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This paper addresses the legendary total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. Two British teams confirmed the light bending prediction by Albert Einstein: Charles R. Davidson and Andrew C. C. Crommelin in Sobral, Brazil and Arthur S. Eddington and Edwin T. Cottingham on the African island of Príncipe, then part of the Portuguese empire. By jointly analyzing the two astronomical expeditions supported by written and visual sources, I show how, despite extensive scholarship on this famous historical episode and the historiographical emphasis on the plural dimensions of knowledge construction, many human and non‐human actors have been kept in the shadow of the eclipse. I do so by focusing on what I call knowledge from the periphery together with knowledge from below, grounded literally on how localities (sites) affect choices and events, and growing outward to encompass a wide range of participants. I show how the geopolitical status of the two nations where the observational sites were located, and specifically Portugal's condition of colonial power, affected main decisions and events, while highlighting the active role of participants, ranging from experts from the peripheries and those involved in the travels to local elites and anonymous peoples, some of whom contributed to the observation of totality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States imports around 25% of its merchandise under some form of preferential trade regime. This paper examines both the origins and the consequences of U.S. trade preferences in the context of the gravity model of international trade. The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, it provides estimates of the impact of preferential trade regimes in terms of access to U.S. markets while controlling for geostrategic interests that determine the countries that are offered commercial preferences. Second, we consider not only country eligibility but also the extent of utilization of these programs. Third, we provide new estimates of the impact of transport and transactions costs beyond distance. In the standard gravity estimation, we find that beneficiaries of these preferences, except GSP, export between two and three times more than the excluded countries, after controlling for country and product characteristics. Nonetheless, the estimated effects of these programs are lower when controlling for utilization ratios and selection biases due to the correlation between geopolitical interests and the standard explanatory variables used in the gravity model of trade, such as countries' geographic distance from the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we build on the work of Graham Smith, who was developing a critical geopolitics of Russia in his posthumous paper of 1999, published in this journal. Like Smith, we link the evolving geopolitical orientations of Russia to the search for a post-Soviet identity amongst its citizens and its political leadership. While Smith saw a core concept in Russian geopolitics having Protean masks, it is the leadership of the Russian state, specifically President Putin, who has successfully adopted a Protean strategy to appeal to the disparate elements of the Russian geopolitical spectrum. Based on a nationwide survey in spring 2002, we identify six clusters in Russian public opinion by socio-demographic characteristics and we connect each cluster to the main geopolitical orientations competing in contemporary Russia, including democratic statism and the increasingly marginalized Eurasianism that formed the core subject of Smith's paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Soviet Union, many foreign policy intellectuals have peculiarly identified the Republic of Uzbekistan as the locus of‘pivot’ designation. A century on from his original‘Geographical pivot of history’ lecture, this paper examines the work of a Russian, an Uzbek, and an American who use Mackinder to understand contemporary Uzbekistani geopolitical orientations, in particular with reference to the USA. Drawing on critical work on the history of geopolitics, it highlights that whilst these texts claim objectivity, they betray political and subjective foreign policy choices. It suggests that whilst the revival of interest in Mackinder testifies to the continued attraction of his ideas, this has, with rare exceptions, been based upon a superficial reading of both his work and the body of secondary literature, and that this raises both disciplinary and ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘geographical pivot of history’ concept, subsequently developed into his famous‘Eurasian heartland thesis’, marginalizes South America, yet his ideas have attracted considerable interest there, including interpretations (and fantasies) of a‘South American heartland’. This paper examines the reception of Mackinder's ideas in Latin American geopolitics and how his heartland thesis was adapted for the South American context. It traces the roots of this adaptation in earlier South American geopolitical writing, and examines these ideas of counter-insurgency policies and global geopolitical strategies, analysing their relationship to military and anticommunist perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that, although Mackinder never mentions New Zealand in his influential 1904 paper and despite the absence of a formal Kiwi geopolitical tradition,‘The geographical pivot of history’ provides a useful framework with which to approach New Zealand geopolitics. The argument uses two Mackinderian ideas to suggest three phases in New Zealand's security relationships during the Mackinder century. First, New Zealand's commitment to Mackinder's‘pivot area’ notion of‘imperial defence’ and‘collective security’ characterized its dependent security phase. Between 1973 and 1990/91 there was a transitional security phase towards Mackinder's second‘global interconnectedness’ idea. Third, this shift led to a current interdependent security phase which is characterized by the recognition that New Zealand's security relationships, despite its geographic isolation, are mutually dependent on political, economic, and military events around the world. The impact of 11 September 2001 and the consequent‘war on terror’ are also considered. The paper concludes by suggesting that New Zealand's post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq point to the continuing relevance of Mackinder's‘The geographical pivot of history’ to New Zealand geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper continues recent discussions on the (geo)politics of the production of academic knowledges, in relation to the recent rise of narratives of‘the creative economy’. Creativity and the‘creative industries’ are increasingly common components of urban economic development discourse, especially following the release of a set of key books– most notably Charles Landry'sThe Creative City(2000), and Richard Florida'sThe Rise of the Creative Class(2002)– that have become popular among economic development planners and cultural policy makers. This paper focuses on the traffic of these books, and their authors, beyond the Anglo-American core. It also briefly discusses policy discourses interpreted from these texts. It is principally, though, a critique of the ways in which academic knowledges circulate, stemming from theorization of academics as creative producers, and of knowledge production as part of the creative economy. The article seeks to critique the means by which particular northern economic knowledges become normative, framed as universal and‘global’, and are distributed and absorbed via intellectual‘scenes’ and an academic‘celebrity’ circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks to the role of geographical metaphors in the ‘battle of words’ to describe Europe and its presumed identity. The facile adoption of banal cartographies such as those of a ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Europe highlights two concerns: first, that despite the imperial and isolationistic temptations of the current American administration, its geopolitical imagination remains firmly wedded to – indeed, cannot but define itself by – its relationship with the ‘Old Continent’. Secondly, it reveals an astonishing distance between such cartographic abstractions and the variety of non-territorial metaphors – in particular, those of mediation and translation – that are increasingly being invoked to inscribe possible futures for the European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea's rising status in regional and global affairs has received significant attention in recent years. In academic, media, and policy debates, though, South Korea is usually regarded as a mere middle power that, due to its geopolitical situation, has only limited leeway in its foreign policy choices. Accordingly, it must constantly maneuver between its larger neighbors: China, Japan, and Russia. However, this perspective negates the fact that the same geopolitical constraints also apply to other states in the region. Thus no country can easily project its power onto others. We use the concept of 'regional power' as a template for investigating South Korea's rising stature in regional and global politics, and argue that Seoul appears quite capable of keeping up with other assumed regional powers. Hence, we not only provide a novel account of South Korea's foreign policy options but also go beyond current approaches by asking about the (undetermined) possibilities that exist for Seoul's regional relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first instance, the CAI negotiations (then: BIT) were for China a strategic reaction, aimed at dividing the EU and the US and preventing trade and sustainable development standards, respectively arranged with EU and with 12 Pacific countries (including Japan) to be imposed to China. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] gl In conclusion, rather than the consequence of a serious power asymmetry in favour of China, CAI is explained by a multidimensional rebalancing in favour of the EU; therefore, the set of drivers for the voluntary creation of such a new regime is, for both the EU and China, inevitably more complex, beyond oversimplification. The EU has traditionally been much more open than China to foreign investment: by CAI China commits itself to opening up to the EU in a large number of relevant economic sectors, and with new mechanisms of follow-up monitoring. Moreover, after the EU elections of 2019, the new pro-integration leadership showed an enhanced self-confidence and will of innovation, notably by fostering further regional EU integration, by the unprecedented recovery plan ("Next generation EU", 2020), in the context of the COVID crisis and the transition from the declining US Trump administration to the Biden New Deal. [Extracted from the article]

Given the centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty to settler colonial formations, it is unsurprising that geographers and other scholars working on such topics are increasingly finding settler colonial studies fruitful in their research agendas. However, work on settler polities in political geography has historically been marked by the present absence of this framework, which has been consequential in terms of circumscribing the kinds of political analysis that geographers can offer. It also limits the nature, depth, and scope of radical critique of violent domination by skirting certain questions about the core drivers of dispossession and responsibility for them. This article examines political geographical engagement (or lack thereof) across each of four themes: population management/governance, territory/sovereignty, consciousness, and narrative, paying particular attention to works which challenge the present absence of settler colonial theory in political geography. We argue that analyzing settler colonial formations as such is essential to conceptualizing their workings and linkages or disjunctures with other forms of empire. Yet this focus also has broader political stakes related to geography's complicity with racialized state power, violence, and empire, as well as and efforts to decolonize the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this essay is to examine the ways in which Beijing perceives the issues of Tibet and Xinjiang differently in the context of its geostrategic thinking in international politics today. In doing so, this essay will provide a deeper understanding of Beijing's different geostrategic sensibilities of Tibet and Xinjiang in regard to rising China's national security interests in Central and South Asia. This essay argues that, although Beijing publicly sees the Tibet and Xinjiang problems as issues of securing Chinese sovereignty, geostrategically Beijing alludes to a subtle difference in its perception of the two regions: (i) the Tibet problem is a practical, domestic issue to be handled by Beijing's paternalistic engagement of modernization, and is a symbolic issue regarding how to manage rising China's benign image abroad while harshly oppressing any separatist voices in Tibet; and (ii) in Beijing's geostrategic thinking, Xinjiang's security importance seems to be defined in terms of energy security for China's economic growth, which is integral to social stability and the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy, as well as the transnational Islamic terrorist movement interlinked with Uyghur separatism in Xinjiang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their importance in public discourse, numbers in the range of 1 million to 1 trillion are notoriously difficult to understand. We examine magnitude estimation by adult Americans when placing large numbers on a number line and when qualitatively evaluating descriptions of imaginary geopolitical scenarios. Prior theoretical conceptions predict a log-to-linear shift: People will either place numbers linearly or will place numbers according to a compressive logarithmic or power-shaped function (Barth & Paladino, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). While about half of people did estimate numbers linearly over this range, nearly all the remaining participants placed 1 million approximately halfway between 1 thousand and 1 billion, but placed numbers linearly across each half, as though they believed that the number words 'thousand, million, billion, trillion' constitute a uniformly spaced count list. Participants in this group also tended to be optimistic in evaluations of largely ineffective political strategies, relative to linear number-line placers. The results indicate that the surface structure of number words can heavily influence processes for dealing with numbers in this range, and it can amplify the possibility that analogous surface regularities are partially responsible for parallel phenomena in children. In addition, these results have direct implications for lawmakers and scientists hoping to communicate effectively with the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to a special section on the future for research on the topic of religion and geopolitics, some terminological, theoretical, methodological and analytical possibilities are set out. A distinction is drawn between 'religious geopolitics' and the 'geopolitics of religion'. Research published thus far on this intersection has limited thematic and topical scope. I further this critique by suggesting new theoretical and methodological possibilities by pointing out the poverty of thinking in the dualistic terms, religion/secular. I conclude this introduction by providing four analytical approaches to the intersection between religion and geopolitics. The essays in this special section are attempts to present future coherence to this growing literature but also illustrate the many divergent possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracy narratives and ways of knowing are a highly visible, accessible and increasingly commonplace part of contemporary global life, permeating across spheres of politics, science and popular culture. Catalyzed by rapid developments in networked media and a political climate of enhanced government secrecy following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, thinking conspiratorially about power forms part of a broader global public challenge to State control over access to information and knowledge. Rather than relegate the study of conspiracy to a marginalised and discredited form of dissent ('conspiracy theory'), this article proposes how geographers can bring a critical attention to the multiple spatialities inherent in and produced through discourses of conspiracy; the ways of knowing and practising the world which conspiracy informs for differently placed subjects, both publics and politicians alike, across the political spectrum. This discursive understanding of conspiracy is developed in relation to the critical geopolitics scholarship and recent concerns within this literature towards producing more situated, embodied and emotional accounts of geopolitics stemming from engagements with non-representational and feminist theory. Grounding the geopolitical analysis of conspiracy discourse in these concerns, the types of geographies that might emerge is explored through empirical research conducted on and with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here the convergence of heterogeneous political actors around their conviction in a US government conspiracy exposes some of the possibilities and problematics which attending to the commonplace geopolitics of conspiracy opens up for ongoing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) has made important contributions to our understanding of globalization, overcoming much of the state-centrism of other kinds of political economic approaches. It has also extended effectively beyond the relatively narrower focus of its predecessors, the global commodity chains and global value chains approaches, to analyze not only the direct process of production but also various social activities that are crucial to the overall process of commodity (and value) production. Yet in spite of opening a potential space for interrogating political processes as integral aspects of production, most work on GPNs has avoided the discussion of political issues that speak to the messiness, contestation, and violence that often accompanies globalization. This article shows that GPN approaches can and should encompass geo-political aspects of the production process that range from labor struggles to inter-state competition and even war. As examples from South Korea show, a geo-political economy approach to GPNs that includes examination of war and geo-politics can extend our understanding of the process of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the geopolitics of globalisation in Europe. It states that the absence of contemporary Europe on the prolific literature on empire and postcolonialism can be rooted in three factors. First, is the inescapable largeness and clarity of present imperial largeness and clarity of present imperial actions taken by the U.S. and its gravitational pull upon geopolitical analyses. The second factor involves the view by Europeans, intellectuals and policy-makers on what are viewed as the benign motivations and processes which underlie Europe and European Union governance. The third factor is concerned with what Lyotard names performativity.

Political geography and geopolitics were built on the same basic postulate as political sciences and the theory of international relations: the nation-state was the relevant scale for all types of analysis. This postulate was a reasonable one at the time of the Treaties of Westphalia. This type of polity triumphed on the international scene at the time when Hobbes wrote the Leviathan. The basis of the social contract implicit in the perspective was simple: in order to achieve personal security, everybody gave up the parcel of freedom (and the associated use of violence) he was naturally endowed with, and delegated it to the Leviathan, the State. The only field where competition between human beings was legitimate at the most elementary level was that of economy. The evolution of the international scene does not only result from the evolution of weaponry or communication and transport technologies. For many persons today, renouncing any parcel of their individual freedom appears as a mutilation of their egos. There was a general agreement in the past on the scale where the analysis of political action had to be developed: it has disappeared. For a growing part of modern societies, inter-individual or local competition may take a political form and rely on the use of violence at all the levels, including the micro-scale. It means that political geography and geopolitics have increasingly to allow for the variety of scales of political action and the changing relations between the competition for power, wealth and status which are present in every society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the entrenchment and interaction in space of ethnic and national identities in an environment in which competing conceptualization of space persist. Both the Greek- and Turkish-speaking communities in the town of Komotini, in northern Greece, have claims to a variety of ethnic and geographical origins. Space making by state officials, minority residents, and local Greeks is analyzed to explain how the claims of the different actors are related.

The article presents a discussion related to the psycho-cultural interface man and world politics. In every discipline, the would-be theorizer must eventually come to grips with the age-old issue of the parts-versus-the-whole, or the components-versus-the-system. This issue divides, in turn, into two fairly distinguishable sub-issues. First, what is the relative importance of each for explanatory purposes? Can one develop a satisfactory general theory without any regard for the parts, the particles, the particular? Is inclusion of them desirable, necessary, sufficient? How much attention can one pay to micro-level entities and phenomena without invading an unfamiliar discipline, without becoming extreme reductionists? These questions cannot, of course, be answered in even the most tentative fashion until the social scientists devises an acceptable solution to the second sub-issue: what sort of conceptual scheme permits to embrace parts as well as whole, or allows to explicitly ignore one or the other? For the social scientist, the issue-in one way or another-is that of relating the individual to all those social groups of which he is a member, as well as understanding the relationship between the smaller of these groups and the larger.

In this brief conclusion to the special section on 'Assemblage and Geography' we reflect on the promises and challenges of assemblage thinking in the context of contemporary geographical thought. We draw out five issues for further discussion; ontological diversity, formation, the non-relational, newness and method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]