试析冷战后美俄地缘政治空间竞争

冷战结束以来,美俄间以主权国家利益为核心的地缘政治竞争一直在进行着。美俄间的地缘政治空间之争主要表现在美国主导下的北约东扩和在独联体地区的渗透。而俄罗斯为了防止其在欧亚大陆战略生存空间被挤压和近邻地区被分化,采取了一系列的反对、抵制措施,以防地缘政治空间被进一步削弱并力图为俄罗斯未来重新崛起保留一定的地缘政治空间。作为战略博弈优势方的美国的地缘政治政策主导着美俄关系演进的进程和张力。     

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.     

Towards a geopolitics of atheism: Critical geopolitics post the ‘War on Terror’

Political geography has an established tradition of engaging with religiously-driven geopolitik. However, despite the remarkable growth in professed atheist beliefs in recent decades and the popular expression of an imagined geopolitical binary between secular/atheist and religious societies, the geopolitics of irreligion have received almost no attention among academic practitioners. This paper outlines the core tenets of ‘New Atheist’ philosophy, before addressing how its key representatives have taken positions on the ‘Global War on Terror.’ In particular, we critically interrogate the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens and identify a belligerent geopolitical imagination which posits a civilizational clash between an existentially-threatened secular, liberal West with responsibility to use extraordinary violence to protect itself and the world from a backwards oriental Islam. The paper concludes with four possible explanations for the paradox that the New Atheist critique of religion for being violent acts itself as a geopolitical incitement to violence. In so doing, we seek to navigate debates about the nature and purpose of critical geopolitical research given that the historical, intellectual and political contexts in which it was formed have changed.     

Experimental territoriality: Assembling the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea

This paper examines the interactions of sovereignty and political economy that shape North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC)—an economic zone jointly operated by North and South Korea. Drawing on contemporary literatures concerning sovereignty, territoriality, and sites of political economic experimentation in East Asia, we argue that the KIC represents an experimental form of territoriality: one that is particularly volatile due to its unique geopolitical location where interaction among the various actors that compose it periodically shuts down or threatens to suspend the project. This volatility cannot be reduced to the structure of the North Korean regime alone, however. Rather, it must be situated within the continuation of a framework of enmity on the Korean peninsula as well as the ethical and political conundrums raised by the largely capitalist nature of the KIC as a form of inter-Korean economic cooperation.     

The apostle of internationalism: Stephen Duggan and the geopolitics of international education

Stephen Duggan, the educator and director of the Institute of International Education (IIE) between 1919 and 1946, has been described as an ‘apostle of internationalism’. Duggan's work as the director of a new international agency in the co-ordination of educational exchange sought to position the United States of America as the centre of international education. Duggan's writings during this period reflect the articulation of a geographical vocabulary which positioned the United States as a steward of an ‘international’ space of education despite Duggan's continual disparagement of cultural imperialism. This paper explores the geographies of Duggan's discursive rendering of American responsibilities for the security of ‘the international’, the potential for America to act as a beacon of educational exchanges, and as the ‘rational’ space to counteract threats to an imagined American educational hegemony. This outline was shot through with the anxiety of alternative internationalisms and the possibility for education to be used in opposition to the ‘virtuous’ international education proposed by Duggan and his contemporaries. An exploration of Duggan's writing provides a backdrop to the development of international educational agencies in the interwar period as critical technologies of an American geopolitical power.     

The last outpost of Empire: Rockall and the Cold War

This paper is about what can be seen at sea. It considers the historical geography of a site at the geopolitical axis of the British Empire and the Cold War. It focuses on a hitherto unacknowledged historical reference point: the last territorial expansion of the UK, which laid claim to the tiny islet of Rockall, lying some 300 miles west of the Scottish mainland. Rockall was annexed in September 1955 because it was situated within radio-electrical range of a test site for Britain's first nuclear missile, the American-made ‘Corporal’. As a ‘tactical’ nuclear missile designed for potential deployment in Eastern Europe, the Corporal was a central part of NATO defence policy in the 1950s. Crucial to its development was a testing station in the Outer Hebrides, from which the guided missile could be fired and its ballistic trajectory tracked over the North Atlantic. Occupying an area only 83 feet across and 100 feet wide, Rockall represented a strategic vantage point for the rival gaze of Soviet intelligence. Following Paul Virilio's argument that the logic of war is less about scoring territorial or material victories than about securing ‘the “immateriality” of perceptual fields’, this paper details the ceremonial annexation of Rockall and the subsequent transformation of the Hebridean seascape into a vast topography for military surveillance. This final expansive moment of British imperialism was legitimated by symbolic and rhetorical strategies tying Rockall to both earlier geographical exploration and the science of natural history.     

地缘政治关系简析

本文从地缘政治学分析国际政治大国与全球地理环境之间的关系实质,即地理位置、综合国力和战略利益在地域政治体系中的相互联系、制约和影响,及变化规律.     

Putting geopolitics in its place: Gibraltar and the emergence of strategic locations

Gibraltar has long been understood as a strategic location. In this paper I examine the historical emergence of this seemingly common-sense fact, turning to the rise of relational geography and assemblage thinking to re-theorise the idea of ‘strategic locations.’ I argue that the ‘unchanging truth’ of geography as asserted by (neo)classical geopolitical authors is always in fact becoming-otherwise, as shifts in the compositional assemblages (e.g., military-technological systems, logistical networks, domestic politics) can ripple through the place in question, very quickly making strategic places un-strategic again, or vice-versa. People and ideas are central to this emergence, as are place-based materialities such as terrain, technologies, and even micro-climates. Empirically I examine first the emergence of Gibraltar within an English/British cartographic and visual apparatus in the 17th century. I then turn to the materiality of the Strait of Gibraltar and the specific agency of the eponymous Rock, as they both interact with various shifts in military technology and the organisation of empire. I conclude with a call for an assemblage approach to place in geopolitics, highlighting the advantages of such an approach.     

The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the technopolitics of river basin development, 1950–1970

This paper examines the links between Cold War geopolitics and economic development to explain the relatively rapid proliferation of the concept of river basin development throughout so-called “developing areas” of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century. The research focuses on the United States Bureau of Reclamation, the most significant water resource development agency of the US government, and its engagement in what it termed “foreign activities” beginning in the aftermath of World War II. Grounded in recent work on technopolitics, the constructed scales of water resource development, and histories of the “global” Cold War, this research examines the advancement of water resource development in the Litani River basin in Lebanon—as guided by staff of the US Bureau of Reclamation—during the period from 1950 to 1970. The Bureau operated as a geopolitical agent attempting to implement a universalized model of river basin development, but encountered continuous difficulties in the form of political and biophysical contingencies. The Bureau’s efforts, centred on the basin as the most appropriate unit of development, were consistently undercut by scale-making projects related to global and regional geopolitical concerns. The research concludes that understandings of the technopolitics of development interventions would benefit from a closer engagement with recent discussions regarding the construction of spatial scale within political geography and related fields. River basin development and its material transformation of multiple locales remains one of the largely neglected, but vitally important, legacies of Cold War geopolitics.     

Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting Arctic geopolitics

This article unpacks the discourse of Arctic geopolitics evident in the space-making practices of a wide variety of actors and institutions, offering an exploration of the ways in which the Arctic is emerging as a space of and for geopolitics. Tracing the well-aired story of Arctic geopolitics through neo-realist readings of climate change, the melting of polar ice, increasing competition for resources and so on, two kinds of spatial ordering are identified as being entwined in orthodox Arctic geopolitics. The first has to do with Arctic space as such, and its open, indeterminate nature in particular. The perceived openness of Arctic space enables it to become a space of masculinist fantasy and adventure, which is mirrored in contemporary accounts of Arctic geopolitics. It is suggested that this is entwined with and nourishes the second ordering of Arctic space in terms of state-building and international relations. The working out of these spatial orderings in recent interventions in Arctic geopolitics is explored via three examples (two Arctic exhibitions in London, the Russian Polar expedition of 2007 and ’sovereignty patrols’ by Canadian Rangers). In conclusion, the article presents avenues for further critical research on Arctic geopolitics that emphasizes embodiment, the resolutely (trans)local, and a commitment to the everyday.