John Agnew

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Geography

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is a clear demonstration of how the conduct of a war can highlight what purpose(s) the war is supposed to serve. In this chapter, President Vladimir Putin’s putative objectives in the Ukraine war are connected to the war-sovereignty nexus through the concept of geopolitical order, arguing that war fu...

Italy was the homeland of Fascism (proper noun). From 1922 until 1943, a self-described Fascist regime ruled the country. As a result of the national election on 25 September 2022, a political party with its roots in that Fascism became the dominant partner in a far-right coalition national government. Does this signify the full-fledged return of t...

A discussion of how the dominant view of the state as an apparatus of territorial rule came about is followed by an exploration of the more specific meanings the term has acquired in sociology. Attention then turns to how the term can be related to concepts of nation, society, and market with which it is frequently paired. Finally, recent efforts a...

Some accounts focus on the role of governmental systems in the management of the 2020–22 Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. But studies with such an emphasis have typically taken second place to interpretations of outcomes in terms of cases and deaths based on cultural and demographic differences. In theory, federal systems would seem to have certain a...

This article examines China's role in the emerging markets debt crisis as a result of the explosion of its lending followed by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, we focus on China's official lending to countries that have signed on as partners of China's Belt Road Initiative (BRI) given the high likelihood, in light of the pandemic, of a...

In the modern state system, territories and borders give meaning to each other in the sense that borders delimit territorialized sovereign power. Conventional political-geographic perspectives hold that territoriality — the management and control of space — is a state strategy that can be turned on and off. There is no denying that territorial prin...

US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in which votes are aggregated on a state-by-state basis. In 2020, as in 2016, the outcome was decided by a set of states where the two candidates were equally competitive: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two geographical stories tend to dominate accoun...

The US federal government has been widely criticized for its response to the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. Much of the poor response and outcome has been ascribed to President Trump’s personal failure. Yet more importantly this failure has been of the US governmental system. More specifically, the role of the federal government in fashioning natio...

Arguably, one of the major innovations in social science beginning in the 1970 s was Immanuel Wallerstein’s discovery of what he called the “modern world-system.” This was the idea of a progressively global capitalist world-economy spreading out from Western Europe and structured geographically to exploit peripheral areas for the benefit of a capit...

The regions–cohesion nexus focuses on how much people and place “prosperity” cannot be readily distinguished but are intimately connected. After reviewing some older sources on this logic, the article examines the current status of social cohesion within the European Union and what the future might hold depending on how much a crucial balance betwe...

Research on populism is animating academic debate in light of the growing global relevance of populist parties and ideologies as well as of the recent events that have radically affected the conceptualization of the border, security, and politics nexus. Until recently, the contribution of political geography and border studies to the analysis of po...

Across the world, established and emergent liberal democracies are under challenge from so‐called populist movements. This entry explores the contemporary usage of the term “populism” and the nature of the political movements to which it is applied. It also addresses the question of “the people” as assumed in many versions of populism and how the g...

Geopolitics is 25 years old. In this Forum former editors reflect on the journey the journal has taken in those 25 years and the wider discipline (or disciplines) in which the journal sits. Alongside a recounting of how the journal came into existence and its name change to just ‘Geopolitics’, the editors reflect on the resurgence and increasingly...

President Donald Trump has been the public face of the blundering managerial response of the US federal government to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, beyond Trump’s personal failure lies a failure of the US governmental system. More specifically, the role of the federal government in fashioning nationwide policies across a range of areas, i...

Notwithstanding his popular image among film critics and the public as a surrealist and/or postmodernist whose films inhabit worlds other than our own, it is precisely the immersion in specific locales that anchors the flights of fancy for which Fellini is famous. After a brief discussion of what I mean by “sense of place,” I will review something...

We briefly trace the claim that a set of counties across the three states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in large part determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Rather than the demographic characteristics of the Census as such it is the meaning that these categories (young/old, Black/White, male/female, and so on) take on...

The UK referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) in 2016 was based around the issue of regaining a putative control or sovereignty that had been lost with membership in that supranational organization. Irrespective of the fact that many people seemed to vote in the referendum on the basis of attitudes towards questions not directly related to E...

Brexit. Trump. LePen. The Five Star Movement. The recent success of populist movements and politicians is extraordinary. The rise of populism is understandable in light of increasing political polarization, disappointing politicians, and exhausting election campaigns. With the future trajectory of democracy uncertain, two important questions remain...

Historical and conventional international relations (IR) frameworks describe the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics that positions China as moving away from its long-time reticence towards foreign entanglements. This raises a contradiction of China being at one and the same time both a de...

Political geography is that part of human geography most directly involved with studying politics. It is a field of inquiry concerned with the geographical organization of governance, the ways in which geographical imaginations figure in world politics, and the spatial basis to political identities and associated political movements. The geopolitic...

State formation worldwide has always involved significant attention to infrastructural and fiscal integration across the state territory. This process is often referred to as national integration. Its absence and/or the exacerbation of disparities between localities and provinces can lead to calls for secession or autonomy, particularly when allied...

The year 2018 saw a moral panic in the United States in the media and among many citizens over the treatment of refugees/asylees at the U.S. southern border, particularly the separation and detention of children apart from their parents. This happened in the context of a period in U.S. political history in which “immigration,” without much discernm...

Scottish nationalism has always had a ‘geographical problem’ in the sense that support for its central goal, the independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom, has had much more backing in some regions and localities than it has had in others. In the 1970s and 1980s the geographical pattern to this support, at least as expressed in votes for the...

India China: Rethinking Borders and Security. By L. H. M. Ling, Adriana Erthal Abdenur, Payal Banerjee, Nimmi Kurian, Mahendra P. Lama, and Li Bo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 192p. $65.00 cloth. - Volume 15 Issue 4 - John Agnew

The essays collected in this forum discuss the geopolitical legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most momentous political events of the twentieth century. From a range of different academic disciplines and perspectives, the authors consider how the profound transformations in society and politics were refracted through space and geo...

Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge across electoral democracies from movements and candidates that claim they are “going to the people” directly for their support. Italy has been a laboratory for this populism even as the term itself is used more widely. The basic question of what the peo...

State formation worldwide has always involved significant attention to infrastructural and fiscal integration across the state territory. This process is often referred to as national integration. Its absence and/or the exacerbation of disparities between localities and provinces can lead to calls for secession or autonomy, particularly when allied...

Political geography is that part of human geography most directly involved with studying politics. It is a field of inquiry concerned with the geographical organization of governance, the ways in which geographical imaginations figure in world politics, and the spatial basis to political identities and associated political movements. The geopolitic...

This article outlines how a materialist understanding of foreign policy predicated on contrasting sovereignty regimes might be applied to current conflicts between China and the United States and its allies in the South China Sea. A stark divergence between liberal and realist commentary, policy prescriptions, and policy practices has emerged in bo...

Power Politics and State Formation in the Twentieth Century: The Dynamics of Recognition. By Coggins Bridget . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 280p. $110.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 14 Issue 1 - John Agnew

Resumo An older European-Enlightenment geopolitical imagination was lost in the late nineteenth century with the rise of naturalized understandings of inter-state and imperial relations that saw states and empires in terms of biological competition conditioned by relative location on the earth’s surface. The word “geopolitics” emerged in that cont...

Electoral outcomes in both established and new democracies alike generate a flurry of interest and analysis. However, the reasons to vote or not are varied. Herein lays a large part of the problem in trying to provide a single explanation for declining turnout for an entire country. In different places within a country different mixes of reasons ma...

RESUMEN Dos historias sobre la crisis de la Eurozona han dominado los relatos académicos y populares en los últimos cinco años: 1) virtuosos países del norte de Europa frente a los derrochadores del sur, y 2) una mera exten-sión de la crisis bancaria de los años 2008-9 en el mercado de bonos de la Eurozona. Este artículo propone que la crisis econó...

The “network” has gained widespread acceptance within economic geography as a metaphor for economic interaction. Consistent with a global production network (GPN) approach, extractive industries are deeply embedded in political structures, physical infrastructure, and environmental conditions. We advocate for a GPN framework that emphasizes the co-...

Forthcoming in Geopolitica(s) 2015

Two ideas have dominated discussion in recent studies of the social andpolitical impacts of globalization by those who think that globalization has had real e?ects and is not simply a synonym for the neo-liberal policies insti-tuted by many national governments beginning in the 1980s. The ?rst is the idea that everywhere in the world is becoming al...

1. Human Geography: The First Half Century 2. Long Live the Revolution! 3. Social Theory and Human Geography: Material Matters 4. Social Theory and Human Geography: Worlds of Meaning 5. New Understandings of Space 6. Methods in Question 7. Human Geography and How and Why Things Happen 8. Making Space for Human Geography in the Social Sciences 9. Ma...

The dominant ways in which intellectuals and political elites around the world have come to think about world politics are not the result of either an open search for the best perspective or theory or a reflection of an essentially local perspective. The most prestigious repertoires of thinking about world politics represent the historical emergenc...

Some of the most important geographical concepts—geopolitics, region, and territory—are often decoded according to the norms of the history of ideas, broadly construed. By this, I mean that their ‘genealogies’ as ideas are regarded as providing the key to unlocking their current meaning in relation to how the world works. As such they are thought o...

I restate my argument as a critique of lexical conservatism and the so-called history of the present as a history of words. This leads to a discussion of what we mean by genealogy and agency in contemporary theoretical work. I then briefly respond to some of the key points raised by the commentators.

Inequality and injustice have distinctively geographical aspects in modern Ireland. ''Spatial justice and the Irish Crisis'', describes and explains the socially, economically, and geographically differentiated outcomes of one of the most far-reaching economic calamities experienced by any developed country in the past century.

Quand bien même le pouvoir politique serait territorial, la territorialité n’implique pas nécessairement les pratiques d’exclusion mutuelle totale que lui attribuent les conceptions dominantes de l’État moderne. Cependant, dans les théories des relations internationales, lorsqu’il est question de la territorialité d’un État, la discussion est presq...

The Great Powers and the International System: Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective. By Braumoeller Bear F. . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 297p. $90.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 12 Issue 2 - John Agnew

In this study, the authors use a political perspective to explore the relative global status of cities in China. Two questions are addressed. Firstly, by using international organizations as the subjects and quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of their offices, the overall position of Chinese cities in the global distribution of inter...

The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modem territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by int...

Writing regional narratives of the sort envisaged in this article is much more fraught with difficulties than acknowledged by its author. Four conditions are identified for avoiding the glib story telling that afflicts the genre: reflecting on the limits of previous narratives, particularly the foundational myth of the disinterested observer of tim...

Climate models project continued Arctic sea ice reductions with nearly ice-free summer conditions by the mid-21st century. However, how such reductions will realistically enable marine access is not well understood, especially considering a range of climatic scenarios and ship types. We present 21st century projections of technical shipping accessi...

The center-periphery metaphor is an important element in a number of intellectual traditions in urban geography. From the late 1950s studies of the sociospatial structure of Rome, Italy, viewed the city in terms of a socially and politically powerful center producing an exploited and subjugated periphery of inferior housing and services inhabited b...