Critical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics refers to an intellectual movement begun in the late 1980s and early 1990s that has as its goal the interrogation of “geopolitics” as a discourse produced through cultural and political practice. This view can be contrasted with prior academic engagements with geopolitics that sought to describe the global political landscape in realist terms, focusing on the power relations among states and neglecting issues of culture and ideology. Since then, critical geopolitics has become one of the most dynamic sectors in political geography and has become central to the subdiscipline. This entry begins by discussing the origins of critical geopolitics and the intellectual currents that stimulated it. The entry then discusses the three types of discourse that critical geopolitics has traditionally focused on: formal, ...