The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics

Merje Kuus, Klaus Dodds, Klaus Dodds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317043713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geopolitik

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect. It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

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 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 state-level 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 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.

1
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 self-defined 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 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.

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 ...