Critical Geopolitics

Origins and Divisions

Following the end of World War II, the term geopolitics fell out of use in the Anglo-American world, as it was seen as irretrievably connected to the academic justification of Nazi aggression. Although some political geographers continued to engage in the study of power politics at the global scale, the discourse of geopolitics lay dormant. This lasted until the 1970s, when Henry Kissinger resurrected the term as a reference to the global balance of power between the superpower blocs, thus renewing an interest in territory, space, and power that only grew with the end of détente and the beginning of the second Cold War in the 1970s.

Heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, attempts to study the resurrection of geopolitics during this time period critically viewed the enterprise of geography itself as a discursive actor rather than a passive descriptor of the world it inhabits. Geopolitics, then, was an enterprise engaged in by elites (both academic and political), who attempted to remap the world in ways that were advantageous. Using Foucault's notion of power/knowledge, it was argued that the ability to define the map on which politics would be contested was itself a key element of power. Thus, geographers (and, more specifically, practitioners of geopolitics) are key links in the construction of the taken-for-granted mappings of the world.

Less reflexively connected to the discipline of geography is the similar notion that some elites are hegemonic over the discourses of the rest of the world and, thus, have the ability to write (and rewrite) the rules by which geopolitics is conducted. Historical examples of this view include British attempts to eliminate the slave trade in the 20th century and the promulgation of a liberal individualist discourse of human rights by the United States and other actors through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Thus, what had previously been deemed as normal and acceptable became discursively repositioned as abhorrent when the then superpower, Britain, rewrote the moral rules of slavery. However, critical geopolitics has typically been more interested in the ways in which even more elemental facets of geopolitics are naturalized. For instance, drawing from similar intellectual currents in critical (or dissident) international relations, the very primacy of the nation-state itself was questioned. A move such as this opens up vast spaces for intellectual exploration, and indeed, critical geopolitics has ranged far and wide in the years since the project was initiated. Within critical geopolitics, there has been a traditional divide of subject matter into three main categories of formal, practical, and popular geopolitics. This tripartite division is important as a reminder that geopolitics is not the study of a single set of practices and discourses but an incredibly diverse set of ideas that are quite often in conflict with one other. Thus, there is no center from which geopolitical “truth” emerges; rather, it is distilled from multiple (and numerous) centers of production (the model for this is Henri Lefebvre's production of space).

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