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The basic concept behind critical geopolitics is that intellectuals of statecraft construct ideas about places; these ideas have influence and reinforce their political behaviors and policy choices, and these ideas affect how people process their own notions of places and politics. [1]
Critical geopolitics sees the geopolitical as comprising four linked facets: popular geopolitics, formal geopolitics, structural geopolitics, and practical geopolitics. Critical geopolitical scholarship continues to engage critically with questions surrounding geopolitical discourses, geopolitical practice (i.e. foreign policy), and the history of geopolitics.
Around 2015, a new branch of the critical geopolitics literature appeared, deconstructing and critiquing another new branch of literature, on the geopolitics of renewables. [2] [3] This new critical geopolitics literature argued that (1) the risk of geopolitical competition over critical materials for renewable energy is limited; (2) the resource curse as we know it from the petroleum sector will not necessarily reappear in many countries in connection with renewable energy; (3) transboundary electricity cut-offs will mostly be unsuitable as a geopolitical weapon; and (4) it is not clear that growing use of renewable energy will exacerbate cyber-security risks. [2]
Rooted in poststructuralism as well as various versions of postcolonial scholarship, critical geopolitical inquiry is, at its core, concerned with the operation, interaction, and contestation of geopolitical discourses.[ citation needed ]
This poststructuralist orientation holds that the realities of global political space do not simply reveal themselves to detached, omniscient observers.[ citation needed ] Rather, geopolitical knowledges are seen as partial and situated, emergent from particular subject positions. In this context, geopolitical practices result from complex constellations of competing ideas and discourses, which they in turn modify. [4] The linkages between geographical patterns and processes, on the one hand, and various types of discourses on the other hand, are a key contribution to the geography of media and communication. They also imply that geopolitical practice is not, therefore, unproblematically 'right' or 'natural'.
Further, since geopolitical knowledge is seen as partial, situated and embodied, nation-states are not the only 'legitimate' unit of geopolitical analysis within critical geopolitics. Instead, geopolitical knowledge is seen as more diffuse, with 'popular' geopolitical discourse considered alongside 'formal' and 'practical' geopolitics. These three 'strands' of geopolitical thought are outlined below:
Popular geopolitics is one of the ways in which geopolitical knowledge is produced. It argues that geopolitical ideas are not only shaped by the state, intellectual elites and politicians. Rather, it is also shaped and communicated through popular culture and everyday practices. [5] : 208 Popular culture construct a common sense understanding of world politics through the use of movies, books, magazines, etc. [5] : 209
Political geographers have widely studied the role of popular culture in shaping the popular understanding of politics. [5] : 209 Klaus Dodds, a political geographer, studied the conveyance of geopolitical ideas through movies. [5] : 209 While analyzing James Bond movies, he discovered a recurring message of Western states' geopolitical anxieties. [5] : 209 For example, the movie From Russia with Love conveyed United States' anxieties as a result of the Cold War and The World Is Not Enough conveyed the threats posed by Central Asia. [5] : 209
Structural geopolitics is defined as contemporary geopolitical tradition.
Formal geopolitics refers to the geopolitical culture of more 'traditional' geopolitical actors. Critical accounts of formal geopolitics therefore pay attention to the ways in which formal foreign policy actors and professionals - including think-tanks and academics - mediate geopolitical issues such that particular understandings and policy prescriptions become hegemonic, even common-sense.
Practical geopolitics describes the actual practice of geopolitical strategy (i.e. foreign policy). Studies of practical geopolitics focus both on geopolitical action and geopolitical reasoning, and the ways in which these are linked recursively to both 'formal' and 'popular' geopolitical discourse. Because critical geopolitics is concerned with geopolitics as discourse, studies of practical geopolitics pay attention both to geopolitical actions (for example, military deployment), but also to the discursive strategies used to narrativize these actions.
The "critical" in critical geopolitics therefore relates to two (linked) aims. Firstly, it seeks to 'open up' Geopolitics, as a discipline and a concept. It does this partly by considering the popular and formal aspects of geopolitics alongside practical geopolitics. Further, it focuses on the power relations and dynamics through which particular understandings are (re)constructed. Secondly, critical geopolitics engages critically with 'traditional' geopolitical themes. The articulation of 'alternative' narratives on geopolitical issues, however, may or may not be consistent with a poststructuralist methodology. [6]
Critical geopolitics is an ongoing project which came to prominence when the French geographer Yves Lacoste published 'La géographie ça sert d'abord à faire la guerre' ('geography is primarily for waging war') (1976) and founded the journal Hérodote . The subject entered the English language Geography literature in the 1990s thanks in part to a special "Critical Geopolitics" issue of the journal Political Geography in 1996 (vol. 15/6-7), [7] and the publication in the same year of Gearóid Ó Tuathail's seminal Critical Geopolitics book. [4]
Ó Tuathail's 1996 book Critical Geopolitics defined the state of the subdiscipline at the time, and codified its methodological and intellectual underpinnings.
The historical role of Europe has been subjected to a rich tradition of critical works in geopolitics, as reflected in several book series, such as Routledge's Critical Geopolitics series, edited by Alan Ingram, Merje Kuus and Chih Yuan Woon, as well as the series on Critical European Studies (also at Routledge), edited by Yannis Stivachtis. Contributing to this area is the book entitled The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis by József Böröcz.
Critical geopolitics-based work has been published in a range of Geographical and trans-disciplinary journals, as well as in books and edited collections. Major journals in which critical geopolitics work has appeared include:
Elsewhere, critical geopolitics-derived studies have been published in journals specializing in popular culture, security studies, borderstudies (such as in the Journal of Borderlands Studies) and history, reflecting the breadth of subject matter subsumed under the critical geopolitics headline.
Critical geopolitics 'theory' is not fixed or homogeneous, but core features - especially a concern for discourse analysis - are fundamental.
Popular engagement with the geopolitical, as (re)presented in popular culture, is a major area of research within the critical geopolitics literature:
Lebensraum is a German concept of settler colonialism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of World War II.
Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation, or a quasi-federal system.
Karl Ernst Haushofer was a German general, professor, geographer, and politician. Through his student Rudolf Hess, Haushofer's conception of Geopolitik influenced the development of Adolf Hitler's expansionist strategies. He coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler adopted in Mein Kampf and used to motivate global Nazi expansionism and genocide. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Haushofer's wife and children were categorized as Mischlinge. His son, Albrecht, was issued a German Blood Certificate through the help of Hess.
Sir Halford John Mackinder was an English geographer, academic and politician, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy. He was the first Principal of University Extension College, Reading from 1892 to 1903, and Director of the London School of Economics from 1903 to 1908. While continuing his academic career part-time, he was also the Member of Parliament for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 to 1922. From 1923, he was Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics.
Geostrategy, a subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategies, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends Strategy is as intertwined with geography as geography is with nationhood, or as Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan state it, "[geography is] the mother of strategy."
Nicholas John Spykman was an American political scientist who was Professor of International Relations at Yale University from 1928 until his death in 1943. He was one of the founders of the classical realist school in American foreign policy, transmitting Eastern European political thought to the United States.
Robert David Kaplan is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
Political geography is concerned with the study of both the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Conventionally, for the purposes of analysis, political geography adopts a three-scale structure with the study of the state at the centre, the study of international relations above it, and the study of localities below it. The primary concerns of the subdiscipline can be summarized as the inter-relationships between people, state, and territory.
Yves Lacoste is a French geographer and geopolitician. He was born in Fes, Morocco.
The concept of imagined geographies originated from Edward Said, particularly his work on critique on Orientalism. Imagined geographies refers to the perception of a space created through certain imagery, texts, and/or discourses. For Said, imagined does not mean to be false or made-up, but rather is used synonymous with perceived. Despite often being constructed on a national level, imagined geographies also occur domestically in nations and locally within regions, cities, etc.
Gerard Toal is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
John A. Agnew, FBA is a prominent British-American political geographer. Agnew was educated at the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool in England and Ohio State in the United States.
Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Mohammad Reza Hafeznia is a full professor of political geography in Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran. He obtained his Ph.D in political geography from Tarbiat Modares University in 1990.
Roger Brunet is a French geographer.
Simon Dalby is an Irish born academic and CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Dalby works in the disciplines of environmental security and critical geopolitics.
Geopolitical imaginations are constructed views of the world that reflect the vision of a place's, a country's or a society's role within world politics. Geopolitical imaginations are constituted by shared assumptions and representations of power relations and conflicts in world politics within a certain geographical territory. By critically analyzing how and why these imaginations are constructed, it is possible to reveal underlying power relations and to get a better understanding of various conflicts. Therefore, geopolitical imaginations are closely connected to the academic field of critical geopolitics.
Geography of media and communication is an interdisciplinary research area bringing together human geography with media studies and communication theory. Research addressing the geography of media and communication seeks to understand how acts of communication and the systems they depend on both shape and are shaped by geographical patterns and processes. This topic addresses the prominence of certain types of communication in differing geographical areas, including how new technology allows for new types of communication for a multitude of global locations.
Katharyne Mitchell is an American geographer who is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Reece Jones is an American political geographer and Guggenheim Fellow. Jones was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.