Showing papers by "Gearóid Ó Tuathail published in 1997"

At the End of Geopolitics? Reflections on a Plural Problematic at the Century's End:

Abstract: It is now something of a clichC to assert that we live in an era of transition between a dying old world order and the birth of a new world order. A multiplicity of different theoretical schemas have tried to outline and chart this transition. For some, we are undergoing a wrenching but also exciting transition from a Second Wave civilization, where the norms of industrial society were paradigmatic, to a Third Wave civilization of informational capitalism that will establish a completely new order of norms, values, behaviors, and even subjects.1 For others, we have reached the end of history and the dramas that face us are a triumphant liberalism grandly unfolding across the planet, Yet others stress the limits, contradictions, and dark future of world order, underscoring how the triumph of a fully neoliberal world order is impossible in a decentered, polyglot world of emergent anarchy and pervasive indifference.* Certainly, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 can be read as nothing other than a epochal event. The historian Eric Hobsbawm uses this date to mark the end of what he calls “the short twentieth century.” It began in Sarajevo in 1914 and ends ironically not only with the collapse of the Soviet Empire but also where it began, in a Sarajevo under siege by the forces of fascistic nationalism.3 For students of geopolitics, these varied attempts to chart the end of the old and the beginning of the new have involved numerous pronouncements on the passing of geopolitics. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, figures like Paul Virilio (and more recently James Der Derian) were arguing that “chronopolitics” is now more important than geopolitics in contemporary international affairs. “The loss of material space,” Virilio

On videocameralistics: the geopolitics of failed states, the CNN International and (UN)governmentality

Abstract: The discourse of state failure is a post-Cold War era phenomenon which provides a point of entry into the problematic of global regulation and governance after the Cold War. The mass media spectacles of chaos in the 1990s-in Iraq, Somalia and Rwanda-are windows into three overlap ping dynamics which are re-mastering regulation and governance in the post-Cold War world. The first of these dynamics is the specter of state failure in international politics. The second is the power of global media machines as omnipresent visualization technologies, which are infecting and disrupting the political project of envisioning global order by hegemonic institutions and actors. The third dynamic is the regulatory imperatives of economic growth and political stability exerted by hege monic states and institutions upon the strong and the weak alike. This article seeks to theorize critically the webs of power spun by all three, elaborating in the process a Foucauldian-inspired concept-videocamer alistics-to describe thei...