References for Geopolitics

• Feminist analysis of the binaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’ created by 9/11 tragedy

• Human rights abuses ignored and images of Afghan civilians killed in the attacks omitted to form an audible silence

• The tragedy was both local and global but was produced as a national tragedy

Hyndman, 2003

• Fear cuts across the personal and societal, it has been globalised since the War on Terror

• There is a disconnection between fear and everyday life meaning they is a lack of understanding of how social politics can become entangled in the everyday to form emotional landscapes

• Marginality is strongly related to fear and often much hidden violence occurs in the private spheres

• Global and local fear interacts, an example being women’s bodies being caught up in international relations

Smith, 2008

• There are forced relations operating upon bodies as they are violated, exploited and abandoned

• Many everyday experiences manifest the position of disempowered people, these vulnerable bodies become a site for feminist exploration

• An example of Sara Smith’s work on marriage in Ladkha seeing the body become a geopolitical site

Dixon & Marston, 2011

• Feminist geopolitics as an approach connecting people, places and events across power and productions of inequalities

• There is a need to move away from the ‘Big Men’ of geopolitics and bring marginalised groups into the academic focus

• The creation of the nation-state is seen as the primary form of scale, feminist geopolitics favours the body as a site for deeper analysis

• There is a call for a greater understanding of emotional geopolitics, fear and risk

Massaro & Williams, 2013

• In the 1970s and 80s the WGSG began to publish texts increasing the visibility of women in Geography

• Women had been absent from Geography Departments, journals etc. seeing geography become based on a masculinist rationality that has been reproduced

• Feminist scholars critique masculinist argument and challenge oppression to allow for greater women’s participation

Nayak & Jeffery, 2012

• Geopolitics seen as a masculinist tradition dominated by the study of men and their actions

• Feminist geopolitics occurs at different scales within the private sphere and the body starting with those most impacted

• Women and others now challenge the language of geopolitics which has been viewed as universal but begin to rewrite narratives on the scale of the body and the home providing a new lens to make visible the everyday experiences of women

• There are challenges that feminist geopolitics still only focuses on mainstream women and even greater representation must be reached

Dittmer & Sharp, 2014

• Pan-Africanism sought to force alternative postcolonial worlds to Cold War binaries and see the Third World as a place in it’s own right with unique and vast culture

• Subaltern states have been silenced by the international politics of the US and Europe, they must be heard and understood through an appropriate lens

• Tanzania is an example of advocating for Pan-Africanism with Nyerere pressing for Third World solidarity

Sharp, 2013

• Feminist geography explores unequal relations and understands that geographical knowledge is often gendered and baed on masculine assumptions

• In the 1980s and 90s black feminists spoke of ‘double discrimination’ living in racialised and patriarchal societies, they criticised feminist movements for being insensitive to the differential experiences of women

• Women’s activism includes the private sphere and is often associated with peace movements

Painter & Jeffery, 2012

• Subaltern geopolitics attempts to offer alternatives to dominant critical geopolitics by giving power to marginalised states

• There is little consideration of the politics of representation on the margins with huge parts of the population and global society ignored when their experiences should count the most

• Identifies and connections should be recognised to make visible the margins and provide access to formal circuits of power

• Seeks to build a world where everyone’s lives count and no bodies are seen as more privileged than others

Sharp, 2011

• In the US Empire is very important and is often compared to the British Empire with both being seen as rooted in Mackinder’s ideas and expressions

• Geopolitics centres around 4 key thinkers: Mahan on sea-power, Ratzel on living space, Mackinder on land-power and the Heartland and Kjellen on blocs of states

• In US and Russian strategists Mackinder’s ideas of controlling resources and the wider world have been seen in a revival of geopolitics

• Mackinder’s ideas have resonated in a number of historical movements such as Nazi based strategies, post WW2 US strategies and now Russian and US containment ideas

• His ideas provide a powerful basis for the use of force and projection of this as well as considering the same physical and geographical areas that are important today

• His work could be challenged by progressive geopolitics in the future

Kearns, 2009

• In 1996 ‘Critical Geopolitics’ was published with the task of revisioning global politics to critique engagements across geography, international relations and post-colonial studies; now the richness of critique is what makes it a thriving venture

• There is more to be done in terms of feminist geopolitics to ensure it is engaged not only on the scale of the body, but also the big ideas of geopolitics

• There should also be a rewilding of geopolitics to account for power power and space intersect with animal and non-human life as well as understanding the views of BAME, female and LGBTQ+ scholars to make critical geopolitics more engaged and responsive 

• The materialist turn should also be understood and how a more than human approach may change critical geopolitics and how it understands the limits to performativity and power

Koopman et al., 2021

• There is a need to reassess the value of language as the political importance of it seems to be being lost in the constant development of new disciplines such as feminist and decolonial geopolitics that put language in the background of their analysis 

• Language and language practices make realities, it is a broad practice and a process that came to be considered in greater depth in the wake of the Cold War

• There are arguments for exploring only language being inadequate, but in reality it is embodied, communicative and acted so deserves attention; this is being seen in the ‘new Cold War’ language conjuring emotions and tangible actions as well as used as click-bait

• New attempts to diversify critical geopolitics will need to extent to language and language practices, especially in de-colonial and new cyber geopolitics

• Words are not passive representations but active

Medby, 2020

• The Orient was almost a European invention, it is not a fact of nature and is not merely there but it is based on a history of thought, imagery and vocabulary drawing from a style of thought based on an ontological separation between the Orient and the Occident that is recreated in works of culture ever since

• The ideas, culture and history of the Orient cannot be seriously understood without understanding the power operations behind it, the relationship between the Orient and the Occident is one of domination and hegemony that justified ruling, dominating and restructuring from the West

• The structure of the Orient is nothing more than a structure of lies mainly produced by the British and French cultural enterprise over India and the Bible lands in their own interests

Said, 1979

• A more holistic and critical view of geopolitics sees that the US geopolitics in Central America reflects the state’s attempt to arrest declining global hegemony 

• The use of language and binaries set up a Soviet-US struggle and the domino theory reframed the unrest in El Salvador as an ideological struggle

• This sees that economic self-interest and state authority are not the key geopolitical interests, but instead the culture of the American way of life and hegemony framed Reagan’s geopolitics in Central America seeing defense spending increase and traditional boundaries strengthened

• Attempting to continue domination and maintain credibility were key to Reagan’s policy

O Tuathail, 1986

• Calls for a challenge to the pre-given and taken for granted space and instead investigate the politics behind geopolitics 

• This draws on the Foucauldian premise of discourse through which political actors shape geopolitical ideas through language, images and narratives communicating geopolitical understandings; geopolitics is seen as a spectacle

• It seems to break away from the state-centric view of geopolitics to challenge categorisations, cultural creations and imbedded norms of Western thought concerning gender, race and identity 

• Sees that geopolitics is not a formal school of thought but a practice enacted by wider intellectuals of statecraft in the everyday conduction of foreign policy 

• There is also an appreciation of popular culture and the everyday contributing to discourses and influencing how people see and engage with geopolitical issues

O Tauthail, 1996

• Recent work in political and cultural geography foreground the role of affect in the performative enactment of space and spacing; film can be seen as an affective assemblage through which political sensibilities emerge and are amplified

• The relation between cinema and enactments of geopolitical interventions must be understood in the way one reproduces or subverts the discursive framed codes and scripts but also in terms of the amplification and anchoring of particular effects though tactics and techniques 

• An example is seen in the geopolitical logics of intervention implicated in the US involvement in Somalia in 1993 and its depiction in ‘Black Hawk Down’

Carter & McCormack, 2006

• Top Gun Maverick reflects anxiety over the US’ relative decline in the face of China’s high tech military upsurge and aired with great geopolitical timing in the same week Biden met with several heads of state to reassure them of the US’ commitment to their regions

• This is seen in Cruise obviously being older as well as a sense of nostalgia to the US’ old military prowess with older pilots flying traditional planes

• In the film, students face an enemy with a more advanced ‘fifth-generation’ aircraft but China is never named and potentially offensive material is removed as the film is fearful of naming their enemy 

• The aging male lead and old-fashioned kit gives a clear sense of vulnerability

Crabtree, 2022

• Decolonial theory acts as an intervention in time and space as it deconstructs the idea of a postcolonial seen as the end of colonialism, but this still enforces hegemonic relations

• Colonial power/knowledge dynamics remain embedded in scholarly work so there is a need to reconfigure knowledge production; there is a need to think from the colonial difference and speak from the underside

• The postcolonial is flawed as it relies on theoretical framing and binary thinking that perpetuate asymmetric geopolitics of knowledge, the decolonial makes visible the violence of this scholarism and attempts to think outside the western canon

• This is needed for example in indigenous political geographies and can be combined with feminist geopolitics to considered the embodied experience of those marginalised

Naylor et al., 2018

• Halford Mackinder incorporated social Darwinism as he saw the world as a stage for competition between races and nations; he suggested that the resources, railways and remoteness of the Russian heartland would pose a threat to powerful states

• Mackinder believed that who ruled the heartland would rule the world, showing geography’s connection to empire; he supported British imperialism

• Raztel incorporated Darwin’s theory into the formation of political communities, he suggested the state was a living organism and it’s imperative for living space would justify stronger states to expand territorially into new areas

• Ellen Churchill Semple saw the environment as determining human behaviour and this would influence social, cultural and religious developments; she often resorted to racist tendencies as she saw that entire populations would be morally, spiritually or culturally inferior due to their environments 

• Petr Kroptin argued against imperialism seeing cooperation more important than competition to improve global living conditions

Nayak & Jeffery, 2012

• W.E.B Du Bois was one of the most important intellectuals and activists of the C20th, he spoke about the intersections of race, empire and White supremacy with his activism making the case for greater engagement with decolonial geopolitics

• The colour line showed that fundamental elements of world politics were not states or territory, but race, imperialism and structures of White supremacy seeing that events such as WW1 must be understood in relation to race

• He also advocated for transnational solidarity among the subaltern promoting Pan-Africanism, organising conferences and promoting Afro-Asian solidarity to form alliances across social movements and national borders

• Decolonial geopolitics develops from this as a worldmaking project not just a critique but a reimagining of a new structure of the world; this relates to subalter and postcolonial geopolitics

Moore & Joudah, 2022

• Some states now built their own alternative non-violent securities which make connections across difference and distance focusing on the safety of bodies and grounding geopolitics in everyday life

• Anti-geopolitics often focuses on resistance to hegemonic geopolitics rather than being an effort to make something new, feminist geopolitics therefore takes this and puts together new and broader definitions for security for more bodies in more places

• Alter-geopolitics is a way of extending the concepts of anti and feminist geopolitics and it reminds us to look at marginalised, private and everyday experiences that we may not think of as geopolitics; this offers much in terms of how we think about security

Koopman, 2011

• In Ladakh, a continued territorial dispute between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority sees much regulation imposed around the social interactions between people on opposing sides of the tension

• As a result, love and emotional connections become geopolitical forces and ‘the body itself becomes a geopolitical site’ as it embodied and bridged the conflict

• Communities attempt to discipline citizens in order to defend territories, but ultimately it is the body and its implicit connection to another that reveals the hardship and denial of affection enforced for individuals.

Smith, 2012