Showing papers in "Geopolitics in 2013"

Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare

Abstract: This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillan...

City-Regionalism as a Contingent ‘Geopolitics of Capitalism’

Abstract: This paper argues that it is intellectually unsustainable to separate the new economic geography of city-regionalism from its geopolitical context. The neo-liberal competition state is centrally implicated in how the city-region scale is politically orchestrated so as to bolster international competitiveness. Yet the diversity of national and sub-national forms of city-regionalism cannot be attributed to economic development considerations separately from ongoing struggles around the collective provision of social and physical infrastructure. Drawing upon selected examples from the United States, the paper demonstrates how city-regionalism expresses the contingent geopolitics of capitalism. Its overall aim is to advance theoretical knowledge both of the internal political geography of the competition state and of its external territorial relations.

From Geopolitical to Geoeconomic? The Changing Political Rationalities of State Space

Abstract: This article underlines the significance of context-sensitive research in understanding the historical transformations of state space that have occurred as part of wider geopolitical conditions. We trace such transformations by theorising the role of political rationalities in governance, and then by looking at how certain rationalities have surfaced in the spatial-political practices in Finland. We will scrutinise how the connection between space and population manifests in these rationalities. The paper traces at first the rise of the political rationality upon which the Finnish ‘welfare state’ was predicated, using the process as a touchstone to examine the recent political rationality which displays a will to transform the state and its spatiality. Our analysis reveals that an increasingly economistic and transnationally oriented geopolitical calculation of space is taking place in the ongoing governmental interventions aimed at modifying both the spatial structures and the qualities of populations in...

Beyond State-Centricity: Geopolitics of Changing State Spaces

Abstract: This paper scrutinizes the challenges which scholars face when examining the interconnections between the state and geopolitics in the purported “transnational world”. By discussing the relational perspective which “opens” the traditional state-as-a-monolith centric view of geopolitics, the paper sets a foundation for the present special section on the changing geopolitics of state spaces. The paper proceeds by first reflecting on the move from geopolitically “closed” to more open state territories, and then considers some of the ways the state has been examined in spatially sensitive research with respect to geopolitical scholarship. Finally, the paper maps out possible horizons for forthcoming studies on the geopolitics of state spaces.

Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Sceptical Intervention

Abstract: This article makes a methodological argument about ‘studying up’ in foreign policy bureaucracies. Although recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ethnography across the social sciences, including the study of foreign policy and diplomacy, theoretical reflections on the methodology as such greatly outnumber those that actually attempt ethnographic accounts of foreign policy institutions. This imbalance results in large part from the difficulty of fieldwork in these settings. Drawing on six years of research on EU external relations, including 105 interviews with foreign policy professionals, this article lays out some of the difficulties and thereby clarifies the benefits and costs of such fieldwork. More broadly, the article highlights some of the methodological challenges in interpretative research inside the institutions of foreign policy. My concern is not with ethnography or foreign policy as such; I rather examine the specific challenges of conducting fieldwork informed by ethnographic met...

Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In)Security, Animating Social Change

Abstract: This piece is the introduction to a special section on Feminist Geopolitics focusing specifically on securitisation. This introduction provides an overview of the field of feminist geopolitics and situates the contributions of the articles that follow. We argue that the contributions to the section push the field in two distinct ways. First, a number of the pieces draw important connections between geopolitical and geoeconomic processes. Second, the pieces continue to excavate the complex relationship between geopolitical processes and everyday life. Taken as a whole, this special section highlights the utility of feminist geopolitical approaches for gaining analytic clarity and thinking through and enacting positive social change.

War and Tourism: The Banal Geographies of Security in Colombia's “Retaking”

Abstract: This paper explores the discourses and practices of state securitisation that Colombia underwent during the last decade. By focusing on the imaginative geographies of security resulting from the unexpected couplings of war and tourism in the country, it delves into the everyday and highly uneven spaces of (in)security forged by the Democratic Security regime. It shows how a feminist take on the geopolitics of war and peace offers a better understanding of the making and unmaking of banal spaces of security and their role in the production of hegemonic state formations in Colombia.

Domesticated Dispossessions? Towards a Transnational Feminist Geopolitics of Development

Abstract: Geopolitics today is increasingly marked by the violent convergence of (in)security, market integration, and dispossession. Yet few studies address the connected, counter-insurgent geopolitics of ostensibly ameliorative, women-focused development interventions in the (post)colonial world. This paper charts a new theorisation of the geopolitics of development by focusing on gendered social movements, intersecting relations of difference, and social reproduction in two seemingly distinct areas: rural Guatemala and urban India. It introduces a transnational feminist geopolitical analytic – based on relational comparison, critical ethnography, and collaborative dialogue – to elucidate both specificity and global interconnection. Specifically, this consists of analysing struggles over dispossession through processes of ‘de(bt)velopment’ in the Ch'orti’ Highlands and ‘redevelopment’ in Mumbai at key historical conjunctures. These struggles illuminate not only (in)securities experienced by marginalised groups bu...

Fear, Loathing and the Everyday Geopolitics of Encounter in the Arizona Borderlands

Abstract: This paper argues for the importance of attending to both affective and emotional experience in analysing the origins and effects of border and immigration efforts in the US/Mexico border region. We do so by engaging with theoretical understands of the politics of affect and emotion among cultural and feminist geographers and social scientists. We then examine Arizona's SB 1070 and its connection to a larger history of border and immigration enforcement in Arizona. Drawing from ethnographic work, interviews, and media and policy analysis, we engage with narratives provided by border area ranchers to unpack how these ranchers' encounters with unauthorised migrants have changed over time. We then examine how the everyday fear and anxiety associated with these encounters drive political activism and state intervention in the region. We conclude by discussing how this intervention, in turn, reproduces racial and gender hierarchies, hierarchies that are themselves affectively mediated.

Humour at the Model United Nations: The Role of Laughter in Constituting Geopolitical Assemblages

Abstract: Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on ‘real’ issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor.

It's Not a Laughing Matter: Critical Geopolitics, Humour and Unlaughter

Abstract: This paper explores the possibilities of considering humour and laughter as a serious matter of concern for critical geopolitics and political geography more generally While there has been some interest in this topic, there is scope to devise a more expansive research agenda Using both laughter and Michael Billig's notion of unlaughter, the paper considers how these visceral expressions contribute, often in subtle ways, to the making of geopolitical subjectivities The final part of the paper considers some possibilities for future research

Documenting Territory: Passportisation, Territory, and Exception in Abkhazia and South Ossetia

Abstract: Despite the crucial role it played in the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the phenomenon of passportisation has not received a great deal of scholarly attention. Much of the literature has treated the mass distribution of Russian passports to the residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as little more than a strategy to manufacture an excuse to go to war with Georgia. Drawing on recent scholarship on territory and territoriality, as well as with literature addressing Agamben's theories of exceptional spaces, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of passportisation by analysing the territorial effects it produced. It argues that the wholesale conversion of Abkhazians and South Ossetians into Russian citizens did not merely manufacture a casus belli, it also produced exceptional spaces within the territory of the Republic of Georgia, where the norms of international law and the modern state system were effectively suspended.

Security and Fear: The Geopolitics of Intimate Partner Violence Policing

Abstract: This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emo...

Photographing Vladimir Putin: Masculinity, Nationalism and Visuality in Russian Political Culture

Abstract: This article introduces the study of photographs of politicians as an object of geopolitical analysis. It does this through exploring the holiday photographs of Vladimir Putin released by the Kremlin in 2007, 2009, and 2010. Putin's biography provides a backdrop to a detailed analysis of the geopolitical representations contained in the photographs of him. In the same fashion as other images, the photographs seek to provide a contemporary view of events and, at the same time, serve as a medium through which particular political scripts are narrated. The photographs also help to reproduce (and question) hegemonic discourses about public forms of masculinity in Russia. This article is intended to contribute to the debate on how visual images can help make sense of the geopolitical world.

Re-Orientating Vertical Geopolitics

Abstract: Geopolitics has a tradition of adopting a downward looking view-from-above, which is imbued with an imperialistic ‘god's eye’ perspective. Although acknowledged and critiqued, this paper argues that it needs to be actively re-orientated to encompass the discourses and practices of looking up. The paper analyses the practices of looking up and surveilling the sky through which air defence is achieved. It interrogates the ways in which UK air defence is represented in official documents and analyses the activities of the Royal Air Force's Air Surveillance and Control System. The paper argues that this system enacts a vertical geopolitics that goes beyond those understood in other geopolitical literatures and offers suggestions for developing our understandings of a volumetric vertical geopolitics that recognises the aerial view as generated from below as well as from above.

Waging Hospitality: Feminist Geopolitics and Tourism in West Belfast Northern Ireland

Abstract: Many areas of Belfast were considered no-go areas, places where the police had lost jurisdiction, whilst the media designated these neighbourhoods as terrorist enclaves. The urban scars that remain after the signing of the peace agreement, have transformed these marginalised areas into places of hospitality for tourists curious about the past conflict. This paper highlights the interdependent relationship between hospitality and the development of a post-war confidence for a community that had long been stigmatised as a violent enclave. For the purpose of this paper I bring together a feminist geopolitical analysis, with its attention to daily life, with more recent feminist theories of hospitality, observant to issues of inclusiveness. A feminist analysis of this type not only reflects the complicated gender politics of West Belfast, but also exposes a “politics of hospitality” that helps reframe our understandings of security.

Technologies of Border Management: Performances and Calculation of Finnish/Schengen Border Security

Abstract: This paper focuses on the Finnish Border Guard, a professional law enforcement authority responsible for the control and surveillance of the Finnish and Schengen borders, and its performances of border security. Performativity approach means that the analysis of the material, consisting of the bulletins and reports that have been published by the Border Guard service, is not merely focused on the representation of borders but the bulletins themselves are understood as performances of border security. The paper argues that new technological innovations, together with new legislation and institutional procedures, now steering the governance of the Finnish/Schengen border, are bound up with a new culture of border management in which border security is not (just) conceptualised in terms of territorial sovereignty but in terms of international cooperation, prevention and economic profitability.

An Incorporating Geopolitics: Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border

Abstract: This paper develops a critique of the emergence of the new European Border Agency, Frontex, specifically its operations along Europe's maritime borders with North Africa. Rather than account for Frontex in terms of securitising and neoliberalising processes, as has become common, I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections then set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, such an incorporating geopolitics can be shown to be replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – that between trade freedoms and security restrictions – with a more fundamental contradiction: that the more border controls address more than just borders, the more they may themselves undermine the societies they purport to protect.

The Evolution of ‘Eurasia’ as a Geopolitical Concept in Post–Cold War Turkey

Abstract: This article aims to discuss and analyse the major factors behind the emergence and evolution of “Eurasia” as a geopolitical concept in Turkey in the post–Cold War period. For this purpose, special focus will be placed on Turkish political, academic and intellectual circles' redefinition of their geopolitical outlook towards Russia and the Turkic republics of Central Asia and Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s. The major argument of the article in this regard is that while discourses such as Pan-Turkism, Eurasianism and Neo-Ottomanism have exercised a degree of influence over the conceptualisation of Eurasia in Turkish academic and intellectual circles, the concept has been generally treated as an instrument of pragmatism by Turkish policymakers. This pragmatism is not only reflected in their geo-economic calculations in the field of energy pipelines, but also the reasoning behind the striking improvement of political and economic relations between Turkey and Russia in the 2000s.

The Spider in Europe's Web? French Grand Strategy From Iraq to Libya

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between geopolitical change and the evolution of French grand strategy from Iraq to Libya. While the European Union (EU) and the bilateral relationship with Germany continue to feature high in French grand strategy, France has in the space of just a few years substantially strengthened its Atlantic connection (with the US, Britain and NATO) and upgraded its relationship with other European powers – particularly Russia. It is argued that the driving reason behind this diversifying trend is the weakening of the US-led West, both globally and in Europe. If US military power laid the foundations of order in and around Europe, America's shift of geostrategic attention eastwards is underpinning a political destructuring of Europe and its broader neighbourhood. For one thing, Europe is moving towards a more multipolar balance, as evidenced by Russia's resurgence in the east and southeast, Turkey's drifting from the EU and growing influence in the continent's southeast and, ...

Tabula Imperii Europae: A Cartographic Approach to the Current Debate on the European Union as Empire

Abstract: Maps are much more than geographic tools. They are powerful visual icons of statehood and identity. Created by agents tainted by their own historical subjectivity, maps are saturated with multiple levels of meaning, while their perceived status as accurate scientific tools lends them an authority which the map-reader is not meant to question. This paper examines maps from a Gadamerian hermeneutic perspective to investigate the layers of meaning embedded into these unquestioned, hypnotic emblems, and proposes that the maps produced and displayed by the European Union on its websites and in its continental currency are texts imbued with powerful imperial imaginations which reify a sense of collective identity and apparent superiority. This imagination is entwined with the territory of Europe and ultimately defines what it is to be European through the exclusion of ‘the Other’ – those Europeans deemed unworthy of inclusion in the European imperium. Ultimately, the paper argues that maps of the Union reflect ...

Conceptualising New Modes of State Governmentality: Power, Violence and the Ontological Mono-politics of Neoliberalism

Abstract: This paper explores the ontological constitution of the neoliberal state. By enriching Michel Foucault's work on neoliberal governmentality with Heideggerian reading of the ontological conditions involved in the process, the paper argues for an understanding of neoliberalism as a mono-political process of ‘enframing’, through which things and human capabilities are revealed as an array of ‘reserves’ set available for the market rational utilisation. It is argued that the neoliberal state is not based on the ideological or discursive turn in political practices, but on the extending drive, through which the real itself, including the ethical constitution of human conducts, natural entities, and life (with its possibilities), is ontologically positioned to serve the interests of profit-making. The paper concludes by showing how the neoliberal state and the economisation of everyday life are fundamentally based on the ontological violence of concealing the openness of being, and thus, the possibility for ont...

State Space - Outlining a Field Theoretical Approach

Abstract: The state space concept is part of attempts to dismantle the ‘territorial trap’ and the concomitant dichotomy between national ‘inside’ and international ‘outside’. This paper contributes to this scholarship by proposing the concept of transnational field as a tool for a nuanced understanding of the intermingling of the national and the global. The paper argues that the formative logic of globalization is not simply the growth of economic interconnections and dependencies, but also the dynamism related to competition and collaboration structuring inclusions, exclusions and awards in transnational fields.

‘I'm Still Not Crossing That’: Borders, Dispossession, and Sovereignty in Frozen River (2008)

Abstract: This paper considers the film Frozen River (2008) for the purpose of considering how the US-Canadian border is dramatised within the context of two women caught up in a illicit trading of migrants via a Native American Reservation. Re-calibrating more mainstream Hollywood's fascination with the United States' southern border, Frozen River usefully focuses attention on two areas that deserve further reflection namely the materiality of borders and border crossings and biopolitics. The paper concludes with some reflections on how borders, biopolitics, dispossession and sovereignty need further theorization by political geographers and other scholars.

State spatiality and the governance ofeconomic development in the UK: Thechanging role of the region

Abstract: This paper adopts a critical regionalist perspective to bring new insights into the drivers of state spatial transformation in sub-national economic development governance in the UK. It demonstrates that multiple forms of state spatiality are emerging in the context of late capitalism which are both territorial and relational. The paper argues that these developments cannot be explained as a simple re-scaling of the geopolitical project of competitiveness. Instead they reflect an array of political forces both in and of space, which are calling into question the functionality of regional state spaces for the governance of economic development.

Governmentalities of Big Moscow: Particularising Neoliberal Statecraft

Abstract: In the summer of 2011, the Russian state initiated a project to significantly expand the size of its capital, Moscow, developing it into a polycentric urban formation and a ‘global city’. This article approaches the global city as a circulating form of governmentality by way of analysing discussions prompted by the plan for Big Moscow. It proposes that the logic of optimisation at work in the plan implies that it can be characterised as a neoliberal reform. The focus of the essay is on how neoliberalism becomes particularised in the context of the analysed discussions as it gains backing from constellations of authoritarian politics or historically rooted forms of cultural understanding. This does not render the examined case an anomaly but rather provides a paradigmatic example of how the productive entwinement of seemingly disparate governmental techniques is a necessary effect of the installation and functioning of the neoliberal regime.

Mapping the Geopolitics of the Russian Federation: The Federal Assembly Addresses of Putin and Medvedev

Abstract: This paper builds upon previous research on American state-of-the-union addresses and Russian geopolitics by examining how the Kremlin has represented Russia's geographic and geopolitical position in the post-Soviet era. It analyses presidential addresses to the Federal Assembly from 2000 to 2011, a period encompassing Vladimir Putin's first two terms as president and the single term of Dmitry Medvedev. In addition to exploring general trends evident in these speeches, this paper also provides in-depth analyses of three major themes: Russia's civilisational identity, the state of the international system and Russia's role within it, and global economics. We find that the legacies of the Cold War-era perceptions of threat, as well as dissatisfaction with the Cold War's resolution, remain salient in these speeches. However, there is some movement toward a broadening of Russia's cognitive map.

Trapped in the Logic of the Modern State System? European Integration in the Wake of the Financial Crisis

Abstract: In the wake of the Single European Act of the mid-1980s and a series of follow-on initiatives aimed at fostering greater integration in Europe, a number of commentators began describing Europe as a truly novel political-territorial arrangement. By the middle of the 1990s, however, the adoption of a common currency came to dominate the European integration agenda. The embrace of monetary union reflected a view of European integration that was firmly embedded in the logic of the modern territorial state system. That logic led many commentators to view the success or failure of integration in terms of the degree to which powers were being transferred from state governmental and economic institutions to the central decision-making bodies of the European Union. Such an approach cast the EU as a super-state rather than as a new type of political-institutional entity. As a result, the integration project was less subversive of the state system than it might otherwise have been – bolstering the view of the Europe...

Identity Politics and the Russia-Canada Continental Shelf Dispute: An Impediment to Cooperation?

Abstract: The geopolitics of the Arctic region is viewed as a race for resources between coastal states. Yet, alarmist assessments are tempered by the reality that the most economically viable hydrocarbon reserves are entirely contained within the uncontested EEZs of the littoral states. Given this situation, confrontational rhetoric coming from Ottawa and Moscow seems not only troubling but peculiar. This article attempts to explain this peculiarity. It argues that leaders in both states seem willing to emphasise the ideational salience of disputed space to domestic audiences while downplaying their cooperative track record. The article finds mixed evidence of the instrumental use of national identity politics in Arctic issues, which often conflate distinct elements of Arctic geopolitics. While this dynamic has not yet prevented cooperation over disputed boundaries, perpetuation of these narratives may erode domestic support for dispute settlement.

Merging Together or Drifting Apart? Revisiting Political Legitimacy Issues in Cyprus, Moldova, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract: One way to approach conflict management is to use a four-dimensional political legitimacy criterion, which could set the agenda for enhancing peace prospects in Cyprus, Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Here the argument is that through measuring the internal legitimacy of conflicting parties and then comparing and contrasting the given empirical values on the scales of cohesion/security and democracy/performance, we may be able to distinguish conflicting pairs either “merging together” or “drifting apart”, depending on how the secessionist entities position themselves vis-a-vis their parent states. Empirical facts on the ground tell us that Cyprus may have the biggest chances of reunification, whereas Moldova's perspective looks meagre. The BiH, which has preserved its territorial integrity, faces real secessionist challenges, given the illegitimacy of the state and a manifest dissatisfaction with systemic deficiencies.