Showing papers by "John Agnew published in 2004"

Is there a politics to geopolitics

Abstract: 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.

The Changing Nature of Space

Abstract: From one point of view, terrestrial space is inert. It is simply the geographical surface upon which physical, social, and economic practices and ideas exert their influence. But because the impact of practices and ideas is historically cumulative and geographically differentiating, space can be thought of as having long-term effects on the conduct of human life because of the very unevenness in the spatial distribution of physical resources and human capabilities. In this way, space is turned into place or ‘lived space’: the humanly constructed settings for social and political action. Contemporary Geography has abandoned the view once characteristic of many of its Anglo-American and German practitioners that physical geography is determining of other features of geographical difference across geographical scales from the local to the global. Rather, social and economic practices are now seen as primary in creating geographical differences of all kinds.

Looking into Cyberspace

Abstract: Spatializing International Relations: Analysing Activism on the Internet. By Jayne Rodgers. New York: Routledge, 2003. 184 pp., $80.00 (ISBN: 0-415-25592-9). Theories of international relations are overwhelmingly based on territorialized accounts of geographical space. Even if individual states are not viewed as self-sufficient actors, they are still seen as territorial entities embedded in a hierarchy of nested territorial spaces, with power moving up and down the hierarchy from suprastate entities (such as alliances and customs unions) to local administrative units (such as municipalities and regions). What has generally been lacking is theoretical attention to alternative ways of spatializing power—beyond the territorial field-of-forces model that has long dominated the field. Various such alternatives exist—such as spatial network, ensemble-of-worlds, and world society models (see, for example, Agnew 2002). Moreover, the need for alternative models has become all the more urgent with the increased perception of the importance of economic, political, and cultural transactions that take place through space-spanning networks that cross state boundaries and that can no longer be easily restricted by states. Spatializing International Relations by Jayne Rodgers reviews some of the new ways in which scholars from a range of disciplines (predominantly geography, anthropology, and feminist political theory) have tried to “spatialize” our understanding of international relations. It does so in two ways. First, two chapters describe, respectively, the spatial theories of international relations and analogous theories drawn from feminist political theory. Second, Rodgers undertakes a sustained empirical examination of the politics of Internet political activism across five chapters, using the spatial theory of the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre as a rough-and-ready theoretical template. Rodgers's key contention is that “the Internet does not fit neatly … into …