Advancing geographical understanding

Introduction

What are the critical challenges facing the European Union (EU) today? How might growing inequalities in China affect that country’s economic and political future? What are the principal sources of instability in contemporary Southwest Asia and North Africa? Will the United States continue to be the dominant global power in the 21st century? Broadscale regional questions of this sort figure prominently in the public debate; they are frequently topics of discussion in the news-oriented media, and they receive a great deal of scrutiny in political and policy circles. The attention they attract reflects a general recognition that how such questions are framed and answered can have significant political, social, and economic consequences.

Given the discipline of geography’s concern with the organization of phenomena on Earth’s surface, the character of different places and regions, and the interactions among processes within and across space, its practitioners are well positioned to contribute to the way broadscale regional questions are framed and answered. Yet, outside of some textbooks, it is relatively rare to come across recent publications by human geographers that paint general portraits of large-scale regions or that advance arguments about the types of developments that will likely affect future regional trajectories. The paucity of studies in this vein helps to explain why, for the most part, many influential regional narratives have developed and been deployed with little reference to ways of thinking associated with contemporary scholarship in human geography.

The hesitancy of contemporary human geographers to contribute to the formulation of what might be called grand regional narratives (as distinct from metanarratives—see below) may reflect geography’s recent emphasis on contextual differences—a concern that makes many disciplinary practitioners wary of overarching statements. Since generalized accounts of what is happening in different regions represent a fundamental way most people make sense of the world, however, 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. The goal of this article is to promote consideration of what those costs might be.

The article begins with a discussion of the nature and significance of grand regional narratives. Attention then turns to the gap that exists between such narratives and much contemporary human-geographic practice. Following that discussion, three case studies are examined that illustrate what is lost if grand regional narratives are not addressed more directly by human geographers: one focused on how regions are characterized (Southwest Asia/North Africa is the case study), one on how regions are compared (the contemporary EU and the early United States), and one on how regionalization schemes are deployed (the “North–South” dichotomization of the world). The article concludes with an examination of the relevance of the highlighted issues for the so-called public geographies project and a consideration of the types of adjustments in professional practice that are needed to facilitate academic geographers’ engagement with grand regional narratives.

The nature and significance of grand regional narratives

I use the term grand regional narrative in this article to refer to a generalized, empirically grounded account of what is going on, or has gone on, in a region of sufficient size and importance to be widely viewed as a significant presence on the world stage. There is a certain risk in using the “grand regional narrative” formulation, as grand narratives are sometimes thought of as synonyms for metanarratives. A metanarrative is a universal, comprehensive explanation of historical experience and present circumstance that shapes thinking in fundamental (and often unexamined) ways (see Lyotard, 1984; originally published in 1979). The types of metanarratives discussed (and critiqued) by Lyotard are rooted in world views that are a product of major sociocultural movements (e.g. the Enlightenment), political–theoretical orientations (e.g. Marxism), religious traditions, and the like. Lyotard, among many others, has fundamentally challenged the integrity and coherence of such metanarratives, arguing instead for a focus on small, localized narratives, or “petits récits.”

There is a considerable gap, however, between the metanarratives Lyotard critiques and the small-scale alternatives he champions. That gap is populated by mesoscale accounts that are less conceptually overarching than metanarratives, but involve a higher level generalization of empirical understanding than is captured by localized narratives. A generalized story about the development and prospects of a significant segment of Earth’s surface is an example of a mesoscale narrative. Unfortunately, there is no widely accepted descriptive term that is used to describe narratives of this sort. Since the word grand is generally understood to be less all encompassing than “meta” (from the Greek word for beyond), however, it is reasonable to view a grand narrative as a mesoscale narrative that is rooted in a generalized interpretation of circumstances and events, but does not necessarily embody the kind of overarching, conceptually rooted explanation that typifies a metanarrative.

Lyotard himself did not recognize this distinction, using the terms grand narrative and metanarrative more-or-less interchangeably, but there is certainly scholarly precedent for distinguishing between grand and metanarratives. Allan Megill (1995: 152–153), for example, identifies four different levels of narrative: everyday narratives, master narratives, grand narratives, and metanarratives. Megill’s use of the term grand narrative is somewhat different from that which is proposed here, but he makes a good case for drawing distinctions between different types of narratives (in his case, situating grand narratives between syntheses that make an authoritative claim and fundamental, often religiously inspired, world views). More in keeping with the way the term grand narrative is deployed in this article, John Warner (2004) uses the grand narrative turn of phrase to describe a particular, widely accepted story that took root about the use of professional power in the medical profession in the 1970s. Reflecting on the conceptual implications of his analysis, Warner draws a distinction between grand narratives and “master narratives” (read metanarratives), arguing that the latter are “more deeply tainted than Grand Narrative with connotations of linear, positivistic, and invidiously exclusionary historical accounts” (Warner, 2004: 765, footnote 7). Warner’s approach is consistent with the use of the term grand narrative in a variety of other studies, which reference the kinds of generalized empirical understandings that influence how people view the world, but do not aim to invoke the overarching modernist explanatory framework that is usually associated with the metanarrative concept (see, e.g. Raina’s 2003 discussion of the “Grand Narrative of ‘Terrorism’”).

The point of carving out some independent conceptual terrain for a grand (as distinct from the meta-) narrative is that much of the give and take about what is happening in the world involves the juxtaposition of synthetic narratives that do not necessarily challenge transhistorical understandings. When Jonathan Spence (1990) explored the question of why Qing-dynasty China was not a global power despite the country’s head start in earlier centuries, he was not necessarily challenging progressivist historical metanarratives, whether classical liberal or Marxist in their orientation. Instead, he was offering a reinterpretation of a generalized narrative of how China developed over time: a grand regional narrative, as I am using the phrase here. In a similar vein, one can embrace a similar metanarrative about China’s long-term development and yet adopt different explanations (or narratives) about the political and economic circumstances that gave rise to China’s recent resurgence. The point is that some analytical space for such mesoscale regional narratives is needed—a space that is separate and distinct from metanarratives, but that still embodies a generalized sense of how and why certain circumstances have unfolded. The term grand regional narrative captures that middle ground.

In a more practical vein, focusing attention on grand regional narratives matters because myriad understandings and actions are influenced by the basic stories people tell themselves about different parts of Earth’s surface. Following the historiographer Hayden White (1987: 1), these might be thought of as generalized “code(s) … on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.” They are not just convenient frameworks for organizing pieces of information. As the literature in psychology makes clear, they are fundamental to the way people make sense of the world (see, e.g. Boston, 2009: 158; Brunner, 1991: 4).

Seen in this light, grand regional narratives are far more than simple collections of facts or events; they create a structure of understanding and meaning based on those facts and events (Sandlos, 1998). Those understandings and meanings, in turn, play “a critical role in providing frames within which the meaning of the larger societal experience can be grasped” (Irving and Klenke, 2004: 33). Irving and Klenke’s work focuses on the influence overarching narratives play in leadership training, but the crucial ideological and social significance of grand narratives has received significant attention in a variety of other fields of study including environmental education (e.g. Bowers, 1995; Sandlos, 1998), international relations (e.g. Linklater, 2009), and conflict resolution (e.g. Auerbach, 2011).

Explicit discussions of the nature and importance of grand narratives are not common in the geographic literature, although Holly Buck’s (in press) examination of the importance of geoengineering narratives to environmental understanding includes an extended review of the role narratives play in people’s understanding and outlook. She makes the case for developing new concepts and metaphors that speak to existing grand narratives, for “new terminology and new metaphors don’t just reflect changing realities; they create shifts in the narrative, open the way for shifting realities, make change possible.” Drawing on David Harvey’s (1999: 111) discussion of how different narratives shape the way environmental justice issues are perceived, she persuasively argues for a direct engagement with the narratives people use to interpret science. Other recent work in the human geographic literature also treats grand narratives as central objects of critical analysis, including Pedynowski’s (2003) study of the way a particular narrative about science limits understanding of what science has to offer, Dittmer’s (2007) examination of how “metanarratives” of Russian national identity have influenced debates over North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Dittmer’s use of the term metanarrative is more akin to my use of grand narrative), Pain’s (2009) analysis of the way a particular narrative of “globalized fear” has been deployed in studies informed by critical geopolitics perspectives, and de Oliver’s (2011) investigation of how the obsolescence of grand narratives of group or national exceptionality have undermined the standing of anti-immigrant organizations.

The foregoing studies are all premised on the idea that grand narratives play a powerful role in society. As such, there is clearly much to be gained from studying them and trying to shape them. However, making such a claim is decidedly not the same as asserting that those narratives have some authoritative or all encompassing character. As Roland Barthes (1970) persuasively argued some time ago, narratives are always partial and defy any single interpretation—a point consistently reinforced by the critical theory-inspired literature of recent decades. And despite my call for more attention to grand regional narratives in this article, I readily acknowledge that, at least in some respects, the traditional grand narrative form is in retreat in the face of new approaches to communication and interaction. As Sandlos (1998: 5) puts it:

Increasingly the dominant methods of information passage and storage … are the sound byte, the video clip, the database, and other technologically mediated forms of communication. The coming of the information age has increasingly meant that human beings communicate without context or meaning and without narratives to encode the information that is swirling around the planet at increasing speed.

The underlying point is that empirically grounded generalized stories, though necessarily contingent, selective, and besieged by new technologies and forms of social interaction, remain important shapers of the way people think about and approach the world. One can take the position that the classic, all-encompassing modernist metanarrative of progress brought about through the application of human reason is being fundamentally undermined and still conclude that there are influential mesoscale empirically grounded narratives about regions (the grand regional narratives that are the focus of attention in this article) that shape ideas and actions. These narratives 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. They are rooted in ontological and epistemological predispositions, but also in accounts of events, circumstances, and material arrangements—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.

The role of grand regional narratives in human geography

By definition, engaging a grand narrative requires big-picture scholarship. There are certainly many examples of such scholarship in the recent human geography literature, including studies focused on major forces shaping the contemporary world (e.g. Agnew, 2009; Harvey, 2003; Smith, 2005), studies examining how significant contemporary issues are being framed and addressed (e.g. Elden, 2009; Monmonier, 2001), studies promoting important new conceptual and research approaches (e.g. Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008; Kates et al., 2001), and studies examining major historical and contemporary geographic changes (e.g. Carney, 2001; Clark, 2006; Williams, 2003). With a few notable exceptions, however, it is not common to find geographic studies overtly addressing the types of regionally focused questions posed at the beginning of this article, and it is not common (outside of textbooks) to find recent writings by geographers offering syntheses of major developments and trends in significant world regions. Consider, for example, the articles (2002–2011) published in the last 10 years in the “People, Place, and Region” section of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Of the 146 articles that appeared over that stretch of time, there were no more than 16 with titles that suggest a concern with the general trajectory or character of a major world region—defined at the lower end of the spectrum as a modest-sized country or significant region within a large country, and at the upper end of the spectrum as a continent or other macrodivision of Earth’s surface. ¹ Articles appearing in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers over the same period reveal a similar pattern; at most 20 of the 307 published articles (in all subfields of geography) are framed in ways that focus on the nature or prospects of a major world region. ² And almost none of the articles in either of these journals offer a synthetic overview or comparative assessment of trends affecting major world regions.

The recent book literature provides a few notable examples of broad-ranging treatments of significant world regions by geographers, including Meinig’s (1986–2004) four-volume overview of the “Shaping of America”; Rigg’s (1997) analysis of modernization’s impact on Southeast Asia; Gregory’s (2004) assessment of the continuing imprint of colonialism on Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq; Glasmeier’s (2005) cartographic examination of poverty’s impact on America; de Blij’s (2005a; 2012) reviews of metageographical trends in several world regions; Tyner’s (2009) assessment of the impacts of globalization on the Philippines; Smith’s (2010) study of the forces shaping the future of the Arctic; and Toal and Dahlman’s (2011) investigation of the unmaking and remaking of Bosnia. Moreover, Lewis and Wigen (1997) have authored a powerful book on the importance of focusing attention on regions and what they mean. As impressive as this (inevitably incomplete) list of region-focused books authored by geographers is, its relative brevity is suggested by the fact that books by geographers are rarely referenced or reviewed in the types of wide circulation journals or newspapers that play a significant role in shaping the public debate.

There is no simple explanation for the thinness of the body of geographic work focused on general regional circumstances, but the major theoretical shifts of the past few decades have almost certainly worked against the production of large-scale narratives about regions—just as they have worked against the production of other types of grand narratives in different fields of inquiry (see Priestland, 2012). The logic behind the theoretical and methodological disquisitions that lie behind this trend cannot (indeed should not) be dismissed. A broad and deep literature inspired by critical realist, poststructuralist, feminist, and postmodernist perspectives has highlighted the value of intensive investigations of relatively small-scale cases in the quest for insight and understanding. Hence, a fundamental goal of much contemporary scholarship is to point out the shortcomings and simplifications of grand narratives so we can gain a better understanding and appreciation of the world. Work in this vein can certainly serve to challenge the coherence of particular grand narratives, which in turn can pave the way for the development of counter narratives over time. But in the absence of some actively sketched out counter narrative with fairly clearly defined contours, most people are unlikely to embrace alternative conceptions—and the task of reinforcing or challenging dominant regional analyses will be left to others. Oxford historian David Priestland (2012) makes this point in an essay about trends in historical scholarship.

In their abandonment of the big picture in favour of the fragment, academic historians have ceded the political high ground. And this crucial strategic space has been occupied by popular historians from the liberal centre and the right, such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts.

To promote consideration of what is at stake in this regard, I turn to three examples that underscore why geographic engagement with grand regional narratives matters. The first looks at the types of grand regional narratives that have played a dominant role in geopolitical understandings of a significant region—Southwest Asia/North Africa—to highlight why such narratives can benefit from geographical input. The second turns to an example of a frequently invoked regional comparison—between the contemporary EU and the early United States—to focus attention on how geographical thinking can contribute to the formulation of the types of comparative claims that often undergird grand regional narratives. The third focuses on the widespread use of a common, if problematic, regionalization scheme—Global North versus Global South—to encourage consideration of the consequences of the general failure to think more critically about large-scale regional constructs.

Characterizing regions: the case of Southwest Asia/North Africa

Over the past decade, perhaps no part of the world has attracted more attention by students of international relations and geopolitics than Southwest Asia and North Africa—the so-called Middle East. In the early 2000s, a regional grand narrative flourished in some influential US foreign policy circles in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. That narrative casts the Middle East as a uniquely dangerous region characterized by a population (outside of Israel) capable of being united under the banner of a violent, anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism and in a position to pose a serious threat to regional, and indeed global, stability if democracy did not take root there (see, e.g. Dalby, 2003; Gordon, 2003). Altering this state of affairs, according to the narrative, required bringing Western democracy to the heart of the region—something that could only be accomplished through the use of force but something that would likely be welcomed because of democracy’s evident advantages over existing political arrangements (Rieff, 2012). It goes without saying that this narrative helped to pave the way for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq—and to draw support for that invasion from selected other countries.

There is no need to review here the multiple challenges that could be (and in some cases were) raised to this narrative. Suffice it to say that it could be criticized for being rooted in a fanciful view that identities were coalescing around large-scale, discrete, and oppositional “cultures” (the “clash of civilizations” thesis set forth most explicitly by Huntington, 1996); for ignoring critical internal social, cultural, ethnic, and national divisions; for exaggerating the threat posed by Islamist radicalism; and for assuming that a political–institutional framework developed elsewhere could be successfully imposed on a region from outside. These critiques were advanced by human geographers (see, e.g. the forum in The Arab World Geographer organized and introduced by Falah (2003)). Yet, beyond efforts to point to fallacies underlying the type of grand narrative outlined above, in the years that followed there were few broadly targeted and accessible efforts by geographers to sketch out the parameters of an alternative grand regional narrative aimed at policymakers or the general public. ³ Looking at the region from a geographical perspective, what key issues need to be understood if outsiders are to interact constructively with different parts of the region? What social, economic, environmental, and political arrangements deserve particular attention in the years to come? What places may be vulnerable to contestation, and why? The contributions from geographers taking up those broad questions are hard to find.

Of course, addressing such questions invites generalizations that necessarily require some degree of simplification; as such academic geographers would be remiss if they devoted most of their time to syntheses at the scale these questions invite. But whether geographers take up such questions or not, others will; to avoid them, then, is to leave the terrain open to others who might understand that geography matters, but who do not necessarily share the sensibilities or insights that come from extensive study of the subject. Robert Kaplan’s (2012) book “The Revenge of Geography,” which is an expanded version of an article with the same title (Kaplan, 2009), provides a case in point.

Employing a fluid writing style and an authoritative tone, Kaplan draws on geopolitical thinkers from a century ago—most notably Halford Mackinder—to argue that geography (by which he mostly means climatic circumstance, landforms, rivers, and sometimes demographic characteristics) will have a greater impact on what happens in the Middle East in the years to come than anything else. The essence of the argument is summed up in his earlier Foreign Policy piece, where he wrote:

In fact, much of Eurasia will eventually be as claustrophobic as Israel and the Palestinian territories, with geography controlling everything and no room to maneuver … The ability of states to control events will be diluted, in some cases destroyed. Artificial borders will crumble and become more fissiparous, leaving only rivers, deserts, mountains, and other enduring facts of geography. Indeed, the physical features of the landscape may be the only reliable guides left to understanding the shape of future conflict. Like rifts in the Earth’s crust that produce physical instability, there are areas in Eurasia that are more prone to conflict than others. These ‘shatter zones’ threaten to implode, explode, or maintain a fragile equilibrium. And not surprisingly, they fall within that unstable inner core of Eurasia: the greater Middle East, the vast way station between the Mediterranean world and the Indian subcontinent that registers all the primary shifts in global power politics. (Kaplan, 2009: 102)

Kaplan is certainly not without his critics outside the discipline of geography (see, e.g. Drezner, 2009); even somewhat sympathetic reviewers have noted many internal inconsistencies in his account (see, e.g. Slaughter, 2012). But it is hard not to agree with Morrissey (2009: 37), when he responds to his own question “does Kaplan matter?” with an emphatic (if regretful) yes. Dalby (2009: 43) reaches the same conclusion—closing a review of Kaplan’s 2009 article with a call for geographers:

… to contest this imperial nostalgia, not only because it misconstrues the present, and does so dangerously, but also because it’s high time we insist that the discipline has something substantial to say about our collective fate … But to make that substantial contribution to the discussion of our collective future we need both up to date maps and clear understandings of our new place in the changing biosphere.

Such an undertaking, of course, is not easy—and it can involve a certain amount of risk. ⁵ Efforts along these lines need not be driven by the effort to develop Kaplan-like generalities, but to be effective, it is important to move beyond critiques of other people’s narratives to point to particular regional circumstances or developments that are deserving of attention. Consider, for example, two matters that are fundamentally geographical in nature but that have largely been missing from the narratives that have dominated external thinking about the Middle East: socioeconomic inequalities and sectarian divisions. Turning to the first of these, in the wake of the uprisings that broke out in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in 2011 (popularly known as the “Arab Spring”), many policymakers and commentators suggested that they were caught completely off guard. The surprise factor might have been significantly reduced, however, if pundits had been less preoccupied with who was in power and more concerned with underlying socioeconomic patterns. Egypt and Oman are both governed by authoritarian regimes, but unrest has been much greater in the former than the latter. The reasons for this difference are complex, but the far more entrenched socioeconomic inequalities in Egypt are surely part of the story. That matter might have been harder to overlook if there had been a few general geographical studies looking comparatively at socioeconomic divisions within the region.

A careful, nuanced understanding of the nature and significance of sectarian divisions has also been missing in much of the public debate over the region; indeed they were almost entirely ignored in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. Even after the 2003 invasion, sectarian divisions were generally acknowledged only at the level of broad differences among the country’s Arab Sunnis, Arab Shiites, and Kurds. However, such differences are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. To this day, more deep-seated, locally significant sectarian divisions are rarely given systematic consideration by most commentators—even in the face of developments such as the uprising in Syria that clearly has sectarian overtones. David Rieff (2012) has written a thought-provoking piece attributing that oversight to the appeal across the political spectrum of a progressivist narrative that relegates such divisions to a supposedly more unenlightened past. He makes a strong case. Whatever the cause, however, the reality, to use Rieff’s (2012: 32–33) words, is that “at least in the West, the political and intellectual ruling classes seem to have to ‘rediscover’ sectarianism every time it crops up (which, of course, is often) only to forget about it again” (parenthetical in the original). Might that rediscovery be more likely if there were a few general geographical studies assessing the nature and significance of sectarian divisions in Southwest Asia/North Africa?

The point is that unless geographers play a more visible role in shaping grand regional narratives, ageographical ways of thinking underlying those grand narratives are unlikely to be challenged. A recent study of the US National Research Council (2010) takes the position that geographical ideas, approaches, and techniques can greatly enrich our understanding of a wide array of social, environmental, and technological issues. If that point is to be more widely recognized, the construction of grand regional narratives cannot be left to those with little sense of what geography has to offer.

Comparing regions: the early US analog for European integration

Generalized comparisons between places are often fundamental to the way grand regional narratives develop because such comparisons allow people to put what is happening in some kind of context. Consider, for example, Amartya Sen’s (2011) wide ranging, influential comparative examination of the quality of life in India and China that appeared recently in the New York Review of Books. Sen’s willingness to undertake this type of analysis is likely driven by the idea that a better understanding of the situation of both countries can come from looking at general trends in comparative perspective, and the extensive attention his essay garnered is indicative of how influential such pieces can be in shaping the public debate. The paucity of geographical studies framed at similar scales, however, works against the incorporation of geographical concepts and ideas into the ways in which regions are broadly conceptualized.

One example that serves to underscore this point comes from a frequently invoked comparison between the contemporary EU and the United States in the decades immediately following its independence from Britain. Steven Hill (2012) sets forth the basic comparative narrative in the following way:

It is important to understand that Europe today is in its own Articles of Confederation stage, entangled by many contradictions and tensions as it tries to fashion its union and decide how integrated it wants to be. This process will take many years, as it did for a young United States of America that fought a civil war over states rights and member states’ sovereignty seventy years after its founding.

Drawing parallels between contemporary Europe and late-18th- to early-19th-century America serves to highlight similarities in institutional context (the large, spatially divergent debt burdens of the two entities) and reinforce the idea that forging a common sense of identity is simply a matter of letting integration play out over a substantial period of time (accords with Weisenthal, 2011). This narrative has greatly influenced thinking and policy over the past quarter century. It helped to bolster the idea that the EU should increasingly be adopting state-like characteristics—a proposition given concrete expression by the move toward monetary union—and it is being deployed with some success by those who believe that greater fiscal centralization in Europe is the best way to move beyond the sovereign debt crisis of recent years (Murphy, in press). Yet, there is growing evidence that it is helping to push the EU in a direction that could bring more, rather than fewer, challenges to a political experiment that is already suffering a crisis of democratic legitimacy (see generally Schmidt, 2004).

What is ignored in this comparison is the lack of parallelism in the types of political-cum-cultural communities found in the early United States and in contemporary Europe. The larger scale identity communities of contemporary Europe were, for the most part, forged during the age of nationalism, and their significance has been reinforced by long-standing political–territorial arrangements and linguistic differences; they are fundamentally different from the identity communities that comprised the early United States, which brought together under one jurisdictional umbrella former colonies that had not fostered nationalist-like attachments and were all dominantly English speaking. Only by ignoring considerations of this sort can one argue, as has Papic (2011), that the early United States represents “the best analogy for the contemporary European Union … (because) one can find many parallels with the European Union, among others a weak center, independent states, economic crisis and over-indebtedness.” To state the proposition more generally, without some effort to grapple with human geographic differences that transcend institutional and economic circumstances, the effort to understand the lessons that one region holds for the other can be fundamentally impoverished. It follows that bringing geographical thinking to bear on the broad regional comparisons that are invoked to support some grand regional narratives represents a further rationale for promoting more engagement by geographers with such narratives.

Using regions: the “Global North–Global South” dichotomization of the world

Grand regional narratives are not just driven by regional characterizations and contrasts, as Lewis and Wigen (1997) persuasively argue how we conceptually divide up the world matters as well. Lewis and Wigen’s study directed attention to divisions of the globe at the continental scale, but an even larger scale division has become increasingly common over the past two decades: “Global North” versus “Global South.” This terminological and conceptual dichotomization has its roots in the perceived usefulness of focusing attention on significant regional differences in the levels of socioeconomic well-being, and accompanying power differentials, across the planet. Given initial impetus by the Brandt Report (Brandt Commission, 1980), a North–South framing, which predated the Global North–Global South language, gained traction when a growing number of development practitioners and academics sought to move beyond the limitations and biases of prior generalized approaches to characterizing macrosocioeconomic-cum-political divides. ⁶ To many commentators, it represented an improvement on the value-laden terminology of “developed–underdeveloped” or “developed–developing,” the blatant inaccuracy of the “industrialized–nonindustrialized” binary in the wake of the migration of much industry to historically less industrialized parts of the globe, and the geopolitically obsolete “First World–Second World–Third World” trichotomization after 1989 (see generally Berger, 1994; Reuveny and Thompson, 2007). The growing ascendance of a Global North–Global South discourse has brought a geographically explicit terminological division of the world into common use. The terms Global North and Global South seek to capture both the extent of the development divide between different parts of the planet and, increasingly, the constraints on the ability of those in the so-called Global South to improve their circumstances as a consequence of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and the unequal power relations that are endemic to economic globalization. ⁷

While it is true that Global North and Global South do not carry the pejorative baggage of terms such as underdeveloped, when viewed through a critical geographical lens, a simple North–South regional dichotomization of the world is fundamentally problematic. Most obviously, no matter what index one uses to draw distinctions along socioeconomic lines, the countries of the Global North do not all lie in the North; New Zealand and Australia are quite far south, Singapore sits on the equator, Israel is farther south than Syria, and so forth. Moreover, within continents typically assigned to the Global South, some of the most prosperous countries lie farthest to the south (South Africa in Africa, Chile and Argentina in South America).

If these were the only problems with the Global North–Global South framing, one could perhaps sympathize with those who take the position that a certain amount of messiness is an inevitable feature of any broad division of the world, so we simply have to live with the imprecision of “Global North–Global South” (an argument advanced by Heath, 1981, Reuveny and Thompson, 2007, and Grovogui, 2011, among others). ⁸ Yet, the problems with this kind of North–South framing run much deeper. Because the division is rooted in locational/latitudinal terms, it carries with it—and indeed may well help to sustain—environmentalist overtones; to be in the northern latitudes is to be prosperous and powerful; to be farther south is the opposite. Moreover, it perpetuates the idea that we live in a fundamentally bimodal world of wealthy countries and poor countries. Even leaving aside the within-country disparities that are ignored in such an approach, it makes increasingly less sense to divide up the world in this way given the substantial number of cases that lie somewhere near the middle, no matter what variable is the focus of analysis. In short, by directing attention largely to countries and dichotomizing the world, Global North–Global South portrays an image of the spatiality of development or wealth that is significantly at odds with reality.

There have been some attempts to defend this geographical framing on substantive grounds despite these critiques. Najam (2005) argues that the North–South dichotomization is useful because the countries of the Global South frequently act as a diplomatic unit; Grovogui (2011) insists that Global South is acceptable if understood more as a metaphor than an etymology. These defenses, however, ignore the fact that there are many significant divisions within the Global South, including diplomatic ones (Sudan, South Sudan, India, and Pakistan are all conventionally grouped with the “Global South”). Moreover, it is unlikely the Global South is viewed primarily in metaphorical terms, even if that is the way some would like to see the concept deployed. Expanding on this point, Vanolo (2010: 34) argues that the North–South framing is one of the several unconsciously deployed caricatures of global divisions that have stifled creative thinking and undermined the idea that geographical spaces are modifiable social constructs, McFarlane (2006: 4) contends that a North–South division of the planet fosters “active imaginative barriers that militate against the possibilities of different countries to learn from one another,” and Kreutzmann (2008: 676) suggests that the North–South binary is the latest version of a set of categories that have helped to sustain “container thinking.” Against this backdrop, it is surprising to find that, with only a few recent exceptions (see below), geographers have tended to adopt the North–South framework uncritically and have been largely silent about one of the more commonly deployed geographical tropes used to conceptually partition the world. Notably, this general disciplinary reticence has taken place in the face of scholarly interventions arguing that dominant categorizations of the world can fundamentally affect how power is understood and deployed (Slater, 1997). ⁹

There is certainly much that can be said about the limitations of a Global North–Global South framing of the world. Two Swiss political scientists have written a trenchant critique of the binary (Eckl and Weber, 2007), arguing that:

First, it eclipses the heterogeneity within the two poles—both within and among states. Second, it neglects those who do not join either of the two sides; third, it does not specify what exactly is meant by the phrase. The latter point can be accounted for by the linguistic concept of metonymy. Both the phrase ‘North–South divide’ and the terms ‘North’ and ‘South’ are-apart from their rough geographical meaning basically void of fixed content; the specific meaning has been deleted … Language matters: words create and shape our understanding of the world, and we base our judgements and decisions on them. The language that we use should reflect this insight. (Eckl and Weber, 2007: 17–18)

Encouragingly, a few recent publications in geography journals suggest that at least the beginnings of such a reexamination may be under way. In a study of what airline flows between cities call tell us about the coherence of the “South,” Taylor et al. (2009: 836) conclude that Global South “is a geographical chaotic conception, which has possible implications for its major sponsor, the United Nations Development Programme, wedded to an old political geography, while “real, existing” economic development proceeds regardless.” In a related vein, Vanolo (2010: 30) has argued that North–South framings are one of several “modernist-oppositional metaphors” driven by an inner logic that serves “to define a geographical conceptual boundary between two rough categories: the modern world and the ‘rest’ … communicating implicitly a message of ineluctability with respect to the problem of development.” And Sidaway (2012: 53) has made explicit reference to the challenges that have been leveled against the Global South appellation, arguing that the categorization is “fundamentally in question” in the wake of the types of critiques described previously.

However, these geographical critiques are the exception rather than the rule. More common, as noted above, is the deployment of a Global North–Global South framing as if it were completely unproblematic. That a grand regionalization scheme that is so overtly and emphatically geographical could give rise to so little comment by geographers suggests a lack of sufficient engagement by disciplinary practitioners with developments at the scale of major world regions. If the Global North–Global South scheme had received more critical scrutiny, more geographically sensitive approaches to dividing up the planet might well have gained traction, or at least we might be seeing a more judicious deployment of what is, at best, a highly generalized spatial categorization of the planet.

Implications for public geographies

The past few years have seen growing calls for public scholarship in and beyond geography (see, e.g. Mitchell, 2008a; Moseley, 2010). Public scholarship can take many forms, of course, but the role of grand regional narratives in geography represents a potentially significant issue for the effort to promote “public geographies”—a phrase particularly associated with the British geographic literature, where it is used to refer to “being in conversation with publics” (Fuller and Askins, 2007: 655). The public geographies literature embraces a wide range of endeavors by geographers, including efforts to bridge the gap between the academy and the larger society (see Castree, 2006; Mitchell, 2008a; Murphy, 2006). Initially, proponents of such bridging efforts focused on promoting geographers’ engagement with the policy-making process (see, e.g. James et al., 2004; Johnston and Plummer, 2005). Over time, however, attention has turned to a broadened conception of social impact, one that encompasses not just policy studies but also research endeavors involving public participation, activist initiatives, reorganized pedagogies concerned with public outreach, the styles of presentation that can reach a wider audience, the ways in which new technologies and social practices can facilitate different types of public engagement, and the constraints presented by the institutional contexts within which geographers work (Castree, 2000; Fuller, 2008; Fuller and Askins, 2007, 2010; Hawkins et al., 2011; Ward, 2006). ¹⁰

Against this backdrop, one might expect the public geographies literature to include significant discussion of the role geographers can or should take in shaping grand narratives. Yet, for the most part that discussion has not taken place. Perhaps the most notable exception is Castree’s (2006) piece on “geography’s new public intellectuals,” which argues that studies by Harvey (2005), Smith (2005), and Retort (2005) have the potential to influence public debate in part because they offer “‘big stories’ both in the sense that they’re analyzing global affairs and in the sense that they present an encompassing framework for doing so that is deployed without apologies even though it is inevitably partial” (Castree, 2006: 399). The studies cited by Castree are focused more on general processes than on developments in particular regions, but the logic behind his statement clearly extends to works that seek to provide generalized accounts of what is going in major world regions.

The importance of focusing attention on big stories about regions comes into focus when one considers just how influential selected works by nongeographers have been in promoting influential grant regional narratives. In the US context, for example, works purporting to describe the character or development of major world regions by Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, Thomas Friedman, and Thomas Barnett regularly appear on lists of influential works being read (or recommended to be read) by policy and military elites (see, e.g. American Foreign Service Association, undated; National Defense University, undated; U.S. Army Chief of Staff, 2012). Betts (2010: 187) argues that studies of this sort serve as “beacons, because even practical policymakers who shun ivory-tower theories still tend to think roughly in terms of one of them, and no other visions have yet been offered that match their scope and depth.” The last part of Betts’ comment in particular speaks to the fundamental importance of the issues raised in this article for the public geographies project. If pervasive grand regional narratives are not challenged, or if they are challenged only incrementally and indirectly, opportunities to shape public conversations and decisions will be lost. Instead, the terrain will be left to others, who will not necessarily take the conversation in a direction that many geographers would regard as felicitous.

Conclusion

The lack of much discussion of grand regional narratives in the geographical literature may well reflect a concern about giving credence to stories that, at least implicitly, purport to be authoritative. Yet, to engage a grand regional narrative is not to accept either that it offers some comprehensive, determinate understanding or to suggest that a counter narrative can play that role. It is, instead, to make an argument based on a set of ideas, perspectives, and understandings that can contribute to shaping the overarching stories about regions that so profoundly influence public understandings and actions.

Promoting geography’s role in public debate requires that we think seriously about influential understandings of events and developments, and that we undertake the research and analysis that can speak to those understandings. It also requires that we periodically adopt forms of communication that are accessible to a broader audience. In so doing, it is important to be attentive to the possibility that dominant public discursive framings of issues can foreclose consideration of alternative possibilities (Gregory, 2005). Yet, many important points can be made to a broad audience without sacrificing intellectual integrity; following Katharyne Mitchell (2008b: 3), the adjustments and compromises one needs to make when presenting ideas to the general public are often “relatively minor in the larger course of things.”

More generally, successful efforts to substantiate or challenge grand regional narratives will require some adjustment in dominant scholarly norms. Staeheli and Mitchell (2008) are clearly right when they argue that there are multiple ways for geographers to have a public impact—to be relevant—but at least sometimes it is important not just to critique, but to offer suggestions. As Doreen Massey (2008: 144–145) put it:

It is salutary, and politically important, I think, not always to be in a position of critic (I think of all the easy, anti-State stuff, and sniping from ‘the margins’—which academics rarely inhabit—that litters much theoretical and ‘critical’ writing); to be forced to be constructive and to take a different kind of responsibility. (parenthetical in the original)

In 2004, Peter Dicken drew on these critiques in a piece that clearly resonates with the present effort. Dicken asked why geographers were not particularly visible in the politically significant debates taking place over the concept of globalization. He attributed this state of affairs to three features of much contemporary geographic practice (Dicken, 2004: 18):

One is the increasingly high level of international specialization and microscopic focus of much of our research. The second is that we need to talk to each other more: to overcome our reluctance to engage in real dialogue with our colleagues. The third, and perhaps the most important, is that we need to get out more, not just down to the “local” (as it were) but also into the wider world.

In his article, Dicken was not challenging the importance of focusing on difference, particularity, and situatedness. Nor were Johnston, Taylor, or Bonnett in the previously cited pieces. Instead, they were all encouraging geographers to engage more directly with larger scale issues, patterns, and trends. The present article shares that perspective—not just so that geographers can enhance their status but so that the grand regional narratives that shape thinking and understanding can be enriched by what a geographical perspective has to offer.

Playing a larger role in shaping the evolution of grand regional narratives will also require expanded efforts to disseminate the results of geographic research beyond traditional scholarly outlets. Contributions to publications that circulate widely outside academic circles can serve this end, whether they be articles in current affairs journals or opinion pieces in newspapers or blogs (William Moseley’s effective series of columns in Al-Jazerra English on the 2012 coup in Mali provides an excellent example of what can be accomplished along these lines. ¹² ). Talks to nonacademic audiences can be valuable as well (de Blij, 2005b), as can direct participation in influential domestic and international scientific and policy discussions (Turner, 2005).

Reaching beyond the academy, however, is not the only means of addressing the challenge. Regional or systematic syntheses published in academic journals and scholarly monographs can also provide important foundational material for engaging grand regional narratives (see Murphy and O’Loughlin, 2009). If just once every few years each research-oriented geographer produced 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, there would be much more fodder for the insertion of geographical understandings and perspectives into existing grand regional narratives.

In this article, I deliberately make reference to a range of work coming from geographers whose work is informed by different theoretical and political orientations. I adopted this approach because I do not think scholarship along the lines discussed here should be confined to any single corner of the discipline, nor do I think any particular approach or perspective has all the answers. What is needed is a set of vigorously supported and articulated ideas that speak to prevailing grand regional narratives, united not by their approaches or conclusions but by their effort to consider what can be learned by bringing geographical ideas, perspectives, and techniques to bear in the analysis of issues of broad regional significance. The community of geographers will not agree on all, or even most, of the points that come out of such analyses, but efforts along these lines from different perspectives can lead to the type of healthy debate that can enrich not just the wider conversation but geography itself.