Heretical geopolitics of Central Europe. Dissidents intellectuals and an alternative European order

This paper analyses the emergence, spread and demise of a coherent program of radical geopolitical revision developed in East European dissident circles in the 1980s. Its foundation was the insistence on the need to completely overthrow the post-Yalta, bipolar division of Europe, combined with an emphasis on the priority of human rights in political and peace issues, as well as the belief in the value of the CSCE process. It was also marked by explicit consent for the reunification of Germany as well as the insistence on the need for a democratic Russia to be part of a wider European setup. Through seminal documents, such as the Prague Appeal of 1985 intellectuals, like Jaroslav Šabata, as well as his Czechoslovak, Polish and Hungarian counterparts, were able to convince large parts of the western peace movement and some political circles to adopt the “heretic” perspective. The paper also shows how a seemingly “cultural” discourse of Central Europe, put forth by intellectuals and artists can, together with the “Yalta debate” of the mid-1980s, be read as a specific (critical) geopolitical project. Finally, the post-communist foreign policies of the dissident-led governments are investigated in an attempt to explain the partial demise of “heretical geopolitics”.     

The “geo” of United States national strategy

The paper discusses the geo dimensions of the new world order, with particular emphasis on the increasing role of geoeconomics, and its impact on US national strategy. While the paper uses the US experience to illustrate the growing importance of geoeconomic considerations, the issues raised have direct bearing on many other nations throughout the world.US post Cold War strategy is determined by its three geo challenges. The most important is the geoeconomic challenge caused by the tri-polar division of the world along trading bloc lines, instant global communication and other technologies overcoming the constraints of physical geography, transnational corporations (TNCS) that are becoming supranational in character, and the emergence of a well educated global labor force. The geopolitical challenge is characterized by America's declining relative economic power and its traditional military allies having become economic competitors, while religious, ethnic, and regional tensions threaten its global interests. The third challenge is the military geography issue of effectively projecting power over distance, within the constraints of greatly reduced budgets and loss of overseas bases.     

Governmentality and security in the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The article examines the background to PEPFAR and its reauthorization in Washington DC in 2008 through the conceptual lens of governmentality. Building on existing work, it interprets PEPFAR as a programme for securing the welfare of populations. It also qualifies and extends this work in the following ways. Rather than representing a break with the history of geopolitics, it argues that PEPFAR emerged out of accommodations between geopolitics and governmentality. This point is developed through two takes on geopolitics, first in terms of the projection of sovereign power, and second in terms of articulations between PEPFAR and geopolitical economies of global health. The article suggests, first, that the geopolitics of sovereign power shaped the timing, scale and form of PEPFAR, and second, that PEPFAR articulated with geopolitical economies of global health through its mobilization of US-based corporations, non-governmental and faith-based organizations. The article extends existing work by examining the role of critical mobilizations in shaping PEPFAR, both in relation to questions of political economy and the contentious politics of life. Reflecting on the politics of global health, it considers the prospects for using ideas of security and the international response to HIV/AIDS as stepping stones towards the development of broad-based health systems.     

Rethinking geopolitics in an era of climate change

This article examines the disconnect between predictions about climate change and dominant geopolitical framings of the future. To begin, we introduce four popular geopolitical models of the world. We then show how climate change is a critical variable when considering the future of international politics. Focusing on the specific issues of water availability, agricultural productivity, coastal impacts, and shipping routes, we discuss the implications of predicted changes in the wake of climate change for the assumptions on which these scenarios are built. We show that work linking climate change and geopolitics has clear implications for the ways in which the future geopolitical (dis)order is conceptualized, and we argue that the failure to incorporate this work into geopolitical scenario-planning represents a significant limitation to their utility. We offer some direction for a re-conceptualization of the future based on a more dynamic and flexible approach to geopolitics that recognizes the disruptions posed by climatic and other environmental changes.     

Turn up the heat! Contesting energy poverty in Buffalo,NY

Energy poverty – or the condition of households that cannot adequately heat their homes – is produced at the confluence of multi-scalar processes, from regional labor market restructuring, to urban disinvestment, to geopolitical and geoeconomic struggles over extraction. Critical theorization of the concept is in its nascent phase and the notion itself has received relatively little attention in the United States. Our paper aims to address these lacunae by mobilizing an urban political ecology framework to consider a community-based campaign that targeted residential energy conservation funds in Buffalo, New York. We analyze how the community campaign drew upon the “network crisis” of the energy-poor home to frame critical justice demands that foregrounded energy poverty as the product of uneven socionatural development. Through spatial claims and scalar strategies, the campaign highlighted the contribution of neoliberal conservation programs to deepening patterns of uneven development, and demanded redress of disinvestment in urban housing stock through funding of weatherization for low-income households. We argue that contests over urban energy metabolism offer a fruitful area to explore the possibilities of transforming uneven development from below.     

Fruit of the cyclone: Undoing geopolitics through geopoetics

How can a geopolitical worldview be undone? Can it be undone? These questions have played a central role in critical geopolitics, particularly with feminist and postcolonial authors who seek to show how geopolitics are constituted through everyday processes. This article puts this work into dialogue with a relatively recent strand of geopolitics that attempts to re-examine its environmental foundations. What role might geophysical forces play in challenging hegemonic geopolitical worldviews? The role of materiality in geopolitics will be examined through the work of Guadeloupian author Daniel Maximin. In his book Les Fruits du Cyclone: Une Géopoétique de la Caraïbe, Maximin argues for the unique position of a Caribbean geopoetics, channelled into the figure of humanity as the ‘fruit of the cyclone’, to challenge contemporary geopolitics. In turning to both the natural and the political disasters that visit the Caribbean, he illustrates how impoverished understandings of the geophysical lead to a continuation of colonial patterns. Against this background, Maximin calls for a decolonisation of the coloniser through unsettling their geographical imagination. This decolonisation utilises the geophysical not as a model for human or human–world relations, but as a tool for re-situating oneself and for reimagining global divisions.     

The bio-politics of bodies politic: nature and intertextuality in classic US geopolitical discourse

This paper is a discourse analysis of classic US geopolitical texts which appropriate metaphors of the body to describe the state and its defense. While critical political geographers have demonstrated the role of naturalist epistemologies in classic geopolitics, I contribute to critical geopolitics literature by further examining the discursive economy of naturalism within which US geopolitical discourse is embedded. More specifically, I employ the concept of intertextuality, as theorized by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes in the 1960s, as a key analytical tool. In doing so, I argue that invocations of the ‘body politic’ in 20th century geopolitical texts are a version of bio-politics informed by a proliferating bio-medical discourse over a similar time period. I furthermore argue that such metaphors serve to naturalize territorialized national identities and create a spatial abstraction of a nationalized self in opposition to foreign ‘others,’ a discursive strategy used frequently to justify militaristic state policies. This paper, then, also adds to literature on militarism and the environment by further analyzing the discursive construction of the state in relation to an essentialized, abstracted nature.

A subaltern critical geopolitics of the war on terror: Postcolonial security in Tanzania

Currently, hegemonic geographical imaginations are dominated by the affective geopolitics of the War on Terror, and related security practice is universalised into what has been called “globalized fear” (Pain, 2009). Critical approaches to geopolitics have been attentive to the Westerncentric nature of this imaginary, however, studies of non-Western perceptions of current geopolitics and the nature of fear will help to further displace dominant geopolitical imaginations. Africa, for example, is a continent that is often captured in Western geopolitics - as a site of failed states, the coming anarchy, passive recipient of aid, and so on - but geopolitical representations originating in Africa rarely make much of an impact on political theory.This paper aims to add to critical work on the so-called War on Terror from a perspective emerging from the margins of the dominant geopolitical imagination. It considers the geopolitical imagination of the War on Terror from a non-Western source, newspapers in Tanzania.     

State,capital and spaceships: A terrestrial geography of space tourism

Over the past decade, there has been a significant structural and geographical change in space travel. Following policy, budgetary and regulatory changes in the United States, space travel may now be conducted by private companies. This privatization has also led to some geographical competition and shifts between states within the US. In this paper, I respond to MacDonald’s (2007) call for more critical geographies of outer space activity. Building from his suggestion that we look more closely at the ways in which outer space activity is constituted by “numerous familiar operations” with respect to the practices of international relations and war and to the “basic infrastructural maintenance of the state and the lives of its citizenry”, this paper explores why the US Government has allowed for private space travel and why this privatization drove some states in the US to invest heavily in such a nascent industry sector. It argues that federal and state governments both saw private space travel as a means to fulfill their “basic infrastructural maintenance” with regard to economic expansion, development and competitiveness. The paper analyses these processes through the development of space tourism. In doing so, it provides more detail and geographical context to Dickens and Ormrod’s (2007) overview of the connections between outer space and the circuits of capital. It also demonstrates the many familiar political-economic processes involved in the privatization of space travel and, as such, the possibilities for further critical geographies of space activity.     

War on Terror,work in progress: security,surveillance and the configuration of the US workfare state

This paper evaluates the impact of recent shifts in the geopolitical outlook of the United States—specifically the ‘Global War on Terror’ and its domestic ramifications—on the prior project of reconfiguring the US state to an after-Fordist ‘workfare’ paradigm. In particular, the paper attempts to situate recent developments in the reconfiguration of the American welfare state within the context of debates over the ‘exceptional’ nature of US politics post-9/11. The extent to which this has had a bearing on work practices, welfare provision and workfarism is investigated, citing examples from the post-9/11 era. On the basis of such examples it has been suggested that the project of reconfiguring the US welfare state and labour relations does overlap and intersect with the emergency practices that the US state has instituted domestically as part of the War on Terror. However, the reconfiguration of the US welfare state towards a neoliberal or workfarist paradigm is, we argue, largely part of the ‘normal’ (as opposed to exceptional) fabric of US politics. The project of reconfiguring the US welfare state is ongoing and largely autonomous (although not entirely removed) from the use of exceptional practices in relation to the US security state. Investigation of this relationship, we assert, provides a potentially fruitful ‘new direction’ for both critical geopolitics and political economic geography, and grounds for interaction between the two.     

Transgressions of the man on the moon: climate change,Indigenous expertise,and the posthumanist ethics of place and space

Indigenous peoples have been enrolled in climate change research for decades, participating in data-gathering, as writing collaborators, and serving as the symbolic “canary in the coal mine” for public outreach and policy-making. They have indeed experienced some of the most rapid environmental changes, but rather than emphasize their vulnerabilities, we argue their expertise is narrowly understood in formulating knowledge; the research on climate change has a limited understanding of what it might mean to be inter- or trans-disciplinary because research is formulated exclusively through the assumptions of Enlightenment thought, without sufficiently engaging non-Western subjectivities. Qualitative social sciences and “Indigenous methodologies” can be used to better achieve trans-disciplinarity; in this article we re-tell a story told by Native elders from tribes across Alaska about the “man on the moon.” While literally referring to the US moon landing, elders invoke this story when addressing climate change: it teaches the ethics of the human-nature relationship, developed from a “more-than-human” (or “posthuman”) philosophy. Our data comes from participant-observation and oral history; we draw upon poststructuralist theory, and frame our analysis through the literatures of critical geography, science studies, and American Indian studies. To ensure that Indigenous peoples are not used as props in Western policy agendas, researchers must engage with non-Enlightenment intellectual traditions. More than being a source of data or a symbol of humanity’s ruin, Indigenous wisdom can productively inform sustainable policy agendas to adapt to climate change. What can be learned, for example, is a more-than-human ethics of place and space.     

“The Coast” is Complicated: A Model to Consistently Describe the Nation’s Coastal Population

Our nation’s coast is a complicated management area where no single delineation provides all of the demographic statistics needed to address the full range of policy and management issues. As a result, several different coastal delineations are currently being used, yielding a variety of US coastal population statistics. This paper proposes a simple model for generating and applying coastal population statistics at the national and regional level to increase consistency in coastal policy discussions and improve public understanding of coastal issues. The model includes two major components. The first component is “the population that most directly affects the coast,” represented by the permanent US population that resides in a standard suite of Coastal Watershed Counties, where land use and water quality changes most directly impact coastal ecosystems. The second component is “the population most directly affected by the coast,” represented by the permanent US population that resides in a standard suite of Coastal Shoreline Counties that are directly adjacent to the open ocean, major estuaries, and the Great Lakes, which due to their proximity to these waters, bear a great proportion of the full range of effects from coastal hazards and host the majority of economic production associated with coastal and ocean resources.     

Water Security and the Countermeasures in South Asia Based on the “Belt and Road” Initiative

South Asia is the subregion of Asia with the most neighbors of China. Although the high mountains in the Great Himalayas spatially separate South Asia from East Asia along the border of China’s autonomous region of Tibet, the geographical items such as mountains and rivers link the countries in South Asia with China, resulting in a special and complex geopolitical environment and relationship. In this geopolitical relationship, the transboundary rivers are becoming a key issue of this region in an era of increasing water stress. Depleted and degraded transboundary water supplies have the potential to cause social unrest and spark conflict within and between countries in South Asia, and complicate the geopolitical relationship among them. In addition, the increasing impacts from climate change and human activities will definitely bring many transboundary eco-environmental issues in this region, projecting a big challenge to regional stability and development. The key issues related to the water resources supplement and exploration require the transboundary rivers to be a positive role in regional water resources utility and exploration, and the result will definitely affect regional relationship and water security. How to handle these issues and challenges will be a question for the countries in this region with a long time. Currently, the “Belt and Road” Initiative represents an opportunity to build a shared vision for common prosperity through regional cooperation and is a way to inject new positive energy into world peace and development. In the light of this, the countries with transboundary rivers in South Asia must come together to construct a cooperative mechanism of water security, and adopt a win-win cooperation for the use of transboundary rivers under the principles of “equal”, “equitable” and “reasonable”.     

Geopolitics and family in Palestine

This paper questions geographers’ ability to think about power and violence through different epistemological registers, specifically by examining the discursive production of Palestine as place in geopolitical studies. Although the banner of geopolitics groups together a variety of approaches, these studies more or less cohere around a very particular type of imaginative geography of place - as violent and political. Recent arguments for cosmopolitan approaches to place - particularly when encountering non-Euro/American sites - are used to argue for more diverse approaches to places such as Palestine within Anglophone geographical scholarship. Using research on Palestinian family spaces and spacings, an alternative approach is outlined that exposes some geographies of dealing with and getting by the Israeli Occupation that are largely ignored by geopolitical approaches. These tropes prompt a return, in the conclusion, to the question of how geographers analytically apprehend power and violence, and the possibilities for doing this at the limits of, and beyond, the framework of geopolitical analysis.     

Achmed the dead terrorist and humor in popular geopolitics

The critical geopolitics literature has engaged popular culture and media in many forms, usually focused on mass media or elite-produced niche media. The issue of humor as a form of popular culture with geopolitical content has been explored only recently by geographers. This paper utilizes disposition theory, with its emphasis on social context, to link humor and geopolitical analyses of humor. The analysis of two Jeff Dunham comedy skits centering on the character Achmed the Dead Terrorist demonstrates the utility of disposition theory as a construct to situate humor in the context of its original production and as a fluid, global phenomenon that is shared through various social networks via the Internet.     

Mundane diplomacies for the practice of European geopolitics

This paper offers a practice-based account of diplomacy given that diplomats are central to the production and circulation of geopolitics. We contend that there is a changing geography of diplomacy underway from state-centred to “integrative diplomacy”, prompting the need for reorganisation of the modalities that shape and regulate state presence. Such reorganisation brings with it the challenge of fashioning new pathways of diplomatic engagement to counter the disordering of routinized mundane diplomatic practices, alongside new possibilities for diplomatic space to be used by various actors and interests. In sum, the move to integrative diplomacy commands closer academic attention to the contemporary geographies of diplomatic practice, and how these practices are transacted in diverse spatial settings, sites and domains, under conditions of multiple contestation of state authority and legitimacy. Using extensive European empirical materials, we argue that the ways in which diplomats devise, trial, make claims and counter-claims about geopolitical representations are ripe for practice-based analysis. We do this through an exploration of diplomacy’s geographical dimensions, that is, its everyday spaces and places, orderings and transactions and show how practices can go awry in the move to integrative diplomacy.     

Intellectuals and geopolitics: The ‘cultural politicians’ of Central Europe

This paper investigates the role of intellectuals in the production of geopolitical discourses. It analyzes how the cultural capital of humanist credentials and artistic aura functions to authenticate and legitimate geopolitical claims. Drawing empirically from Central Europe and especially Estonia, I argue that intellectuals are central to the production of a particular ‘cultural’ concept of geopolitics - the notion that foreign policy expresses the state’s and the nation’s identity. As cultural capital gives intellectuals a special license to speak about culture, it constitutes an essential component in geopolitical discourses in Central Europe.The paper contributes to Europeanist geography by clarifying the mechanisms through which Central Europe is cast externally and internally as a place particularly imbued with culture and identity - a place whose integration with the EU and NATO represents its cultural ‘return’ to Europe. It takes us beyond the romanticized notion of intellectuals - especially the formerly dissident ones - as ‘speaking truth to power’, and offers a more subtle account of their role as producers of power discourses.Beyond Central Europe, the paper underscores the political and cultural milieu of geopolitical claims and the specific structures of legitimacy through which these claims are justified and normalized. A nuanced understanding of the role of ‘culture’ in geopolitical discourses requires that we closely examine the cultural and moral capital of intellectuals. This would also enable us to better delineate human agency in the production of geopolitics.     

A Twilight Zone: Identity Crisis in French Geopolitics

The paper initially describes some of the most important historical processes that have conditioned France's geopolitical position in the contemporary world. It discusses the current changes in France's geopolitics as a changing reality of international relations and as a changing discourse of scholars and experts, that reflects those real world changes. The paper focuses on French politics in Africa and on France's policy in Europe after the end of the Cold War. In Africa the French post-colonial empire with its close ties between domestic regimes, French business interests and the French state becomes unsustainable after the bipolar rivalry has been suspended. In Europe French policy can no longer be presented as either an independent view among a series of others (Europe des patries) nor as a successful effort to press French views by way of a larger European entity. The paper presents an overview of geopolitical literature written in France as a reflection of these conditions.     

The emerging Islamic State: Terror,territoriality, and the agenda of social transformation

The world has recently been witness to the emergence of a new contemporary geopolitical phenomenon: the declaration of Islamic States by specific Islamic organizations. This phenomenon has the potential to dramatically transform the geopolitical setting of the Middle East and to have farreaching effects on a global level. Of these most prominent, however, has undoubtedly been the June 2014 declaration by the “Islamic State” organization of a “caliphate” covering large areas of the two war-torn states of Syria and Iraq. The aim of this article is to interrogate the territorial aspects of the Islamic State and to discern what makes it unique and exceptional in comparison to the many other Islamic political organizations that have emerged in recent years. In order to facilitate a better understanding of territoriality, I distinguish here between two major dimensions: conceptions of territoriality and tactics of territoriality. My working assumption is that by distinguishing between conceptions and tactics of territoriality, we can compare the exercise of territoriality by states and, in the present case, organizations. In this article, I argue that the Islamic State poses a challenge to both the conceptual and tactical dimensions of the contemporary territory and territoriality of modern states. Yet, while its conception of territoriality may be widely shared by other political Islamic organizations, its uniqueness lies in its tactics and strategies. Indeed, it is the brutal tactics of the Islamic State that are less acceptable to many Muslims around the world, not its political conception, which enjoys considerable support in the Muslim arena. Yet, when comparing it with modern states, the Islamic State poses a challenge to the territory and territoriality in both conception and tactics.     

Anti-Semitism in German geography 1900–1945

The number of Anti-Semitic opinions found in geographical and geopolitical literature gives evidence of a wide-spread hostility towards Jews before 1945. Only very few critical dissidents branded Anti-Semitism as propaganda of political rightists. The extent to which Anti-Semitism served as an ideological bridge between geography and geopolitics in Germany till 1945 must be established. But independent from geopolitics, there are lots of proof for an autochthonously developed Anti-Semitism among German university geographers long before geopolitics was created. All in all geopolitics had no innovative effect on the research and the theory of political geography in Germany till 1945. Its main topics, epistemological premises and methodological apparatus grew on the substratum of authochthonous traditions created in the 19th century. Geopolitics only takes up basic reflections that already exist.