‘Mother's Little Helper’: The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and the Miltown Resolution

This paper examines the discourse surrounding the release in 1955 of Miltown, America's first psychotropic wonder drug. According to many histories of psychiatry, Miltown heralded the arrival of a new paradigm in treating psychiatric patients – as a drug that operated on a neurochemical level, it was argued to replace a psychoanalytic approach with its focus on the mother‐child relation. Between 1955 and 1960, articles about pharmaceutical miracle cures for mental illnesses filled mass‐circulation news magazines and top fashion magazines. Through analysis of these representations, this article shows how the newly discovered pills came to be associated with existing concerns about conditions problematically referred to as ‘maternal conditions,’ ranging from a woman's frigidity, to a bride's uncertainty, to a wife's infidelity. Using these representations, the paper demonstrates how in American popular culture, psychoanalytic notions of motherhood prevalent in the 1950s shaped early understandings and uses of psychotropic drugs.     

‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand

The recent blockbuster hit ‘Lost in Thailand’ had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation’s highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples and around the city of Chiang Mai. These intertextual performances have made headlines in national and international media for how they reflect various articulations of cultural dissonance. This paper draws on structured interviews among Thai residents and Chinese tourists, as well as a discourse analysis of English- and Thai-language media reports to argue that popular responses to the impact of film-induced tourism in the region are strongly embedded in historical and contemporary Sino-Thai political-economic relations and corollary geopolitical imaginaries of place. These imaginaries are frequently reconstituted through the ambivalent economies of tourism encounters. This paper contributes to emerging research on how geopolitical assemblages are co-constituted by a range of popular discourses, tourism practices, media engagements, and political-economic relations and how they inform popular geopolitical experience of and in place.     

The Tyranny of the Serial: Popular Geopolitics,the Nation,and Comic Book Discourse

Abstract: This paper seeks to theorize the structuring of geopolitical worldviews and attitudes by the comic book medium and by serial popular culture more broadly. Evidence of the use of comic books to promote specific discourses by geopolitical actors is presented, and the conventions that govern the limits of comic book narration are outlined. Among the conventions of production discussed are the role of “continuity” as a structuring force and the serial nature of most comic books. The impact of these conventions is viewed through an examination of Watchmen and Captain America comic books. Both series revolve around issues of political legitimacy and the structuring of geopolitical space, but do so in different ways. This leads to insight connecting seriality with the concept of the nation itself. Finally, a theorization of the limits to comic book and other serialized discourse is outlined, and its ultimately conservative political outcome is described as endemic to the genre.     

Travelling images and projected representations

This article examines how Mormons and Mormonism were represented in Norway in the period before and after their arrival as missionaries, c. 1840–1860. The religion came into existence in a US context of religious pluralism, where the idea, though not necessarily the practice, of religious freedom was central. It has been argued that the persecution of Mormons in the United States had to be coined in non-religious terms, and the religion represented as a fraud and orientalised as an un-American threat to the republic. The Norwegian religious context differed significantly as heterodoxy was opposed and only hesitantly tolerated in a limited scale. The article demonstrates how inimical images of Mormonism present in the United States were imported to Norway, and to a large part found resonance in inherent stereotypes of religious otherness already present. As Mormons changed from being an occidental abstraction to a domestic ‘problem’ in around 1850, the discourse of Mormonism as religious otherness was more openly framed within religious terms.     

Popular magazines and the making of a nation: The healthy baby contest organized by The Young Companion in 1926�C27

The Young Companion, an important representative of Republican Shanghai’s popular magazines, organized a Healthy Baby Contest from August 1926 to March 1927. Though its slogan, “Strong babies promise strong people, strong people guarantee a strong nation” expressed a nationalistic spirit, this contest was rather a commercial activity organized by a popular magazine and its commercial sponsor exploiting nationalistic discourse. Such an integration of nationalistic discourse and commercial interests profoundly influenced mass culture and ultimately promoted China’s modernization and its development as a nation. With this contest as an example, this paper sheds light on the relationship between popular journals and the making of a nation.     

Contesting danger: a new agenda for policy and scholarship on Central Asia

Western geopolitical discourse misrepresents and constructs Central Asia as an inherently and essentially dangerous place. This pervasive ‘discourse of danger’ obscures knowledge of the region, deforms scholarship and, because it has policy implications, actually endangers Central Asia. This article identifies how the region is made knowable to a US–UK audience through three mutually reinforcing dimensions of endangerment: Central Asia as obscure, oriental, and fractious. This is evidenced in the writings of conflict resolution and security analysts, the practices of governments, the activities of international aid agencies and numerous lurid films, documentaries and novels. The article first establishes the tradition of inscribing danger to Central Asia, in both academic and policy discourse, from the colonial experience of the nineteenth century through to the post‐Soviet transition and subsequent considerations of the region in terms of the war on terror. It considers several examples of this discourse of danger including the popular US TV drama about presidential politics, The West Wing, the policy texts of ‘Washingtonian security analysis’ and accounts of danger, insecurity and urban violence in the Ferghana Valley. It is argued that popular policy and academic texts are relatively consistent across the three dimensions of endangerment. This argument is demonstrated through a discussion of how policy‐making and practice is informed by this discourse of danger and of how the discourse of danger is contested within the region. The example of urban violence in Osh, Kyrgyzstan and Jalalabad, Afghanistan in 2010 demonstrates how opportunities to mitigate conflict may have been lost due to the distortions of this discourse of danger. It concludes by raising the challenge to policy‐makers, journalists and academics to contest this western geopolitical discourse and provide better accounts of how danger is experienced by Central Asians.     

Popular Magazines and the Making of a Nation: The Healthy Baby Contest Organized by The Young Companion in 1926–27

The Young Companion, an important representative of Republican Shanghai’s popular magazines, organized a Healthy Baby Contest from August 1926 to March 1927. Though its slogan, “Strong babies promise strong people, strong people guarantee a strong nation” expressed a nationalistic spirit, this contest was rather a commercial activity organized by a popular magazine and its commercial sponsor exploiting nationalistic discourse. Such an integration of nationalistic discourse and commercial interests profoundly influenced mass culture and ultimately promoted China’s modernization and its development as a nation. With this contest as an example, this paper sheds light on the relationship between popular journals and the making of a nation.     

Lost in conceptualization: Reading the “new Cold War” with critical geopolitics

Focusing on the debates on energy security in Germany, this paper analyzes the structure, logic, and circulation of the “new Cold War” as a geopolitical narrative. We use the literature in critical geopolitics to analyze the conceptual implications of an apparent dissociation between the media and governmental stance toward the new Cold War and its embedded geopolitical logic. The relationship between the “kind” of geopolitics inherent in the new Cold War and the different “forms” in which it circulates suggests a blurring of boundaries between all such geopolitical forms, through multiple crossings-over between institutions, textual genres, and circulating actors. The media presence of the New Cold War also highlights the ambiguity of the “popular” in popular geopolitics, which is further refracted on other geopolitical forms which share its characteristics. This not only makes imperative the more precise formulation of key conceptual categories such as popular or banal geopolitics, but also calls into question the link between the state and particular geopolitical logics, as well as the relationship between the mass media and 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.     

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.     

‘Fit Only for the Scrap Heap’: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945

This paper examines the expert and popular discourses that sought to construct and disseminate the idea that Australia faced a masculinity crisis with the return of servicemen at the end of the Second World War. It explores how these discourses proposed a process of remasculinisation to ensure the successful reintegration of returning servicemen. These discourses were directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men. Doctors played an important role in producing this prevailing discourse on the looming post‐war masculinity crisis, identifying its symptoms and proposing solutions. This crisis discourse filtered into popular culture through many means, predominantly, however, advice literature and romance fiction. While some of these expert and popular discourses constructed a backward looking ideal of domesticity for women, romance fiction in particular explored more modern possibilities of companionate marriage. The dissemination of a discourse about an impending masculinity crisis created different possibilities for the reconstruction of relations between men and women. The remasculinisation project could look both backwards (through ideals of women's subservience to damaged men) and forwards (through notions of marriage as a partnership) in imagining post war gender relations.     

An Anti-geopolitical Eye: Maggie O'Kane in Bosnia, 1992-93

This paper, written in April 1995 before the significant events of the summer of 1995, and torn between anger and academia, explores the general question of the relationship between geopolitics, gender and 'the gaze' using the case of the Bosnian dispatches of the award-winning British Guardian journalist Maggie O'Kane. In it I elaborate an argument that O'Kane's powerful dispatches can be considered examples of an anti-geopolitical eye, a way of seeing that disturbs the enframing of Bosnia in Western geopolitical discourse as a place beyond our universe of moral responsibility. The paper uses O'Kane's anti-geopolitical eye to place the horror of Bosnia before geographers, a horror that should provoke reflection upon geographies of moral responsibility (proximity and distance) in foreign policy discourse. It concludes by noting that although the anti-geopolitical eye disturbs a generalized distancing of Bosnia from the West in Western geopolitical discourse, it has its own limits and is never simply a negation of geopolitics.     

Spiritual geopolitics of Georgia's territorial integrity

This paper represents a study of the geopolitical reasoning of the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) and its leader Patriarch Ilia II regarding the question of Georgia's territorial integrity. Does the GOC's territorial discourse complement or challenge Georgia's territorial nationalism? The empirical analysis of the geopolitical discourses of Patriarch Ilia II in the early 1990s and in the wake of the 2008 August (Russia-Georgia) War shows a complicated relationship between spiritual and secular geopolitical discourses on Georgia's territorial integrity. Ilia's spiritual geopolitics is neither dissident nor entirely complementary. The Patriarch's definition of Georgia's territorial integrity eschews the broadly accepted formulation of “Russian occupation” within Georgia and in its place, insufficient faith and religiosity within the Georgian society take a more prominent place in the explanation of the problem's origins. Ilia II defines the religion and the GOC as the unifying factor, spiritually, territorially, and politically, of the rival parties and alienated peoples and territories. The church's canonical territoriality, rather than the state's sovereign territoriality, plays the key object of concern in the Patriarch's geopolitical discourse. However, Ilia II frames this narrow institutional interest of the church as the basis for the nation's territorial unification. By advocating more narrowly for the GOC's canonical jurisdiction across the entire disputed territories, rather than actively embracing secular anti-Russian geopolitical narratives, the church simultaneously stands outside of the territorial conflict, taking a seemingly neutral position, and reinforces the territorial claim of the Georgian state. By distinguishing and problematizing the role of GOC's canonical territoriality in the question of Georgia's sovereign territoriality, the paper concludes that the GOC is a territorial power in its own right, not merely a spiritual wing of the state of Georgia.     

Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from below’

This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led “universal” moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.     

A revolution in military geopolitics?

This paper looks into the recent discussions within the US military community of a coming or current ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) which is said to imply fundamental changes in military geopolitical imaginations and practices (military geopolitics). In a first step, an account of the rhetorical and the conceptual part of the discourse of the RMA is conducted. In a second step, the proclaimed RMA is situated within a wider cumulative technological and organizational development in warfare after the Second World War. In a third step, special attention is given to geopolitical incongruities or contradictions apparent within the discourse of the RMA, and between the rhetorical part of the RMA and more conventional geopolitical practices and imaginations. In a conclusion, the promise of an actor–network approach in further investigations of contemporary techno-geopolitical discourses and practices is spoken for.     

After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics

Abstract:  This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a "geopolitical social", which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic. We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in "critical geopolitics" nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.     

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal administration. Contrasting earth system science ideas about global transformations with Canadian nationalist rhetoric concerning petroleum production and notions of unlimited resource extraction as parts of national identity sharply highlights the contours of Canadian identity. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, the official nationalist formulation will have to be drastically changed, but as the widespread rejection of the LEAP manifesto suggests, such ideas of a sustainable mode of globalization have yet to substantially influence Canadian political discourse, despite the rhetorical support offered to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.     

Cartographically constructing Kurdistan within geopolitical and orientalist discourses

Maps are powerful geopolitical tools, which are widely used to represent conflicts over territory, boundaries, citizens, and resources. But maps do more than represent. They are also discursive tools, which reflect, express, and help create geographic knowledge, political agendas, and social stereotypes. Through a longitudinal study of American journalistic cartography of Kurdistan – an ambiguously defined region that has often been in the midst of geopolitical conflict – this paper argues that maps reflect and recreate dominant geopolitical discourses, which are often intricately linked to orientalist discourses. A critical analysis of the design elements of place names, map text, border demarcation, and symbology revealed that these representations not only reflected the political and social narratives of the time and space in which they were created, but also constructed and communicated subtle and blatant positions towards the Kurds and Kurdistan. More specifically, these maps frequently marginalized the Kurds by questioning their geopolitical territorial claims, and also portrayed them in typical orientalist discourse as violent rebels or backward victims depending on the U.S. agenda in the region at the time. This paper will show how these interrelated discourses worked together in the cartographic image to portray the Kurds in a manner that generally supported and legitimated the dominant U.S. geopolitical position of a particular event.