Geography, space and the re-emergence of topological thinking

Abstract

‘Topological twists’ is one part of John Allen’s long project where he has profoundly examined the spatialities of (political) power and has considerably expanded our horizons. This commentary will reflect four themes related to his article ( Allen, 2011 ). Since there are currently several challenging views on the changing forms of power, I will first briefly compare his ideas of power with that of others. Second, I will scrutinize the re-emergence of topological thinking in social sciences and geography – ‘re-emergence’ because this idea has long roots. I will then comment on current ideas and related ‘geometric’ vocabularies, and finally discuss the issue of generalization versus context in the social sciences.