Geopolitical Culture Research Articles

The Many Semantic Lives of Geopolitics: Evidence from the New York Times Archive 1900-2023

ABSTRACT Henry Kissinger’s death foregrounds a puzzle in the history of geopolitics. How did a word made infamous by Nazi Germany become so ubiquitous and popular in the English-speaking world? Was Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, responsible for its rehabilitation into respectability in English? Historians, geographers and political scientists have traced how Western geopolitical thought developed in the twentieth century through transatlantic imperial rivalry and knowledge field formations. But there is no quantitative discourse analysis of the many ways in which the word is used in the English language. Responding to this absence, this paper uses both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis to study how the word was employed in the New York Times from 1900 to 2023. Analysis of this corpus, and select examples from it, reveals the limits of three common presumptions about geopolitics: that it entered English as a synonym for Nazi foreign policy philosophy, that its use carried a stigma, and that Henry Kissinger led a revival of the word from the 1970s. Rather, the corpus record reveals a term with many semantic lives, a stigma that did not endure, and a synonym for great power competition and resource rivalry whose popularity is due to many factors besides Kissinger’s influence. Cluster of meaning around rivals and resources, books and culture, and US power define the term’s use in American geopolitical culture.

Modelling neoclassical geopolitics: An alternative theoretical tradition for geopolitical culture and literacy

This paper offers a conceptual and theoretical alternative to geopolitical reasoning. It accepts certain concepts, factors, and variables from classical geopolitics with tested scientific validity and adds to them the awareness and focus on agents contributed, to some extent, by critical geopolitics. Without leaving a soft positivist sphere in which the procedures of the scientific method prevail, the innovative model of neoclassical geopolitics presented here constitutes a two-level approach in which the structural variable of systemic stimuli runs through the dual intervening variable of the geopolitical agent’s perceptions and capacities, shaping the state’s behavior as the dependent variable. In other words, it is innovatively claimed that examining geopolitical agents’ perceptions and capacities often provides valuable input for explaining political out-comes as an object of study in geopolitical research. Through both systemic stimuli and geopolitical agents’ perceptions and capacities, geography remains omnipresent with its concepts and approaches. Hence, one of the main objectives of the article is to contribute to the thriving of geopolitical culture and the literacy of decision-makers and the general public.

Ghostbusting in the Late Anthropocene

This paper examines the latent ecocriticism of the horror-comedy Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) against its original source material in the context of climate catastrophe culture. As a sequel to the Ghostbusters films (1984, 1989), Afterlife shifts the setting: (geo)physically, from metropolitan New York City to a ‘dirt farm’ in Summerville, Oklahoma, and generationally, from the original middle-aged, male ghost-catchers to the teenaged grandchildren of the brightest among them. While the original antagonist – the (fictive) Sumerian god Gozer – returns once more to end the world, the Anthropo(s)cenic landscapes of Afterlife establish the film as a geopolitical intervention in the debate on the already-in-progress environmental apocalypse. In its (partial) rejection of the values of its 1980s-era source material, which is critically assessed herein, I argue that Afterlife speaks to humanity’s emergence as a geological agent defined by geopolitical cultures rooted in human exploitation, hydrocarbon extraction, agro-industrialisation, and nuclearism. Indeed, the decade of Reaganism haunts the film, serving as a ghostly reminder of how we arrived at our current Anthropocene predicament through white heteropatriarchal triumphalism, neoliberal excess, and ecocide.

Emergent geographies of chronic air pollution governance in Southeast Asia: Transboundary publics in Singapore

AbstractHaze is a product of in‐situ biomass fires that becomes mobile as it moves across state boundaries in Southeast Asia. The literature on the governance of transboundary air commons has largely been fixed at the national or supranational scalar of reference. Hence, successes and failures tend to be evaluated based on policy and diplomatic (non)progress. This paper contributes to recent literature that argues that haze should be treated as a challenge and opportunity for transboundary governance and not merely transnational governance. Transboundary governance does not restrict the study of cross‐border relations to national scales of analysis but encompasses resource connections that traverse borders at all scales of governance. This paper focuses on Singapore, a state where biomass fires do not occur but where the effects of haze are acutely felt. Among ASEAN member states, Singapore has been viewed as a particularly active player in region‐wide governance on haze. However, the role of non‐state environmental stewardship initiatives in pathfinding, nudging, and signalling state, corporate and regional actors towards emergent transboundary governance arrangements have been underplayed. By focusing on the efforts of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA), Singapore Environment Council (SEC), and People's Movement to Stop Haze (PM Haze), this paper explores how transboundary publics can fill policy gaps in transnational haze governance regimes. As a highly depoliticised city‐state, Singapore's experience serves as a microcosm for ways forward within the broader ASEAN geopolitical culture favouring depoliticised ‘engaged non‐indifference’.

The geopolitical orientations of ordinary Belarusians: survey evidence from early 2020

ABSTRACT Examining geopolitical orientations in a representative survey of Belarus in early 2020, we adopt a critical geopolitical perspective that highlights geopolitical cultures as fields of contestation and debate over a state’s identity, orientation, and enduring interests. We examine support among 1210 Belarusians to four foreign policy options for the country – neutrality as the best foreign policy, joining the European Union, staying in the Eurasian Economic Union, or developing close relations with both these organizations. We also analyze responses to where Belarus should be on an 11-point scale from aligned with the West to aligned with Russia. In early 2020, Belarusians indicated divided geopolitical preferences in the same way as other post-Soviet societies along demographic, ideological, and attitudinal cleavages. Lukashenka’s quarter-century dictatorship has left Belarus in a condition of nascent (geo)political polarization. The 2020 electoral crisis alone did not polarize Belarus; it was already a dividing polity.

ICYMI: RT and Youth-Oriented International Broadcasting as (Geo)Political Culture Jamming

Research in political communication has recently begun to explore the role of non-Western English-language state-funded international broadcasters (NEIBs) in influencing international audiences. Despite this, there has been little attention given to understanding how NEIBs engage and influence young people in ‘Western’ democracies. Our article addresses this gap by providing a detailed analysis of RT's English-language, youth-orientated news product ICYMI. Launched in 2018, ICYMI is a social media-based news brand that consists of a series of 2–3-min videos that deliver satirical takes on recent global events including military conflict, financial scandals, and culture clashes. Our findings, which examine the first year of the platform's activity, show that ICYMI is a novel form of engagement, one that is not easily categorised as either public diplomacy or propaganda, nor can it be described as traditional journalism. Instead, we label this approach as geopolitical culture jamming. In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of 45 videos published on YouTube by ICYMI over its first year to examine how the platform attempts to influence how young people relate to traditional foreign policy discourses. Our empirical analysis centres on how viewers engage with and interpret ICYMI's videos with the aim of addressing how RT may be influencing younger audiences, particularly its core demographic of Anglophone white males whose comments reflect an attachment to ICYMI's populist, anti-elite worldview.

Cricket, Brexit and the Anglosphere

This article explores the relationship between cricket and Brexit through the prism of Anglosphere. It argues that there are many parallels between the idea of the Anglosphere and cricket, evident e.g. in geopolitical formation, race and culture. However, in each case the analysis shows that the fit between cricket and the Anglosphere is imperfect. The article further illustrates that while the major building blocks for the future consolidation of the Anglosphere in a post-Brexit world have also shaped cricket, they represent a form of neoliberal postcolonial domination. Consequently, while cricket is the sporting exemplar of this cultural formation, the article shows that the aspirations of Brexiteers to construct a future Anglosphere are both fanciful and reactionary. While Brexit will have a distinctly more limited impact on cricket than other sports, the geopolitics of postcolonial cricket make a return to a pseudo-imperial organization of the game improbable.

The multidimensionality of geopolitical culture foundations

The multidimensionality of geopolitical culture foundations

Cartographies of Consensus and Grievance: Visualising the Territory of Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is a state both confronting protracted minority group secessionism and culturally associated with large co-ethnic minority groups in neighbouring states. This context has generated conflicting pressures on the visualisation of territory in Azerbaijani geopolitical culture. This article surveys contemporary cartographic practices in Azerbaijan and identifies two salient traditions, one reproducing consensus on the territorial integrity of the Azerbaijani state and the other mobilising grievance at truncations of an Azerbaijani ethnic homeland. It identifies the emergence of hybridity between these modes of seeing Azerbaijani territory and discusses their implications for the resolution of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict.

More than Meets the Eye: A Multimodal Approach to Science-Popularizing Discourse and Representation of the ‘Other’ in a Selection of National Geographic Feature Articles

National Geographic Magazine (NGM) is an American cultural icon renowned for the dissemination of geographic knowledge, the exhilaration of cultural explorations, the popularization of science discourse, and the cultivation of visual imaginaries. Among popular science magazines, its distinctive force in the popular imagination squarely lies in the manipulation and division of labor among individualized and sensationalized textual and visual signifiers. While NGM is said to reproduce familiar iconic visual systems, representations of the ‘Other’ seem to constitute a unique configuration through which latent geopolitical ideologies impinge on the feature article multimodal ensemble. Extending past scholarship on National Geographic Othered representations, science-popularizing discourse, and multimodality, while mobilizing multiple tools drawn from several theories, this research proposes a genre-based multimodal framework to the analysis of feature articles as dialectically connected to the collective, the historical, and the generic dimensions of the cultural practices therein. As a point of departure, the paper examines two feature articles retrieved from the online version of NGM, particularly from the Reach for the Stars content hub the magazine created for UAE space endeavors in partnership with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), home to the UAE’s National Space Programme. Specifically, the study scrutinizes the representations of Arab space scientists (the Other) in manners that tie closely to the geopolitical culture of the US (the Self). Findings showcase that despite the magazine’s metaphor a window on the world, the multimodal ensembles of science-popularizing discourse in NGM emerge as complex cultural processes fashioned in response to the ever-changing US geopolitical ideologies.

The American securitization of China and Russia: U.S. geopolitical culture and declining unipolarity

ABSTRACTPolicymakers define threats through the development and presentation of threat narratives, which seek to shape, promote, and limit policy agendas and debate through public discourse. Since 2015, American officials engaged in a securitization process which depicts great power competition, in the form of a rising and aggressive Eurasian alignment of China and Russia, as an existential threat to both America’s geopolitical position in the international system and the liberal-democratic world order. This led to the articulation of an international threat environment under threat from revisionist powers and a revival of Cold War-era rhetoric about both a democracy-autocracy binary and spheres of influence. Utilizing an original dataset which codes the content and evolution of these threat narratives, it seeks to answer the following questions: How is this securitization process reflective of American geopolitical culture? How does the U.S. believe that this challenge arose? How does Washington see its role in this process? It finds that the perceived intentions of these countries, fueled by their respective political cultures, were the crucial factors for precipitating this process, rather than their growing capabilities. It also identifies four ways in which this process reflects underlying fears found in American geopolitical culture under declining unipolarity.

Reordering China, Respacing the World: Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路) as an Emergent Geopolitical Culture

Since it was set out in speeches by China’s Premier Xi Jinping in September and October 2013, discussion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has proliferated in China. We argue that the scale and density of this discussion can usefully be conceptualized as an emergent geopolitical culture, reworking geopolitical narratives and spatial policies established in China in the second half of the twentieth century. In charting this emergence, we examine the ways in which the BRI links the reordering of China’s economic geography with articulations of China and the world. Surveying BRI as an emergent geopolitical culture, we draw on the example of the narratives of familiarity, partnership, and location vis-à-vis China and Singapore. Our conclusions reflect on how the BRI is appropriated to visions of China’s destiny. Key Words: Belt and Road Initiative, China, geopolitical culture, Singapore.

Imperialism, Technology and Tropicality in Arthur C. Clarke’s Geopolitics of Outer Space

ABSTRACT This paper addresses geopolitical cultures of outer space by examining the selected life and works of Arthur C. Clarke (1918–2008), one of the leading space technology advocates of the twentieth century, in the specific context of his adopted home of Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Within the framework of studies that have connected critical geopolitics and science, further discussions concerning the interface between imperialism, technology and tropicality help demonstrate the relevance of Clarke’s geographical imagination to understanding geopolitical cultures of outer space. Three aspects of Clarke’s life and works are examined: First, his underwater exploration activities in Ceylon from the late 1950s to the early 1970s; second, his 1979 Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel The Fountains of Paradise; and finally, his promotion of Sri Lanka as a future hub of outer space technologies in the early 1980s. The paper suggests that geopolitical readings of outer space can be understood through investigating diverse aspects of place, landscape and identity.

The Geopolitics of Cyberspace: a Diplomatic Perspective

AbstractThe Internet has been seen as the harbinger of a world without borders or sovereignty. But states have recently reemerged in Cyberspace, asserting sovereignty or using it to pursue conflict with rivals. This article explores the geopolitics of Cyberspace. It argues that critical geopolitical concepts like geopolitical fields, culture and conditions can offer insights into the behaviour of actors in Cyberspace. The argument is explored through case studies of the US, Russia and China. The article goes beyond traditional nation states to apply similar analysis to the European Union and Internet companies. It concludes that both classical and critical geopolitics can make valuable contributions to the analysis of Cyberspace, and the behaviour of both state and non-state actors. Diplomacy has a crucial role in managing geopolitical conflicts in Cyberspace. But diplomats need to rethink their engagement and reform the structures and cultures in which they operate.

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Key Messages Canadian nationalist rhetoric is still premised on resource extraction despite discussions of climate change by the Liberal government since 2015. Taking earth system science seriously requires rethinking national identity and the conventional geopolitical premises on which it is based. Meeting Paris Agreement on Climate Change commitments requires much more fundamental changes than Canadian Federal government rhetoric so far acknowledges.

Geopolitical cultures, pragmatic patriotism, and Russia’s disputed islands

This paper draws on the notion of “geopolitical culture” as a conceptual tool for understanding debates over the formulation of foreign policy in contemporary Russia. To draw out the value of this concept, the paper explores the symbolism of territory as a means for restoring Russia’s status, respect, and power. However, in contrast to previous studies, it traces the ways in which a concession of territory has been promoted as a device for achieving Russia’s great power ambitions. More broadly, the paper seeks to stimulate a wider debate on reconceptualizing the relationship between territory and identity in Russia, at the same time as it places Russia’s Far Eastern borderlands at the heart of debates on the spatial imaginaries of the Russian homeland. By drawing on and advancing recent theoretical innovations in critical geopolitics, and recognizing the significance of the discourse of nationalism within these framings, the paper explores the nuanced and multiple story lines that constitute Russia’s geopolitical culture. Through this approach, intriguing and complex plot lines and unexpected twists are revealed, which have at times been obscured by nationalist-territorial-revanchist narratives on Putin’s Russia. It is suggested that such approaches can also provide insights for interpreting cases and contexts beyond Russia and Eurasia.

Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACTThe human control of fire is a relatively neglected part of the discussion of the contemporary transformation of the planet. Thinking about it in terms of geopolitics is a way to link climate adaptation, extinction and the possibilities of extending traditional analyses of political ecology to the global scale. Such thinking is explicitly rejected as the appropriate premises for foreign policy action by the Trump administration which poses American greatness in terms of traditional understandings of firepower. This clash of geopolitical cultures is now key to global politics, where dramatic landscape transformation, related species extinctions as well as climate change results directly and indirectly from human control of combustion. Firepower is a matter of military technology as well as, in the form of fossil fuel combustion, the essential energy source that fuels the global economy. Focusing on combustion as a key geophysical force in contemporary geopolitics offers useful insights into the Anthropocene discussion and, in particular, the two planetary boundaries of climate change and biodiversity loss, which are key to contemporary efforts at global environmental governance.

Shades of grey in Russian pre-Soviet geopolitical traditions

The article revisits scholarly conceptualizations of Russian geopolitical traditions focusing on the pre-Soviet “classical period” and attempts to offer an alternative, more general typology with the goal of decomposing different traditions and comparing the interaction of their constituent parts. It contests the purity of any tradition and presents them as interacting, competing, overlapping and penetrating one another at the levels of three frames—identity, ideology, and paradigm. Through this theoretical discussion we will be guided by three companions—thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century whose geopolitically relevant works can be located in different overlaps of geopolitical traditions and escape simple labels: Boris Chicherin, Vladimir Solov'ev, and Konstantin Leont'ev. Finally, the article examines the overlap of all three geopolitical traditions and identifies here stable parts of geopolitical culture of pre-Soviet Russia.

Geopolitical Cultures of Outer Space: The British Interplanetary Society, 1933–1965

ABSTRACTThis paper identifies and critically examines the British Interplanetary Society’s geopolitics of outer space from 1933 to 1965, presenting a critical astropolitics of outer space in contributing to the critique of neo-classical astropolitics. The paper identifies three distinct periods in the changing geopolitical outlook of the BIS, the first being the idealist internationalism of the early years of the Society, the second concerning narratives surrounding the formation of the International Astronautical Federation, and the third articulating Commonwealth collaborations in promoting British-led spaceflight research. The paper concludes by suggesting that the early idealism of internationalism in spaceflight research became diminished and contingent by the mid-1960s in the context of the changing geopolitical realities of the post-war period, and argues for increased academic engagement with geopolitical cultures of outer space.

Orientalism and the geoculture of the World System: Discursive othering, political economy and the cameralist division of labor in Habsburg Central Europe (1713-1815)

This article addresses the question of to what degree the concept of geoculture can be brought in line with research on Orientalist stereotypes and imaginary. Following Said’s original definition of orientalism discourses of the 18th-century political economy are reassessed by focusing on their perception of spatial hierarchies in Eastern Europe. This article reconsiders these discourses as an active factor in the struggle for power and a tool in the hands of the geopolitical interests of absolutist monarchs in Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Russia in the age of mercantilism, as demonstrated by the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania. By focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy between the Spanish War of Succession and the Congress of Vienna, it is demonstrated here that, territorial landlocked empires within Europe used a similar language as colonial maritime empires in order to justify their geopolitical expansion and territorial domination of Eastern Europe. In a second step, it is shown that this discourse was part of the geopolitical culture of the World System and was instrumental in setting ideological conditions for cameralist-driven institutional transformations in favor of the core regions within the Habsburg dominions in Central Europe.