Political Geography

Abstract

The decade and a half since the last review article on political geography by Reynolds and Knight (1989) in Geography In America has been one of extraordinary geopolitical transformation and change. Not only did the Cold War come to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union but the spectacular terrorist attacks of September 2001 brought the “post-Cold War peace” to an end also. In the early 1990s the threat of superpower nuclear war faded as an omnipresent nightmare in international relations. Yet new threats and dangers quickly emerged to take the place of those imagined during the Cold War. Concern grew about “rogue states,” genocidal ethnonationalism, global warming, and the dangers of nuclear proliferation (Halberstam 2001; Klare 1995; Odom 1998). Fears about terrorism also grew with a series of bombings, from Paris, London, and Moscow to Oklahoma City, New York, and Atlanta. United States troops and embassies in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen were the targets of terrorist attacks. But it was only after the disruption, shock, and panic of the devastating terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and subsequent incidents of bioterrorism that world politics was given new definition and clarity by the world’s most powerful state. The new metanarrative of geopolitics is the “war against terror.” Beyond the high dramas of geopolitics, already existing trends in everyday economic and political life deepened in the last decade and a half. New social movements have forced questions concerning the politics of identity and lifestyles onto the political agenda. The globalization of financial markets, telecommunication systems, and the Internet further rearranged governing notions of “here” and “there,” “inside” and “outside,” “near” and “far.” With global media networks broadcasting news twenty-four hours a day and the Internet spreading a world wide web, the “real” geographies of everyday life were becoming strikingly virtual as well as actual (Wark 1994; Mulgan 1997). Informationalization, and the relentless pace of techno-scientific modernity were transforming everyday life and education in the United States’ colleges and universities. Celebrated by the culture of transnational corporate capitalism, these tendencies brought enormous wealth to some, further polarizing income inequalities across the planet while also introducing unprecedented vulnerabilities and uncertainties into what was becoming “global everyday life.”