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Political Geography in Historical Context
Abstract
This account of political geography shows how it coemerged with modern geography in the era of interimperial rivalries (1870–1945) within a longer historical perspective. Geography was then a unitary, synthetic form of knowledge, encompassing the natural world and human history. Although Darwinian notions of struggle for survival applied to world politics influenced the naturalized ideas of pioneers of political geography such as Ratzel and Mackinder and, to different degrees, French and American geography, all these national traditions evolved differently in the interwar period. While the field was temporarily eclipsed after World War II, its Cold War revival shifted political geography's focus from environmental determinism to the relationship between power and knowledge, and later that between power and representations. Contemporary geopolitics points to a continued need for effective planetary governance, and the cultural changes it may require ask for greater imagination based in historical understanding.
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Agnew and Muscarà Rowman & Littlefield Geography / Political Science
" this engaging book uses the revealing history of political geography to explore a broader canvas of geopolitics and politically framed geographic knowledge from the imperialist age through the cold war to the present. illustrated with fascinating vignettes and everyday examples, this is an ideal text with which to think through the vertiginous dilemmas of our time. if political geography had an app, this would be it. " —Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech
"this informative and well-written book carefully scrutinizes both the complex history of political geography and the contemporary challenges the field faces in a globalizing world. offering current and versatile examples, the authors usefully problematize how politics, identities , and power relations are informed by geography and how geography is in turn informed by politics. this will be a major text for both students and researchers of political geography. " —Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu, Finland
Now thoroughly revised and updated, this concise text offers a deeply knowledgeable and balanced history and overview of political geography since its inception in the late nineteenth century. Rather than trying to impose a single " fashionable " theory, leading geographers John Agnew and Luca Muscarà consider the underlying role of changing geopolitical context for understanding the evolution of the discipline. The authors focus especially on reinterpretations of the post–cold war period, exploring the renewed questioning of international borders, the emergence of the Middle East and displacement of Europe as the center of global geopolitics, the rise of China and other new powers, the reappearance of environmental issues, and the development of critical geopolitics. offering more flexibility than a traditional core text, this book will be a valuable resource for all courses in political geography.
This study demonstrates the great convergence between the geographical conceptions of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) and Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). Despite their differences, each shared a common vision on several major issues, especially their general vision of the Man-to-Nature relationship and that, all things considered, led them up to very similar theoretical concepts of region and state.
This article explore the history of geography in the Ivy League – eight of the oldest and most prestigious academic institutions in the United States. Each of these influential universities provided instruction in geography and most established undergraduate or graduate programs at one time or another. Although most Ivy League universities have geographers on their faculties or retain some aspects of the field in the guise of programs such as Urban Planning or Development Studies, Dartmouth College is the only one with a Department of Geography. The discipline has long struggled to establish itself as theoretically grounded and therefore worthy of membership in these universities. Geography’s fate in the Ivies, however, has also hinged on the activities of individual professors, the disposition of key administrators, trends within the discipline, and events outside the field itself.
This chapter engages with the use of “empire,” “imperial,” and “imperialism” from a historical perspective, inevitably affected by changing geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts, as well as by scientific and intellectual ones. After introducing some relevant features of general use of these terms, the relationship between empires and political geography is presented for three historical periods: the Age of Empires (extending to 1945), the Cold War, and the post–Cold War. The conclusion presents some reflections on the analytical usefulness of the terms.
In the aftermath of the cold war, the environment has emerged as a major area of concern as a potential cause of political conflict. This paper critically reviews the concept of 'environmental security' and examines the assumptions underlying debates around environmental conflicts from the perspective of political ecology and global political economy. It argues that attention to the specificities of local contexts must be combined with an appreciation of the continued salience of the structures of imperial knowledge and power.
German geopolitical writers in the 1930s proposed a tripartite division of the world into large panregions of American, European, and Japanese hegemony. This model is examined, with attention to imperialist ambitions in Africa. Six indicators of international relations (diplomatic ties, memberships in intergovernmental organizations, air-traffic links, trade and foreign investments, developmental aid, and arms sales and military intervention) are used to analyze the applicability of the model. The concept of Eurafrica is less valid now than it was before World War II because of waning colonial ties, activities of non-European states, and the marginal role of Africa in world affairs. Western European influence is decreasing in Africa. Eurafrica is still a premature geopolitical concept. -Authors
The often overlooked economic dimensions of the current American national security strategy bridge the military policies of the neo-conservative Bush doctrine with the neo-liberal tendencies of economic globalisation. They do so by explicitly extending control into the “dangerous periphery” of the global economy by strategies that attempt to integrate these regions into the global economy. Reading recent official American defence documents in parallel with commentaries on the war on terror by popular authors Thomas Barnett and Robert Kaplan suggests a broad complementarity of geopolitical categories that link imperial military action directly with neo-liberal globalisation. Both rely on a dichotomous mapping of the world into civilised core and dangerous periphery, categories that reprise earlier imperial mappings of the world and replicate the violent practices of empire.
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 ‐ that have led into the ‘territorial trap’.
The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.
Publications in the field of history and philosophy of geography have shown increasing vibrancy and consistent alignments around some key foci. These are, first, a renewed engagement with biographies and autobiographies, which is part of wider rediscoveries of individuals as concrete actors in the construction of knowledge. Second, a draw towards interdisciplinarity in reassessing practices such as exploration, mapping and publishing, in connection with broader trends in intellectual history. Third, a continuing interest in topics coming from the ‘margins’ of mainstream Anglophone scholarship.
This introductory essay sets up the discussion in this special section on the first English language translation of Friedrich Ratzel's 1901 Lebensraum essay. After providing biographical context for this controversial nineteenth-century German geographer, we offer a brief history of what is perhaps his most famous conceptual contribution: Lebensraum (living space). We end by introducing the five contributions to this special section.
From one war to another. Paul Vidal de la Blache
Beyond purely revanchist motivations, the enthusiasm for geography that took hold from the 1860s onwards was anchored in the awareness that modern means of communication virtually place the existence of everyone in a global dimension. So, the spatialities developed under the impulsion of different customs and ideologies are differentiated by the way that they balance the local (and national) against the global. The author analyzes the writings and cartographical illustrations of Paul Vidal de La Blache, pioneer of the French school of geography, in order to decipher the components of the “geographical space” that he constructed, and she compares his notional system, his words and maps to those of the military, diplomats and, during the Great War, to German semantics (Raum).
Few countries have had a more tortured history over the past century or so than Russia (or the Soviet Union as it was dubbed for most of that time). However, its story is packed with intellectual excitement and has displayed an originality that has derived from its distinctive geographical and historical context. The evolution of Geography as an academic discipline has closely followed the discovery and exploration of this vast part of the world and the experience of living and working in its natural regions and its ambiguous position between Europe and Asia. Its medieval roots and its “frontier” continental spread mean that it has also been, in many ways, Europe and North America rolled into one over the last two centuries.
A series of 11 original essays discussing the impacts of 11 September 2001 on foreign policies and international relations. The authors draw from a variety of perspectives to discuss America and emerging world orders, terrorism, environmental security, civil society and the visual and print media.
This paper argues for the re-conceptualization of geopolitics using the concept of discourse. Geopolitics is defined as a discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft ‘spatialize’ international politics and represent it as a ‘world’ characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas. Four theses explicating this re-conceptualization are outlined including the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘practical’ geopolitics. These arguments are illustrated by a general discussion of practical geopolitical reasoning in US foreign policy which includes an analysis of George Kennan's ‘Long Telegram’ and ‘Mr X’ article representations of the USSR. The irony of such practical geopolitical representations of place is that they necessitate the abrogation of genuine geographical knowledge about the diversity and complexity of places as social entities. Geopolitical reasoning, it is concluded, ironically works by being anti-geographical.
Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, geographers have notoriously avoided doing so. In this paper, we consider why this has been the case and how different conceptions of canonicity have mattered to the ways in which the history of geography and its intellectual foundations have been narrated. In thinking through the significance of geography’s texts to the ways we imagine the discipline – its past, present, and future – we consider how processes of remembering and forgetting have been employed to serve certain intellectual and ideological agendas. We conclude by advocating a more serious engagement with geography’s textual legacy: one which might benefit not only disciplinary historiography but also disciplinary consciousness, and thus the future of geography itself.
Before geographers commit themselves to public policy, they need to pose two questions: what kind of geography and what kind of public policy. The evolution of the discipline, in terms both of its aims and its professional organization, must be seen as an adaptation to external conditions, particularly to the development of the corporate state with its emphasis on the 'national interest'. The corporate state forces education to be seen purely as investment in manpower and academic research becomes subservient to the state and is used to preserve and strengthen the status quo. There is here a potential conflict with the academic's sense of moral obligation, but in practice the conflict is resolved by the parochialism and élitism of the humanistic tradition. To help to move away from the corporate state and towards the 'incorporated state' in which men can control the social conditions of their own existence, geographers need to address their efforts towards understanding the tension between the humanistic tradition and the pervasive needs of the corporate state and thereby to learn how to exploit the contradictions within the corporate state itself.
Geographers in Washington, DC, during World War II and the agencies in which they worked are recalled through the naming of geographers engaged in wartime work during this seminal period in the development of the geography profession in the United States. The five agencies then employing the largest number of geographers were the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the Topographic Branch of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, the Board of Economic Warfare (later the Foreign Economic Administration), the Board on Geographic Names, and the Office of the Geographer, Department of State. The impacts of this period on individual geographers, the professional organization of geographers, cartography, higher education, and the government are suggested.
Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. In this way he shows that climate change, far from being simply an 'issue' or a 'threat', can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world. Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change and its likely impact on our lives.
The heartbreaking plight in which a bipolarized and atom bomb-blessed world finds itself today is but the extreme manifestation of a dilemma with which human societies have had to grapple since the dawn of history. For it stems from a fundamental social constellation, one where a plurality of otherwise interconnected groups constitute ultimate units of political life, that is, where groups live alongside each other without being organized into a higher unity.
Wherever such anarchic society has existed—and it has existed in most periods of known history on some level—there has arisen what may be called the ‘security dilemma’ of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.
Perpetual peace projects constitute a largely undervalued intellectual tradition that has attracted many polemical arrows. One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at the projects is that their authors too often abandon themselves to utopianism. Yet this tradition has proved to be much more influential than is generally recognized: contemporary international organizations, from the League of Nations to the United Nations, from the European Parliament to the International Court of Justice, were sketched out, if only in embryonic form, in these perpetual peace projects. Yet it is rare to find their authors numbered among the founders of internationalist theory.
Traditional China was an agrarian society which experienced a significant development of handicraft and commerce. In this respect, China was similar to medieval Europe and to certain pre-Hellenistic civilizations of the northern and western Mediterranean. However, while these Western agrarian civilizations ultimately lost their societal identity, Chinese society perpetuated its basic features for millennia. And while medieval Europe saw a commercial and industrial revolution that led to the rise of an industrial society, traditional China never underwent such changes.
Obviously, when characterizing societal structures, it is not enough to speak of agriculture, handicraft, and trade in general. We must consider their ecological and institutional setting and the specific human relations involved in their operation.
Recent analyses of interwar International Relations (IR) have argued that there was no realist–idealist debate, and that there is no evidence of a distinct idealist paradigm. Less work has been done on realism in the interwar period. This article analyses the thought of one particular early 20th-century realist: Halford J. Mackinder. A product of the development of political geography, and a major influence on American strategic studies, Mackinder is best known for his Heartland thesis, which has been interpreted as environmental determinism. Yet, Mackinder’s realism is a complex mix of geopolitical analysis and the influence of ideas on human action. His concepts of organizer and idealist foreign policy ideal types pre-date Carr’s realist–utopian distinction by two decades, while his interpretation of the realities of international politics is at odds with Morgenthau’s realism. A closer analysis of Mackinder’s realism (1) underscores the links between geopolitics and realist strategic studies; (2) demonstrates the diversity of realist approaches in interwar IR; and (3) shows that it was possible to be a realist and also support the League of Nations. There are limits to Mackinder’s usefulness to 21st-century IR, but an understanding of his brand of realism is necessary for a fuller understanding of the development of realism as a 20th-century school of thought.
Analyses Ratzel's political geography within the context of the imperialism of the late 19th century. -from Author
This paper chronicles the revival of geopolitical writing and analysis in North America and Europe since 1970, after 20 years of decline. The revival is examined in terms of both language and substance, and the reasons for the revival are explored. As well as its role in the analysis of global and regional strategy, geopolitics has entered popular language and political discourse. The contributions of geographers are discussed, and the opportunities and dangers of the revival are examined. The importance of historical and political critique is argued.
Geography has already had a substantial impact on national policymaking, but the unrealized potential is even greater. Since World War II, geographers have played important roles in a great many federal agencies, and other geographers outside the federal service have been leaders in such arenas as environmental and urban policy. Besides some personal characteristics that make many geographers useful, the main reason is that public policymaking in the United States is exquisitely geographic at the national level. As it is presently structured, however, our policymaking system has a limited capacity to find out the geographic import of the policy options it considers; this complicates interactions between the executive and legislative branches of the government. At a time when society expects policy to be arrived at pluralistically and when a great many of our policy debates involve relationships between one's location and one's legitimate vested interest, geographers have a remarkable opportunity to build roles for their perspectives and skills into new policymaking structures that are evolving.
The history and present condition of Geography have to be understood historically. A review of the roles of geographical knowledge under capitalism illustrates how it has changed in relation to shifting societal needs. Against such a background it is then possible to fashion an historical materialist interpretation of the present dilemmas of Geography as an academic discipline and to formulate concrete proposals for its transformation.
Over the past two decades broadly geographical sensibilities have become prominent in the academic study of science. An account is given of tensions in science studies between transcendentalist conceptions of truth and emerging localist perspectives on the making, meaning and evaluation of scientific knowledge. The efficient spread of scientific knowledge is not a phenomenon that argues against the applicability of geographical sensibilities towards science but actually calls for an even more vigorous project in the geography of knowledge.
Torture can be understood as part of a geopolitical response to a discursively inflated threat. Public discussions of torture in the United States between 11 September 2001 and the May 2004 revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison cautiously justified brutal interrogation methods by couching the threat of terrorism in the language of the ticking-bomb scenario. Terrorist acts constitute a real threat to material security, specifically to the “topological” presuppositions of the forms of power/knowledge that Foucault and others have argued are central to modern social orders. Techniques of biopower and governmentality can only operate effectively if “normally empowered” biopolitical subjects allow populations and governing authorities to orient their governing and self-governing activities according to “mappable landscapes of expectation.” The threat of terrorism, especially in the person of the suicide bomber, renders landscapes of expectation more difficult to map, at least locally. The ticking-bomb scenario is the most important vehicle by which the material threat of terrorism has been discursively extended to encompass the entire national territory and intensified to a uniform level of unacceptability. Once this process is recognized, it is possible both to understand torture as a biopolitical technique of compensation for the threat of terrorism in its discursively inflated form and to place torture more firmly within the wider geopolitical account of “Empire” inaugurated by Agamben, Butler, and Hardt and Negri.
Making political geography: Placing the new generations of political geographers
- Koch N.
Plan d'un ouvrage sur la géographie politique
- A.-R.-J Turgot
“Confining the enemy”. Mackinder's theory of containment and the conflict in Ukraine
- Hochberg M.
The language and nature of the “new geopolitics” – the case of US‐El Salvador relations
- Ó Tuathail G.