Abstract
It is slightly ironic that a quarter century after the emergence of critical geopolitics as an insurgent knowledge formation in the late 1980s, a book fortunate enough to have this insurgency as its title has aged sufficiently well to be considered a ‘classic’. It can, of course, be seen as a parochial and insider form of recognition because, as Jason Dittmer notes, critical geopolitics (research agenda and book) appears to have had limited impact on the world beyond geography, especially in the adjacent field of international relations. According to the University of Minnesota Press, the book has sold just over 2000 copies worldwide. As Jason’s comments suggest, it is now likely more cited than read, its approach superseded by new intellectual preoccupations and crucial events like 9/11 and the global war on terror it justified. Nevertheless, I am pleased that Critical Geopolitics and other equally significant books from the early 1990s helped shape how young geographers have conceptualized and researched geopolitics over the decades (Dalby, 1990; Campbell, 1992).
Jason and Jennifer’s readings are generous, yet rightly hint at the weaknesses of the book. Written from within an Irishness that was somewhat heroic (anticolonial and outsiderish), the book was born of ambition, frustration and post-tenure workaholic momentum. It was largely written in a ramshackle bungalow on the outskirts of Blacksburg, Virginia, a distraction-free location suitably on the margins. At that time, deconstruction was a great solution to the problem of definition, the ‘what is geopolitics’ question that preoccupied me during graduate school. It also allowed me to jump straight to select figures and scenes in the history of geopolitics, and into the contemporary practice and intellectualization of US foreign policy. My eclectic ‘interventionist essays’ (p. 17) were unified by post-structuralist methodology. Finally, it provided an intellectual rationale against ambitious new theory-building. Even the distinction between formal, practical and popular geopolitics is not in the book. And there is, of course, no concluding chapter.
Jason speculates on what might have been. It can be argued that my reluctance to engage in positive concept-building in the book was a missed opportunity. While I have offered more conceptual development in some of my subsequent work, I have never laid out a comprehensive vision. One of the productive (and underdeveloped) insights of the book is the distinction, one of two I wish to mention, between geo-politics and geopolitics (p. 18), the former referring to the broad problematic of the ‘politics of writing global space’ whereas the latter named a narrower set of discourses that sought to explicitly evoke ‘geography’ as an explanation and conditioning factor in foreign policy practice. This might have been pushed further to outline a sharp distinction between geopolitics as geo-strategy, namely grand strategy’s geographies, and geopolitics as the broader question of geopolitical culture. A geopolitical culture is what state-builders create to define their state and its position in the world. The power structure within a state delimits the intellectual space within which it operates.
Michael Mann’s four sources and organizations of power, cited on the last page, can be used to think about this in a systematic way (Mann, 1986). Ideological power networks tend to generate cultural and civilizational discourses. Economic power networks tend to be the supports for modernization and accumulation-centric discourses. Military power networks inevitably generate state-centric security discourses, though not exclusively these. Together, these three networks can be said to delimit civilizational, modernizing and statist traditions of geopolitical thinking as ideal types. I would argue that we can broadly identify these ideal type traditions in the geopolitical cultures of the great powers in the modern era, with lesser states buying into these cultures to greater and lesser degrees. At least, that is my contention in my latest work on US and Russian geopolitical culture after the Cold War. Coordinating and steering is the work of political power networks (Mann’s fourth organization of power), and it is here we find the debate and creative synthesis that generate not only foreign policy doctrinal statements and visions but also the everyday geopolitical reflexes shaping how diplomacy is conducted.
Practical geopolitics is about reconciling the pragmatic and normative in foreign policy practice, what state leaders must accept because of internal politics and their state’s relative power position, and what state leaders would wish to be the case in international affairs. Formal geopolitics is elite theorization, grand and not-so-grand strategy. Popular geopolitics tends to be associated most with the culture industries and pop culture, so perhaps the notion of everyday geopolitics (developed by a number of academics) is most appropriate for the geopolitical orientations of ordinary citizens – something I have sought to empirically examine in Russia, or for those caught up in geopolitics (as ‘An Anti-Geopolitical Eye’ addresses). More than formal or popular geopolitics, the rather traditional diplomatic history domain of practical geopolitics has probably been my enduring interest down the years.
A second distinction in the book is between geo-politics and geo-power. I saw the former as one expression of the latter, though I did not specify this in any detail. The latter notion was inspired by Foucault’s concept of governmentality and I viewed it as the governmentalizing of space by imperial state apparatuses as they encompassed and organized pre-modern places into modern territorial binds, metrics and visualizations. The book suggests this is not equivalent to geopolitics, and expresses some concern at the inflationary qualities of that word. But I did not argue this case insistently, instead taking refuge in the claim: Geopolitics is not a concept that is immanently meaningful and fully present to itself but a discursive ‘event’ that poses questions to us whenever it is evoked and rhetorically deployed. It is a problematic best approached historically and contextually, a problematic concerning the writing of the global that requires an antiglobal(izing) method of inquiry that avoids treating ‘it’ as a stable and singular ‘it,’ a smooth historical surface for theoretical work. (p. 17).
Geopolitical vertigo was the condition I foregrounded in the book. This notion could be sharpened to encompass the prevailing mood and atmospherics created by what transnational media network ecologies do in producing dramatic events and crises. I am thinking here of the affective wave in the wake of 9/11 or the anger and shock this summer across the world in the wake of the destruction of Malaysian Airlines 17 over rebel-held Ukraine. The book describes geopolitics as a convenient fiction, but its emergence as a rhetorical commonplace due to Henry Kissinger’s popularization of the term from the 1970s also arguably made it a very inconvenient and challenging object of theorization, sometimes precise yet often vague. Perhaps a concluding chapter that made an explicit case for its careful disaggregation would have given greater conceptual structure to the field of critical geopolitics. But that is a big ‘perhaps’. As Jason notes, the field of critical geopolitics developed in ways different from the book in many ways.
Jennifer Hyndman is very generous in her comments. The feminist analysis in Critical Geopolitics is modest, but it was always clear that questions of gender were crucial in deconstructing geopolitics as a complex of practices. Critical geopolitics had to be feminist. Bosnia did raise questions later framed as expendable life and grievable subjects, but these notions proceed from the same problematic I was struggling with as I wrote: the Holocaust as history, geography, government, geopolitics. In 1992 I was fortunate to participate in a University of Liverpool fieldtrip with Gerry Kearns and the late Graham Smith in Budapest. One of the subjects we examined in depth was the deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population in 1944. In discussions of this grim subject more than a few of us remarked on its relevance to the new war raging just a few hundred kilometers south of us in Bosnia.
The following spring I accompanied Andrew Charlesworth to Poland on a ‘Landscapes of the Holocaust’ fieldtrip that involved site visits to Auschwitz, Kraków (where Schindler’s List was being filmed at the time), Treblinka and Warsaw (where I attended the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and saw Yitzhak Rabin heckled by Nazi sympathizers). These trips and books like Modernity and the Holocaust informed the Bosnia chapter (Bauman, 2001). The Bosnian war posed profound moral and political challenges to my general anti-US interventionist worldview. The Bosnia chapter was a first cut at working this out, the ‘anti-geopolitical eye’ article another, and the subsequent fieldwork, articles and book yet deeper engagement with this searing, tragic conflict.
Unfortunately, international politics in the two decades since has largely offered up more of the same: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Ukraine, and Gaza. The summer of 2014 has been particularly brutal viewing for international news junkies. New information technologies have made that experience more intense, more distributed, and even more disturbing, given how they reveal the vicious inequalities of lives valued and deaths permitted – most transparently in Israel/Palestine. Considerable attention in policy circles is now devoted to the ‘radicalizing’ effects of videos of warfare and atrocities on YouTube and jihadi websites. But one only need to tune into the BBC’s brilliant reporters in Syria and Gaza to come away disturbed and angry at the raw injustice of it all. I had a certain passion about the Bosnian war when I wrote Critical Geopolitics, and this drove me forth towards local work in that country. Avoiding misanthropy and cynicism after a quarter of a century studying conflict is difficult. But I can still hear John Agnew in his office quoting a voice in a very grim condition indeed: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.