Geopolitical Narratives Research Articles

What’s territorial about China? From geopolitical narratives to the ‘administrative area economy’

A human geographer and China specialist introduces perspectives on territory in China from the vantage of guowai (outside the country) and guonei (inside the country). This relational comparison extends analysis of Chinese geopolitical narratives to current questions about state power in China, and opens up the geopolitical perspective to recalibrate analysis of territory and territorial boundary formation inside the nation-state. Territorial change is particularly significant in China because subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed and state development strategies regularly depend on strategic boundary changes to form new governing spaces. The article introduces the concept of the “administrative area economy” from the Chinese literature to explain how the Chinese political economy crucially depends on reterritorialization to establish and promote contemporary urbanization and achieve political and economic goals. This analytical approach, based on the international scholarship and the Chinese-language literature, also reflects Agnew’s incorporation of methodological advances from new area studies in political geographical analysis.

Total/Eclipse

Taking as its historical touchstone France's 1937 international ‘Exposition des Arts et Techniques’ – for which Germany erected an extensive pavilion – Karen Fiss examines the cultural relations that subtended its portentous presence in Paris, from cinematic cooperation between the two countries throughout the 1930s to popular photo-essays illustrating the affinities of their respective peasant cultures. Borrowing the title of Jean Renoir's 1937 film by the same name – a reverie on Franco-German rapprochement debuted to great success during the Paris Exposition itself – Grand Illusion exposes French cultural policy of the mid-1930s for the figment it was: a passive consumption of Nazi excess that strained to believe in its pacifist intentions. Beginning with an elegant exegesis of Renoir's eponymous work, Fiss turns the film's premise on its head, as the premise of her book's argument: that ‘the grand illusion of the film … was not the futility of war but the futility of believing that peace was possible’ (p. 14). The rootedness of this study in and around 1937 and the spaces of the Exposition affords a richness of historical detail which the author applies to larger geopolitical narratives.

The City Personified: The Geopolitical Narratives of Rudy Giuliani

The article examines the growing interest in political celebrity and urban branding within media and cultural studies. It stresses the significance of narrative strategies in political statecraft, with specific reference to the intimate relationship between mayors and cities. It focuses on the figure of Rudy Giuliani, both in his period as mayor of New York between 1993 and 2001, and in his subsequent political and private lives, paying close attention to how the event of 9/11 acted as a pivot in his political career. After conceptualizing the relationship between mayors and cities through a discussion of public discourse, celebrity, and political scale, the paper then identifies three processes by which Giuliani has personified New York: first, through narrative control and self-projection within the New York political sphere, by considering his use of selected city sites as a form of synecdoche in his media strategies, and his marginalization of those who challenged him politically; second, through his elevated celebrity status and visual representation by the media in the aftermath of 9/11; and third, through the genre of autobiography and branding, via his book Leadership and related commercial activities, whereby he shifted the scale of his narrative beyond New York.

The European Union and the Insiders/Outsiders of Europe: Russia and the Post-Soviet Space

The European Union is being perceived in Eastern Europe as an important actor, but with very different connotations. Some neighbours have membership ambitions and see the EU as a model (cf. the enlargement/democracy narrative). For others, relations with the EU are an instrument to balance regional relations (cf. the geopolitical narrative). Finally, some perceive the EU as striving to expand its influence beyond its borders (cf. the value empire narrative). The chapter investigates the discourses on the EU in the eastern neighbourhood and Russia. It starts from the assumption that perceptions in the region have a strong impact on the EU’s ability to pursue its policy goals. At the same time, EU policy influences debates in its partner countries. By examining this interrelationship this paper aims to understand the extent to which the EU is able to play the role of an important regional actor in the post-Soviet space.

Looking Back to Look Forward: Chinese Geopolitical Narratives and China's Past

A prominent political and human geographer outlines a way of thinking about China's "place in the world" that is based on a penetrating examination of how influential Chinese thinkers and politicians use analogies to China's past historical practices and geographical forms as sources of inspiration for contemporary and future directions in Chinese foreign policy. Different venues within China, such as military academies, universities, and civilian think-thanks, are producing interpretive frames (geopolitical narratives) that are competing for influence within the leadership of the Communist Party and the state bureaucracy. The author distinguishes four such narratives, each with a different emphasis on China's past: (a) Pacific Rim, (b) Orientalist, (c) nationalist geopolitik, and (d) international relations with Chinese characteristics. He argues that rather than simply imposing Western narratives on China, investigators should be concerned with exploring the geopolitical narratives that are arising from within China and that will plausibly provide the justifications for future Chinese foreign policy.

Graduated incarceration: The Israeli occupation in subaltern geopolitical perspective

This paper highlights the importance of analysis of the microgeographies of occupation, and the spatially-differentiated means that the Israeli Occupation Forces use to maintain the occupation and create spaces of graduated incarceration for Palestinians. Using the examples of the hinterlands of Qalqiliyah and the old city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank, this paper exposes the microgeographical differentiation the occupation mobilizes in its attempt to enact a panoptic sovereignty over the population, in the process of dispossession. This study challenges geopolitical formations of the state as primary actor, and focuses instead on narratives of Palestinians describing their own experiences of occupation by a hostile state. By relying on popular media, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, this paper seeks to incorporate a Palestinian vision of life under occupation to challenge traditional geopolitical visions of the Palestinian Israeli conflict, in effect creating a subaltern geopolitical narrative.

Spatial Structures and the Phenomenology of Inter-National Identity

Spatial abstractions and metaphors are not new to International Relations (IR). Particularly, when we consider the relationship of “international space” with the geopolitical narratives of the early twentieth century, we find that both the theoretical construction and political composition of space are central components of world politics. Space in this sense, as critical scholars of geopolitics have demonstrated, is less the backdrop against which international phenomena occur and more the scaffolding for a particular ordering of the world. When we consider the increasingly successful “annihilation of space by time” enacted by modernity, however, space would seem to be a moot theme for IR theorists to look at in dissecting the sociology of our discipline. Space, in one sense, is merely a terrain to be traversed. Yet such a conception of space—as a “structural,” or “structuring” phenomenon with profound effects on IR's notions of identity and security—has historically ignored the bases of self-consciousness and communal exchange on which it rests. As an existential structure, there is more to space than what IR has historically told us: space allows for meaning to take root in the world only as lived-space, as the soil for perception and action to play out a web of stories and interests on its stage. Though inherently concerned with “the writing of space” (Ó Tuathail 1996), geopolitical narratives in IR tend to occlude the facticity of space as a realm of human relations and expressions. The meaning of space is shifted from an embodied experience of the local to the global entanglements of dispersed human bodies. By digging into this inversion, not only can we draw out the personal from the inter-national (as a meeting of nations and peoples), but also derive from the global a rich source of epistemic crossings and exchange. Such an undertaking requires a fundamental re-orientation of how we experience IR, a task as simple, and ambiguously impossible, as “learning to see what is ours as alien and what was alien as ours” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:120).

Lost in conceptualization: Reading the “new Cold War” with critical geopolitics

Focusing on the debates on energy security in Germany, this paper analyzes the structure, logic, and circulation of the “new Cold War” as a geopolitical narrative. We use the literature in critical geopolitics to analyze the conceptual implications of an apparent dissociation between the media and governmental stance toward the new Cold War and its embedded geopolitical logic. The relationship between the “kind” of geopolitics inherent in the new Cold War and the different “forms” in which it circulates suggests a blurring of boundaries between all such geopolitical forms, through multiple crossings-over between institutions, textual genres, and circulating actors. The media presence of the New Cold War also highlights the ambiguity of the “popular” in popular geopolitics, which is further refracted on other geopolitical forms which share its characteristics. This not only makes imperative the more precise formulation of key conceptual categories such as popular or banal geopolitics, but also calls into question the link between the state and particular geopolitical logics, as well as the relationship between the mass media and geopolitics.

Ungoverned space: Global security and the geopolitics of broken windows

Contemporary geopolitical narratives have shifted from a Cold War focus on security attained through effective spatial containment to an emphasis on security won through effective spatial administration. Weak, disorderly, and ungoverned spaces are often scripted as insecure and dangerous, requiring sovereign intervention and harsh discipline as a corrective action. These narratives and practices increasingly borrow from the domestic arena, and serve to blur former binaries such as internal/external and policing and war. This paper investigates the domestic “broken windows policing” language of ungoverned, disorderly space in New York City, and traces its movement and subsequent usage in the occupation of Iraq. The use of language such as broken windows and zero tolerance serves to legitimate state practices, but is also effective as a shaping force for newly articulated positions and subjects. It is argued that broken windows policing, as an imaginative geopolitical scripting of the perils of chaotic and ungoverned space, helps to produce new forms of governance through security. Further, this disciplining process facilitates the formation and entrenchment of neoliberal practices and subjectivities by rendering spaces and populations ‘insecure’ and in need of repositioning—hence opening them up to powerful market forces and technologies of the self such as privatization, entrepreneurialism, and responsibilization.

Alvar Aalto: architecture, modernity, and geopolitics

An intellectual biography that reconsiders the influence of Aalto's Finnish origins and explores geography as a dominant theme in the history of modern architecture Perhaps no other great modern architect has been linked to a native country as closely as Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). Critics have argued that the essence of Finland flows, as if naturally, into his quasi-organic forms, ranging from such buildings as the Baker House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to iconic 20th-century designs, including his Savoy vase and bent-plywood stacking stools. What did Aalto himself say about the importance of nationalism and geography in his work and in architecture generally? With an unprecedented focus on the architect's own writings, library, and critical reception, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen proposes a dramatically different interpretation of Aalto's oeuvre, revealing it as a deeply thoughtful response to his intellectual and cultural milieu-especially to Finland's dynamic political circumstances following independence from Russia in 1917. Pelkonen also considers the geographic and geopolitical narratives found in his writings. These include ideas about national style and national cultural revival, and about how architecture can foster cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and regionalism. Expanding the canonical reading of Aalto, this work promises to influence future inquiries on Aalto for generations to come.

The Rise of China and India: Geo-political Narratives from the Singapore Perspective

Narratives emanating from Singapore on the rise of China and India tend to emphasise the economic emergence of the two giant economies. Like many other Asia-Pacific countries and, indeed the world, business and commercial analyses of Chinese and Indian economic trends have spawned a massive industry of consulting, news/information, publishing and speaking circuits. But what about geopolitical narratives in international relations — do they also reflect the same levels of optimism, pragmatism, problems and criticisms that economic analyses face? This paper looks at the selected thoughts and individual perceptions of three thinkers who have left their diplomatic/academic footprints on the subject.

The Rise of China and India: Geo-political Narratives from the Singapore Perspective

The Rise of China and India: Geo-political Narratives from the Singapore Perspective

‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Conspiratorial thought has been highly visible in post-September 11th America, manifest through the continued growth of a public ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ as well as at the state-level, through the Bush administration’s conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US homeland. In this paper, I demonstrate how conspiracy can be understood as a ‘knowledge-producing discourse’; dialectically engaged across multiple subject positions and through which geopolitical narratives are performatively produced and contested at interconnected scales of bodies, homes, city streets and national ‘homelands’. Through drawing on, and challenging, the conceptual and methodological approaches of a burgeoning feminist geopolitics, I ground my analysis in the embodied performances of ‘patriotic dissent’ by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City, as well as through my own situated and ethical engagement with positions of political difference.

Placing blame or blaming place? Embodiment, place and materiality in critical geopolitics

Gerard Toal's comprehensive work on the 2004 terrorist attack and counter-terrorist assault in Beslan, North Ossetia is a forceful critical analysis of competing geopolitical narratives expounded by the Kremlin, North Ossetian regional government, and the Beslan terrorists. Despite the strong success that Toal achieves in elaborating the competing geopolitical narratives that seek to construct meaning in the wake of the Beslan attack, the substantive analysis remains confined largely to the purposeful geopolitical strategies employed by key actors within different places and at different scales. In this commentary, I argue that a feminist geopolitical perspective is necessary to explore the material practices and experiences that stand in counter-point to elite-led efforts to construct simplified geopolitical narratives to enframe inherently complex events. This effort to understand the place-bound effects of geopolitical narratives leads me to discuss three particular lacunae within critical geopolitical analysis of the Beslan attack – the need for ethnographic thick description to understand how place-based actors experience and contextualize the attack; the ability of actors to push beyond circumscribed geopolitical narratives to produce a richer, hybrid understanding of the multiple places and scales involved in the attack; and the ability of a feminist, place perspective to help forge a normative moral geography of right and wrong in a post-foundational era that privileges narrative, discourse, and power at the heart of geography.

Beyond Surface Appearances: Les Hepple's Inspiration to Critical Geopolitics

Abstract Notes 1. L. Hepple, ‘Classics in Human Geography Revisited: Hepple, L. W. 1986: The revival of geopolitics', Political Geography Quarterly 5(4), S21-S36’, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) p. 423. 2. S. Dalby, ‘Classics in Human Geography Revisited: Hepple, L. W. 1986: The revival of geopolitics. Political Geography Quarterly 5(4), S21-S36’, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) p. 424. 3. D. Atkinson, ‘Classics in Human Geography Revisited: Hepple, L. W. 1986: The revival of geopolitics. Political Geography Quarterly 5(4), S21-S36’, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) p. 426. 4. L. W. Hepple, ‘Metaphor, Geopolitical Discourse and the Military in South America’, in T. Barnes and J. Duncan (eds.), Writing Worlds: Text, Language and Discourse in Geography (London and New York: Routledge 2002) pp. 136–154. 5. J. D. Sidaway, ‘What is in a Gulf? From the ‘Arc of Crisis’ to the Gulf War’, in G. O Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds.), Rethinking geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge 1998) p. 231. 6. See F. Halliday, Threat from the East: Soviet Policy from Afghanistan and Iran to the Horn of Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982). Although focussed on the Pacific, P. Hays, L. Zarsky and W. Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987) also had much to say on the creation of CENTCOM and related contexts. 7. Sidaway (note 5) p. 234. 8. J. D. Sidaway and M. Power, ‘The Tears of Portugal’: Empire, Identity, ‘Race’ and Destiny in Portuguese Geopolitical Narratives', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23/4 (2005) pp. 527–554. 9. D. Atkinson, ‘Geopolitical Imaginations in Modern Italy’, in K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds.), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London and New York: Routledge 2000) pp. 93–112. 10. T. Harris, T. Hoare, R. Johnston, K. Jones, P. Plummer and, E. Thomas, ‘Les Hepple: An Appreciation’, Environment and Planning A 39/6 (2007) p. 1275. 11. O. Rackham, Woodlands (London: Harper Collins 2006) p. 363–366.

Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe

This article uses the character of Josef Švejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it. By foregrounding Švejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency in geopolitical discourses.

Writing Michigan History from a Transborder Perspective

Writing Michigan History from a Transborder Perspective by Susan E. Gray Histories of individual American states constitute a peculiar kind of political history. Pivoting on the fact of statehood, these works invariably combine a geopolitical narrative of how a state came into existence with a heavily social and economic account of the subsequent fortunes of its citizens. They are thus histories both of boundary making and of human experience confined within those borders, qualities they share with historical overviews of the development of other North American political units?whether the United States as a whole, Canada, or the Canadian provinces. Even though the process of boundary making is by definition as much exclusive as inclusive of lands and peoples, state histories do not usually consider what difference statehood made for either lands divided or people excluded. This is in part because state histories tend to be ideological in structure; typically, they are organized to depict the march of progress to the present.1 It is also true that state boundaries have generally received little attention within the larger narrative of American history, except as artifacts of the conflict between slave and free states and of the displacements of Native Peoples with the advance of white settlement. But some state borders are also national ones, as between Michigan and Ontario. Here the process of boundary making?the division of lands and the exclusion of The author would like to thank Colin Coates, Nora Faires, Mary Ward Graham, and David Macleod for their advice and encouragement in preparing this essay. 1 I take this point from Allan Greer. He describes traditional Canadian historiography as treating the Rebellion of 1837-1838?about which more will be said later in this article?as an anomaly in Canada's movement "towards a goal in the nineteenth century . . . [and] whether this end point was the construction of a transcontinental, commercial, and political union, the development of parliamentary government, or the preservation and resurrection of French Canada, itwas certainly a Good Thing." Allan Greer, "1837-38: Rebellion Reconsidered," Canadian Historical Review76,no. 1 (1995): 3. Michigan Historical Review 34:1 (Spring 2008): 1-24 ?2008 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 2 Michigan Historical Review peoples?proved integral to the evolution of a state within a borderland of several centuries standing. As any Michigan schoolchild is supposed to know, before the state came into existence, and for roughly as long as Michigan has been a state, the two peninsulas formed part of a larger contact zone embracing the Great Lakes basin. There, indigenous, mostly Anishinabe, inhabitants, engaged with the representatives of three successive empires?French, British, and American. The various groups all made territorial claims in their own ways and for their own purposes. Native Peoples, of course, had occupied homelands on and around the two peninsulas long before Europeans arrived in the upper Great Lakes region in the mid-seventeenth century. But after statehood, something disappears from the histories of Michigan: neither Indians within nor anyone outside the borders of the state plays much of a role in post 1837 narratives. This absence is puzzling, because most Native Peoples inMichigan managed to evade the federal program for their removal west of the Mississippi. Indian removal does not, therefore, signal the closing of the frontier and the coming of statehood inMichigan, as it does in most other histories of states in the trans-Appalachian West.2 Similarly, social and economic ties between the peninsulas and the rest of the Great Lakes basin were not limited to the fur-trade era before statehood. On the contrary, even if scholars do not tend to treat them as such, the social and economic histories of Michigan and Ontario have remained interpenetrated to this day.3 A brief survey of the five major histories of Michigan published in the past fifty years reveals their dependence upon statehood as the turning point away from narratives of a transborder region to state chronicles that exclude many of the actors of the earlier period who, 2 The classic study of Indians and empires in the Great Lakes basin is Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the...

"The shadows of no man's land" : crossing the border in the divided capital of Nicosia, Cyprus

Abstract. In May 2004, only Greek Cyprus joined the European Union. The EU did not negotiate with Northern Cyprus as the Greek Cypriot government is acknowledged as sole representative of Cyprus. Despite this, after more than two years of EU membership, the Republic of Cyprus is seen in a positive light by the people of Northern Cyprus. Through the grey zone of the acquis communautaire, north Nicosia and Cyprus profit from European modernisation and the common market. Although the northern part of the island is still often labelled as «occupied territory», in the light of recent European developments. Nicosia, and with it Cyprus, seem to no longer be solely defined by their Green Line. This grey, self-created Option means that the EU has indeed had a significant effect on the «Cyprus issue». For the Greek Cypriot authorities, their hoped-for advantage of a stronger negotiation position in Europe did not turn out as expected. For the north, their fragile socio-economic structures appear to have benefited from the common market with the Republic of Cyprus. Despite the current partitioning of Nicosia, this city may therefore be understood today as a unique example of urban osmosis.The conclusion is made that both the long-term impact of the new osmosis which is taking place at street level in the city of Nicosia, and the city's capacity for co-optation and resistance, should be assessed and perceived not in the form of traditional geopolitical narratives, but in a form more sensitive to its complex context.

‘The Tears of Portugal’: Empire, Identity, ‘Race’, and Destiny in Portuguese Geopolitical Narratives

Geopolitical discourses are constitutive moments within the expression and construction of ‘national’ identities. Approaching geopolitics and identities as contested and fluid domains, we examine the relationships between geopolitical narratives and visions of Portugueseness ( Portugalidade). The focus is on the frames of geopolitical thought developed in 20th-century Portugal, with particular reference to the post-1945 period and with some consideration of the transformations since 1974 accompanying the collapse of what was both the first and the most enduring European overseas empire. This study of Portuguese geopolitical discourses leads to a conclusion in which we reflect on the significance of relations between the ‘colonial’ and the ‘postcolonial’ and the articulations of East–West and North–South in geopolitical discourses. This permits wider critique concerning the location of geopolitics within 20th-century and contemporary imperialisms.

The US–Mexico Border in American Movies: A Political Geography Perspective

The region surrounding the US–Mexico divide is probably one of the most frequently screened landscapes of North America. Since the beginning of commercial cinema, the border has been a leading or secondary character in dozens of movies, ranging from the obvious westerns to the less obvious horror, science fiction and film-noir categories. The connotations given by the American film industry to the cross-border experience – both from the south and north –connotations, and the meaning of the border that has been assumed to support such interpretations can be considered, from a ‘critical geopolitics’ perspective, as popular forms of expression of a geopolitical discourse pertaining to the role and standing of the United States relative to its southern neighbour. In order to detect the frames and assumptions of this popular geopolitical narrative, the author takes into account the scripts and the visual representation of the borderscape of a miscellany of about 30 movies, all produced in North America over a period of 65 years.