Agnew, John (1949–)

One of the leading human geographers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, John Agnew has made major contributions to the fields of political geography, international relations, and international political economy. Born in England in 1949, Agnew received his BA from the University of Exeter and his MA and PhD from Ohio State University, receiving his doctorate in 1976. Since 1995, Agnew has been a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1975 to 1995, he taught at Syracuse University. In 2008, he was elected president of the Association of American Geographers.

The author or editor of two dozen books and approximately 150 journal articles and book chapters, Agnew has been at the forefront of new research directions in several different areas of human geography. Starting in the late 1980s and continuing through today, Agnew has been the leading figure in the effort to create a theoretically informed, place-based electoral geography. In his work on politics in Italy and the United States, Agnew has moved the subfield beyond its former rampant empiricism and lack of concern for social theory. As part of this effort, Agnew has played an important role in theorizing and problematizing the concept of place.

Agnew has been a key figure in the formation of the field of critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics seeks to make apparent the geographical assumptions and understandings, and implicit and explicit meanings that foreign policymakers and others give to places that serve to justify their geopolitical actions. In his work, Agnew traces the historical foundations of the modern geopolitical imagination through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Agnew has also played an important role in reconceptualizing the main concepts of international relations, most famously through his critique of the “territorial trap,” problematizing the state-centrism that dominates much of geopolitical and international relations thought. In addition, he has been a leading writer in the areas of hegemony, sovereignty, and globalization.

In studies of international political economy, Agnew has demonstrated the important role that regional, national, and global economies and economic policies play in (geo)politics; detailed the uneven spatial impacts of globalization within countries; and recognized the role of core-periphery impacts and relations within countries, as well as across countries, within the world economy.

Through his many publications, John Agnew has played a critical role in political geography's renaissance in the late 20th century and is [Page 33]recognized today as one of human geography's leading scholars.