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.     

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.     

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.     

Ecosystem Responses of the Subtropical Kaneohe Bay,Hawaii, to Climate Change: A Nitrogen Cycle Modeling Approach

The global coastal zone is characterized by high biological productivity and serves as an important channel through which materials are transferred from land to the open ocean, yet little is known how it will be affected by climate change. Here, we use Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, a semi-enclosed subtropical embayment partially surrounded by a mountainous watershed and fed by river runoff as an example to explore the potential impact of climate change on the pelagic and benthic cycling of nitrogen. We employ a nine-compartment nitrogen cycle biogeochemical box model and perturb it with a set of four idealized climate scenarios. We find that hydrological changes play a dominant role in determining the ecosystem structure, while temperature changes are more important for the trophic state and stability of the ecosystem. The ecosystem stability against storm events does not significantly change under any scenario. The system remains autotrophic in the future; however, it becomes significantly less autotrophic under drier climate, while it turns slightly more autotrophic under wetter climate. These findings may have implications for other high island watershed and coastal ecosystems in the tropics and subtropics.     

Socio-cultural dimensions of climate change: charting the terrain

We have reached a crucial turning point in debates around climate change. A well established scientific consensus regarding the physical causes, dynamics, and at least many likely implications of anthropogenic climate change has thus far failed to result in any substantial movement towards mitigation. For many, then, the most urgent questions regarding climate change are now socio-cultural ones, such as: how do people come to hold and act on certain beliefs regarding environmental conditions and processes; how do institutional forms and histories shape and constrain the views and options of various sorts of actors; and what are relationships among fossil fuels, climate change, and the historical geographies and future trajectories of capitalism? Far from being simpler than physical and life science questions, these social science questions introduce entirely new sorts of actors, dynamics, and methodological challenges into this already complex and dynamic domain. This special issue takes up these topics. In this essay, we chart some of the major contours of contemporary social science thinking regarding climate change and introduce the articles in the special issue. We begin by examining work, from political science and scholarship on the commons, that foregrounds questions of sovereignty, territoriality, and cooperation with respect to environmental governance. Then we examine work from neoclassical economics and radical political economy, which frame climate change in terms of externalities, or contradiction and crisis, respectively. Finally, we examine the rapidly proliferating work exploring how individuals think and feel about these issues, emphasizing concepts of risk, communication, and governmentality.     

A review of observed and projected changes in climate for the islands in the Caribbean

Observed and projected changes in climate have serious socio-economic implications for the Caribbean islands. This article attempts to present basic climate change information—based on previous studies, available observations and climate model simulations—at spatial scales relevant for islands in the Caribbean. We use the General Circulation Model (GCM) data included in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) and the UK Hadley Centre regional climate model (RCM) data to provide both present-day and scenario-based future information on precipitation and temperature for individual island states. Gridded station observations and satellite data are used to study 20th century climate and to assess the performance of climate models. With main focus on precipitation, we also discuss factors such as sea surface temperature, sea level pressure and winds that affect seasonal variations in precipitation. The CMIP3 ensemble mean and the RCM successfully capture the large-scale atmospheric circulation features in the region, but show difficulty in capturing the characteristic bimodal seasonal cycle of precipitation. Future drying during the wet season in this region under climate change scenarios has been noted in previous studies, but the magnitude of change is highly uncertain in both GCM and RCM simulations. The projected decrease is more prominent in the early wet season erasing the mid-summer drought feature in the western Caribbean. The RCM simulations show improvements over the GCM mainly due to better representation of landmass, but its performance is critically dependent on the driving GCM. This study highlights the need for high-resolution observations and ensemble of climate model simulations to fully understand climate change and its impacts on small islands in the Caribbean.     

The radical geopolitics of US foreign policy: the 2003 Iraq War

This article presents an approach termed “radical geopolitics” that addresses two of critical geopolitics’ blind spots, namely, its lack of attention to the causes (the “why”) of policy and its neglect of political economy. In particular, it examines the respective roles of the geopolitical and geoeconomic factors that drive policy. The argument draws on David Harvey’s “logics of power,” modified and reformulated into a “geoeconomic logic” and a “geopolitical logic” through which postwar American foreign policy may be interpreted. The former logic arises out of capitalism’s tendency to expand geographically and the latter out of politicians’ need to maintain credibility internationally as well as from electoral pressures at home. A discussion of the Iraq War illustrates the approach and illuminates issues overlooked by critical geopolitics analyses, in particular: Why did the US invade Iraq in 2003? And what was the role of oil, if any, in motivating the invasion? It is argued that Iraq was invaded to control its oil (but much less to use it for US consumption, and still much less to generate profits from it), and to maintain American credibility. Radical geopolitics should not be seen in opposition to critical geopolitics, but rather as seeking to supplement its analyses through discussion of issues which have received less attention.     

Climate change impact projections at the catchment scale in Tunisia using the multi-model ensemble mean approach

In this work, we developed a mean projection for climate change and assessed its impact on some hydro-meteorological indicators relevant to climatic condition, precipitation extremes magnitude and frequency for the Siliana catchment in Tunisia based on an ensemble of seven combinations of global circulation models (GCMs) and regional climate models (RCMs) derived from the EU-FP6 ENSEMBLES project. We performed quantile-based mapping (QM) bias correction technique of climate model projection using local observations. Because there is no warranty that the best climate model based on its performances in reproducing historic climate will be superior to other models in simulating future climate, we used the multi-model ensemble (MME) mean approach to derive a mean projection as the best guess for climate change projection for the Siliana catchment. We also quantified the uncertainty of the MME in the projected change in the selected indicators by comparing their values in the reference period (1981–2010) to these in the future period (2041–2070). Results reveal that the Siliana catchment will be prone to drier and warmer climate in the future with less rainy days for each month. The uncertainty associated with the MME projection suggests that no clear general tendency for extreme rainy days in the future is expected. These findings highlight the need to consider an ensemble of multi-climate models with an uncertainty framework if reliable climate change impact study is sought at the catchment scale.     

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.     

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.     

Understanding geomorphic responses to environmental change: a 19 000‐year case study from semi‐arid central Texas,USA

Understanding the impact of past climatic changes on landscape stability is crucial in order to predict and mitigate the effects of future changes. However, in arid and semi‐arid environments, reconstructions are often hampered by a poor understanding of the relationship between sediment deposition and climate. We present here data from central Texas, a region that is sensitive to environmental change but has received relatively little attention. The study integrates a chronology of 29 optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages from six sedimentary sites in a range of depositional contexts with a 19 000 a climate record derived from pollen extracted from the adjacent Boriack Bog. By comparing the two records, we aimed to assess the relationship between climate change and geomorphic activity. Data show that extensive aeolian and colluvial deposition occurred during the mid to late Holocene, with sedimentation generally increasing during more arid phases. However, a number of depositional events on slopes were associated with moister episodes, and sediment was also deposited in a summit setting immediately after phases of increased precipitation. Linkages between climate change and geomorphic response were therefore complex, being controlled by both sediment supply and transport energy. The climatic fluctuations identified in the Boriack Bog record highlight the sensitivity of central Texas to environmental change, while disparities in conditions recorded between it and other palaeoenvironmental sites in the southern USA emphasise the need for further work in order to enhance understanding of landscape sedimentary response to climate. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Climate Change,Geopolitics, and Human Settlements in the Hexi Corridor over the Last 5,000 Years

Social responses to climate change over human history have been widely discussed in academia over the last two decades. However, the transformation of the human–environment nexus crossing prehistoric and historic periods and the processes associated with it are not yet clearly understood. In this study, based on published works on radiocarbon dating, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, and archaeological sites, together with a synthesis of historical documents and highresolution paleoclimatic records, we trace the extent to which human settlement patterns in the Hexi Corridor in northwestern China evolved in conjunction with climate change over the last 5,000 years. A total of 129 Neolithic, 126 Bronze Age, and 1,378 historical sites in the Hexi Corridor(n=1,633) were surveyed. Our results show that, in the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age periods(～2800–100 BC), climate change contributed to the transformation of subsistence strategies and the subsequent changes in human settlement patterns in the Hexi Corridor. The warm-humid climate in ～2800–2000 BC promoted millet agriculture and helped the Majiayao, Banshan, and Machang Cultures to flourish. The cold-dry climate in ～2000–100 BC resulted in the divergence and transformation of subsistence strategies in the Xichengyi–Qijia–Siba and Shajing–Shanma Cultures and in a shift in their settlement patterns. However, in the historical period(121 BC–AD 1911), human settlement patterns were primarily determined by geopolitics related to the alternating rule of regimes and frequent wars, especially in the Sui–Tang dynasties. We also find that trans-Eurasian cultural exchange since ～2000 BC improved social resilience to climate change in the Hexi Corridor, mediating the human–environment nexus there. Our findings may provide insights into how human societies reacted to climate change in arid and semi-arid environments over the long term.     

Moments in everyday/distant geopolitics: Young people’s fears and hopes

The everyday implications of a volatile geopolitical climate are increasingly recognised, but far less is known about how people’s emotional geographies are affected by geopolitical change. This paper offers a critical examination of how some young people in different parts of the world navigate fears and hopes that might be considered ‘global’ in nature, and those that might be considered ‘everyday’. We report from participatory research conducted with young people from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We examine how personal fears and hopes intersect with wider anxieties about youth, urban crime and terrorism. The research suggests that global-everyday emotions are not separated out in young people’s analyses. They are critically reflexive about wider discourses of fear, while undertaking the day to day business of navigating what are sometimes challenging emotional topographies.     

Unstable climates: Exploring the statistical and social constructions of ‘normal’ climate

The idea of climate has both statistical and social foundations. Both of these dimensions of climate change over time: climate, as defined by meteorological statistics, changes for both natural and anthropogenic reasons; and our expectations of future climate also change, as cultures, societies and knowledge evolves. This paper explores the interactions between these different expressions of climate change by focusing on the idea of ‘normal’ climates defined by statistics. We show how this idea came into being in meteorological circles and then review how this idea of climatic normality gets entangled with cultural and psychological processes. Using data from historical and predicted climates in the UK, we illustrate the significance of choosing different baseline ‘normals’ for retrospective and prospective interpretations of climate change. Since the choice of these statistical ‘normals’ reflects cultural, political and psychological preferences and practices as much as scientific ones, we argue that expectations of the climatic future are influenced by social as well as statistical norms. Seeing climate as co-constructed between the psycho-cultural constraints of society and the physical constraints of the material world offers a different way of thinking about the instabilities of climate and the ways we adapt to them.     

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.     

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.     

Episodic recharge and climate change in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia

In semi-arid areas, episodic recharge can form a significant part of overall recharge, dependant upon infrequent rainfall events. With climate change projections suggesting changes in future rainfall magnitude and intensity, groundwater recharge in semi-arid areas is likely to be affected disproportionately by climate change. This study sought to investigate projected changes in episodic recharge in arid areas of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia, using three global warming scenarios from 15 different global climate models (GCMs) for a 2030 climate. Two metrics were used to investigate episodic recharge: at the annual scale the coefficient of variation was used, and at the daily scale the proportion of recharge in the highest 1% of daily recharge. The metrics were proportional to each other but were inconclusive as to whether episodic recharge was to increase or decrease in this environment; this is not a surprising result considering the spread in recharge projections from the 45 scenarios. The results showed that the change in the low probability of exceedance rainfall events was a better predictor of the change in total recharge than the change in total rainfall, which has implications for the selection of GCMs used in impact studies and the way GCM results are downscaled.     

How sensitive are river systems to climate and land‐use changes? A model‐based evaluation

Simulated Holocene sediment discharges from a high‐resolution cellular model of river evolution in northern England, driven by a peat‐bog proxy climate and palynological based land‐cover record, show a very close similarity to alluviation phases evident in British river valleys. Independent validation of the model indicates that British river systems have been surprisingly sensitive to short term (ca. 10² yr) climate fluctuations, although river dynamics also have been modulated by land‐use change and sediment supply. This has important implications for understanding alluvial system evolution, establishing controlling factors and, most importantly, forecasting river response to future climate and land‐use changes. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Geopolitics in the nineties: one flag, many meanings

This article provides an overview of recent publications on geopolitics. The diversity is overwhelming. Publications are therefore divided into four schools: neo-classical geopolitics, subversive geopolitics, non-geopolitics and critical geopolitics. These four schools are distinguished on two dimensions. The first is the distance to the object under study (practical/applied versus academic/reflective). The second refers to the position towards the state system (states as the principal geopolitical actors versus attention for other political actors and interests). Despite their differences, the four types of studies share a growing interest in geoeconomics.     

Impacts of climate change on groundwater in Australia: a sensitivity analysis of recharge

Groundwater recharge is a complex process reflecting many interactions between climate, vegetation and soils. Climate change will impact upon groundwater recharge but it is not clear which climate variables have the greatest influence over recharge. This study used a sensitivity analysis of climate variables using a modified version of WAVES, a soil-vegetation-atmosphere-transfer model (unsaturated zone), to determine the importance of each climate variable in the change in groundwater recharge for three points in Australia. This study found that change in recharge is most sensitive to change in rainfall. Increases in temperature and changes in rainfall intensity also led to significant changes in recharge. Although not as significant as other climate variables, some changes in recharge were observed due to changes in solar radiation and carbon dioxide concentration. When these variables were altered simultaneously, changes in recharge appeared to be closely related to changes in rainfall; however, in nearly all cases, recharge was greater than would have been predicted if only rainfall had been considered. These findings have implications for how recharge is projected to change due to climate change.