power and patriarchy that shape their daily lives. For example, several women’s groups from the ‘developing world’ or ‘Global South’ became a formidable voice for diversity among women globally by way of the UN’s World Conferences on Women in the 1970s and 1980s, which challenged the ‘universal’ conceptions of women’s needs and responses to patriarchy. Many women’s groups sought to address the social inequalities and hierarchies of global economic structures as part of rather than separate from their subject positions as women (Jain 2005). Categorically framing ‘Third World’ women as oppressed led to several claims by hegemonic powers as the self-proclaimed ‘savior’ of these women. The subsequent trope of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1988) continues to be implemented as a geopolitical tool for ‘Western’ nation-states to gain support for international military invasions and occupations of ‘Others’. These racist and sexist ideologies became a hallmark of international geopolitics during European colonialism and remain a significant aspect of US geopolitics as part of the global war on terror (Fluri 2011a; Oliver 2007; Riley Mohanty and Pratt 2008). The following examples illustrate several ways in which women’s bodies have become public signifiers of geopolitics.

Women’s bodies as a geopolitical signifier The veiling practices of women in North African and Middle Eastern countries became a key signifier of difference during European colonialism. Colonizers orientalized the veil as a symbol of ‘tradition’, ‘religion’ and ‘backwardness’ and strategically unveiled women as part of the colonial project (Kandiyoti 1991). Modernist movements and regimes in the twentieth century either forced unveiling, such as the Pahlavi regime in Iran and Mustafa Kemal ‘Ataturk’s’ Turkey, or encouraged it as part of modernist projects (such as in Egypt). Local modernizers represented veiled women as a symbol of backwardness and oppression, which was subsequently extended to Islam. Consequently women’s re-veiling became a central theme of Islamic politics and part of the transnational rise of counter-modernity, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Kandiyoti 1991). In the case of Iran, women’s organizations during the Pahlavi regime (1925– 79) were linked to the elitisms and modernity of the Shah’s monarchical rule. Subsequently, women’s emancipation was defined as immoral and unethical after 515

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the Islamic revolution (1979), which included the repeal of the Family Protection Law and required compulsory hejab (in response to the forced removal of the veil under Reza Shah). Ayatollah Khomeini’s government also limited women’s custodial rights and reinstated male guardianship of women (Moghadam 1999; 2002; Najmabadi 1993). The Iranian case further illustrates the ways in which the national category of women became a key signifier of modernity and subsequent resistance to modernity as part of geopolitical struggles for state control (Moghissi 1999). Today veiling remains a contentious issue for women living in certain European states, such as France were ‘the veil’ has been banned in certain public places (Scott 2010). In response, Muslim women have also occupied public spaces to protest the discursive framing of Islamic dress as ‘oppressive to women’. For example young Muslim women in France attached French flags to their headscarves as part of a public demonstration against the headscarf ban. By linking the flag with the headscarf, they challenged the assumed binary between their French citizenship and religious identity. This also highlights the intersectionality of their subject positions as French citizens, practicing Muslims and women. The contemporary headscarf issue in Turkey situates women between the state’s ‘techniques of governance’ and religious expectations of women’s dress and public mobility (Secor 2005). The headscarf represents a visual signifier of the so-called intrusion of Islam into secular European society (Yegenoglu 2002). Gökariksel and Secor’s research into the veiling fashion industry in Turkey locates the operation of this industry at the intersections of corporeal piety, public displays of the body through fashion and consumer capitalism. They argue that veiling fashion reveals a ‘sliding gap between the signifier (the veil) and its desired signification (Islamic womanhood)’ (Gökariksel and Secor 2009:15). Clothing industries that produce the fabric required for compulsory dress codes, have lobbied the state in Iran to maintain these requirements (see Shaheed 2009). Thus, the veil has become a symbolic tool of state control, Othering and a site for economic opportunities. It is not the veil but rather its imposition (both the enforcement on or off the body) that constitutes the state’s corporeal control over women (Moghadam 2002). The use of women’s bodies within national and international beauty pageants provides another example of the symbolic representation of womanhood within and for the nation.2 Oza links the symbolic representation of women’s bodies with neoliberal economic policies as part of the national representation of Indian womanhood in the Miss World and Miss Universe pageants (2006). Beauty pageantry was used to publically and symbolically counter the forced veiling of women in Afghanistan and in support of the geopolitical maneuvers of the USA in Afghanistan after 9/11 – for example, the participation of Afghan-born, California resident, Vida Samadzai as Miss Afghanistan in the 2003 Miss Earth Pageant. This type of feminine performance was used to situate the socio-political binary of the uncovered body as ‘free’ and the covered body as oppressed. This dichotomy proves a powerful 2

Beauty pageants have also been used to counter gendered binaries and claims of one body as more legitimate than another as a representative of a nation or group (see Cohen, Wilk and Stoeltje 1996). 516

Women and seductive geopolitical tool for reinforcing stereotypes about Muslim women’s ‘inherent oppression’. This form of corporeal ‘freedom’ is mythologized in order to sideline the corporeal control required by pageant organizers and consumer-based expectations of the feminine public body (Fluri 2009a). The historical and contemporary processes of neoliberal geopolitics which locate and define certain places (such as Afghanistan and Iraq) as flawed through the problematic representation of women as oppressed by culture, religion and location subsequently invoke the ‘saving women’ trope as a geopolitical weapon to gain public support for militarized aid/development. The discursive and symbolic framing of ‘Afghan women’ places them into a limited geopolitical category that does not include the spatial and contextual complexities of their lives or the multiple framings and complications associated with their place within society. This therefore positions the dominant invading power as the ‘savior’ while marginalizing or sidelining the efforts of local feminist groups (Fluri 2009b). The efforts made to support women in Afghanistan have been largely bound into a geopolitical mission that does not take into consideration the contextual and gendered complications, complexities and diversity of women’s lives and experiences. This subsequently posits women in between competing geopolitical expectations regarding their behavior, dress, presence and participation in public and political life. The geopolitics of conflict further exemplify the categorical woman as an agent of geopolitics from various groups and perspectives.

Women and political violence Existing gender norms and essentialist constructions of masculinity and femininity are often more narrowly defined during military or state conflicts and flexibly manipulated for similar purposes. For example, the use of women in Algeria as interlopers into ‘French’ society was both an effective tactic of resistance and a manipulation of existing and expected gender norms. Gender essentialism has been well researched, analyzed and subsequently critiqued by academics; however, essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity continue to pervade the social mainstream and much of political policy. Therefore, gender dichotomies have become a political site of manipulation and tactical forms of violence (Enloe 2000; F.M. Smith 2001). Riley examined the shifting practices of masculinity and femininity respectively through women’s roles in wartime as soldiers, refugees, prisoners, jailers, activists and suicide bombers (2008). While debates about the intentionality and actions of female suicide bombers range from pawns in fundamentalist and violent insurgent networks to active participants in revolutionary struggles (Hasso 2005; Lawrence 2007; Moser and Clark 2001), the female suicide bomber represents both a tactic of gendered spatial assumptions of public insurgent violence, and disrupts a gendered claim to territory and sovereignty as well as men’s ‘legitimated’ control over the means of violence in both conventional and insurgent warfare. 517

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics In other combat roles, women are being incorporated into US military operations based on the perception that they are ‘seen’ as less-threatening than their male counterparts and therefore more able to ‘win-over’ local populations as part of a ‘winning hearts and minds’ campaign. For example, the Counter Insurgency Operations (COIN) in Afghanistan have implemented all-women marines, identified as Female Engagement Teams (FETs). FETs are strategically implemented to conduct forced searches and seizures of domestic spaces in order to maintain the honor of Afghan women and by extension their families (Fluri 2011a), because a male solider would violate the spatial/sexual boundary between public and private spaces and dishonor the family. It is both important and necessary to recognize the gendered use of violence during war and the ways in which men and women experience political violence differently (Carpenter 2006; Giles and Hyndman 2004). For example, the long histories of geopolitical conflicts involve women’s bodies as part of the terrain of conquest, security and protection (Das 2007; Saikia 2007; Sutton and Novkov 2008). Rape as a weapon, trafficking and the increase of sex workers in conflict zones continue to be hallmarks of wartime geographies, while these aspects of violent conflict may also be used as a tactical ploy to reinforce military myths of ‘saving women’ (Enloe 1989; Fluri 2011b). The work of feminist activists and the rise of women’s influence within various political and transnational organizations, such as the UN, include the formation of the Convention for Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the classification of rape as a war crime; and UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which focuses on the treatment of civilians during conflict and addresses women and girls specifically. The gendering of women as vulnerable or assumed victims during wartime (see Sheppard 2008) runs in stark contrast to women’s active participations in military and paramilitary operations. Therefore, feminist geopolitics provides an important and necessary method of analysis for understanding the spatial and contextual aspects of geopolitical conflict as well as the multiple and diverse aspects of gender that operate within the theater of war and other forms of political conflict.

Summary This chapter has identified the multiple ways in which geopolitical projects strategically adopt socio-political constructions of women. The category ‘women’ has been evoked within specific locations for dominant geopolitical projects, as a form of counter-geopolitics, and to manipulate existing gendered norms for geopolitical purposes. As feminist geographers have shown, the complexities of gender and the multiple intersections of race, ethnicity, religion, sex/sexuality and socio-economic class are also necessary and vital to the study of geopolitics. Geopolitical studies that include the tensions and interactions between public and private spaces and multi-scalar analyses remain fundamental to feminist 518

Women scholarship. The socially and politically constructed roles for women (and men) as participants, resistors, reactionaries and revolutionaries both within and outside the structures of statecraft often elucidate new geopolitical epistemologies. The ways in which these constructed gender norms are put to work for geopolitical and counter-geopolitical actions and movements, must continue as integral to and integrated with critical geopolitical scholarship.

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28

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Activists Kye Askins

A starting position 1979: my first awareness of ‘politics’ is the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister. I remember my initial excitement as a 10-yearold girl that a woman was ‘in power’, given the dominant culture of chauvinism in the north-east of England. But this turned to despondency as my community experienced Thatcher’s conservatism – the north-east was decimated by policies pushing a free market economy, as unemployment in a traditionally industrial area increased and welfare services were cut, causing a range of social hardships. 1981: my first memory of ‘activism’ was watching a BBC news bulletin about the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.1 I was captivated by the determination, solidarity, integrity and generosity of women prepared to sacrifice their everyday lives for their beliefs, for a better future for all. I remember interrogating my mother as to why she was not there, trying to persuade her to go (and take me) – I was becoming increasingly aware of feminism, environmentalism and issues of social justice. I begin with these anecdotes to highlight the contested and grounded natures of politics and activism. My own political perspectives and motivations for action are embedded in the formative experiences outlined above and have evolved through life experiences. I came to be a human geography lecturer, undertaking participatory action research that foregrounds the co-construction of knowledges with communities and individuals (see Kindon, Pain and Kesby 2007) and adopting pedagogical approaches that recognise the capacities of students and disrupt traditional power relations in the classroom (Freire 2005: hooks 2003). As such, I do not feel that I have the authority to write any ‘definitive’ review of ‘critical geopolitics and progressive activists’, but I do have something to say around these issues, mindful of my position as ‘geographer as anti-expert’ (Heyman 2009). 1

See .

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics This chapter, then, can only ever be partial, and I offer it in the spirit of a jumping-off point. My apologies for the myriad absences, of literature, theoretical insights, campaigns – as will be argued through this chapter, what constitutes ‘activism’ and ‘activist’ is multiple and emergent and operates through diverse sites and processes: activisms/activists of various kinds are everywhere (see Notes from Nowhere 2003), and I struggle to do them justice. Indeed, as I write, I am contemplating the interconnections across this book. Part III includes journalists, women, indigenous groups and artists alongside ‘progressive activists’, while earlier parts considered topics such as radical geopolitics, borders, environment and resources. As academics we have to categorise in order to analyse and discuss, but activists are women and women are activists. Activists campaign about border issues and border geopolitics frame activist concerns. And so on. My point here is that we need to think carefully about the knowledges produced through specific academic lenses, since critical geopolitics is about questioning assumptions in a taken-for-granted world and examining the institutional modes of producing such a world vis-àvis writing about the world, its geography and politics. (Hyndman 2001: 213) I am also contemplating writing as resistance and adopting a strategy/style that endeavours (in small ways) to disrupt the dominant scripting of academia, as part of my own commitment to critical engagement – following Cixous’ conceptualisation of writing as a call to action and transgression (1991). Hence there is less an overriding argument, more a series of reflections, thoughts and questions, intended to provoke further deliberation and perhaps even action. I start by thinking about what we mean by ‘activist’. Drawing on feminist scholars, I suggest that consideration of the everyday, embodied agencies of activists, alongside more ‘traditional’ activism and movements, can help us to reframe debates stuck in a division between international and domestic spheres and re-appraise critical geopolitics as concerned with tensions across the material and discursive, rather than mired in a problematic emphasis on representation alone. I move on to extend these concerns to the spaces of activism, considering the complex and multiple sites of activist practices and discourse as relational, to open up critical geopolitical inquiry to think across networks of power and social relationships – and crucially across different spaces, from private to public to global to virtual. This leads me to examine the construct ‘progressive’ and ideological differences across and within activism/s. Staying with tensions across representation and the reality of struggles against oppression, I consider how we might productively further critical geopolitical work by paying closer attention to the contested multiplicities of the political within activism. Recognising that ideologies/politics are also imbued with the more-than-representational (Lorimer 2008), the chapter then highlights literature on activism, emotion and faith/spirituality, calling for critical geopolitics to work not only across the material and representational, but beyond. I end by returning to a focus on our work as academics, and how we produce knowledges and actions within our own everyday geographies. 528

Activists

Activist as agent In a Progress in Human Geography forum, Bassin outlined critical geopolitics as ‘devoted to the study of how geographical space is represented and signified by political agents as part of a larger project of accruing, managing and aggrandizing power’ (in Murphy et al. 2004: 620–21). However, Sharp, among others, argues that such emphasis on the textual – rather than the material and everyday – leads to critiques regarding its elitism, academic distance and masculinism (2007). While there has been a ‘political turn’ in feminist geography, which ‘aims to synthesize the small “p” political of feminist geography with the larger “P” of political geography’ (Hyndman 2004: 308), Sharp contends that the reverse has largely not happened, despite issues regarding embodiment and the everyday having a great deal to offer (geo)political research. I believe that work on activists/activism teases out precisely such everyday practices, outlining being and becoming activist in mundane and embodied ways and offering points of connection across materiality and discourse, in grounded and radical ways. Twenty-first-century society has a long list of causes to protest against: war, autocratic government, privatisation and commodification of land and natural resources, climate change, corporate greed, social oppression and violence on the basis of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability and so on. The growing body of literature on activists shows the ways in which people are both structurally and culturally marginalised and their contingent, complex and fluid resistance (Anderson 2004; Featherstone 2008; Leitner, Sheppard and Sziarto 2008). Oppressed/excluded people are mostly cognizant of the structured spatialities of their everyday lives: where they can/cannot live, work, vote, access essential resources, services, education and so on. They are also aware of the ways in which they are portrayed, stereotyped and represented by elites and across dominant society. Resistance to such material exclusions and exclusionary narratives is central to most activism – activism both coheres around and plays out through materiality and discourse (see Routledge, Cumbers and Nativel 2007). Thus when we talk about agency and critical geopolitics we need to open out to a more nuanced understanding of activism/s. In particular, I want to focus first on who we mean by ‘activist’, because our (academic) constructions of activism will impact upon and be refracted through any critical geopolitical lens. There is a tendency when imagining ‘activist’ to consider the rebellious figure fighting oppression in demonstrably physical acts of defiance against hegemonic regimes. Such an agent of change is normatively fixed in the formal political sphere, a militant figure of radical subjectivity (Thoborn 2008). This is the ‘traditional’ activism driven by the aim of permanent, progressive political change, motivated by and organised around key philosophical positions such as anti-racism and feminism or influential events and political/politicised figures (Zeilig and Ansell 2008). But more recent work on biopolitics, linked with feminist work recognising the materiality of the body within the politics of representation, problematises ‘how individual bodies and bodily potentialities literally become expressions of 529

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics geopolitical space’ (Jones and Sage 2010: 316). Pertinent here is research which highlights banal, embodied activities that take place within more ‘traditional’ activism (Chatterton 2006) and the incorporation of ‘everyday acts of defiance’ within broader action for social change (Martin, Hanson and Fontaine 2007). Described by Chatterton and Pickerill as ‘activist-becoming-activist’, such agencies are embodied and incomplete processes, in which individuals embrace a plurality of values and perspectives, and orientate towards pragmatic goals, without necessarily or only expecting completion: Many people articulated their engagement in political projects through messy, complex and multiple identities – always in the process of becoming and moving forward through experimentation and negotiation. (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010: 479) Similarly, Horton and Kraftl outline ‘implicit activisms’ as small scale, personal and unprepossessing, centred around ‘small acts and kind words’ rather than the ‘grandiose or meaning-ful’ (2009), while Bobel and starr pay close attention to notions of shifting, multiple and embodied identities in political struggle in analyses that draw upon feminist, poststructural and postcolonial perspectives (Bobel 2007; starr 2006). Activist agencies, then, are as much mundane as grandiose and multiple, fluid and emergent. Perhaps we can conceptualise a continuum of being and becoming activist, along which the mundane and grandiose, the implicit and explicit, may be more or less enacted at any time/in any place, without foreclosing the possibility of both kinds of agencies occurring simultaneously. And as Sharp et al. show, practices of resistance are crucially intertwined with practices of domination, raising important questions regarding ‘entanglements of power’ (2000). Such thinking may help a critical geopolitics to examine the diverse ways in which people are marginalised, how they are physically repressed in real material terms as well as discursively oppressed through exclusionary narratives – and the ways in which power weaves through both these registers. For me, envisioning ‘activist as agent’ as plural, diverse and caught up in complex webs of power relations requires careful consideration of how people, in their prosaic and grandiose actions, act in geopolitical ways, and I echo Koopman’s call for an alter-geopolitics which looks to ‘grassroots practice, to the ways that groups are doing geopolitics “off the page”’ (2011: 274). And this requires critical examination of the ‘geo’ of such multiple, emergent political action.

Spaces of activism A central concern of both critical geopolitics and activists is that many struggles are grounded in the inequalities that capitalism and attendant individualism bring. Thus we need to carefully examine the ways in which neoliberalism plays out in 530

Activists and across space and issues faced by communities in context, because particular activisms are embodied in/through particular sites, with people, place and space mutually co-constituted (Brown and Pickerill 2009). Moreover, struggles are also more than contingent: while activists are both placed and place their actions, many work across such geographies too, thus we need to consider the relationality of activists/activisms. Relevant here is work by critical geographers, especially feminist thinkers, who have long advocated a need to reconsider the issue of scale. As Sharp writes, feminist political geographies: look to global scales of analysis without abandoning their attention to the importance of the everyday experience of peoples in different locations in the world’s economy … theorizations that see the body, nation and global as indicative of the same processes rather than as different scales. (2007: 381–2) Such thinking is pertinent to many radical grassroots activists who commonly draw upon global discourses in their calls to action, and inculcate notions of global citizenship, to explicitly link the local and the global (Escobar 2001; Juris 2004). Research on global activist networks usefully conceptualises the notion of ‘convergence space’ to understand how activists are able to campaign across grassroots issues, recognising interconnections across different struggles and enabling affinity across heterogeneous social formations and movements (Cumbers, Routledge and Nativel 2008). Convergence spaces are place-based but not placebound, centrally concerned with developing a politics of solidarity capable of transferring across space and scale without flattening out contested positions, struggles and beliefs. This work has much to offer critique of the disjuncture between neoliberal notions of citizenship, re-imagined in terms of global cosmopolitanism, and the ‘democratic deficit’, wherein our dominant state-based system disallows individuals to participate politically at the international scale (Kaldor 2003). Certainly, we should beware aligning ‘global with discursive’ and ‘local with material’ in any reductive binary. Pickerill and Chatterton, exploring social centres within the UK, described ‘autonomous geographies’ as spaces ‘where people desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship’ and as ‘multiscalar strategies’, operating across space and time, creativity and resistance (2006: 730). They highlight the need to appreciate the ways in which spaces of protest and everyday life combine in people’s attempts to effect meaningful social change, constituting overlapping spaces of agency that are concerned with local struggles connected to a global context. They later develop ‘autonomous geographies’ to outline activist practices as simultaneously ‘anti-, despite- and post- capitalist’, linking across the material and the discursive, that are ‘neither locally bounded nor easily transferable to the transnational’ (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010: 475). Such ‘contested spatialities’ of activism resonate with long-standing calls amongst feminist geopolitical thinkers to conceptualise across formal and informal politics and the public and private spheres, and research on activism has much to offer critical geopolitics on this point. For example, Fincher and Panelli explored 531

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics the complex interconnections across professional, public and private spaces experienced by women activists in Australia in their attempts to both define ‘strategic identities’ and use different places in their activism (2001). In particular, the use of public space to ‘gain visibility’ and safe, private space to communicate and develop campaigns, raises questions to what ‘activist space’ might mean. Similarly, Hardy, Kozek and Stenning discussed the importance of paying attention to ‘new spaces of activism’ in which Polish women articulate their interests beyond the formal workplace (2008). We need to remain attentive to differential power relations within activism, though. Critical literature on activist networks carefully unpicks the dominant representations of networks/activist collectives that can hide the material inequalities caught up in their internal social and spatial relations, particularly regarding scale and mobility. Routledge considers the generation of political associations with the People’s Global Action network, highlighting that a politics of alliance is constructed through making connections across space, but which are embedded in place-based and interpersonal moments and meetings (conferences, physical actions) – and there are more or less powerful actors and more or less mobile actors, reconstructed by those very hegemonic forces being resisted (2008; see also Featherstone 2008, on the ways in which the distribution of resources and ideas in activist networks is culturally inflected). And how might the new spaces of the internet challenge dominant geopolitical scripts? Recently, media reports have focused on the centrality of social networking sites – and the mobility of internet-enabled phones – to organise pro-democracy protests across the Middle East. Beyond offering new tools for communication, virtual space facilitates the potential to foster debate and collective decisionmaking and action through blogs, while ‘activist hacking’ is the virtual version of direct action (Jordan 2002): Land, examining citizens’ involvement in human rights advocacy, argued that ‘the transformative potential of networked activism lies not in the technology it uses but in the actions it fosters’ (2009: 241). The role of the internet in producing and enabling activist networks has been researched for some time (Juris 2005; Pickerill 2007), and critical geopolitics can productively explore the ways in which new software, platforms and packages are being used to subvert and resist hegemonic geopolitical strategies – how virtual space constructs, and is constructed by, different activists and diverse agencies offers fertile subject matter for work on citizenship (Jones 2010). We do need to be cautious, though, regarding the political and geographical issues surrounding use of the internet: who ‘owns’ which virtual sites, who profits, who can access computers, mobile phones and so on (Fuller and Askins 2010). That the Chinese government periodically blocks its residents from viewing certain content shows that virtual space is a site of geopolitical strategic importance – implicated both discursively and materially. The growing body of literature on activism clearly points to a blurring beyond normalised spaces and places of activism, whether through problematising scale or relating across the public and private or investigating an evolving virtual world of resistance. There is a more tangential issue to the geopolitics of activism, too. In my experience, activists (banal and grandiose) often contend with and disagree 532

Activists about their strategies. Of course, strategies both narratively (re)produce activism and place and are spatially enacted – decisions to undertake letter writing, e-mailing, petition signing, street marching, blockading, boycotts and/or viral disruptions are caught up in circulating discourses and occur in place – but what I refer to here are the more spatially abstract concerns around notions of ‘margin and centre’. Activists often spend many hours debating whether it is ‘better’ to work from inside a dominant structure to foment change or outside it. This brings me to focus more closely on the role of ideology in activism and what this may say to critical geopolitics.

Politics and ‘progressive’ activism There is commonly conflation around the notion of activist as progressive, as always already committed to moving forwards, implicitly to a better future for humanity. At the very least, such a dominant construction of activists as campaigning for improvement for all works to hide what we might call ‘regressive’ activism, which supports a return to some previous politics/context or at least retaining a status quo. Middle class community campaigns against the development of windfarms (Wolsink 2007) is one example of people who take action precisely because they see a certain kind of ‘progress’ as negative, as antithesis of emancipation for themselves and their communities. The issue here is ideological: what constitutes ‘progressive’ depends on your politics. So when Kurtz outlined the struggles of women of colour against local industrial development in the USA, this involved very different politics (and circulations of power) as in the windfarm case (2007). More widely, environmental activists are not united on what constitutes best ‘progression’: many call for lowering the consumption of resources to previous levels, a regression argued to be the transformative change required for a positive outcome for people and planet; others support a more technological ‘fix’ around nuclear energy and moving forward to develop new ways to combat ecological problems. D. Mitchell contends that being progressive ‘demands at the very minimum a commitment to struggling towards universal human emancipation’ (2004: 29). Mitchell’s argument is grounded in a critique of postmodernist, poststructural and post-humanist thought, specifically their recognition of partiality, and outlines anti-universalism – ‘the emancipation of only some humans in some places at some times, or no emancipation at all’ (2004: 29) – as self-defeating and regressive. Similarly, Heynen writes of the challenge to recognise an elemental universalism as a vital aspect of activist work, that takes seriously the fundamental material necessities of human bodies’ survival, stressing the need to foreground resources such as food, water and so on within a radical politics/geography that eschews any open plurality which ‘zaps our ability to focus on these most important questions of continued existence’ (2006: 921). There are also academics, especially among feminists, who draw upon poststructural and postcolonial epistemologies specifically, as enabling progression 533

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics towards a better material future for all, precisely because the theoretical deconstructionism allows previously hidden structures of power that unequally distribute the food, water and so on to be visioned and then addressed: Poststructuralist analyses do not categorically deny the material bases of power relations. … They can in fact reveal the processes by which particular constellations of power are effaced or naturalized (Hyndman 2001: 220). Further, Khasnabish discussed the need for ‘insurgent imagination’ as a way of articulating new forms of radical political actions, because ‘to take social change projects seriously we must also attend to this imaginative terrain and practice’ (2007: 523). These tricky epistemological arguments further emphasise the need to think about tensions across the discursive and material, rather than foregrounding one or the other – to think both ontological issues regarding physical matter and epistemological issues around cultural representation as central to critical geopolitics and activism. I find Latour’s work interesting here, especially his description of politics as ‘largely about things’, what he calls ‘matters of concern’ – those resources, predominantly physical, about which people have issues (2005). That is, beyond formal political structures of governance, the informal politics of the everyday is centred around the circulation of things. This resonates with many activist concerns regarding access to/costs of water, food, decent housing, healthcare and education, having a landfill site in your neighbourhood and so on. Latour argues for ‘other ways of doing politics’, that involve a move towards a post-humanist ‘thing-based democracy’, rather than one centred around issues, foregrounding the ‘social agency of things’ to consider the materials we need to assemble around to ‘solve cohabitation with’. We could link here to EarthFirst! activists, who ideologically hold nature as part of a holistic earth system, alongside people, not in subjugation to them (Wilbert 2000), to explore what understanding activism in a more-thanhuman way might mean, and how this disrupts dominant constructions of politics and knowledge. This is not to abandon ‘entanglements of power’ though, and Latour remains interested in issues of representation. Survival is not only about the fundamental materials of food, water and so on, it is also about discourse and cultural hegemonies – activists campaign against homophobic, racist and sexist abuses that, tragically, also lead to death and other serious bodily harm – abuse enacted on the premise/construction that some lives are expendable, worth-less (Bhungalia 2010). We must carefully consider the bodies themselves and the ways in which they are inscribed as superior/inferior in dominant discourses that lead to unequal societies – see Hosang on contemporary, embodied youth-led organizing as ‘refashioning the ideological landscape through which particular racialized representations of “youth” are constructed and naturalized’ (2006: 5). Moreover, research on activism is enlightening around such issues of ideological difference in that issues and difficulties surrounding political plurality are often explicitly addressed. Work on autonomous activist spaces, for example, stresses 534

Activists activist attempts to do politics differently, to avoid internal power hierarchies by creating open, accessible, horizontally organized spaces, recognising the limits to identity politics (Mudu 2004). Autonomy is explicitly about a prefigurative politics – indeed creating autonomous space is direct action in itself, which takes political diversity seriously (Chesters and Welsh 2005). And while an emphasis on a ‘politics of affinity’ examines ways in which multi-issue politics and different kinds of activists/activism come together to address ‘overlapping oppressions and proliferation of strategies’ (Gordon 2007), in practice this involves the messy negotiation of different bodies within activist communities/spaces which often remain masculinised. Starr reminds us that setting out a framework of political and cultural diversity can instead problematise identifying and dealing with internalized inequalities within countercultures (2006), and Wilkinson highlights the ‘fetish of consensus’ in affinity politics which, despite aiming to ensure a voice for all, can still work to exclude certain positions/individuals (2009). Certainly, when we consider the everyday as well as grandiose activist-asagent, political ideologies vary vastly: not all ‘activists’ even name themselves or their actions as activist, and many take action for change within a dominant system rather than to change that system. Future research on activism and critical geopolitics could usefully engage with work on the post-political or post-democratic condition (Rancière 2006) on this point – understanding the ways in which a post-political frame sutures capitalism as inevitable and the market economy as the global structure of social order for which there is no alternative. In a similar vein, Boltanski and Chiapello argued that the marginal has been reclaimed by the centre, with capacities around autonomy, spontaneity, creativity and fluidity now the buzzwords of many contemporary aspects of capitalist business organising (2005). One solution to this, politically, seeks to ‘explode any dividing line between marginal and central’ (Sliwa, Spicer and Svensson 2007: 502). Likewise, Chatterton discussed the need to ‘transcend the role of activism, to literally give up activism’ in order to open up connections and counteract entrenched political/politicised positions (2006: 259). Such debates often invoke passionate responses and are morethan-rationally debated. It is to issues regarding emotion and affect that I now turn.

Beyond materiality and discourse Emerging literature exploring emotions, affect and non-representational theory (NRT) vis-à-vis activism has much to say about increasing calls for more nuanced enquiry into the workings of geo-power (e.g. MacDonald in Jones and Sage 2010; Pain 2009). For me, emotion is central to activism, and most accounts of activism touch upon ‘sense’, ‘feeling’ and that inexplicable desire to ‘do something’ (Askins 2009). In Cieri and Peeps’ Activists Speak Out (2000), the emotional is threaded throughout candid personal narratives detailing sometimes harrowing, sometimes hopeful accounts of different activisms across the USA. Katz’s exploration of activist responses to the social and spatial inequalities in New Orleans laid bare 535

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics after Hurricane Katrina gives a moving account of how local people’s hopes, fears, happiness and grief are linked directly to their actions/activism (2008), while Pulido discusses the ‘interior life of politics’ to situate emotion (and ethics) as an ‘unspoken and often unrecognised force’ compelling us to action: As social scientists, we need to acknowledge this rich terrain of emotions, consciousness, and thought located in the interior, if we wish to grasp the breadth, depth, and dynamic nature of political activism. (Pulido 2003: 48) Pertinent here is work on the emotional reflexivity involved in becoming and remaining activist. For example, Lee highlighted the way in which developing personal social bonds are key to mobilising and sustaining women as communitybased activists (2007), while Flam understands shared activist emotions such as loyalty, anger and hope as constructed as counter-emotions to broader macropolitical contexts (2005). Bosco pointed to the ways in which Argentinean social movements strategically deploy and frame emotion in order to develop activism, linking to the concept of ‘emotional labour’ (2007), while Pratt highlighted the tactical use of specific emotions to engender politicised communities at the local level (2009). Moreover, Brown and Pickerill outlined how different spaces of activism are implicated in relationships between emotions and activism – how the creation of space for emotion in activism is central to how activism plays out (2009). Such literature speaks to the material, discursive and more-than-representational aspects of activism, as felt, facilitated, narrated and practised (Lorimer 2008). A critical geopolitics engaging beyond materiality and discourse should pay attention to Thien’s argument that work on emotion and affect offers the potential to dissolve false distinctions between the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ and public/private boundaries (2005). This again resonates with feminist critical geopolitics and the call to think across public and private spaces, to deconstruct the ‘state’ versus the ‘domestic’ scale binary, discussed earlier. We should beware of normalising certain emotions, and certain people’s emotions, within activism (Wilkinson 2009), as well as being wary of emotion and affect in enabling manipulative relations of power in activism/social movements (Polletta 2006). Such issues reconnect to problems surrounding ideological difference (on tensions between Western constructions of ‘proper women’s rights’ agendas around domestic violence and Ukrainian women activists’ emotional understandings of family as a site of safety in comparison with the state as oppressor, see Hrycak 2007). Wright offers a more detailed overview of scholarship on emotion, affect and political protest than can be covered here (2010). Most perceptively, she calls for greater consideration to be paid to issues around spirituality, drawing on Hopkin’s call for feminist geographers of emotion and social justice to explore religion within everyday lives, emotions and (geo)politics (2009). Indeed, Morin and Guelke explored the role of religion as motivation for activists, foregrounding spirituality as driving political passions (2007). Important connections can be made here with geopolitical work on faith and religion: for example, the role of American evangelicanism in geopolitical interventions (Dittmer 2007), or societal responses 536

Activists to and concerns around the ‘war on terror’ and the ways in which political agencies emerge in relation to religious extremisms (Mahmood 2005; see also the special issues of Geopolitics 11(2) (2006) and GeoJournal 67(4) (2006)) and the rise in the discourse of postsecularization (Kong 2010) and how this may challenge feminist politics (Braidotti 2008). Thinking about the emotional and affective dimensions of religion, alongside those of political agency/activism, will no doubt offer new insights into material and discursive geopolitical struggles. Recent work on affect and emotion is also re-engaging with the relevance of scholars in wider society. Pickerill wrote about the struggles and hopes endemic in being an ‘active’ academic, trying to do ‘good work’ in line with her politics and passions (2008). Wright is equally explicit regarding her personal emotional investment in academic engagement with societal struggles for justice (2010; see also Cope 2008). I conclude this chapter by considering these concerns.

Progressing critical geopolitics What I have tried to offer in this chapter is some indication of the complex, contested, emergent, messy, embodied, discursive and emotional aspects of activism/s. We need to think about the everyday and the regional, national and transnational; about the material and the discursive; about political economy and the emotional, affective and more-than-representable. We need to consider the emergent, contested and multiple together with how they are inscribed by entanglements of power. And we need to recognise our own positions and actions as academics/researchers in the making of political and geographical knowledges. There is much I could say, but I will end with three key points/appeals. First, we should be cautious of the label ‘activist’ outside a Western/developed world. Newman points to the homogeneity of published geopolitical work, suggesting that ‘we’ in the Western academy know little about what ‘we’ might name as geopolitical traditions of the non-Western world (in Murphy et al. 2004). Instead, concepts are translated/transposed onto ‘other’ situations (see Yiftachel 2002, on the Israel–Palestine conflict). Postcolonial critiques argue against such academic Orientalism (Robinson 2003), and we should avoid naming others’ ‘activism’ in our own image (Secor 2001). Opening up who/what constitutes ‘activist as agent’ in critical geopolitics research requires an interrogation of our own politics and positionalities, remembering that production of geographical knowledge is tied to struggles both outside and inside the academy. Second, we need to keep critically re-engaging with issues around academic labour and the relevance of the university, recently conceptualised through a frame of ‘public geography’ (see Fuller and Askins 2010; Ward 2007), and the ‘activist academic / scholar activist’ (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010; K. Mitchell 2008). I mentioned that participatory action research is central to my work: this is because I believe such an approach facilitates vital links across university/community (mrs kinpaisby 2008), which pay attention to the embodied, 537

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics emotional and discursive struggles of communities within cross-scale structures of governance, and research that is open and responsive to such concerns. I recognise, though, that there are other approaches to research that can be just as valid in linking action on social justice through our praxis, and a variety of methods are important in an academic’s ‘toolbox’. Writing, too, is an significant dimension of resistance (D. Mitchell 2004), and increasing interest in writing beyond the scholarly confines of journals: for example, using the internet through blogs/websites,2 may offer new potentials for geopolitical work. Pedagogy is central too – covering geopolitics (and other subjects) in ways that foreground both grandiose and mundane activisms/ action and empower students to recognise their own agencies for change, can make explicit those hierarchies and entanglements of power that do damage across the world. And we may choose to work outside the centre – engaging with learning and teaching beyond the academy (see http://publicuniversity.org.uk/; Van der Veen 2010). Third, we can challenge the geopolitics of our own positions in an increasingly neoliberal academy, in which we compete with each other for resources, are held accountable to audit and students are becoming ‘customers’ (Sparkes 2007). Considering our actions within and beyond the academy should critically examine the ‘imperialism within’, being mindful of hegemonic recuperation of our agencies (Koopman 2008). Sustained research into the governance of university, and education more broadly, together with its associated production of knowledge, remains minimal. I am not suggesting any didactic version of activism/action here, academic or otherwise. Rather, I strongly believe we should act as, when and where we feel capable. ‘Each of us must proceed at our own level of emotional capacity’ (Heynen 2006: 927). Writing this chapter has been an action for me, intended to contribute to wider critical rethinking around geopolitical issues, which may in some way be part of changes that I consider ‘progressive’.

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2

See exchanges on the Crit Geog Forum, www.jiscmail.ac.uk: search the archives of 2011 for ‘geog blogs’ and ‘a (minor) critique of blogs’ in the subject field. 538

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RESEARCH

COMPANION

Index

9/11 (11 September, 2001) 38, 130, 134–5, 213, 268, 359, 363, 369–72, 479 Aboriginal Australians 423, 424, 428 Abu Ghraib 76–7, 266 activism 136–8, 197, 202–03, 397–8, 512–13, 518, 527–538 actor-network theory 62, 267–70, 274–5 affect 60–1, 81, 535–7 Afghanistan 39, 199, 370, 379, 516–18 see also war on terror Africa colonization of 36, 177 mining 284, 318, 332–3 oil 294–5 SAPs 389–90 and sovereignty 121 African National Congress (ANC) 367 agency 11, 53–54, 57, 130–1, 199, 282–3, 286, 306, 335–6, 383–8, 397–8, 405–11, 427, 440–41, 445–52, 485–8, 510–13, 529–31, 534 Agnew, John 15, 117, 217, 233, 237, 398 Algerian National Liberation Front 366–7 alter–geopolitics 202–3, 335, 397–8 al-Qaeda 130, 197, 254, 362, 371 see also war on terror Antarctica 171–2, 306 Anthropocene 41, 291, 307–08 anthropology 112, 219, 222, 427 anti-geopolitics 197–8, 334, 375–6, 396–7 Antipode 129, 138 Argentina 171–2

artists 461–73 Ashley, Richard 225, 239 Atlantic Monthly 305, 447 Australia 423–4, 428–9 Austria 472 Avatar 287 Balkans conflict 443–4 Barnett, Thomas 328–9, 447 Bell, Martin 442–3 Bell, Steve 79, 253 bin Laden, Osama 110, 359, 362 biofuels 315–16 biopolitics 153, 231, 504, 529–30 Body see embodiment Bolivia 172 borders border studies 218–19 boundedness 214–18 in popular geopolitics 222, 224, 471 and technology 223–4, 471–2 Bosnia xix, 375, 393–4, 441–4 Bourdieu, Pierre 394 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 450 Brandt Line 325, 329 Brazil 171, 427 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 439, 442 British Empire 2, 99–100, 173, 194, 250 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 5, 181 Bush, George H. W. 449 Bush, George W. 79, 254, 268, 359, 363, 479 Butler, Judith 77, 95

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Dalby, Simon 22–4, 182, 233–4, 497–8 dams 334, 397 Debrix, Francois 441, 447–8 decolonization 37, 167, 431–2 deconstruction 51–4, 120, 497 democracy 39, 102, 148, 155–6, 194, 426, 532, 534 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea see North Korea Department of Homeland Security 369 Derrida Jacques 24, 50, 52 see also deconstruction development 332–3, 390, 393 see also post– development diamond industry 283–5 digital games 81–4, 286, 346 Dittmer, Jason 79–80, 253, 385 diplomacy 5, 12, 29, 78, 193, 294, 427, 451–2 discourse analysis 54, 133, 154, 233–5, 392, 407 dissident International Relations (IR) 213–15, 218, 233–4 Dodds, Klaus 51, 78, 79, 91–2, 218, 249, 252, 306, 328 domesticity 348 Dowler, Lorraine, 198–199, 200, 501 drone warfare 375

Cable News Network (CNN) 449–452 Cairo, Heriberto 26–7 Cameron, James 287 Canada 293, 426, 430 capitalism and climate change 42–3 neoliberal policies 150–2, 328 see also neoliberalism property rights 426 and warfare 40, 131–6, 427 Captain America 79–80, 253, 271 cartography see maps cartoons 79–80, 222, 253, 482 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 466 Chavez, Hugo 360 Chick, Jack 482–3 Chile 170–71 China 40, 193, 294 Chomsky, Noam 365, 452–3 cinema 75–9, 81, 196, 286–7 classical geopolitics 21, 192–5, 209, 495 climate change 42–44, 312–14 Clinton, Bill 75–6, 443 Cold War aftermath of 37–39, 327 in geopolitical logic 5, 37–39, 51, 252, 291, 387, 495 representations in media 20, 77–8, 222, 254, 448 and sexuality 100 Colombia 368, 373–4 colonialism 112, 327, 422–4, 427–9, 515 colonias 394–5 comics 79–80, 271–2 communism 21, 293 containment policy 180–81 contemporary art 463–73 Cooper, Anderson 439 corn 315–16 Counter-Terror Expo 470 counter-terrorism 331, 363, 370, 373–6, 466–70 see also war on terror critical international relations theory see dissident International Relations (IR)

El Salvador 23 Elden, Stuart 119, 251, 371 elites 25, 33–4, 43–4, 54, 57, 152, 156, 236, 383, 387, 396, 446, 453, 485, 488 Egypt 54, 290 Embedded Art 468–70 embodiment 74, 103, 113, 295, 353, 388, 528–30 environmental security 290–1, 305–6, 533 Escobar, Arturo 392 ethnography 60, 112, 412–16 European Union 115, 407–08, 411–12, 431, 472 evangelical Christianity 477–490 Evera, Stephen van 38 extraordinary rendition 466 extraterritoriality 115 544

Index Herb, Guntram 231–2 heteronormativity 92–95, 97–101, 104 Hitchcock, Mark 482–3 homonormativity 95 humanised geopolitics 194–6 humanitarian aid 29, 393–4, 449 Huntington, Samuel 5, 51, 213 Hurricane Katrina 439–40

fear 252–3, 374–8, 448 feminist geopolitics 60, 134, 198–203, 237–8, 253, 351–3, 500, 504, 510–11 feminist theory 9, 78, 89–90, 198–200, 223–4, 510–11 film see cinema Finland 219–221, 241 fishing industry 307 Flint, Colin 130, 247 food security 315 Foucault, Michel 23–4, 25, 55, 112, 153, 235, 308, 319, 329 493–4 see also power/ knowledge FOX News 442, 448 France 26, 178, 290 363, 367 French Revolution 362–3 Friedman, Thomas 328, 447

immigration 43, 327, 393, 428, 502, 503 India 173, 397, 513 indigeneity 427, 431–2 indigenous knowledge 421, 429, 431 indigenous sovereignty see self-determination Indonesia 307, 326 intellectuals 12, 248, 336, 360, 493–5 see also intellectuals of statecraft; public intellectuals intellectuals of statecraft 9, 15, 23–4, 50, 60, 242, 445–6, 493–505 International Monetary Fund 109, 328 international organizations 405–17, see also European Union; United Nations Iran 39–40, 515–16 Iraq 39, 139, 158, 294, 331–2 see also Gulf War; war on terror Ireland 72, 250 Islam Islamophobia 102, 156, 479, 513 relationship with Europe 478, 516 and sexuality 102, 197, 515–16 and terrorism 362 see also al–Qaeda Israel 344–6, 481, 483–4

gender 92–6, 134, 198–200, 237, 345, 350, 509–15, 517 geo-economics 147–8, 240–41 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 74, 252, 370, 430 Geopolitica(s) 26 Geopolitics 26, 132, 165, 489 Germany 178–80, 193, 363, 468–70 globalization 39–44, 150–51, 241–2, 274, 484 Global South 97, 156, 159, 210, 323–337, 389–90 greenhouse gasses 313–14 Gregory, Derek 76, 117, 135 Guardian, The 79, 254, 443, 444 Guevara, Che 367 Gulf War 252–3, 286, 292–3

Japan 176, 289, 311 Jong-il, Kim 69 journalism 396, 439–456, see also news media

Haiti 327, 439 Hall, Stuart 19 Hartshorne, Richard 1, 4 Harvey, David 130 Haushofer, Karl 3–4, 23, 50, 170, 176, 179 heartland theory 2, 5, 50, 171–5, 432, 498 Herman, Edward 452–3 Hérodote 131, 182–3 hejab 516 Hepple, Leslie 22–3

Kaplan, Robert 33, 35, 43, 305–6, 319, 447, 498 Karadžić, Radovan xix Kearns, Gerry 36, 131, 139, 200–02, 396 Kennan, George 449–50 545

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics NAFTA 315 Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) 397 nationalism 61, 98–103, 170, 224, 275, 352, 472 national security 233–4, 238, 255, 311–12, 387, 468–9 see also militarization; environmental security nation-state 92, 98–103, 115, 224, 231–244, 410 Native Americans 425–6, 429 Nazism 3–4, 20, 23, 175, 180 neoclassical geopolitics 168 neoliberalism and democracy 155–6 and imperialism 151–2, 157–9, 291, 328, 331 and NGOs 389–91, 395 origins 147–8 resistance to 155, 156, 396, 530–31, 538 and the state 153–6, 239–42 neorealism 495–6 networks 267–70, 274–5, 409–12, 464, 531–2 news media 69–71, 74, 83, 252, 271, 274, 326, 439–56 New York Times 271, 328, 364, 439 Nicaragua 365 Nigeria 292, 293 Nixon, Richard 19, 20, 21, 263 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 201, 287, 368, 387–400 non-representational theory (NRT) 296, 489, 535 North Korea 69–71 nuclear energy 311–12, 533 nuclear weapons 37, 39, 41, 80, 311

Keynesian economics 130, 148, 155, 232, 389 Kissinger, Henry 4–5, 20, 22, 34, 181, 383 Kjellén, Rudolf 1, 169, 231 Klein, Naomi 132 Koopman, Sara 200, 202, 335, 397–9 Krotopkin, Peter 131, 139–40 Kuus, Merje 237, 391, 392, 407–08, 441 Laclau, Ernesto 60, 407 Lacoste, Yves 131, 182 labour migration 348–9 see also immigration landscape 53, 81, 155, 213, 223–4, 253, 255, 285, 296, 346, 375–8 Latour, Bruno 275, 407–08, 534 Lebensraum 2, 21, 50, 175, 286, 345 see also Ratzel, Friedrich Lefebvre, Henri 350 Left Behind 482–4 Lenin, Vladimir 368 Lesotho 332, 393 Libya 29, 296 Luke, Timothy 25, 218–19, 451–2 Mackinder, Halford 1, 2–3, 12, 33, 35, 50, 131, 139–40, 173–5, 192–4 magazines 4, 180, 271–2 Mandela, Nelson 367 maps 174–7, 221, 273, 430, 465–8 Marxism 130–31, 422, 447 masculinity 78, 92, 517 Megoran, Nick 137, 168, 222, 471 Mexico 315 militarization 247–57, 234, 309–12 military technology 34, 37, 40, 234, 311–12, 347, 466–8 Mitchell, Don 138, 533 Monroe Doctrine 20 Mont Pelerin Society 147–8 Mouffe, Chantal 60, 407 Müller, Christian–Phillip 471–2 Müller, Martin 16, 407, 489 muslims see Islam

O’Kane, Maggie 376, 396, 444–5 O’Reilly, Bill 442, 448 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid 23, 59, 71–5, 182, 233–5, 248, 249, 497–500 oil 2, 41, 135–6, 283, 288, 290–95 Orientalism 149, 157–9, 329, 371, 496, 499 see also Said, Edward Otherness 23, 93, 215–16, 234, 478, 494, 497

546

Index racism 23, 79, 96, 102, 174, 194, 428–31 Rancière, Jacques 463–4 Ratzel, Friedrich 1, 2, 91, 170, 213, 345 Reader’s Digest 4, 25, 75, 179, 222, 254, 448 Reagan, Ronald 365 realism 33–9, 41–2, 110–13, 115, 190, 449, 495 Realpolitik 152, 478, 495 Reclus, Élisée 131 refugees 43, 118 religion 309, 477–90, 515–17, 536–7 see also evangelical Christianity; Islam religious fundamentalism 100, 515–16 see also premillenialism resistance 103, 132, 151–4, 197–8, 295, 334–6, 366–8, 378, 397, 425–7, 510–13, 528–32 see also activism; anti-geopolitics resources competition 2, 5, 156, 171, 194, 289, 294, 334, 425, 431 representations of 282–7, 292–4, 305 wars 287–92, 331, 345 see also diamond industry; oil Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) 368 Robespierre, Maximilien see French Revolution Routledge, Paul 197–8, 334, 396–7 Rumsfeld, Donald 254 Russia 3, 173–4, 193, 219–221

pacific geopolitics 203–4 Paglen, Trevor 466–8 Pakistan 359, 365, 375 Palestine 341–2, 344–6, 359, 487 participatory methods 336, 339, 398–9, 430, 527, 537 peace 189–94, 198–206 peak oil 293 phallogocentrism 91–92 Philippines 39, 307, 335, 343, 349 photography 73, 76–7, 263–6, 467 Pinochet, Augusto 170–71 political economy 130, 133–9, Political Geography xx, 22, 74, 165, 497 popular culture 8–9, 75, 134, 253–4, 361, 462, 485, 499 see also cartoons; cinema; comics; magazines; television popular geopolitics 51, 254, 267, 361, 485, 499 pork industry 316 Portugal 176–7 postage stamps 273–4 postcolonialism 121, 323, 421–2, 427–31 post-development 392 postmillenialism 486–8 power xx, 6–8, 40–1, 62, 80, 111–4, 116–9, 130, 152, 191, 192–6, 197, 210–11, 214, 220, 224, 235, 237–8, 253, 265, 273, 288, 308–19, 323, 329–32, 334–6, 368, 383, 393–4, 397–8, 427, 431–2, 440, 465–8, 497, 500, 501–4, 510, 530, 532, 533–5 power/knowledge 23, 55, 181, 392, 493–4 practical geopolitics 51, 222, 267, 360, 498 pragmatism 412–16 premillenialism 481–7 Professional Geographer 370 progressive geopolitics 200–202, 396 public intellectuals 136–8, 365, 392, 445–6, 537 see also intellectuals of statecraft

Said, Edward 6, 54, 159, 181, 197, 323, 329, 364–5, 371, 427 Sami 425 self-determination 423–6, 431–2 sexuality 92–3, 99–104 Sharp, Joanne 25–6, 51, 74–5, 198–99, 200, 222, 237, 253, 254, 335, 352, 353, 361, 448, 500–501, 529, 531 Sidaway, James 121, 288, Situationists 374, 463 Smith, Adam 130, 389 Smith, Neil 53, 74, 243, 251, 370 social Darwinism 2, 3, 36, 213

queer theory 89–98 race, see indigeneity; racism 547

The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics United Kingdom 167, 173–5, 373, 467 United Nations 41, 171, 393, 424, 450, 483 United States of America economy 151–2 exceptionalism 12, 22, 29, 102, 480, 483–4 Farm Bill 314–17 hegemony of 19, 29, 37, 132, 255–6, 328–9, 370 militarism 132, 135, 139, 151–2, 157, 247–9, 255–6, 292, 331–2, 369–7, 447 nationalism 101–2, 370 religion 477–87 suburbia 342, 346–7 universities 20 see also Native Americans

Somalia 81, 449–50, 452 South Africa 204, 367, 430 South America 170–72, 364 South Sudan, Republic of 109 sovereignty contingent 119–121, 237, 426 de facto 113–14, 237 de jure 113–14 shared 115, 312–14 territorial 116–119, 190, 218–221, 233, 478 see also borders Soviet Union nuclear capabilities 37, 311, 234, 387 dissolution 34, 325 representations of 25, 222, 361, 448 see also Reader’s Digest rivalry with United States 5, 38, 287 see also Cold War; containment policy spatiality 7–9, 116–119, 209, 410 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 157, 336, 427 sport utility vehicles (SUVs) 293–4 statecraft 130–2, 170, 233–6, 360, 452, 496–505 statelessness 115, 118; see also refugees structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) 328, 333, 389–90 Sturm, Tristam 482–3 subaltern geopolitics 335–7 subjectivity 9–10, 153 Sudan 485–6 surveillance 81, 101, 153–4, 160, 223, 273, 429–30, 467, 484

Venezuela 360 Venice Biennale 471–2 violence 189, 191–2, 196–198, 247–9, 263–6, 284, 291–2, 345–6, 366–7, 469 visuality 71–5, 112, 271–3, 361 Wallertstein, Immanuel see world-systems theory war on terror 134–5, 291–2, 326–7, 360, 365, 369–72, 479 Washington Consensus 389–90 waste 307–12, 317–18 welfare 154, 231–2, 292, 349, 389–90, 428, 507 Westphalia, Treaties of 478 women bodies 94, 199, 515–17 exclusion 78, 91–2, 194 political agency 200, 512–15, 531–2 and violence 517 World Bank 327–8, 389–90 world–systems theory 22, 24, 130 World War II 289, 311, 317

tabloid geopolitics 447, 482 tar sands 293 Taylor, Peter xx, 22, 27, 130 television 75–77, 439–40, 449–53 temporality 271–2 territoriality 92, 274, 345–6, 410, 416, 425 territorial trap 215, 233, 313 terrorism 223, 254, 326–7, 359–70, 372–8 Thrift, Nigel 49, 407 Toal, Gerard see Ó Tuathail, Gearóid torture 373–4, 466 Turkey 180, 516

Zapatistas 315 Zimbabwe 29, 428, 432

548