Critical Geopolitics Research Articles

Theorizing the spatiality of ICT-mediated transnational repression: Evidence from China’s repression of Uyghurs in Turkiye

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning scholarly interest in how authoritarian states use transnational repression to intimidate and punish their citizens abroad. Our freshly collected surveys and in-depth interviews with members of the Uyghur diaspora in Turkiye reveal that China’s transnational repression of the Uyghur diaspora goes beyond preventing political mobilization. With the use of Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs), China employs widespread repression against ordinary Uyghurs by cutting off their communication lines with their homeland and through the Chinese police constantly harassing and threatening them, mostly through social media applications. Despite the growing body of literature on transnational repression, the spatial dimension of ICT-mediated transnational repression remains relatively undertheorized. Building on the literature of critical geopolitics, digital geographies, and Foucault’s concept of panopticon this study theorizes that China’s ICT-based practices beyond its borders have led to the configuration of “a transnational social space of insecurity,” which constitutes an idiosyncratic form of repression and spatiality by affecting diaspora Uyghurs’ everyday practices through the pervasive use of tech-based apparatuses and mechanisms. This idiosyncratic space constitutes and is constituted by “disciplinary” and “automated” subjects pushed toward constant self-surveillance and self-discipline. While China has physically turned East Turkestan into an open prison through political education camps, forced labor in production chains, ubiquitous installation of CCTV cameras, and frequent police control on phones and computers, ICTs enable China to transfuse its repressive system to the transnational domain by creating a parallel social space, which functions as its quasi-spatial extension.

Climate change, bodies and diplomacy: Performing watery futures in Tuvalu

AbstractClimate change is one of the key foci of critical geopolitics in the twenty‐first century, with a proliferation of scholarship considering the international conferences, imaginaries, and securitisations of the climate crisis. Since 2019, Tuvalu has been using human bodies submerged in water – including diplomats, children, and politicians ‐ within its diplomacy to draw attention to the severity of the climate crisis. By examining contemporary Tuvaluan climate diplomacy, this article advocates for a greater engagement with feminist geopolitics to interrogate the embodied practices of climate diplomacy. It draws upon fieldwork conducted in the South Pacific in 2018 and 2019 including at the 50th Pacific Island Forum in Tuvalu. Firstly, this article explores the 2019 visit of the Secretary General of the United Nations to Tuvalu ‐ arguing the photoshoot of him wearing a formal suit in the lagoon connected the imaginary of Tuvalu as a ‘sinking island’ to a wider international community. Secondly, it considers the use of Tuvaluan schoolchildren playing in the water during the 50th Pacific Island Forum. It argues this constituted a vital territorial conjuncture that drew attention to Australia's inaction on climate change and the risk to Tuvalu's future from the rise of sea level. Thirdly, it considers the body of Simon Kofe, Foreign Minister of Tuvalu, during his addresses to COP26 and COP27 from firstly the lagoon in Funafuti and then the metaverse, to examine the shifting narratives of Tuvalu's future within its climate diplomacy. This article argues that climate diplomacy is a deeply embodied practice and human geography scholarship must be more attentive to the geopolitical work that bodies do within climate diplomacy to understand the temporalities and spatialities of diplomacy better.

Understanding China’s infrastructure activities in Africa through artistic practice and exhibition

The infrastructure-led development model initiated by China under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has faced domestic and international challenges. By focusing on a national travelling art exhibition featuring Chinese railway construction in Africa in 2023, this paper examines the role that curatorial and exhibition practices can play in (re)shaping public geopolitical understandings of China-Africa relations. Exhibiting over 200 artworks collected from both China and Africa, this art programme not only forms a nuanced, personal and storied narrative of China’s overseas development work in Africa but also tactically responds to current internal and external criticism of the Chinese government’s global ambitions channelled through the BRI. This work extends the ongoing interest geographers have at the intersection of the visual arts and critical geopolitics.

A contextual approach to decolonising IR: Interrogating knowledge production hierarchies

Abstract Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour becomes infinitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specific particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – differently in different sites. Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. This raises several questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what effects? This article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evidence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.

Shifting geopolitics of the European higher education space

ABSTRACT Given recent major geopolitical events in the European region, such as Brexit and the launch of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this article explores recent and under-researched shifts in the geopolitics of the European higher education space, focusing specifically on the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The analysis is informed by the critical geopolitics approach and relies on interviews with stakeholders in the four countries that established the EHEA (Germany, France, Italy and the UK), key recent EHEA official communications, and a thematic analysis of these datasets. The analysis has revealed three major recent overlapping shifts in EHEA geopolitics: regarding its borders, identity and values. These findings are significant, highlighting the existence and dynamics of the phenomenon of higher education geopolitics in Europe and addressing an under-researched area in the literature on European geopolitics and the role of higher education in it.

All About China?

Combining international relations and critical geopolitics literature with a public opinion survey in Thailand that delves into some rarely explored and sensitive questions to understand respondents’ political views and attitudes, we examine the extent to which domestic political developments can be understood through a US–China great power lens. Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favor China? While we find some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, we also show that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China. To view election outcomes in a country such as Thailand as “wins” for one or other great power would be highly misleading.

From Grievances to Growth

Abstract Past animosities and complex geopolitics make the Israel-Palestine conflict complex and require a multifaceted approach. As modernization theory fails to address such conflicts, we combine post-colonial theory, identity politics, critical geopolitics, with modernization theory to provide a more complete picture. A comprehensive strategy for building a strong and united Palestinian society is presented in this paper, which emphasizes democratic changes, military power rebalancing, international law, and economic independence. Education and technological progress drive societal growth, so strong governance systems are essential for political stability. We demonstrate how these methods work and what are their drawbacks by analyzing real-life examples of how social, economic, and political factors affect conflict. In the study, governments, civil society, and international organizations are a key focus for finding a long-term solution. This extensive research on conflict resolution and growth expands the conversation and offers lessons that can be applied to various conflict situations.

The nature conservation-geopolitics complex: Bridging between conservation geopolitics and peace park discourses

Nature conservation strategies are affected by, as well as instruments of, geopolitics and interterritorial relations. This paper provides a conceptual framework that facilitates a systems-based analysis of the relationship between nature conservation and geopolitics. We compare and connect two prominent academic literatures relevant to this relationship: the peace parks and conservation geopolitics literatures. Whereas peace parks refer to an academic knowledge field, a social movement, and a territorialized conservation reality on the ground, conservation geopolitics refers to an academic discourse within critical geopolitics. We analyzed both academic literatures on four aspects: (i) the approach to nature conservation; (ii) the approach to interterritorial relations; (iii) the framing of the relationship between nature conservation and geopolitics; (iv) the actors involved. The former literature predominantly emphasizes cross-border integration, community development and nature conservation benefits. The latter predominantly highlights the more exclusionary, conflictive, and normative aspects of the relationship. The comparison highlights that the relationship between nature conservation and geopolitics can be best understood as a complex. Relational approaches, such as systems approaches, can uncover the intricacies of the nature conservation-geopolitics complex. We have laid the groundwork for such a systems approach by identifying four system components domains: the diversity of involved actors, the institutional framework, multiscale and historical dynamics, and the spatial-territorial context. A systems approach to the nature conservation-geopolitics complex provides a guiding framework for the examination of contemporary issues like the diverging agencies of various actors, trade-offs, and ethical dilemmas between nature conservation and geopolitical concerns.

The Significance of a Feminist Geopolitical Analysis in Mahasweta Devi’s The Hunt and Douloti the Bountiful

In the inspiration of bringing alternatives to Critical Geopolitics and Subaltern Geopolitics, Feminist Geopolitics has been employed in this paper. Feminist geopolitics traverses upon the discriminated, marginalized community’s lives and events as well as it connects their exploitation with power production. This feminist geopolitics’ analytical approach demonstrates connections of geopolitics power production with everyday life of Indian tribal people. While reading Indian Tribal community as a subaltern in the works of Mahasweta Devi, through feminist geopolitics we have analyzed violence, displacement, and resistance of tribal women. In geographical imaginaries, the land of tribal protects and strengthens women; simultaneously the tribal land displaces and destroys. The article investigates two questions, 1. What is the role of land in the lives of tribal women? 2. What is the need of mother land for tribal women? It also focuses on two women, whom the dominant geopolitics had marginalized once, but then, the research gap states, how one (woman) could survive through epitomic influence on geography and another could not survive due to displacement. Moreover, the gap insists on how the power relation operates inside and outside the tribal border as well as the interest, knowledge and power of elite’s invades the tribal community after the independence. The qualitative method (textual analysis) is used for research analysis, and Arya (2020) defines that “textual analysis is a type of qualitative analysis that focuses on the underlying ideological and cultural assumptions of a text” (Arya, 2020, p. 173). Hence, this method utilizes the theoretical approaches of the feminist geopolitics theory for the study of the two short stories of Mahasweta Devi. In this article, Imaginary Maps (1995) a collection of short stories by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from which The Hunt (1995) and Douloti the Bountiful (1995) (two stories) have been analyzed for discussion.

Post-Soviet Dependence with Benefits? Critical Geopolitics of Belarus’s and Tajikistan’s Strategic Alignment with Russia

ABSTRACT The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has stimulated a debate on Russia’s relations with states which were part of the Soviet Union. Our article contributes to this discussion by focusing on Russia’s two ‘strategic partners’, Belarus and Tajikistan, and exploring these countries’ perspectives. We develop a critical geopolitics framework which accounts for time, multi-level power dynamics and culture. The article provides a new understanding of the dynamics of geopolitical knowledge beyond the West, analysing how Belarusian and Tajik political elites’ decision-making towards Russia has evolved from the late Soviet period until now. While both governments appear to be dependent on Russia and, consequently, generally supportive of its politics in the global arena, the article argues that this alignment has been highly strategic. Throughout the years, Belarusian and Tajik decision makers have skilfully navigated power and economic asymmetries with Russia by using their geographical location and Russia’s neo-imperial mindset to their benefit.

Mapping Energy Geopolitics in Europe: Journalistic Cartography and Energy Securitisation After the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT The 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered measures in the European Union to reduce its energy interdependencies with Russia. In this paper, we delve into the role of journalistic cartography as places of visual securitisation producing the context which enabled these decisions. Crossing critical security studies with critical geopolitics and critical cartography, our hypothesis is that journalistic cartography solidifies certain discourses over energy geopolitics through the performance of maps dividing the world between places endangered and places exporting danger. Our analysis conducted on 206 maps leads to three main results. Firstly, it demonstrates the existence of common narratives across countries, thus nuancing previous findings concerning the spatial heterogeneity of energy security discourses. Secondly, these imaginaries rely on five mapping genres that perform spatial categorisation between insecurity from outside/security from inside. Thirdly, these genres sustain a neorealist interpretation of energy interdependencies, which sees trade as a zero-sum game and exports as coercive political tools, while silencing other approaches.

Decolonising Australian Gold Rush Narratives with Critical Geopolitics

AbstractSettler-colonial futurity and colonial onto-epistemology are embedded across mainstream Australian public education institutions and schooling. While Country is central to Indigenous being, knowledges and pedagogy, Australian public and school education and curricula regularly fail to engage with Country and place in its historical, political, institutional, more-than-human, and relational dimensions. This paper investigates how colonial discourse and narratives permeate public and schooling education resources about mining and the Australian gold rush, including those presented in local Victorian gold rush museums. These support an influential story of Australia’s past/present that erases First Nations1 custodial relations with Country, strengthens settler-colonial futurity and celebrates and legitimises its colonising and extractive relations between people, Country, and ecologies. The paper presents an argument for attending to critical, relational geopolitics in education and environmental education to destabilise and shift these ways of understanding. It considers opportunities and challenges presented by Australian curricula in terms of their capacity to develop geopolitical understandings of past/present/future social and ecological in/justice, and to support new political understandings and sense of connection and belonging with Country.

A neighbour no more: evolution of Ukraine in the EU geopolitical discourse from the 1990s to the post-Russian invasion

ABSTRACT The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in many ways, significantly altered the perceptions of both countries. This study employs a critical geopolitics framework to analyse the evolution of the EU’s geopolitical discourse on Ukraine from the 1990s to the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion. By analysing the statements of EU officials, particularly within the European Commission, this research delves into the shifts that have shaped the EU’s stance on Ukraine’s positioning within the European spatial imaginaries, arguing that Ukraine’s geopolitical status within the European space has undergone transformative changes amidst Russia’s invasion, notably encapsulated in the evolving notions of ‘family’ and ‘responsibility’ articulated by EU officials.

Geopolitical Dynamics in The Golden Ocean by Patrick O’Brian

Literary works, as a medium for conveying cultural messages, play a pivotal role in both generating and disseminating political hegemony. The recent incorporation of critical geopolitics into literary criticism, originally an offshoot of international relations, signifies an expansion of its analytical purview to scrutinise literary works and expose latent political practices. At the core of critical geopolitics is the assertion that geopolitics is not an impartial framework but a socially, culturally, and politically constructed discourse designed to organise global politics. The methodology of critical geopolitics entails a meticulous examination and delineation of discourses that shape a specific mindset, adhering to particular understandings and objectives. This scrutiny of discourses unveils the intricate interplay between geopolitics and knowledge production, wherein specific political and cultural assumptions are unequivocally presented as universal truths. Thus, the resultant knowledge reflects not only the unique mindset of a particular subject and culture but also perpetuates the marginalisation of alternative perspectives. In essence, the knowledge generated within the realm of geopolitics, encompassing perceptions of place and identity, is inherently non-neutral; rather, it constitutes constructed representations. The discourses wielded in this construction process are subjective expressions strategically tailored to serve distinct objectives. This study endeavours to illustrate how meanings and power dynamics are intricately intertwined with these intentionally crafted representations in The Golden Ocean (1956) by Patrick O’Brian. Through this analysis, the study seeks to unravel the complex nexus between literature, geopolitical constructions, and the perpetuation of power relations.

Briefing Idea of Geopolitics

Geopolitical diversity holds an undeniable allure, leading to the categorization of publications into four 'schools': neo-classical geopolitics, subversive geopolitics, non-geopolitics, and critical geopolitics, each exploring different dimensions of geopolitical dynamics. These schools distinguish themselves based on their proximity to the studied object (practical/applied or academic/reflective) and their stance toward the state system (focusing on states as principal actors or acknowledging other political actors and interests). Despite their differences, these studies collectively demonstrate a growing interest in geo-economics. Various thinkers, including Mackinder, Spykman, Collins, and Ratzel, have formulated these theories using terms like Heartland, Rimland, inland, outerland, enclave, and exclave. Notably, Bangladesh, as a developing country, is geopolitically strengthening its position in world politics.

Critical geopolitics in the era of identitarian populism

The transformation of the current world paradigm is generating new, strong stimuli for geopolitical knowledge. The sharpened geopolitical competition grows from colorful mix of postmodern instruments, modern motivation, premodern and hybrid methods, clearly territorialized and deterritorialized threats, state-centric and diffusion processes. Identitarian populism, which restores the boundaries that have been pushed out of the political space by integration and globalization, is getting in the forefront of geopolitical discourse. In international relations, the clash of identities, their instrumentalization and revival of imperial dreams extend the area of critical geopolitics, which has instruments for exploring geographic permanence of power as well as identity discourse, and whose cognitive apparatus is therefore an attractive analysis tool. The article contributes to a debate about options for greater usability of sub-discipline in the new context, proposes arguments for depoliticization of critical geopolitics in the right-left plane, discusses possibilities for complementary, synthetic deployment of neoclassical and critical geopolitics in exploring new context and argues in favour of even closer cooperation with the international relations theory.

Russian and Turkic Worlds in Eurasia

This article delves into the dynamics of ethno-confessional factors influencing Russian-Turkish relations, exploring the Russian and Turkic worlds as geopolitical constructs within the Eurasian sphere. Employing a synthesis of critical and classical geopolitics methodologies, the study emphasizes the civilizational aspect as a pivotal element in the intricate interplay of competition and cooperation between Russia and Turkey in the Eurasian context. The research methodology integrates a civilizational perspective with critical geopolitics. The authors examine various strategies utilized by Turkey and Russia to implement ethnoconfessional policies in their quest for geopolitical influence. These strategies encompass the creation of narratives around 'fraternal nations', the promotion of shared historical, cultural, religious, linguistic, and heroic narratives; the cultivation of pro-Russian and pro-Turkish national elites; and the exploitation of ethno-national factors during domestic political crises. This analysis traces these phenomena from historical imperial contexts to contemporary interstate relations.Furthermore, the article underscores the significant impact of individual leadership in shaping the concept of the Turkic world, with a particular focus on the current President of the Turkish Republic, R.T. Erdogan. Erdogan is portrayed as a key figure actively advocating for and reinforcing the unity and identity of the Turkic world.

From ‘Territorial Peace’ to ‘Total Peace’ in Colombia: A Geopolitical Balance

ABSTRACT This forum discusses the concept of ‘total peace’ (paz total) and the notion of ‘peace regions’ (regiones de paz) recently coined by the government of Colombia to advance in the implementation of the Peace Accords signed back in 2016 with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces FARC. Broadly drawing on a radical and critical geopolitics perspective, the forum’s contributions offer a set of interpretations, exploring a wide range of different aspects, such as the relations with the previous concept of ‘territorial peace’ (paz territorial), the changing geographical dynamics of the armed conflict, the proliferation of unlawful armed structures and drug trafficking, and violent processes of capital accumulation. Moreover, specific themes such as environmental conflict, the political reintegration of the guerrillas, gender and differential approaches, and ethnic and peasant communities’ perspectives are also addressed, without losing sight of the more general question of the country’s territorial reordering.

In Different Languages 2.0.

In recent years, the EU has been integrating the categories of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘geopolitical’ into its discourse. This article aims to identify whether the use of the same terms signifies that Moscow and Brussels are about to find a “common language.” Theoretically, the article is based on critical geopolitics, which helps to disclose common elements in the interpretations of sovereignty and geopolitics, as well as fundamental distinctions in the way these categories are integrated in the discourses of the European Union and Russia. The study shows that the EU’s adaptation of the language of realism further complicates communication between Moscow and Brussels.

Ko upravlja istočnom Evropom, upravlja svetom - da li je geopolitika objašnjenje rata u Ukrajini?

The aim of this article is to examine applicability of classical geopolitics to interpret the context of the war in Ukraine. The author argues that the classical geopolitical approach has shortages in explaining the current warfare in Ukraine, because territory, space, and geography are not sufficient to explain complex international relations in today's globalized world. The interventionistic policy of the US, the main force of Atlanticism, undoubtfully has the key role in shaping the situation in Ukraine, but a wider picture indicates presence and influence of corporate and financial non-state actors that benefit from strengthening military-industrial complex. The author concludes that critical geopolitics offers deeper inquiry into the geopolitical claims than the classical geopolitical thought because the former recognizes that nowadays states are not only geopolitical agents. There are indications that the war in Ukraine is waged by Western political, economic, military, and financial elites against Russia as a part of the strategy to maintain global power and prevent rising multipolarity.