Critical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics challenges conventional geopolitical accounts that posit an unproblematic use of geography as a causal or influential force in international politics. Based on poststructural theory, critical geopolitics has sought to subvert the taken-for-granted reasoning underlying geopolitics to insist, following Michel Foucault, that power and knowledge are always inseparable. There can be no apolitical or “natural” geographic influence on the practice of politics. Critical geopolitics has paid particular attention to the language of geopolitics (or geopolitical discourse). To critical geopolitics, language is not unproblematic, simply describing what is there. There is always a choice in the concepts that can be drawn on to make sense of a situation. Language is metaphorical, explaining through reference to other already known concepts. For instance, during the cold war, the domino metaphor simultaneously embodied a power political system where only two powers existed (the Soviet Union and the United States), where only force could oppose force, and where the unfolding of the process was inevitable; once started, the continuing fall of states was as unavoidable as stopping a line of dominoes from toppling once the first domino had been pushed. Disease metaphors were structurally very similar, relying on notions of contagion or the malign spread of infection, again depending on a simple notion of geographic proximity as the basis for social and political change.

Whereas traditional geopolitics regards geography as a set of facts and relationships “out there” in the world awaiting description, critical geopolitics believes that geographic orders are created by key individuals and institutions and are then imposed on the world as frameworks of understanding. Critical geopolitical approaches seek to examine how it is that international politics are imagined spatially or geographically and in so doing to uncover the politics involved in writing the geography of global space. Gearoid ÓTuathail called this process “geo-graphing” (or earth-writing). For geopoliticians, there is great power available to those whose maps and explanations of world politics are accepted as accurate due to the influence that these have on the way in which the world and its workings are understood and, therefore, the effects that this has on subsequent political practice. Critical geopolitics aims to challenge the objectivity of geopoliticians. For example, the privileging of sight (especially with the use of maps and diagrams) over other senses in geopolitical reasoning allows geopoliticians to write as if from afar—as if somehow unconnected to the world being surveyed. This reinforces the idea of an objective account rather than one written from a position grounded within the events being discussed. It hides the fact that geopoliticians have their own points of view and loyalties.

In arguing this, critical geopolitics suggests that geopolitics is not something simply linked to describing or predicting the shape of international politics; it is also central to the ways in which identity is formed and maintained in modern societies. National identity is not simply defined by what binds the members of the nation together; perhaps even more important, it is also defined by representing those who exist outside as different from members of the nation. Drawing borders around territory to produce “us” and “them” of the nation and those who are different does not simply reflect the divisions inherent in the world; it also helps to create these differences. Again, geopolitics does not simply reflect the facts of geography; dividing the world into domestic and international realms helps to form geographic orders and geographic relationships. Geopolitics reduces spaces and places to concepts or ideology. The complexity of global space is simplified to units that singularly display evidence of the characteristics that are used to define the spaces in the first place (e.g., Asia is exoticism, the Soviet Union is communism, Iran is fundamentalism, the United States is freedom and democracy).

...