Abstract
Murphy’s (2013) argument for greater engagement by academic geographers in the discourses and debates underpinning foreign policy is critiqued. Contemporary academic culture means that few geographers undertake the sorts of research and writing that Murphy wishes to see increased. Even within that context, it is hard to identify what his hoped-for grand regional narratives might look like; his expectation that they could be both empirically grounded and authoritative is questioned.
Over the last few decades, there has been a substantial literature, peaking at certain moments, in which geographers bemoan their discipline’s lack of influence on many elements of public debate and public policy, accompanied with soul-searching about why geography is so underestimated and its expertise (other than the technical: NAS-NRC, 2011) is so underutilised. Many of those pieces encourage greater engagement by geographers with debates over public policy, and Alexander Murphy (2013) has now joined their ranks, seeking to stimulate greater activity within a particular field – foreign policy (broadly defined). 1
In appreciating why those concerns appear and reappear, it is necessary to separate out issues that relate to geography from those relating to geographers. Geography in many discourses refers to subject matter – to ‘what is where?’ questions and, to a lesser extent, questions as to how the natural environment ‘works’ (what used to be pejoratively termed ‘capes and bays geography’). For others, references to geography are to the academic discipline, with its own changing agendas and practices and which, to some commentators, is only weakly linked to the subject matter they consider geography’s core (hence arguments like Hart’s, 1982a, 1982b, promoted a form of geographical engagement that deviated from a then-dominant discourse regarding disciplinary practice: Golledge et al., 1982). References to geographers usually refer to practitioners of the academic discipline, but they – as Harvey (2005) demonstrated – are only one group among a number (and not necessarily even the most influential) who create geographical imaginations (or, in Murphy’s terms, grand geographical narratives?).
These terminological distinctions are crucial when addressing claims pointing to perceived deficiencies in ‘geographical understanding’ among at least some sections of society. To some – usually speaking from outwith the discipline and referring to the subject matter – those deficiencies involve ignorance, the lack of ‘basic’ geographical information: their geography is ‘subject matter geography’ and the deficiencies are to be remedied in early school years. For others, usually speaking from within the discipline, the deficiencies represent external ignorance – particularly among those who exercise power within societies, including the media – of the breadth and depth of geographical knowledge: if what geographers know about the world was more widely appreciated, efforts to understand and improve it might be more successful.
Murphy’s essay falls in the latter category, concerned with not just a lack of appreciation among the powerful of what geography/geographers have to offer in advancing regional understanding but in particular with geographers’ failure to engage in relevant debates and increase awareness of their potential contributions to important public policy debates. He wants more geographers to promote their intellectual wares, to be involved in not only addressing and informing debates that underpin (usually political) action but also in framing and implementing public policy.
That case can be – indeed has been – made in a variety of ways and, in true geographical sense, at a variety of scales. Much of it – as illustrated by materials referred to in Murphy’s section on ‘Implications for public geographies’ – has focused at relatively local scales, usually confined within the territory of a single state. His interests are wider: grand regional narratives. Much work on regions is small-scale too, but Murphy’s regions are not; his regions are mostly international, even continental, in scale and he wants geographers to write books and articles that will be set reading in, for example, the American National Defense University and the American Foreign Service Association and will influence foreign policy debates and the consequent strategy, rather than just providing an information base on which later tactics can be deployed (as with the UK Naval Intelligence Handbooks discussed by Clout and Gosmé, 2003). 2
On grand regional narratives
I am unsure – even after the discussion of the nuanced differences between grand narratives, metanarratives and so on – exactly what a grand regional narrative looks like. Murphy’s definition of grand narratives (not regional) presents them as:
… far more than simple collections of facts or events; they create a structure of understanding and meaning based on those facts and events … [which] in turn, play ‘a critical role in providing frames of reference within which the meaning of the larger societal experience can be grasped’ (Irving and Klenke, 2004: 33)
Murphy’s grand regional narratives are:
… influential meso-scale empirically grounded narratives about regions … that shape ideas and actions [which] reflect and influence people’s concepts of identity and belonging, their political inclinations, their worries about the future, and their views about what can and should happen … overarching stories about how certain places have developed over time, how particular geographical entities came into being, how the world is organized physically and culturally, where threats come from, and much more.
Murphy provides three case studies to illustrate why geographical engagement with grand narratives matters – implying that most current discourses display little or no reference to either geography (as a discipline) or geographers (some – like Kaplan’s, 2012 – pay considerable attention to geography as subject matter and to selected geographers). Each of those exemplar narratives is open to challenge, however, because it overgeneralises and oversimplifies complexities that geographers know about – hence the statement that ‘Looking at the region [the ‘so-called Middle East’ in the first case] from a geographical perspective, what key issues need to be understood if outsiders are to interact constructively with different parts of the region?’ Non-geographical grand regional narratives are inherently dangerous because they can lead to simplistic policies whose consequences are rarely only those intended – as with the second Iraq War. (One wonders, however, what geographers could contribute to arguments that democracy has ‘evident advantages over existing political arrangements’ there.)
Murphy provides no compelling evidence that a geographical grand regional narrative would be very different from non-geographical narratives in what it offered. He cites two examples. First, policymakers and commentators would have been less surprised by the ‘Arab Spring’ if they paid less attention to the authoritarians who exercised power in the countries affected and much more to ‘entrenched socioeconomic inequalities’ – a claim for which no evidence is cited; were Pentagon and State Department officials, plus a myriad ‘think tankers’, really so unaware of those inequalities and their potential to stimulate unrest and, perhaps, ‘revolution’? The second example concerns the lack of ‘careful, nuanced understanding of the nature and significance of sectarian divisions … in much of the public debate over the region’; many maps and discussions in The Economist, for example, have made its wide international readership clearly aware of such divisions and their implications.
Murphy’s second case study concerns parallels that some draw – they had entirely escaped me until I read his essay – between state-building in post-independence United States and the current situation in the European Union (EU). He argues, rightly, that such comparisons fail to recognise the great differences between long-standing deep political and cultural variations across the countries of the EU and the relative uniformity of the nascent United States. Again, I find it hard to believe that those who focus on the apparent similarities are really unaware of such differences between the two space-times or that it requires a grand geographical narrative to open their eyes to the realities. Analogues are often useful as means of illuminating and understanding a particular situation – as much to point up the differences as to emphasise the similarities; was not that one the messages deployed by early proponents of models in geography (Chorley and Haggett, 1967; see e.g. Winslow, 1966, and the subsequent debate, plus Bird, 1956)?
The third case concerns the use of the Global North–Global South binary in so many representations of the world, a ‘grand regionalization scheme that is so overtly and emphatically geographical … [but has given] rise to so little comment by geographers’. Murphy’s basic argument is repeated: the world is a more complex place than such simplistic theories suggest and geographers should be making sure the world knows this.
Murphy’s section on ‘Implications for public geographies’ sets his arguments into a wider context, hoping that more ‘big stories about regions’ could be produced that would be as influential as those written by scholars in other disciplines plus think tanks and similar institutions. He wants more geographers to play the role of ‘public intellectual’ (Castree, 2006), to engage in writing and other media performances that attract wider audiences and contribute to the framing of issues (in his case, although this is never made explicit, foreign policy issues).
So why have geographers not been addressing the grand narratives?
In two sections of his essay – ‘The nature and significance of grand regional narratives’ and ‘The role of grand regional narratives in human geography’ (until that moment he wrote about geography, not just human geography) – Murphy briefly examines why few geographers have engaged in the activities he wants expanded, why there is a ‘thinness of the body of geographical work focused on general regional circumstances’. 4 This, as he recognises, is somewhat paradoxical regarding his case: over recent decades human geographers have increasingly focused on the particular rather than the general, on the small-scale rather than the macroscale, illustrating his argument that geography stresses differences and variations between and across places rather than grand generalisations (‘a fundamental goal of much contemporary [human geographical] scholarship is to point out the shortcomings and simplifications of grand narratives’)! Many geographers – perhaps not enough? – do research within areas that foreign policy analysts are concerned with, 5 but their investigations are specific in both substance and context; although they may have implications for local policy, they are not readily used to create grand regional narratives.
Murphy refers several times to textbooks as geographers’ only recent writings offering ‘syntheses of major developments and trends in significant world regions’. This is very much a North American (United States) view, where such books are written to serve college and university introductory courses on geography for students with little background in the academic discipline from their school years. Many are ‘world regional geographies’ (Rees and Legates, 2013, 18, contend that ‘Regions are necessary tools to facilitate an understanding of space’). They have no UK equivalents, and not just because the geography discipline is widely taught in schools (ESRC/RGS/AHRC, 2013). Until the 1970s virtually all honours degree programmes included a range of regional geography courses – usually of a continent or sub-continent 6 – with several textbook series serving those markets. Most of the books were somewhat indigestible, however, following a set pattern of physical environment followed by human impress and then regional delimitation (Freeman, 1961): they certainly were not grand narratives that would inform foreign policy analysts and were increasingly discredited along with the approach to geography (one hesitates to say geographical scholarship) they catered to. Human geography changed thereafter, first to the grand narratives of spatial science and then to the local particularities explored in various ‘post-isms’ (Cresswell, 2013). Regions rarely appear in contemporary degree curricula and virtually no geographers follow Mead’s (1963, 2007) advice to adopt other lands, let alone essay ‘general portraits of large-scale regions’ (see also Clout, 2003).
A major argument typifying several contemporary areas of human geographical scholarship criticises – even rejects – all grand narratives. This does not mean that wide-ranging essays should be abjured, but rather rejects the concept of what Murphy terms authoritative and empirically grounded narratives. When essayed, those are individual and social creations; their production, and the ‘structures of understanding and meaning’ (Murphy’s terms) they convey, reflects the circumstances of their creation. They are, necessarily, ideological, reflecting their authors’ identities and positions, created and recreated in continuous processes of locale-based structuration. 7 They may be authoritative in one sense – they are grounded on generally accepted and verifiable ‘empirical information’ – but their arguments draw on particular interpretive positions, or world views. Indeed, some of the books Murphy cites favourably – Gregory’s The colonial present (2004), Harvey’s The new imperialism (2003) and A brief history of liberalism (2007), see also his Rebel cities (2012) and Neil Smith’s The endgame of globalization (2005) – clearly illustrate that, as does another which he cites unfavourably – Kaplan’s The revenge of geography (2012) – because he questions the ‘authoritative’ geographical foundation on which much of its grand narrative is built. If Murphy wants authoritative, value-free geographical grand narratives, our discipline’s recent history makes clear they are not feasible.
A final reason why few geographers are not writing grand regional narratives is that human geographers have recast their discipline as a social science, adopting many of its academic (including publishing) practices (and to a considerable extent those of the environmental sciences too). There has been a recent growing reattachment to the humanities, but their practices – with the greater emphases on both major monographs and grand narratives (some of which are regionally based: Belich, 2009) – have not been widely adopted by human geographers. (Yet again, we can blame the ‘league table cultures’ of contemporary academia!) Some of the profession’s senior members may write either or both of the ‘big books’ and the academically ‘non-standard’ publications Murphy wants more of, but the contemporary cultural context is against that becoming a major trend.
Conclusion
Murphy offers no clear agenda towards his goal, indeed the use of ‘engaging’ in his title suggests some ambivalence over what we are being invited to do, beyond ‘periodically adopt[ing] forms of communication that are accessible to a broader audience’ (some geographers do, as a myriad blogs illustrate: Wilson and Starkweather, 2013), to ‘talk to non-academic audiences’ and occasionally produce ‘a single publication that took on a broad-ranging historical or contemporary regional development and explained what can be gained from looking at that development geographically’ rather than the ageographical approach of most grand narratives (though he never spells out what looking at something geographically actually involves!). He does, however, imply that by not engaging in those ways we are failing to fulfil the reason for ‘our existence as a scholarly discipline’ (Hart, 1982a, 1) because ‘there is a cost to abdicating responsibility for constructing and critiquing grand regional narratives to those who are not in the habit of thinking about the world geographically’. (Although on reading Kaplan’s, 2012, book, I wondered how many geographers were as well informed about some of the empirical grounding to his claims, while rejecting the geography (sic) foundation on which his ideological arguments are based: Ditmer, 2013; Johnston, 2013.)
Geographers – or at least Anglophone geographers – have certainly collectively withdrawn from engagement with parts of the world beyond their national boundaries and, as a consequence, their work has had little impact on those framings of the world within which various aspects of international public policy have been debated and conducted. Whether Murphy’s admirable goal of increasing that engagement will succeed is doubtful, however, given current geographical practices and their academic contexts.