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This article seeks to develop a discursive-argumentative perspective on practical geopolitical reasoning, using the United States’ policy dialogue towards the Bosnian war in the early summer of 1992 as an illustration. Foreign policy statements, press briefings and public policy actions by the President, Secretary of State and their staff are used to document this policy dialogue. Sources include The Public Papers of the President: George H. W. Bush, journalistic reports from leading newspapers and transcripts of State Department press briefings, most of which are accessible in the data archives of Lexis-Nexis. Memoirs, where they exist, are drawn upon to provide insight into the backstage of foreign policy making. The perspective outlined here draws upon the work of the argumentative approach in public policy, some social constructivist perspectives in IR, and a selection of the literature on rhetoric and meaning in social psychology. The article outlines a heuristic theory of how practical geopolitical reasoning works and can be studied in a critical geopolitical fashion. The emphasis is on geopolitical reasoning not state interaction so there is no consideration of the ‘grammar’ of strategic interaction and communication between the U.S., its allies and the various Balkan warring parties. The goal is to illustrate an important feature of the United States’ Bosnian policy discourse, namely its consistent internal tensions and conflicts. This is perhaps best expressed as the argument that the Bush administration, and succeeding administrations, never really had a unitary foreign policy toward Bosnia but rather had a foreign policy argumentative space. The theoretical approach outlined in the article develops a synchronic map of this policy space and documents empirically how it operated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the global governing apparatus of climate planning, has privileged the sovereignty of territorial states. Contemporary political geographical scholarship has since called into question the coherency of the state as a unitary entity and as the sole legitimate arbiter of international politics. This article extends these contributions to planetary climate change adaptation. Through discourse analysis and the multi-scalar institutional and political history of climate planning, this article examines how normative discursive parameters enact prevailing political dynamics that script material futures. Drawing on recent climate planning reports of Palestine and Israel, this article investigates how state discourses operate within an asymmetric geopolitical context where issues of territoriality, sovereignty, and statecraft remain fractured and contested. Climate planning in Israel/Palestine exposes two key institutional constraints of climate governance. First, technical-managerial principles prescribe ahistorical adaptation measures that inadequately address inherently political constraints. Second, the elision of political-economic and historical-cultural contingencies in favor of a universalizing geophysical representation of climate change elides the systemic production of differentiated vulnerability. Consequential of an anachronistic politics of recognition within the UNFCCC, the conditions of climate governance may ultimately embolden the asymmetric status quo. I conclude by highlighting the spatial manifestations (both material and symbolic) of Israeli sovereign violence and the chronic indeterminacy of Palestinian territoriality produced by discursive climate futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]