Subaltern Geopolitics Research Articles

Hegemony, Power Structure and Tribal Resistance: A Subaltern Geopolitics View on Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2018)

Hegemony, Power Structure and Tribal Resistance: A Subaltern Geopolitics View on Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2018)

Subaltern Geopolitics of Closed Borders: Russophone Minorities in Estonia and Finland

The article discusses how geopolitical discourses and related performative practices of bordersensitive groups in countries neighbouring Russia are transformed by the war in Ukraine. Based mainly on the mixture of ethnographic methods (semi-structured interviews and unprovoked talk), the article is built around the study of vernacular geopolitics of Russian speakers living in the city of Narva, Estonia, and Finland. It suggests that the geopolitical narrative of these ethnolinguistic groups is changing from subaltern, neither dominant nor resistant geopolitical imagination, to oppositional geopolitics. This transformation takes place through public expression in the form of creative performances (Estonia) or online and offline protests (Finland). In this way, Russian speakers seek to acquire a political agency, local (in the case of Estonia) or national (in the case of Finland).

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.

Postcolonial experiences of Chinese aid: Encountering and welcoming South–South aid from the middle

AbstractThis paper explores how public servants in aid‐recipient countries perceive and encounter the development structures and normative discourses of South–South partnerships. The paper draws on interviews with senior public servants in the Antigua and Barbuda government who interface directly with Chinese aid delivery. The public servants perceive that ‘Northern’ development models have largely failed and that ‘Southern’ donors can facilitate alternative development pathways. They understand that South–South partnerships give aid‐recipient countries greater control over their development futures, invoking some of the original radicalism of South–South partnerships. The public servants also perceive that Western critiques of Chinese aid are underpinned by orientalism, and they reject notions that they are being passively integrated into the Chinese government's global vision. Yet, they do not passively internalise the normative discourses on South–South partnerships. This paper advances a multi‐scalar postcolonial geographical analysis of South–South partnerships and will be of interest to those exploring how aid‐recipient countries navigate the politics and power relations of the contemporary global aid landscape. The paper also advances debates on how subaltern geopolitics play out in the context of increasing South–South partnerships. Finally, with its focus on South–South partnerships, the paper contributes to the aid ethnographies literature.

Street naming and political identity in the postcolonial African city: A social sustainability framework

ABSTRACT Street naming in Windhoek, Namibia, traces its political origins to the German colonial period. While the role of toponymy as a tool for political construction in the postcolonial epoch is an important matter of scholarly interest, much work remains to be done on the subject in the sub-Saharan African context. Moreover, the dialectical relationships between political identity and sustainable development have largely not been broached. This study seeks to bridge the noted lacunae by propounding a social sustainability framework for street naming premised on the conceptual tripod of postcolonialism, subaltern geopolitics and memorialization. It employs questionnaires administered to residents, interviews with subject matter experts and planners, as well as field visits, photography and document analysis to dissect the ontological processes, characteristics and meanings encapsulated in Windhoek’s approach to street naming. The social sustainability framework evinces the identity of the postcolonial African city in six main facets: urban toponymy and morphology; urban planning and development; political engagement; social equity and innovation; indigenization and cultural identity; as well as transitional justice. Through a cynosure of Windhoek, a southern African city under-researched in the existing literature, it provides important theoretical and empirical insights regarding the political dynamics of sustainable development.

Subverting geopolitics: The reinvention of geography in post‐revolutionary Mexico

AbstractWithin the enduring effort to rethink geography from multiple viewpoints and new conceptual categories, critical geographers have recently sought to ‘decentralise geopolitics’ (An, Sharp, and Shaw, 2021, Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 270) by proposing alternative analyses that can tackle the Eurocentric stance that has largely defined the field. This paper contributes to this decentralising effort by bringing to light, historically, an anti‐imperial discourse that took the form of a proper geographical invention. Specifically, the paper analyses the thought of the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos – who acted as Secretary of Public Education in the aftermath of the Revolution (1921–1924) – and argues that Vasconcelos' discourse represents a ‘subaltern’ intervention against the imperial presuppositions of the new‐born discipline of geopolitics. The paper contends that Vasconcelos' thought constitutes a conscious attempt, although clearly imbued with ‘postcolonial’ tensions and contradictions, to challenge the ‘scientific’ basis of the emerging geopolitical discourse at that time. By analysing Vasconcelos' geographical and geo‐social imagination through his recuperation of the myth of Atlantis and the idea of Cosmic Race, the paper illuminates an early operation of ‘subaltern geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2011, Geoforum, 42, 271) that aimed to contrast the new wave of Western imperialism which, intensively nurtured by socio‐environmentalist narratives, defined the turn of the twentieth century.

From the Sky to the Streets, and Back

Abstract Against the Eurocentric, heteronormative paradigms that continue to structure analysis of post-9/11 global warfare, this article asks what it means to decenter the view from the imperial war room, illustrated most poignantly in the 2016 thriller Eye in the Sky. Highlighting the role played by the Kenyan state in the ongoing war against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, it takes seriously the African subjects who co-constitute geographies of war making in East Africa today, from the political and business elite who normalize militarized masculinities and femininities, to the African troops whose affective and violent labor sustains war making in Somalia. Far from a celebration of subaltern agency, the article engages the notion of a “subaltern geopolitics” that is mindful of asymmetries of power and that foregrounds ambiguous positions of marginality that are neither dominant nor resistant. Attention to entanglement disrupts binary analytical paradigms of global/local and masculine/feminine, and calls for a deeper consideration of collaboration and complicity.

The Anti‐Imperialist Geopolitical Suburb? Caimanera as Guantánamo’s Revolutionary Frontier

AbstractThe spatialities of anti‐imperialist praxis are increasingly fraught with innumerable challenges that require complex epistemological considerations. As borderless US‐based militarisation regimes proliferate globally at an unprecedented pace, embedding their political‐territorial control more securely through state and logics of neo‐imperial extractive capitalism, they have prevailed through the strategic discourse of “progress, security and freedom”. This paper explores the geopolitical workings of Caimanera, the town closest to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (GTMO), as a counter‐hegemonic project to US imperialism. Referred to as the First Anti‐Imperialist Trench in Cuba—a territory lying within the shadow of one of the world’s most notorious prisons and oldest military bases—Caimanera’s history is fraught with tension since the base was first established by the US in 1903. Since the triumph of the 1959 revolution, the base continues to be held against the will of the Cuban people and is strongly denounced as an illegal occupation. Based on archival material, landscape analysis, and visits to Caimanera in 2015, 2017 and 2019, this paper explores how the anti‐imperialist geopolitical suburb has historically evolved through the territoriality of its governance and actions. This anti‐imperiaist geopolitical suburb is explored as a conceptual form and mode of praxis drawing insights from Fidel Castro’s theorisation of the “Battle of Ideas”, whereby the production of oppositional space in response to imperial threats and aggression is tackled through complexities of the city‐building process and the cultural ideological resistance of its closely interwoven educational landscape. The anti‐imperialist geopolitical suburb as a space of subaltern geopolitics creatively attends to the complex task of sovereignty and boldly promulgates a movement towards peace and solidarity in the larger transnational region.

Between dependency and engagement: Centring subaltern geopolitics in multiperspectival border studies. Lessons from the Western Sahara

Contributing to the growing interest in multiperspectival border studies, this article advocates for a re-centring of subaltern geopolitics in the debate. Focusing empirically on Morocco's diplomatic dispute with the EU over the application of trade agreements to the Western Sahara (2015–2019), the analysis considers the geopolitical bordering of the controversy through the concepts of dependency and engagement to explain how the disputed territory both structured Morocco's disadvantageous relationship to the EU, while also giving rise to material and symbolic possibilities for the state leadership to subvert these geopolitical asymmetries in the late 2010s. The events are theorised through the combined lenses of critical border studies, subaltern geopolitics, and the politics of space to bring two complementary insights to the fore: (i) to insist that multiperspectival approaches account for the uneven landscape of borders, and the entities that act upon, animate, and transform geopolitical affairs from outside the dominant nodes of power and knowledge; conversely (ii) to destabilize prevailing binaries of geopolitical marginality and centrality through a reading of borders in an irreducibly multiple sense. Together, the analysis demonstrates the value of centring subaltern geopolitics in emerging debates on border multiplicity in the field today, while also avoiding the tendency to reinforce the spectacle of the border itself.

Geopolitics of decolonisation: The subaltern diplomacies of Lusophone Africa (1961–1974)

This paper addresses the global engagement of certain African intellectuals who strove for the independence of Lusophone Africa. It does so using geopolitical lenses based on new and multilingual archives. Extending current scholarship on subaltern geopolitics, cultures of decolonisation, and critical development studies, I show the performance of the subaltern diplomacies deployed by political leaders such as Amílcar Cabral, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, and Marcelino dos Santos in capturing international sympathy for their cause from other scholars, activists, and politicians at different levels (from grassroots movements to state leaders and international organisations) across the divides between Cold War blocs and the fields of the ‘First’, ‘Second’, and ‘Third World’. I argue that these endeavours disrupted mainstream narratives of development and Euro-centred ideas of assimilation, partly due to their emphasis on education and the production of subaltern histories and geographies that were instrumental to the national construction of new decolonised countries from so-called ‘Portuguese Africa’. In the 1960s and early 1970s, these intellectuals used the weapons of culture, public communication, and transnational networking as devices that were as important as the accomplishments of their fellow guerrilla fighters in the battlefield. Additionally, these stories confirm the importance of the archive for tracing cosmopolite, multilingual, and diasporic networks and their spatiality, as well as for doing critical geopolitics from perspectives other than Anglo- or Western-centred ones, thus decolonising geography.

Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The geo‐graphing of South Asia

AbstractThis article builds on postcolonial geography's concepts of imaginative geographies, worlding, and subaltern geopolitics by applying them to an examination of South Asia's regional formation in the mid‐20th century. Following a review of debates in postcolonial geography, I analyze the mutations of colonialism as they shaped the dynamics of South Asia in the wake of formal decolonization. First, the Indian subcontinent's partition inscribed colonial knowledge onto the imaginative geographies of postcolonial nation‐states. Second, South Asia was symptomatic of the Cold War's process of worlding, as reflected in the division of global space and the forms of knowledge generated by American area studies. Third, decolonization and postcolonial migrations provided subaltern geopolitical configurations of the region in tension with the nation‐state. This analysis emphasizes postcolonial geography's value in tracking colonialism's shifts across networks of empire and in the passage from anticolonial movements to postcolonial state territorialization.

A Subaltern Geopolitics?

These books discuss the historic anti-imperial movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that subsequently led to a new postcolonial world order. They cover the global visions of subaltern resi...

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.

Subaltern geopolitics and the post-colonial Commonwealth, 1965–1990

Between 1965 and 1990, the Commonwealth - an association of independent states emerging out of the decolonisation of the British Empire - took on an increasingly activist role focusing on racial and social justice and developing new subaltern (geo) political cultures. Drawing on a rich collection of new oral histories with politicians and diplomats from within the Commonwealth Secretariat and Commonwealth governments, this article focuses on the period after the formation of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965. The paper argues that the political institutions of the Commonwealth acted as a site for ‘subaltern geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2011, 2013), substantially developing this idea through a focus on the specific practices, networks, and places through which an alternative geopolitics was produced. It makes four important contributions to the conceptualisation of subaltern geopolitics and to political geography more broadly. First, in focusing on the specific practices of political actors, the paper fleshes out the mundane, fortuitous, messy, and sometimes-contradictory ways in which alternative geopolitical projects were put into practice. Second, the paper highlights the role of social and affective relations – such as those of friendship and familiarity - in geopolitics. Third, it illuminates the need to pay attention to the specific histories and geographies that underpin political action, arguing that the networks and spaces within which key Commonwealth leaders were embedded reinforced and enabled the construction of a post-colonial Commonwealth geopolitics. Fourth, and finally, the paper demonstrates the methodological value of oral history evidence for interdisciplinary research in political geography, diplomacy and international relations.

‘Sovereignty Entrepreneurs’ and the Production of State Power in Two Central African Borderlands

ABSTRACTThis article advances a subaltern geopolitics of sovereignty production at the borders of the DR Congo – the supposedly most fragile – and South Sudan – the youngest state in Africa. Moving beyond critiques of representing postcolonial statehood and sovereignty in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘failure’, we localise and ground analysis by drawing on Butler’s figure of the ‘petty sovereign’‘ to analyse the agency of border officials at the DR Congo/Rwanda and the South Sudan/Uganda border who we refer to as ‘sovereignty entrepreneurs’: officials who, tasked with managing and controlling the border, in constant face-to-face negotiations and closely linked to resource competition prescribe, set and decide on the terms and conditions of border crossing. It is argued that in the context of the DR Congo and South Sudan, where the states’ claims to territorial sovereignty face similar internal and external challenges, the border work of sovereignty entrepreneurs, characterised by the ability to tax, threaten and discipline with impunity, represents a form of sovereign power that renders the state’s capacity to act excessively visible at its borders.

Reading Brand Africa Geopolitically: Nation Branding, Subaltern Geopolitics and the Persistence of Politics

ABSTRACTIn 2010, the ‘Brand Africa’ initiative was launched with the mission to transform perceptions of Africa from a continent of calamities into one of promising economic prospects and entrepreneurial populations. This transformation, ‘Brand Africa’ claims, is one where Africans take their representation from the hands of foreigners and make, through a new image, their own (hi)story. In this respect Brand Africa can be interpreted as a form of subaltern geopolitics seeking to subvert dominant geopolitical knowledge and to fight established structures of domination. However, the article argues its subversive elements are limited, especially when compared to the historical discourses of decolonial pan-Africanism upon which it draws for legitimacy. Indeed, while appropriating this legacy Brand Africa offers up a very different geopolitical vision of possible/desirable African futures. It is argued that this may be accounted for by understanding the extent to which the Brand Africa initiative appears embedded within a South African national context and its own geopolitical ambitions evident within its own nation branding project. What this highlights in turn is that the emancipatory potential and assumed synergies between national and supranational branding central to the Brand Africa initiative are not as unproblematic or uncontested as claimed.

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.

Isolation Through Humanitarianism: Subaltern Geopolitics of the Siege on Gaza

AbstractScholars have argued that in attempts to achieve geopolitical goals, siege often results in covert assaults against civilian populations. In the Gazan context, siege subjects are rendered as surplus to the Israeli state, and are therefore isolated and deprived of basic human needs as well as human rights. In 2006, siege was enacted against Gaza, enforced by the Egyptian and Israeli militaries. As a consequence, the population of Gaza is isolated from the exchange of goods, services, people, and ideas. This article begins with an analysis of siege as a violent process and as a subset of occupation practices. Using ethnographic data collected in Gaza between 2009 and 2014, this article mobilizes the methods and approach of subaltern geopolitics to undermine the notion of siege as a humanitarian alternative to war. This study reveals the micro‐scale, graduated nature of siege and its impacts on the civilians living in Gaza.

‘Wiped From the Map of the World’? Zanzibar, Critical Geopolitics and Language

This essay uses the case of Zanzibar in its complicated relationship with the United Republic of Tanzania (of which it is a part) as a lens on debates in political geography on empirical and conceptual approaches to critical geopolitics. We test the veracity of a multi-faceted critical geopolitics in the contemporary public contestation of Zanzibar's place in the United Republic from 2008–2012. We analyze Tanzanian media, the speech acts of Tanzanian leaders, and the key events and processes related to what is termed the ‘Zanzibar problem’ during the selected years, to make two points about a critical geopolitics approach: to strengthen critical geopolitics by broadening the analysis of language to engage political acts and languages beyond the Global North; and taking ‘subaltern geopolitics’ more seriously via engagement with critical geopolitical voices on discourses, events and processes from the Global South.

Subaltern geopolitics: Libya in the mirror of Europe

In the wake of armed intervention and civil war in Libya, this commentary considers the changing ways that Libya has been represented in Western narratives. These include being part of a new ‘Roman Empire’ in Mussolini's geopolitics, loyal pro‐Western ally in the early Cold War after Libya's independence in 1951, ‘rogue’ and ‘terrorist’ state in the 1970s and 1980s, then success for Western sanctions and diplomacy and subsequently commercial opportunity and cooperative partner in constraining African migration to Europe in the 2000s. The commentary develops the category of subaltern geopolitics. It begins and ends however with issues of memory and massacre: in Libya and Lockerbie, Scotland.