It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Culture and Imperialism

Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modern territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by international relations theorists the discussion is overwhelmingly in terms of the persistence or obsolescence of the territorial state as an unchanging entity rather than in terms of its significance and meaning in different historical‐geographical circumstances. Contemporary events call this approach into question. The end of the Cold War, the increased velocity and volatility of the world economy, and the emergence of political movements outside the framework of territorial states, suggest the need to consider the territoriality of states in historical context. Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions ‐ states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity, and states as ‘containers’ of societies...

The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory

Part I. Introduction: Developing a Regional Approach to Global Security: 1. Theories and histories about the structure of contemporary international security 2. Levels: distinguishing the regional from the global 3. Security complexes: a theory of regional security Part II. Asia: 4. South Asia: inching towards internal and external transformation 5. Northeast and southeast Asian security complexes during the Cold War 6. The 1990s and beyond: an emergent east Asian complex Conclusion Part III. The Middle East and Africa: Introduction 7. The Middle East: a perennial conflict formation 8. Sub-saharan Africa: security dynamics in a setting of weak and failed states Conclusions Part IV. The Americas: 9. North America: the sole superpower and its surroundings 10. South America: an under-conflictual anomaly? Conclusion: scenarios for the RSCs of the Americas Part V. The Europes: Introduction: 11. EU-Europe: the European Union and its 'near abroad' 12. The Balkans and Turkey 13. The post-Soviet space: a regional security complex around Russia Conclusion: scenarios for the European supercomplex Part VI. Conclusions: 14. Regions and powers: summing up and looking ahead 15. Reflections on conceptualising international security.

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/3437/1/75.pdf

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security

© 2005 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/0309132505ph531pr I Parameters, definitions and themes This is the first of three reports I will write covering an emergent area of research in cultural geography and its cognate fields. During recent years, ‘non-representational theory’ has become as an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks better to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds. In as much as nonrepresentational work allows it, these reports will sketch out common themes of interest, and assess impacts, critics and potentials, variously conceptual, methodological and empirical. Of late, non-representational theorists have asked difficult and provocative questions of cultural geographers, and many others in the discipline, about what is intended by the conduct of research (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). What has been identified as deadening effect – the tendency for cultural analyses to cleave towards a conservative, categorical politics of identity and textual meaning – can, it is contended, be overcome by allowing in much more of the excessive and transient aspects of living. Given the scope and force of the original non-representational arguments, it is unsurprising that this theory has been subject to fulsome response. In fact, non-representational theory has become a particularly effective lightning-rod for disciplinary self-critique. Commentaries have emerged from within cultural, feminist and Marxian traditions and the more recent coalition of critical geography. Notably, and anecdotally, some of the most colourful observations have been saved for bi-partisan conversation in the conference or common room. It is important (not to say appropriate) that the nature of the dialogue – variously confrontational, tribal, dogmatic, peevish and full-bodied – goes on record early. Published versions have been concerned predominantly with the theoretical conditions for disciplinary succession or progression that the term ‘non-representational’ would seem to imply and how, in relation, the concept of performance should be understood by geographers. These articles are variously structured as manifesto, critical review, restated challenge, revanchist programme and proposed reconciliation (Thrift, 1996; 1997; 2000; Nelson, 1999; Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000; Nash, 2000; Harrison, 2000; Gregson and Rose, 2000; Crouch, 2001; Dewsbury et al., 2002; Whatmore, 2002; Cresswell, 2002; Smith, 2003; Jacobs and Nash, 2003; Latham, 2003a; Castree and MacMillan, 2004).1 In this report, I would like to treat the flourishing theoretical debate as a significant Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’

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Cultural geography: the busyness of being 'more-than-representational'

'Geopolitics' is a polysemous term that exceeds all attempts to delimit it as a singular presence. It is better approached by critically investigating how the concept is made to carry certain meanings in political discourse. This paper considers three different ways in which geopolitics is used to make meaning in global politics: (i) as survey, (ii) as a philosophy of statesmanship and (iii) as grand strategy. In documenting this performative range of geopolitics, the paper problematizes the conditions of possibility which enable the production of geopolitics as knowledge generally. The key problematic it identifies is a Cartesian perspectivism which operates through assumptions about the faculty of sight to produce the siting and citing of global politics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/622322.pdf

Problematizing Geopolitics: Survey, Statesmanship and Strategy

We live in complicated and confusing times, in spaces traversed by global
flows and warped by the intensity and speed of information technologies.
Whether we term it late modernity or postmodernity, it is a condition that is
unevenly yet unmistakably eroding our inherited ontologies and fixed
imaginations of ‘how the world works.’ Our conveniently conventional
geopolitical imagination, which envisions and maps the world in terms of
spatial blocs, territorial presence and fixed identities, is no longer adequate in
a world where space appears to be left behind by pace, where territoriality is
under eclipse by telemetricality, and where simple settled identities are blurring
into networks of complex unsettled hybridity. The postmodern condition
seems to problematize and unsettle the modern geopolitical map; its disturbs
its time-worn conditions of possibility, its conventional geographical rhetoric,
its traditional territorial objects, and ontological purities. Does, therefore,
postmodernity give us a new geopolitics?

POSTMODERN GEOPOLITICS? : The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond

A tenet of modern studies of nationalism is that mobilized nations will want to live separately from members of other groups to achieve ethno-territorial goals. A comparison of attitudes to a question on preferences for ethnic separatism for two zones of conflict, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucasus of Russia, reveals large differences both between and within the regions. For the 2,000 respondents surveyed in each region in December 2005, more than half of those in Bosnia-Herzegovina believed that geographic separatism would improve the state of ethnic relations while the comparative figure for the North Caucasus was only 14 per cent. When examining sub-categories of the ethnic groups in each region, traditional social science factors, such as religiosity, material status and levels of ethnic pride, yielded significant differences but more so for Bosnia-Herzegovina than for the North Caucasus. Intuitive factors, such as experience with violence during the wars, were not consistently reveali...

Accounting for separatist sentiment in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucasus of Russia: a comparative analysis of survey responses

Political geography of contemporary events VIII the language and nature of the ‘new geopolitics’—the case of US-El Salvador relations

This paper considers the film Behind Enemy Lines, made before 11th September 2001 but rush released soon after, as a cultural and commercial product which provides insights into American geopolitical culture. It argues that the movie's storyline is an articulation of a Jacksonian tradition in American geopolitical culture involving a drama of remasculinization. It also argues that the film is a mythic rendition of morally ambiguous American military engagement with the Bosnian war. Finally, it examines the film as an expression of the structure of feeling of post-9/11 American militarism. That structure of feeling is characterized by impatience with the pragmatics of multilateral diplomacy, and strong desire for the pleasures of the unilateral action and morally righteous violence.

Gearóid Ó Tuathail

Papers

Problematizing Geopolitics: Survey, Statesmanship and Strategy

POSTMODERN GEOPOLITICS? : The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond

Accounting for separatist sentiment in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucasus of Russia: a comparative analysis of survey responses

Political geography of contemporary events VIII the language and nature of the ‘new geopolitics’—the case of US-El Salvador relations

The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture