Feature Review

Abstract

The emergence of the Tea Party has set off a new round of speculation on the “future” of the conservative movement. This essay discusses two issues, defense spending and immigration, on which the Tea Party may fuse a conservative-libertarian approach that might distinguish it from earlier conservative political movements. The essay notes that the twenty-first century has a developing school of conservative thought that can provide the intellectual groundwork for such a political combination between conservatives and libertarians. This school opposes both mainstream liberalism and mainstream conservatism and attempts to rework the conservative tradition to face contemporary challenges.     

American Conservatism 2012: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

This essay examines the peculiar history of American political thought to seek a possible explanation for why conservatism in the United States remains a movement without a spokesperson or a platform to which all citizens of this country who describe themselves as conservative can subscribe. The primary cause of these problems appears to be a serious mismatch between the traditional conservative traits of caution and limits and the historic American spirit of dynamic change and boundless optimism.     

Towards a feminist geopolitics

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geopolitics, nor the ushering in of a new spatial order, but is an approach to global issues with feminist politics in mind. 'Feminist' in this context refers to analyses and political interventions that address the unequal and often violent relationships among people based on real or perceived differences. Building upon the literature from critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, I develop a framework for feminist political engagement. The paper interrogates concepts of human security and juxtaposes them with state security, arguing for a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics is sought by examining politics at scales other than that of the nation-state; by challenging the public/private divide at a global scale; and by analyzing the politics of mobility for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. As such, feminist geopolitics is a critical approach and a contingent set of political practices operating at scales finer and coarser than the nation-state.     

Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare,civilisational geopolitics,and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety

Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.     

Healthcare not airfare! Art,abortion and political agency in Ireland

Ireland’s near-total abortion ban was, in effect, a policy of offshoring abortions. Before the May 2018 vote to repeal it, the 8th Amendment allowed for conservative and nationalist groups to celebrate the idea of Ireland as an ‘abortion-free’ territory, while forcing women to travel to England for abortion or self-manage abortions with illegal pills at home. Artists in the Irish pro-choice movement have contested the public silence around abortion and abortion-travel; in doing so they have disrupted the political narrative of ‘abortion-free Ireland’ by symbolically re-placing Irish abortion seekers in public spaces. These place-based artistic interventions have larger significance for the changing relationship between women, reproduction, and the state. Drawing on ongoing debates in critical and feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the relationship between geopolitics, art, and political agency to theorize the role of pro-choice Irish artworks in challenging the enforced silence that surrounded abortion travel. It builds on geographical engagement with Jacques Rancière to address the feminist geopolitics critique of geopolitical scales and sites of ‘serious’ geopolitics. The article examines three artworks that depict Irish women’s experiences of abortion-related travel to England as part of the larger political campaign for liberalization of Ireland’s abortion laws.     

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.     

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.     

Peering in from the window ledge of the Union: the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the attempt to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland

In this article I examine one particular way in which the Anglo-Irish Agreement redefined unionist politics in the late 1980s. While the operation of “direct rule” had drawn the unionist middle classes ever closer to Britain in economic and cultural terms, it had also left them in a precarious position politically. The nature and scale of this political subservience was brought home dramatically in 1985 when the British government signed an international agreement giving the Dublin government the right to be consulted on Northern Irish affairs. In the period of political flux summoned by the Hillsborough Accord, elements of the unionist middle classes were drawn to the previously marginal ideas of a small leftist organisation that argued for the British political parties to organise in the region. Given the material interests and social conservatism of those attracted to it, the call for “equal citizenship” would inevitably take the form primarily of a movement seeking to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland.     

从国家间到多尺度的政治地理学：日本的历程与启示

二战后日本政治地理学经历了盛极而衰之后再起步的曲折历程，政治地理学一度成为日本地理学中最不活跃的分支学科，也少有学者出席相关的学术活动。但是，20世纪90年代以后，这种状况发生了转变，政治地理学在日本再度兴起。本文通过分析在日本政治地理学相关出版物的变化，考察了二战结束以来政治地理学在日本复兴并被重新建构的过程。研究发现，与地缘政治和领土相关的出版物在日本比较多，经历了两个高峰，而最近又处于增长趋势。政治地理学在此期间经历了由国家间地缘政治向多尺度的政治地理学的转变。基于日本政治地理学的发展历程，本文认为，未来包括中日韩在内的东亚政治地理学的发展尤其要重视以下三点：一是要注重东方国家政治地理学的独特性；二是要警惕回归到作为治国方略的古典地缘政治学的危险性；三是要充分认识多尺度视角的重要意义。本文认为，这三方面的努力，将有可能使东亚政治地理学为当代世界政治地图的领域性和复杂性理解做出独有的贡献。     

Conservatism,Aesthetic and Active: Reflections on Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent

Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent provide us much to admire, as authors and as men, and much to ponder. They can be seen as collaborators in the defense of the nation-state against the empty universalism of “human rights,” and, more generally, in exposing the boundless arrogance and blindness of modern rationalism insofar as it denies its inheritance from premodern sources. This defense of the nation-state and critique of secular rationalism are of vital interest to moral and political conservatives, and Scruton, for his part, has explicitly taken on the cause and the label of conservatism. But conservatives face an imposing and, I propose here, critically instructive obstacle in appropriating the teachings of these two contemporary giants. For, as soon as we begin to examine the foundations of their respective projects, Scruton's and Manent's approaches appear to be, not only quite different (and therefore, one might hope, complementary) but in an important sense directly opposed to one another. This opposition appears most directly in their respective estimates of the realm of politics: one would exaggerate little in saying that, for Manent, politics is everything, whereas Scruton wishes to constrict the reach of politics to the minimum. Thus, Scruton embraces the title “conservative” but understands it apolitically, whereas Manent declines to identify himself as conservative but fully embraces a political task essential to conservatism. Conservatives must confront this disconcerting opposition and see what can be learned from it.     

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.     

Roger Scruton's Conservatism and the Liberal Regime

Although Roger Scruton insists on the incompatibility of his conservatism and the fundamental liberal principles of individualism and consent, his political thought has much in common with classical liberal constitutionalism. This essay explores these relationships while arguing that particularly Locke's constitutionalism is more compatible with Scruton's ideas than he allows. Specifically, Scruton argues that authority necessarily precedes any individual claims, but Locke's civil society, in fact, subordinates individual rights to political authority and common goods. Similarly, Scruton's insists that the state is an end rather than a means, but his own account of the conditionality of allegiance approaches Locke's understanding of legitimacy in the practice of civic association. This narrowing of the differences suggests that a conservative teaching could begin with an education in liberal constitutionalism rightly understood.     

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.     

Philhellenism in Italy: political friendship and the Italian volunteers in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century

Italy offers a particularly important vantage point for understanding the force of philhellenism in nineteenth-century Europe. Tracing the contribution of Italians to the struggles for Greek independence from the war of 1820?-?21 to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1897, this article shows how Italian support for the philhellenist cause illustrates the internationalist context of Risorgimento nationalism. After Unification the philhellenist cause offered the opportunity to continue the tradition of volunteers enlisting to fight against tyranny and oppression abroad. This culminated in the volunteer expedition to fight with the Greeks against the Turks in 1897 led by Ricciotti Garibaldi - son of the hero of Italian Unification. But that expedition also marked the end of the nineteenth-century international volunteer movement. In Italy many socialists and nationalists were opposed to it, in part because it was seen as a diversion from political struggles that needed to be fought at home and in part because the project of the nation in arms was less and less realistic in the context of late nineteenth-century geopolitics. But at its height, the international volunteer movement - to which Italy made a major contribution - was an act of political idealism that drew on appeals to the unity of Greco-Latin civilization.     

The Paradox at the Heart of American Conservatism

Abstract

This essay considers the state of American conservatism focusing initially on social and political institutions and concluding with a few comments on conservatism as an intellectual movement. A paradox is described as lying at the heart of American conservatism: the economic policies supported by conservatives promote economic conditions that are the main causes of the social problems conservatives lament most loudly.     

Enemy of the people: Simmel,Ibsen, and the Civic legacy of Nietzschean sociology

The fall of Communism continued an ongoing weakening of Marxist ideology, which had been hegemonic among the European Left since the Great War. While the decline of Marxist thought can be justly seen negatively as the historical correlative of globalization, this decline has also produced cultural space for a re-evaluation of non-Marxist critiques of capitalist civilization. One example of a powerful non-Marxist critique of capitalist civilization is Georg Simmel's sociology of money culture. Before turning to Simmel's radical critique, this essay explains how Simmel came to be viewed as a conservative. Simmel's presumed conservatism is challenged via a re-examination of the civic implications of his Nietzschean sociology. A central question is whether Simmel's ethical individualism is conservative. This question is finally answered through an analysis of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. The choice of Ibsen is not random, for it amplifies the close ethical and historical affinity of Naturalist drama and Simmel's philosophy.     

Humphrey and Civil Rights: The Politics of Racial Progress

Abstract

This article explores and defends Leo Strauss's interpretation of Edmund Burke's thought. Strauss argues that Burke's conservatism is rooted in the modern empiricist school of John Locke and others. Following Strauss, this article sets out to consider the suitability of these foundational principles to conservative politics. Burke wants to temper or ennoble Lockean politics by inspiring sublime attachment to the political community and its traditions, but he shies away from stating universal standards according to which the traditions of political communities ought to be judged. This respect for reason in history without moorings in transcendent standards of reason or revelation leaves his conservatism on precarious ground.     

Caviar matter(s): The material politics of the European caviar grey market

The last quarter of a century saw the international political community make concerted efforts to regulate global caviar trade and prevent illegal harvesting of critically endangered sturgeon. Ironically, the regulations have enabled the emergence of novel forms of illicit trade which intertwine legal and illegal streams of caviar on the international marketplace. This paper foregrounds these licit-illicit interfaces and argues that the international caviar trade constitutes a ‘grey market’ characterized by a host of laundering practices that entangle legal and illegal caviar flows. Drawing on geographical scholarship on political animals and fleshy geopolitics, the paper theorises how the fleshy material properties of caviar, namely its chemical-isotope profile and composite form, directly shape the European caviar grey market. By highlighting how the materiality of caviar creates grey interfaces between legal and illegal caviar economies, the paper unsettles dominant dichotomized representations of illegal caviar trade which tend to foster overwhelmingly securitized policy-enforcement approaches in Europe. In pointing to the hidden ‘fleshy geopolitics’ surrounding EU enforcement strategies, the paper calls for a reshaping of policy and enforcement which better attends to the grey dimensions of the caviar market and provides increased protection for wild sturgeon populations and marginalised communities located at the Eastern borders of Europe.     

从自然主义到结构主义:地缘政治学方法论演变

本文透过地缘政治理论中各种具体的解释方法,对不同时期地缘政治学进行方法论特征的考察,发现地缘政治理论的发展经历了从自然主义模式、空间-权力关系模式到结构主义模式的演变。结构主义模式是当代地缘政治理论的重要方法论特征,与其它模式相比,表现出较好的解释能力。对地缘政治学方法论演变的历史考察,有助于我们思考未来地缘政治理论建设的趋向,其中以行为体为主体的新地缘政治结构理论建设是地缘政治理论方法论创新的重要选择。