“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft

For more than twenty years popular geopolitics has proven an intriguing and fruitful field of research. It has spurred a lasting interest in everything from movies to stamps as important cultural artefacts that reveal to their audiences the geopolitical visions of their producers. This paper, however, brings into question the ‘popularity’ of popular geopolitics. Using recent examples from the ongoing dispute over the Falkland Islands, we examine the influence of social media and the associated flourishing of ‘citizen statecraft’ which, through its production of geopolitical knowledges, hints at the possibilities of a genuinely popular geopolitics 2.0. We also examine how creative practices, understood in myriad ways in relation to ‘statecraft’, work to unsettle and complicate previously tidy geopolitical categories of the ‘popular’, the ‘formal’, and the ‘practical’. We suggest, by way of conclusion, that ‘citizen statecraft’ may be productive in the flourishing of new modes of international dialogue between communities in dispute.     

A proxy geopolitics of poppies,peasants, and national sovereignty: Turkey’s rhetorical resistance to America’s war on drugs

Nixon's self-declared war on drugs has been underway for over five decades. Not all aspects are well known, and many voices of those touched by the campaign were and remain unheard. In the early 1970s, the Turkish republic faced a political crisis. The military installed a post-coup leadership that acquiesced to longstanding American demands to halt all cultivation of the opium poppy. This was the first sustained battle in Nixon's war, and it had socio-economically devastating consequences for Anatolian peasants who had for generations farmed the crop for licit and illicit markets. To many Turkish citizens, the ban was the result of a new stage in Western imperialism and a direct consequence of their own leaders' failure to protect the country's rural poor majority, on the one hand, and their surrender of national sovereignty, on the other hand. Farmers' voices were rarely heard on this issue, apart from brief quotes in newspapers and in domestic and foreign governmental studies, but their plight attracted sustained popular attention due in part to the proxy geopolitics articulated on their behalf. Before the recently disenfranchised parliament that did not permit sustained discussion or debate of the poppy question, MPs nonetheless rendered impromptu testimonies protesting the ban, its impacts on farmers, the suppression of democracy, and nation's loss of sovereignty. Through an analysis of Turkey's parliamentary record and other contemporary sources, I approach this crucial episode in the histories of intoxicants and the war on drugs. In so doing, I demonstrate the potential and seeming success of proxy geopolitics echoed on behalf of a marginalized people and why engagement with such sources is essential in the wider practice of critical geopolitics.     

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.     

Disrupting air power: Performativity and the unsettling of geopolitical frames through artworks

This paper advances the concept of disruption, drawing upon Butler's (1993) work on performativity, her engagement with Goffman's (1974) frame analysis and recent work on performativity within critical geopolitics. It argues this approach provides a useful tool with which to elucidate gaps in the iterative processes of geopolitical discourse production that offer opportunities for momentary distortions to these dominant articulations of power. It analyses the utility of this approach through discussion of three artworks by the acclaimed British artist Fiona Banner. In June 2010 she unveiled her prestigious Duveens commission project at Tate Britain. The work, entitled ‘Harrier and Jaguar’, was the most ambitious of a series of engagements with military aircraft which have spanned over a decade of creative work. Banner's work has become synonymous with challenging dominant discourses on power and war especially through textual representations of war films and innovative uses of military aircraft. Beginning with her book project, ‘All the world's fighter planes’ (2004) and moving through her Duveens project to the military aircraft-related work ‘Tornado’ (2010), this paper argues that Banner's work illustrates the utility of the concept of disruption; going beyond simply raising questions about our engagements with military aircraft, to actively disrupting our encounters with and understandings of these objects and thus popular representations of air power.     

Intimacies of global toxins: Exposure & resistance in ‘Chemical Valley’

This paper examines the geopolitics of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's reserve, situated in a toxic petrochemical complex known as Canada's ‘Chemical Valley.’ While this reserve holds the perilous title of worst air-pollution in the country, research exploring the profound impacts that this toxic environment has on Indigenous communities remains limited and tends to resort to simplistic framings. In this paper we suggest that Michel Foucault's concept of the ‘heterotopia’ is a helpful prism through which to view Aamjiwnaang in more complex, political terms. We also suggest, however, that this prism has a limited scope when it comes to exposing intimate experiences of global toxins. Drawing on a feminist geopolitics, we seek to stretch Foucault's heterotopic approach in order to show how the reserve is intimately colonized and contaminated by Canada's chemical production. Vitally, our approach gleans insight into the everyday ways that Aamjiwnaang is governed by and also disrupts colonial configurations. Moreover, our paper illuminates how a feminist heterotopic approach can re-orient research towards a deepened understanding of Indigenous-led modes of environmental justice.     

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

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

Geopolitical television at the (b)order: liminality,global politics,and world-building in The Bridge

This article interrogates the geopolitical content of the internationally popular television series Bron/Broen (‘The Bridge’) and its two subsequent adaptations. In my analysis of The Bridge as a global phenomenon, I make a threefold contribution to the literature of popular geopolitics and cultural geography. First, in a normative contribution intended to challenge mainstream assumptions regarding the banality of the medium of television, I situate TV-viewing within the discursive battlefield of global politics as an affective act of world-building, a phenomenon enabled by the emergence of a third phase of television (Television 3.0). Second, via a theoretical contribution, I conceive of Bridge-gazing as a form of quotidian geopolitical interaction, wherein the spectator maps their own emplacement in the world’s various (b)order regimes, while also engaging with the distant politics of the series’ narratives. And, third, in an empirical contribution, I provide a exegetic analysis of the three iterations of The Bridge by interrogating the three series’ geopolitical interventions into pressing issues associated with unfettered globalisation, the purported victory of neoliberalism and the waning of the nation-state.     

Turkey's "New" Foreign Policy toward Eurasia

Two geographers specializing in Turkey's international relations examine the reframing of foreign policy issues under the country's Justice and Development Party (JDP; also known by its Turkish acronym AKP), in power since 2002. After first locating the JDP within Turkey's current political landscape, the authors investigate how notions of civilizational geopolitics have led to a "new geographic imagination" under JDP that has influenced foreign policy thinking. The authors argue that JDP foreign policy exhibits some continuity with that of earlier governments in terms of activist policies toward Central Eurasia (comprising the Middle East, Central Asia, and Transcaucasia), but are based on a new conceptual foundation that views Turkey not as part of Western civilization but as the emerging leader of its own "civilizational basin" (consisting of the former Ottoman territories plus adjoining regions inhabited by Muslim and Turkic peoples). They then explore the implications for Turkey's future relations with the Central Eurasian region (of which Turkey is assumed to be the leader) and countries of the West (viewed now as "neighbors" but no longer "one of us").     

Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border

In June of 2014 Angelina Jolie, actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, visited camps—home to 130,000 Burmese exiles—along the Thai-Burma border to draw international attention to one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her fourth trip to the border since 2002, Jolie's day-long visit was widely commended in popular media. I draw on ethnographic research among Burmese exiles in northern Thailand to argue that the popular geopolitics of hope she engendered is constituted through contradictory impulses of, on one hand, her signification of global capital and the concurrent widespread geoeconomic hope around Burma's deepening integration into global capitalism, and on the other, the far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma. Thus, this paper builds on recent work in popular geopolitics and geographies of emotion and affect to offer a grounded illustration of the micro-macro linkages between popular culture and everyday geopolitical experience, as well as the often politically nuanced role of celebrities in humanitarian interventions. This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around the relationship between celebrity humanitarians from the global North and the political-economic implications of the affective enrollment of their intended benefactors from the global South.     

Passing as a tourist: Exploring the everyday urban geopolitics of tourism

This paper presents a case study of territorial boundary transgression and intergroup encounters mediated by tourism in a volatile and contested urban space. I present the notion of ‘passing as a tourist’ as a prism to investigate the nexus between performative tourism and everyday urban geopolitics. Situated in East Jerusalem's core geographies of colonization and political violence, this paper uses archival news material and a textual analysis of primary questionnaire data to critically examine how Jewish Israeli Jerusalemites visiting the Muslim Quarter in the Old City negotiate encounters in a conflicted space. The study reveals how the performative dimensions of ‘tourism’ in a context of polarized ethnonational division expose the role of embodied, everyday geopolitics in the production of urban spaces of tourism.     

Capturing the multiplicities of resilience through popular geopolitics: Aesthetics and homo resilio in Breaking Bad

In this article, Grove and Adey's (2015) call to capture the multiplicities of resilience through aesthetics is advanced by engaging with the first two seasons of the television series Breaking Bad. This engagement demonstrates that the relationality of geopolitics and mobility is important for resilience. To capture dynamics generated by the interplay of geopolitical contexts and resilient subjectivities through popular geopolitics, Jacques Rancière's aesthetics and the concept of the aesthetic subject are deployed. The emergence of homo resilio as a political subject within an imagined American heartland is presented to contextualise the aesthetic reading of Breaking Bad that follows. The character Walter White is presented as a paradigmatic example of homo resilio to map the geopolitics of this subject position. The paper concludes that race and gender feature at the intersections of homo resilio, geopolitics, and cultural criticism, reiterating the importance of popular geopolitics for capturing the multiplicities of resilience.     

Popular geopolitics of Chinese Nanjing massacre films: a feminist approach

This article attempts to deconstruct the masculinised contract among the war narrative, popular culture, and Chinese nationalism by exploring the roles of women in Nanjing Massacre films with war narratives and Chinese audiences' emotional ‘readings’ of these women. Based on the analysis of City of Life and Death (2009) and The Flowers of War (2011) and audiences' comments on these two films from Douban Movie, this article has mapped a popular geopolitics of these two films through a feminist approach. The main argument of this research points out that, through the production and consumption of these two films, the women of the Nanjing Massacre can be territorialised as Nanjing/China and used to represent China's attitudes towards both the historical and current Sino–Japanese relationship. In this way, the women of these films can be considered an articulation of popular culture and politics, and they are empowered to establish Chinese nationalism and construct anti-Japanese identities in Chinese society. To a wider extent, this article can be read as a contribution to the literature on gender, nationalism and popular geopolitics.     

Identity and geopolitics in Hergé's Adventures of Tintin

This is a study of identity and geopolitics in Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, a series of adventure comics created from 1929 to 1976. The Tintin comics became increasingly popular throughout the mid-twentieth century, and their creator, Hergé, is still a subject of intrigue in the press and popular publications. Recent work in popular geopolitics has pioneered the use of comics as a new type of source material in critical geography. Hergé's approach to the comics format combines an iconic protagonist with detailed and textured environments that draw upon some of the geopolitical discourses of the twentieth century. Three forms of geopolitical meaning are identified within the Tintin comics: discourses of colonialism, European pre-eminence and anti-Americanism. These overlapping trends amount to different facets of one single discourse, which places European ideologies at the centre of its world-view. This is highlighted by focusing on three geographical spaces of the Tintin series, and by contextualising the life and selected works of Hergé.     

Connecting ontological (in)securities and generation through the everyday and emotional geopolitics of Falkland Islanders*

Abstract

Debates about the security of British Overseas Territories (OTs) like the Falkland Islands are typically framed through the discourses of formal and practical geopolitics in ways that overlook the perspectives of their citizens. This paper focuses on the voices of two generations of citizens from the Falkland Islands, born before and after the 1982 war, to show how they perceive geopolitics and (in)security in different ways. It uses these empirical insights to show how theorisations of ontological (in)security might become more sensitive to the lived experiences of diverse generational groups within states and OTs like the Falklands. The paper reflects on the complex experiences of citizens living in a postcolonial OT that still relies heavily on the UK Government and electorate for assurances of security, in the face of diplomatic pressure from Argentina. While Islander youth reflected on how their views about geopolitics and security might be considered marginal, relative to those who directly experienced geopolitical events in the Falklands during the second half of the twentieth century, the paper illustrates the multiple ways they can act as agents of (in)security.     

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.     

“Only Strong States Can Survive in Turkey's Geography”: The uses of “geopolitical truths” in Turkey

Following Critical Geopoliticians' re-formulation of geopolitics as discourse, this article historically traces, politically contextualizes, and empirically analyzes the linguistic practices as found in myriad actors' formal geopolitical writings and public articulations in Turkey. It shows how the production and dissemination of a particular understanding of geopolitics as a “scientific” perspective on statecraft, and the military as an actor licensed to craft state policies (by virtue of its mastery over geopolitical knowledge) has allowed the military to play a central role in shaping domestic political processes. Subsequent to the erosion of bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy from the mid-1960s onwards, civilian actors also began to tap geopolitics but as a foreign policy tool. By the end of the 1990s, geopolitics had become rooted in the discourses of both military and civilian actors shaping (for “better” or for “worse”) Turkey's “foreign” relations with the European Union as well as “domestic” political processes.