Determinism and Indeterminism in Foreign Geography. Part II

The controversy between the environmentalists and the possibilists and the schools of cultural determinism, social determinism and indeterminism in West European and American geography are reviewed. The shift away from geographical determinism is viewed as not being necessarily a positive development in geography because it has led to a gradual strengthening of indeterminist tendencies with their associated disregard for physical geographical factors. When viewed in the historical context, geographical determinism is found to have shifted significantly from the extreme views of Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington to a more pragmatically oriented view of the environmental impact on problems of economic development, i.e. from historical-sociological explanations to problems in applied geography. Even if the modern determinists tend to exaggerate the significance of the physical environment in some cases, this is still viewed as the lesser evil compared with an underestimation of environmental factors.     

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.     

Transformation or stagnation? Rethinking Australia's defence

State on state conflicts are being replaced by hybrid wars and asymmetric conflicts in which there is no clear cut distinction between soldiers and civilians and between organised violence, terror, crime and war. Given the enormous changes in Australia's security environment, it is time to rethink our defence strategy which has four major failings. It is based on a misplaced geographical determinism that ignores the diverse and globalised nature of modern conflict. It has shaped the Australian Defence Force for the wrong wars. It gives insufficient weight to the transnational threats that confront us. And it fails to recognise that modern defence forces must win the peace as well as the war. Australia needs a strategy for the future not the past and a transformed defence force structured for the very different security challenges of the 21 st century.     

On the Significance of Lenin's Ideas for Soviet Geography

The president of the Geographical Society USSR reviews the present state of Soviet geographic theory in the light of Leninist philosophy. The objective existence of natural regions with definite boundaries is affirmed. The approach of “social physics,” applying natural laws to social phenomena, is rejected. The use of mathematical techniques is welcomed, but not to the extent of giving rise to a separate discipline of “theoretical geography” that would deal with whatever is common to both physical and economic geography. The geographical environment is defined as that part of the earth's natural environment in which nature and society are in direct interaction. Both geographical determinism and social determinism (geographical nihilism) are rejected. The definition of geography as a system of scientific disciplines is affirmed, and a proposed redefinition of geography as dealing with the evolution and control of dynamic spatial systems is rejected.     

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.     

Mapping the Contours of Race: Griffith Taylor's Zones and Strata Theory

This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor – regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia – who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's ‘zones and strata’ portrayal of racial evolution, and other geological‐ style maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.     

The Brazilian Green Revolution

This article analyzes the critical geopolitics of knowledge production in Brazil during the 20th century. It offers a critical appraisal of recent calls to decolonize political geography by locating the role played by actors and institutions in the Global South within the broader narrative of the Green Revolution. Historical accounts of the Green Revolution have only recently started to incorporate perspectives of and attribute agency to actors in the Global South. However, Brazil has largely been left out of the geographical scope of the Green Revolution. This article focuses on U.S.-Brazilian geopolitical relations behind an effort to reproduce the U.S. model of higher education, rural extension and agricultural research in Brazil. I argue that the confluence of Brazil's geopolitical importance with opportunities for foreign investment in its agricultural sector brought together U.S. and Brazilian experts and expertise to modernize Brazilian agriculture. The case of transnational soybean research illustrates the importance of this relationship in transforming Brazil's agricultural sector and limiting alternatives. This article offers an account of how the geopolitics of knowledge production shape the long-term institutional legacies of national research institutions.     

“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.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism

When and where did the environmental movement begin? To understand how a public endued with the principles of laissez-faire reversed in such short order a century-old policy of government land disposal, this paper examines how public ownership of land came to be celebrated, with a newly defined professional corps of government foresters such as Dietrich Brandis and Gifford Pinchot feted as popular heroes. Hard-headed environmentalists and legislators found in empire forestry a ready-made model to construct vast areas of the public domain as a utensil for not only environmental but state purposes—industrial, settlement, and budgetary. The empire forestry matrix of government reservations, fire protection, and revenue-enhancing forests solved the tension between romantic preservationist notions and laissez-faire ideals and gave the compromise from which modern environmentalism emerged: it posed environmental problems and solutions as a means to construct the state. This article traces the international trail of modern environmentalism from India, under Lord Dalhousie's forest charter, to the British colonies in Africa and Australasia where it matured, and finally to Canada, the United States and other parts of the globe where environmentalism permanently entered the pantheon of democratic political creeds.     

Ratzel, the French School and the birth of Alternative Geopolitics

Modern French political geography began as a response to Ratzel's Politische Geographie and then became an attempt to place ratzelian ideas into the context of French geographical thought. What then emerged was a political geography which was set firmly in opposition to German geopolitics. There were some geographers who felt that a more effective response could be made by developing an indigenous French geopolitics. This can be seen as being the origin of the alternative geopolitics which was favoured by some American geographers during and after World War II and which subsequently became an important underlying theme in the new geopolitics which arose in the 1970s. The concept of an alternative geopolitics has owed a great deal to the French school of geography and has it roots in the original response of Vidal de la Blache to Ratzel.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

Recontextualising violence,power and nature: The next twenty years of critical geopolitics?

Twenty years ago the intellectual projects that have become known as critical geopolitics emerged at the end of the cold war as a series of critiques of geopolitical reasoning. Drawing heavily on Edward Said's formulations of Orientalism the critical analyses probed the dense cultural productions of danger, the rationalisations for intervention and the logics of “Western” foreign policies. The geographical specifications of the world in the political discourses used to justify numerous imperial actions, and the rationales for the provision of security came under sustained scrutiny. Now two decades later despite the supposed end of history and endless invocations of globalization, the themes of empire and Orientalism remain at the heart of the Western geopolitical imaginary, explicitly structuring how the security intellectuals of our time plan for war and justify the construction of their military machines. Given the continuing dangers of warfare in a biosphere that is being radically destabilized by the modes of economy and violence these geopolitical texts legitimize, the necessity for critique remains compelling. But given the proliferation of uses of the term critical geopolitics, and the numerous disciplinary concerns encompassed by it, perhaps the time has come to narrow its focus once again to its core themes which involve confronting and challenging the geographical reasoning used in the legitimizations of contemporary warfare.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain's Vision of Forest Modernity

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain (1883–1970) developed a unique idea about the importance of forests, advocating the creation of a new society based upon forests, and he pursued policies to implement his unique vision of forestry when he served as the Director of Queensland's Forestry Board from 1918 to 1924 and the Forestry Commissioner for New South Wales from 1935 to 1948. Swain's beliefs developed out of a combination of his Australian experiences and connections with foresters in the British Empire and America. When he could not convince Australian elites about the need to create a forest-based society, he asked foresters at the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference in London to assert the primacy of forestry in land management in the British Empire. Many foresters positively received parts of Swain's argument, but his ideas could never be fully implemented in the British Empire because of the dominance of agrarian doctrines of development in post-Second World War colonial planning and the rapid process of decolonization. Swain's life sheds light onto current debates among historians about the origin and legacy of forestry in Australia and the British Empire. His ideas, many that parallel the basic tenets of modern environmentalism, require historians to rethink the relationship between Empire forestry and environmentalism.     

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.     

Iran and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Ideology and Realpolitik in Iranian Foreign Policy

The Islamic Republic of Iran has pursued full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). In doing so, Iran has appeared to be unfazed by the prospect of allying with Russia and China, two countries which have systematically suppressed their Muslim minorities for decades. Similarly, the SCO's Central Asian member states are led by individual leaders who are generally believed to rule in spite of their populations. As a result, Iran's eagerness to join the SCO may appear to contradict its self-promoted image as the champion of Muslim interests, but in reality it sits nicely within its overarching enmity for the USA. Indeed, the SCO is seen as a geopolitical counterweight to the USA. For Iran, this geopolitical opportunity overrides ideological imperatives, with the gap between ideology and geopolitics most evident under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.     

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").     

“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.     

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.