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Hepple, L.W. 1986: The revival of geopolitics. Political Geography Quarterly 5(4), S21–S36.Commentary 1 Geopolitics is now very much on the agenda for policy discussion and geographical scholarship. In 2001, looking at the thriving literature in political geography as a scholarly field, it is perhaps less than obvious that these themes were in eclipse in the 1950s and 1960s. There are two questions here. First, why the demise of explicitly geopolitical reasoning in this period? Second, why its revival most obviously in the 1980s? Leslie Hepple tackled both these questions in a paper that is significant not just for its attempt to provide a clear answer to both questions but also because in retrospect it appeared at the point in time where geopolitics was undoubtedly ‘back’, but before the subsequent rapid growth of scholarship in geography on the theme (Taylor, 1993). It thus offers a useful historical benchmark against which contemporary scholarship can be evaluated, but also reminds contemporary readers that the revival of interest within geography concerning matters of geopolitics precedes the end of the cold war and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline the potential for three strands of recent critical and feminist scholarship in geography to advance discussions of anti-human trafficking, particularly state responses to the problem. These strands are: the geopolitics of film and media; geographies of bordering and preclusion; and carceral regimes, spaces and institutions. These strands respectively present a critical engagement with the role of representations, practices and institutions in anti-trafficking activity which can enliven discussions within and beyond the discipline on anti-human trafficking responses. This is because they re-centre political concerns around (in)security and sovereign power as these intersect with human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together two streams of literature which rarely enter into conversation: diverse economies scholarship and critical readings of postsocialism. Mobilising the cases of food self-provisioning (FSP) in Czechia and agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as an empirical basis for our reflections, we pursue a two-fold aim. Firstly, we call for attention to the postsocialist East as fertile ground for the study of diverse economies. Secondly, we offer a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as embedded and emancipated theorising, arguing that diverse economies thinking can support novel representations of this geopolitical area and open space to appreciate economic diversity on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a 'provincialised' critical geography of area studies by tracing the spatial genealogy of three waves of Chinese world regional geography and foreign area studies. The shifting terrains have been shaped strongly by the continually reconfigured power-geometries and Chinese thinking of 'the international'. The two coeval fields and knowledge production therein are situated in place-specific institutional contexts, which engender contingent disciplinary geographies and their enduring lack of dialogue. The contemporary regeneration of Chinese 'world-writing' brings its own identities and discourses, power relations and complex impacts to local-global epistemic (in)equality, which requires and rewards further critical mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we outline the case for feminist geolegality, a project that integrates legal geography and feminist geopolitics. The approach captures the myriad ways that law intermeshes with intimate corollaries of geopolitics and geoeconomics. It includes yet surpasses scholarship on international lawfare and military conflict to examine intimate wars that law mediates in the more mundane battlefields of everyday life. The body and home act as heuristic sites to review existing work and future trajectories of feminist geolegality. Its significance is marked further by the era of Trumpism, the gendered spatial and temporal legal implications of which are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The architecture of cloud computing is becoming ever more closely intertwined with geopolitics – from the sharing of intelligence data, to border controls, immigration decisions, and drone strikes. Developing an analogy with the cloud chamber of early twentieth century particle physics, this paper explores the geography of the cloud in cloud computing. It addresses the geographical character of cloud computing across two distinct paradigms. The first, ‘Cloud I’ or a geography of cloud forms, is concerned with the identification and spatial location of data centres where the cloud is thought to materialize. Here the cloud is understood within a particular history of observation, one where the apparently abstract and obscure world can be brought into vision and rendered intelligible. In the second variant, ‘Cloud II’ or the geography of a cloud analytic, the cloud is a bundle of experimental algorithmic techniques acting upon the threshold of perception itself. Like the cloud chamber of the twentieth century, contemporary cloud computing is concerned with rendering perceptible and actionable that which would otherwise be beyond the threshold of human observation. The paper proposes three elements of correlative cloud reasoning, suggesting their significance for our geopolitical present: condensing traces; discovering patterns; and archiving the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Introduction Nearly ten years ago, Gearoid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew published a paper ‘Geopolitics and discourse: practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’ (1992) in Political Geography.[sup 1] Their analysis precipitated a research agenda, which conceptualized geopolitics as a form of political discourse rather than simply a descriptive term intended to cover the study of foreign policy and grand statecraft (see Ó Tuathail, 1986; Dalby, 1988; and indirectly Waterman, 1998). This paper in alliance with an earlier geo-economic analysis of the world economy (Agnew and Corbridge, 1989), urged political geographers to investigate not only the politics of geographical knowledge but also the geographies of the changing world economy. They argued that geopolitics’ close association with Halford Mackinder and others had obscured the extent to which all models of global politics are informed or even guided by geographical understandings (see Agnew, 1983). As a then doctoral student at the University of Bristol, I read this paper with great excitement. Enriched with a critical geopolitical appreciation, I returned to my archival material and (over the next eight years) investigated how the Falklands/Malvinas and Antarctica were represented within British and Argentine geopolitical cultures (see Dodds, 2000a; 2000b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses geographic and especially political geographic work on transnational bureaucratic knowledge production. The term ‘transnational’ signals policy processes that blend national and extranational dynamics in institutional settings that transcend the governmental structures of states. The focus is on the international arena rather than national policy-making. The paper foregrounds the growing attention to bureaucratic processes in geography and highlights some productive arguments about spatiality and practice in that work. I stress the need for closer interdisciplinary engagements and I point to the insights that we would gain from the work of Pierre Bourdieu in that effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replies to Kong’s (2010) lament that geographers of religion have not sufficiently intervened in religious studies. It advocates ‘grounded theologies’ as a rubric by which to investigate contemporary geographies of religion in a secular age. Arguing that secularization can itself be conceived as a theological process, the paper critiques a religious/secular dichotomy and argues that individualized spiritualities presently prevalent are indicative of Taylor’s (2007) nova effect of proliferating grounded theologies. Case studies are drawn from social and cultural geographies of religious intersectionalities and from critical geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why does critical political geography struggle to address, and research, peace? Recent efforts in geography do seek positive accounts of peace, but we argue that critical geographies remain problematically reliant on social agonism. Dominant theoretical lenses used to address critical politics reproduce dissension as the causal grammar of critical sociality and the constitutive effect of difference. We seek an alternative account of peace and sociality. The first half of the paper diagnoses how prevailing conceptual approaches to critique privilege agonism. The second half advances a positive account of peace, without losing the critical tenor of post-foundationalist or relational political insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the interdisciplinary scholarship on radio and sound more generally for the purposes of considering how geopolitical scholarship might reconsider its predominantly visual focus. The first part considers radio and its relationship to studies of propaganda, international diplomacy and even everyday life. Thereafter, attention is given to new themes such as researching radio cultures, broadcasting infrastructure and technology and, finally, the affective impacts of radio on audiences. The conclusion of this paper urges further critical consideration of radio, sound and broadcasting/listener engagement with the well-established geographical literature on music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to establish outer space as a mainstream concern of critical geography. More than half a century after humans first cast their instruments into orbit, contemporary human geography has been slow to explore the myriad connections that tie social life on Earth to the celestial realm. My starting point is a return to an early-modern geographical imagination that acknowledges the reciprocity between heaven and earth. Although other disciplinary engagements are discussed, this project represents the first systematic attempt to explore how outer space both challenges and reanimates the ‘geo’ of geography. The example of Global Satellite Navigation Systems is used to illustrate what is currently at stake in the military contest for geopolitical control of Earth's orbit. Nigel Thrift's work on the technological refashioning of precognitive sociality is contextualized within those systems of state geopower that sustain the everyday uplinking and downlinking to and from space hardware. Lastly, the paper offers a critique of the application of classical geopolitics to outer space in the form of ‘astropolitics’ and its will-to-power variant of Astropolitik. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews writings about postdevelopment. It argues that critical scrutiny of the contemporary reconfiguring of postcolonial sovereignties provides a productive route to rethink the geographies of development and postdevelopment. The relationship of development narratives to reconfigurations of imperialism and postcolonialism produces a complex geography of development and postdevelopment that defies neat summary, but which demands more sustained attention to the interactions of enclosure, boundaries and subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, that geographers already have the conceptual equipment to answer these enormously important questions. We further argue that the fundamental underpinnings of much contemporary economic and social theory, having been developed in times of rapid population growth and labor surplus, must be reconsidered as we enter a period of different material conditions. Reviewing recent developments in population geography and feminist geopolitics, global geographies of labor and aging, and emerging patterns of resource intensification and disintensification, we suggest that – if infused with an explicit political economy – attending to the baby bust can show the way forward to help revitalize our understanding of bodies and materiality in critical and human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the deployment of nonviolence within critical geopolitics. It contends that geographers’ engagements with nonviolence lack grounding, often sliding towards ethical appeals for people’s responsive commitments. Building on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘precarious lives’, I underscore the emotional impetuses through which nonviolence can be harnessed as a concrete pathway for social change. ‘Precarious geopolitics’ as I call it, represents a geopolitics that is sensitive and sympathetic to the claims of nonviolence and a subdiscipline that can seize the opportune juncture truly to reposition itself as one of the arts of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prompted by recent scholarship on geographers' role in advancing the divergent political ends of anarchism and Nazism, this report considers how disciplinary histories make space for the admirable as well as for the abominable episodes of our shared past. In addressing some of the ideological ends to which geography has been put, the report reflects on the historiographical challenge of dealing appropriately with the discipline's stain of Nazi collusion and explores the potential that geography's anarchist traditions have to inspire activist and critical scholarship today. In thinking more generally about practices of exclusion and marginalization in geography, the report argues for the value, and the necessity, of diversity and inclusivity in writing on the history of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the recent recasting of fear within critical geopolitics. It identifies a widespread metanarrative, 'globalized fear', analysis of which lacks grounding and is remote, disembodied and curiously unemotional. A hierarchical scaling of emotions, politics and place overlooks agency, resistance and action. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I call for an emotional geopolitics of fear which connects political processes and everyday emotional topographies in a less hierarchical, more enabling relationship. I employ conscientization as a tool to inform the reconceptualization of global fears within critical geopolitics, and to move forward epistemological practice and our relationship as scholars with social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 10 years have seen a sudden rise in interest in the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in historical research. This has led to a field that has become known as ‘historical GIS’. This development started in the more quantitative ends of the discipline but has spread to encompass qualitative research as well. Interest in historical GIS is not restricted to researchers who would previously have regarded themselves as historical geographers, but has in fact led to an increased awareness of the importance of geography from across the discipline of history. This paper introduces historical GIS and critically evaluates how it is affecting the practice of historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlight the significance of a geographical perspective in emphasizing the spatial and multiscalar dimensions of this changing relationship, particularly in Western states. In doing so, we reveal the violent geographies produced through militarized humanitarianism and demonstrate the ways political violence can be obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. We look at five overlapping lines of enquiry: the way humanitarianism is used to modulate war; the rationalization of military intervention as humanitarian; military deployment in response to humanitarian crises; the military take-up of humanitarian-style practices; and weapons development and humanitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to advance the case for feminist geopolitics that recognises the challenges both to the Enlightenment individual and the discursive turn in geography posed by 'new materialisms'. I will argue that for a distinctively feminist geopolitics a consideration of the way that representational categories align the material around bodies is vital. After a brief discussion of feminist geopolitical approaches, the article moves on to consider accounts of new materialism and assemblage approaches as they are applied to geopolitics, before moving on to consider what a forensic approach might offer to a materialist feminist geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancing relational accounts of 'resource-making' processes by deploying insights from science and technology studies, this article outlines crucial new lines of inquiry for geographical research on unconventional fossil fuels. The exploitation of various carbon-rich substitutes for hydrocarbons has rapidly expanded over the last two decades, to become a highly contentious issue which augments scientific dissensus and generates new collective engagements with the subsurface. The article invites geographers to examine the epistemically and politically transformative potential of such resource-making controversies in terms of reconfiguring: the production of geoscientific knowledge, anticipation of post-conventional energy systems, and temporal strategies of (de)economizing extractive futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However conceptualised, the institutions and relations associated with the state are clearly crucial to political ecological research. Environmental policies are enacted through state institutions, and property rights over land and resources are enforced by the legal framework and monopoly power associated with the state form. Nevertheless, political ecologists have sometimes had an uneasy relationship with conceptualisations of the state, leading to recurring questions over the adequacy of political ecological theorisations. Over the last decade and a half such questions have led to a call for dialogues with political geography and, more recently, with critical geopolitics. In this second progress report, I review recent political ecological theorisations of the state, pointing to a set of shared concerns associated with the processes, relations and struggles through which states are brought into being and acquire certain effects. I will conclude with a note of caution when it comes to an uncritical dialogue with more abstract interpretations of state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews recent literature on shopping malls that reaffirms their importance for human geography. Taking Goss's seminal work on the 'magic of the mall' as a starting point, we trace how recent works attuned to emotion and affect have updated and inspired a re-conceptualization of this potential 'magic'. Synthesizing the linkages between consumer architecture with spatial politics and emotional and affective sensibilities in those spaces, the article seeks to help set the agenda for further research in this field by emphasizing how social difference infuses the retail atmosphere and the way it reveals the workings of geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance has become an analytical lens for examining a range of geographical phenomena. However, research specifically on the geographies of the performing arts has not kept pace with this broader field. Here, I argue for a deeper engagement with the theories and practices of the performing arts, particularly as research on creativity and the geohumanities gathers momentum. The article focuses on three areas where literatures from theatre and performance studies can expand our understanding of what ‘the geographies of the performing arts’ might be: intercultural aesthetics, migrant mobilities, and geopolitics. It examines how these come together in contemporary Cambodian dance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out a new conceptual framework for investigating how city regionalism is constituted as a variegated set of geopolitical processes operating within and beyond the national state. Our approach highlights: (1) the different forms of territorial politics through which city regionalism is conjoined with broader visions of the national state; (2) the material and territorial arrangements which support such a conjuncture; and (3) the political actors enabling city regionalism and the national state to come together within a geopolitical frame of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crutzen and Stoermer’s (2000) naming of the ‘Anthropocene’ has provoked lively debate across the physical and social sciences, but, while the term is gradually gaining acceptance as the signifier of the current geological epoch, it remains little more than a roughly defined place-holder for an era characterized by environmental and social uncertainty. The term invites deeper considerations of its meaning, significance, and consequences for thought and politics. For this Forum, we invited five scholars to reflect on how the Anthropocene poses challenges to the structures and habits of geography, politics, and their guiding concepts. The resulting essays piece together an agenda for geographic thought – and political engagement – in this emerging epoch. Collectively, they suggest that geography, as a discipline, is particularly well suited to address the conceptual challenges presented by the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage’s elements. This has implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change. The article concludes by highlighting the methodological and ethical challenges that such a project would face. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political geographers have significantly contributed to understandings of the spatialities of Europeanization. We review some of this work, while also highlighting research themes where further political-geographic research would be insightful. We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and ‘European power’ in different places within and beyond the EU, and the variegated manifestations of ‘Europeanizing’ processes across these different spaces. We also suggest that political-geographic research can add crucial input to reconceptualizing European integration as well as Europeanization as it now unfolds in a time of ‘crisis’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article engages the platform of critical geopolitics through conceptual clarification of the debates around chronopolitics (the politics of time). It argues that the current literature has either reduced it to the dynamic of ‘speed’ or the ‘modern’ time consciousness in geopolitics. After re-emphasizing a narrative understanding of temporality and a non-dichotomous conception of space and time, the article highlights the heterotemporality of geopolitical discourse. It suggests that chronopolitics should be understood not as an alternative to geopolitics but as one of its crucial elements – and one that can also be found in the project of a critical geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report considers how human geographers and other urban scholars are starting to explore city-regionalism from the vantage point of the politics of distribution. It begins with an examination of city-regionalism as a contingently produced geopolitical project in late capitalism. It then reviews work that examines the distributional dilemmas found in city-regions, including related work on post-suburban development politics. The final section argues that the city-region concept affords a useful platform for examining struggles for social justice and urban environmental politics in late capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The term geopolitics is understood and used in a variety of ways. Political geographers typically invoke the term with reference to the geographical assumptions and understandings that influence world politics. Outside of the academy, geopolitics often connotes a conservative or right-wing political-territorial calculus associated with the strategic designs of Henry Kissinger, Aleksandr Dugin, and followers of the new Geopolitik in Germany. This forum considers the nature and significance of the gap in the ways that the term geopolitics is understood and deployed. Four eminent contributors to the literature in political geography offer their thoughts on the meanings associated with the term and potential confusions that arise from its different uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how EU and NATO enlargement is framed by the dichotomy of Europe versus Eastern Europe, and how the enlargement process simultaneously transforms that dichotomy. I argue that the double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness. I suggest that in order to expose and undercut this reinscription of otherness, research on East-Central Europe should engage with postcolonial theory in a more direct and sustained fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The year 1968 was a global insurrection but the geography of its genesis and of its legacies remains poorly understood. In relation to the outpouring of work critical of the events of the sixties, and of 1968 in particular, by commentators on the political right and left, this essay attempts to rethink the nature of these global events and traces three paths from 1968, each of which represents a distinctive global–local articulation. It is argued that, while there are many different sorts of 1968s, what they each bequeathed was a rethinking of the politics of the possible, and they unleashed a long march through the institutions which have left an indelible mark on the politics of the contemporary era. The essay concludes with some reflections on the legacy of 1968 for the idea of radical democracy and of real Utopias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]