From liberal to conservative: shifting cultural policy regimes in post-Soviet Russia

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of Russian cultural policy from the end of the Soviet era through the current against the framework of welfare state regimes. The end of the Soviet Union 25 years ago ushered in a decade of liberalization marked by a withdrawal of the state from cultural responsibility and hopes that market demand and private support would emerge to fill in the void. With the latter hampered by the economic hardships of the transition and the loss of philanthropic traditions after more than 70 years of communism, a liberal policy regime did not take firmly hold and has gradually been replaced by a new cultural policy consensus more akin to a conservative welfare regime, marked by a return of the state to a more dominant role with the support of core cultural policy constituencies.     

Russia's penal peripheries: space, place and penalty in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Russia has a distinctive 'geography of punishment' that is the product of the use of the peripheries as a place of exile and incarceration. Framing the analysis in a discussion of recent penal theory, including in the works of Michel Foucault, the author traces the formation of Russia's penal peripheries up to the present day and uses the example of the north of Perm' oblast to analyse the process involved in forging a 'penal region'.     

Bangladeshi immigrants in Italy: from geopolitics to micropolitics

"Bangladeshis are one of a wide variety of recently established immigrant groups in Italy, analysed here as an example of the interaction of geopolitics, employment and survival strategies, and the micropolitics of the community's organization in Italy. The geopolitics involves events in Bangladesh (change of government), Italy (the Martelli Law and other legislation), Europe (EU and other European policies, and the opening of eastern Europe as a routeway) and the Gulf. The micropolitics concerns mechanisms of immigration, migration sponsorship, connections to Italian political groups and clientelistic relationships within the community. Micropolitics also governs to a large extent the types of mostly informal work done by Bangladeshis in Rome."     

Intertextual relations: The geopolitics of land rights in Thailand

This paper explores the geopolitics surrounding the “modernization” of the formal property rights regime in land in Thailand (formerly Siam) from the mid 1850s to the late 1930s. The paper argues that this weak, peripheral state, in pursuit of international recognition of territorial and jurisdictional sovereignty, employed a strategy of “counter-spatialization” in order to mitigate or deny claims for control over natural resources and population groups by imperial powers. The intertextual dimensions of this “spatial” mode of resistance are elucidated through a close reading of the ways in which diplomatic negotiations of a series of unequal treaties, beginning with the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1855, shaped—and were shaped by—the formulation and implementation of regulations governing formal property rights in land in Siam. The political economy of land rights at the large scale (local implementation of land titling) and the medium scale (enactment of national land laws) was nested within a process of geopolitical contestation over land rights at the small scale (international recognition of Siamese territorial sovereignty).     

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.     

Critical geopolitics and school textbooks: The case of environment-conflict links in Germany

This study explores the conceptual and empirical utility of studying school textbooks from a critical geopolitics perspective. School textbooks bind together various discourses, modalities and genres and can reflect the dominant knowledge in a given society. They therefore have a high potential to reveal the citational practices resonating between the domains of formal, practical and popular geopolitics. Studying school textbooks can also enrich the literature on children's and young people's (political) geographies by analyzing how the political worldviews and agency of young people are shaped by teaching materials. Empirically, the study draws on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to study how environment-conflict links are textually and visually portrayed in German geography and civics textbooks. The results suggest that German school textbooks significantly reflect the depictions of environment-conflict links in political, media and (popular) science discourses and thus reveal crucial citational practices. Drawing on the environmental security literature, it is further argued that these textbooks convey problematic geographical imaginations: they overemphasize the risk of environmental conflicts, reflect ideas of spill-over effects threatening the global north, and portray people from the global south as irresponsible and threatening.     

Between realism and the 'New Right': geopolitics in Germany in the 1990s

This essay explores the connections between geopolitics and political conservatism. The introductory argument is that geopolitics historically has been appealing and useful for two very different expressions of conservatism: one which aims to preserve the political geography of the existing international status quo and one which seeks to transcend it and establish a new international order. Through an examination of the 'renaissance' of a conservative geopolitics in Germany, the essay considers how this particular pattern is reproduced in the present day. Although this conservative geopolitics operates for the most part at the fringes of political discourses in Germany, it does have a more specific significance for nationalist-conservative perspectives and those of the 'New Right', both in Germany and elsewhere.     

Carl Schmitt in the Kremlin: the Ukraine crisis and the return of geopolitics

The protracted crisis in Ukraine has exposed fundamental political differences between leaders in western Europe and their counterparts in Russia. The very existence of the European Union was meant to have refuted geopolitics as a useful theoretical lens through which to view power relations in Europe. After all, the European project is based on the idea that boundaries no longer matter and that national sovereignty is obsolete. And yet, geopolitics remains critically important—certainly for Europe's potential enemies, but also for Europe itself. It is poignant that to advance our understanding of this new constellation we are well served to turn to the insights of a classic, if hugely controversial, German political thinker: Carl Schmitt. Schmitt's political philosophy is relevant in three aspects. First, as a source of inspiration—even if only indirectly—for the contemporary Russian political establishment. Second, the behaviour of Putin's Russia, particularly since 2008, can be best understood through some of the key concepts that preoccupied Schmitt: sovereignty, the political and geopolitics. Third, Schmitt's philosophy can serve as a point of departure for reflecting on the possibility of a more robust response by Europe to the Russian intervention in Ukraine. What Europe needs is a more hard‐nosed realist approach, which recognizes that Russia's expansionist ambitions can only be constrained by its own readiness and willingness to deploy power both politically and, if necessary, even militarily.     

Global and regional orders and the changing geopolitics of energy

Attention by international relations scholars to the transformation underway stemming from the rise of China has not been matched by that given to the transformation underway in the international energy system. This article looks at three dimensions of that transformation: the end of cheap oil and the rising trend of energy prices; the changing role of the traditional international oil companies and the rise of national oil companies; and the growing energy importance of the Middle East and Russia. It looks at how these changes have already affected or are likely to affect three strategic relationships: US-Middle East; US-China; and Europe-Russia-US. It concludes that more attention needs to be given by scholars to what will be major changes in global geopolitical relationships with considerable consequences for the foreign policies of the major powers.     

Fear,feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal

In this paper we bring together Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and recent feminist geopolitical examinations of fear in order to analyze two cases studies of fear among U.S. college students and U.S. soldiers experiencing sexual violence. Putting banal nationalism and feminist geopolitics into conversation, we argue, reveals both their compatibilities and important pathways for political geography and critical geopolitics to build on Billig’s work. In this regard, the paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate how the insights and imperatives of banal nationalism intertwine in critical ways with the work of feminist geographers, as the banal is often rendered feminine and apolitical and as gender itself is often treated as banal despite its role in the reproduction of the nation. Second, we argue that the multi-scalar analytic of feminist geopolitics offers a valuable intervention into banal nationalism, as relational feminist approaches to binaries like intimate/global provide a useful model to account for hot and banal nationalism as a single, intertwining complex. Finally, through an analysis of fear in relation to sexual violence, the paper illustrates both the inseparability of banal and hot nationalism and how they are deeply gendered, as certain forms of deeply hot violence and fear are depoliticized through their banalization (e.g. sexual assault on college campuses), and as violence that is recognized as hot (e.g. war) is maintained through processes that are deemed banal (e.g. gender).     

Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven

The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands. Ridley Scott's three movies, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and most recently The Kingdom of Heaven explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable; political violence is presented as something that has both simple and very complicated geographies. The public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” in Western states is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott's work. Analyzing them in terms of the warrior, empire and the particular geographies of combat adds a specifically military dimension to the critical geopolitical literature on war and representation.     

The geopolitics of the Irish-Catholic parish in nineteenth-century Montreal

Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century Montreal, as a minority within a larger French-Catholic population, encountered a cultural environment very different from that experienced by their compatriots in most cities of eastern North America. In contrast with the more typical situation in which the majority position of Irish Catholics enabled them to exercise leadership in local Catholic affairs, in Montreal they had to overcome numerous obstacles in order to obtain churches and parishes they could call their own. Diocesan and parish records demonstrate that these struggles, in particular the controversy created by the subdivision of the extensive parish of Notre Dame in the late 1860s were defining events in the formulation of Irish-Catholic ethnic consciousness in Montreal. Constructivist interpretations of ethnicity have drawn attention to the way in which conflictual (and less frequently accommodative) relations among groups contribute to the formation and preservation of ethnicities. Drawing on this approach, it is argued that religious institutions acted as catalysts for debates that encouraged Montreal's Irish Catholics to define themselves in relation to the French-Catholic majority. These debates had an important territorial dimension and ultimately led to the entrenchment of ethnic boundaries in the urban landscape through the creation of separate parishes for the two groups.