Naturalizing the state and symbolizing power in Russian agricultural land use

Land is intertwined with politics: both as a sine qua non for the territorial state, as well as a spatially limited natural resource through which geopolitical power and advantage are articulated and enacted. This remains the case, notwithstanding the emergence of global and planetary frameworks for land management towards collective environmental and developmental goals. Indeed, such frameworks contend with narratives and practices that not only treat land as a strategic national resource, but entangle it with the very ontology of statehood itself. This study examines such state-natures through the case of Russian agricultural land use. Analyzing governmental discourse from 2000 to 2020, it examines how in the extensive cultivation of agricultural land has come to be a hallmark of twenty-first century vertical and horizontal symbolic state-making: both as an instrumental means of enhancing the state's geopolitical power, as well as a means by which state is reified as environmentally sovereign and self-subsistent. So doing, the study complements a growing body of work in critical environmental geopolitics that has tended to eschew state-based analysis, or else leave the state underproblematized. As I argue, considering how the state is made natural, in turn helps to understand how nature is politically if not ontologically entangled in geopolitical thought and practice—in ways that attempts to act upon and indeed bring about wider-scale environmental subjects must contend.     

Subjects supposed to know,believe, and enjoy: The geopolitics of ideological transference in the Swedish begging question

This article aims to contribute to the emerging field of psychoanalytic geopolitics by introducing a conceptualization of a geopolitics of ideological transference of political knowledge and belief. This is done through an extensive theoretical application of the Lacanian- Žižekian concepts of the “subject supposed to know,” “subject supposed to believe,” and “subject supposed to enjoy” on an empirical case study. The case concerns the discourse, ideology, and politics of the Swedish state hegemony regarding its handling of the territorial presence of impoverished and excluded EU citizens with Romanian/Bulgarian passport and Roma heritage – popularly called “the beggars” – with a focus on the crisis-laden year of 2015. The government, state, and the media elevated key actors into the ideological status of subjects supposed to know how to end the “beggars’” presence in Sweden in a rational and yet caring way, thus enabling the continuous belief in the Swedish ideology of moral exceptionalism although the practical outcomes effectively hindered the EU citizens from obtaining better life conditions. It is argued that a geopolitics of transference through the application of said concepts enable us to further understand how political actors can simultaneously act cynical and idealist, which both illuminates and complicates notions of what knowledges and beliefs inform politics and political geographies in general.     

The conflicting logics of cross-border reterritorialization: Geopolitics of Euroregions in Eastern Europe

Europe is currently experiencing an unprecedented process of reterritorialization in the context of European Union integration. Central to this process is the implementation of various cross-border cooperation schemes, commonly known as Euroregions, aimed at redefining fixed, border-induced Westphalian territoriality. The literature on Euroregions has primarily examined the reterritorialization of state power and institutions across borders, documenting the emergence of cross-border governance networks. However, the territorial underpinning of cross-border reterritorialization, as well as the process of territorial constitution of cross-border spaces has been less well explored. This paper examines cross-border reterritorialization from a geopolitical perspective informed by multi-scalar conceptualizations of political territoriality. Actors at supranational, national and local scales often follow territorial logics that are at odds with each other. Competing meanings of territory and territoriality interact to produce a geopolitics of Euroregions that shapes cross-border reterritorialization. The paper focuses on the Euroregions established at the current fringes of the EU, in the Romanian–Ukrainian–Moldovan borderlands.     

Geopolitics as palimpsest: Contextual inscriptions of the global war on terror

This article aims to develop the agenda of a grounded, contextual critical geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the interaction between local and hegemonic geopolitics. This is achieved by examining the local reception of the geopolitics of the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) in the context of the establishment of US bases on Romanian territory following the 2004 US Global Posture Review. A close reading of this context reveals a complex and ambiguous relationship, simultaneously assertive and subversive, between the GWOT's sui generis, territorially non-specific geopolitics of transit, and Romania's exceptionalist geopolitics of place, significance, and convergence. Not only did the GWOT geopolitics fail to erase local geopolitics, but it also became muddied, contaminated, and inadvertently destroyed by the ‘old’ local geopolitical knowledge. This suggests an understanding of geopolitics as a palimpsest, the product of serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings-over that produce geopolitical knowledge of, and in different contexts. In broader conceptual terms, this study highlights the heteroglossia of geopolitical knowledge, the resilience of local geopolitics, and the importance of contextual sensitivity in the pursuit of the normative mission of critical geopolitics.     

Education and intimate war of position: The National Security League's Committee on Patriotism through Education, 1917–1919

The National Security League was an elite private lobbying group in the World War I preparedness movement in the United States. Its educational wing was a group consisting mostly of college professors called the Committee on Patriotism through Education, which sought to use education to promote a militaristic brand of patriotism. This paper adds to our knowledge of the geopolitics of the period by critically reviewing the Committee's propaganda efforts, as organized into its Patriotism through Education Series. More importantly, this paper theorizes this propaganda by engaging with two literatures that seldom cross paths: emerging interest in intimacy-geopolitics and Gramsci's concept of war of position. Intimacy-geopolitics is used to highlight the performative edge of war propaganda, as it directs desire and affect to toward geopolitical visions which accord with elite visions of the good life. Intimacy-geopolitics as an analytical framework helps connect affect and war in a way that avoids scalar hierarchies of violence. The Committee deliberately sought to direct emotion toward militaristic ends, and saw teachers as foot soldiers in that effort. Understanding how war propaganda works through affect, that is, how it positions country as an object of affection, also qualifies and dovetails with an understanding of war propaganda as elemental to the Gramscian war of position. Quite apart from accusations of war-profiteering, elite manipulation of desire and affect toward the war effort also worked to obfuscate class interest in favor of gender and other social roles.     

The 1444–5 expedition of the Dauphin Louis to the Upper Rhine in geopolitical perspective

In summer 1444 the Dauphin Louis, son of Charles VII of France, appeared on the Upper Rhine with a large army. The purpose of his expedition was to reconquer the territories of his future brother-in-law, Sigismund of Austria-Tyrol, from the Swiss Confederates and their allies. However, after achieving just one victory, on 26 August, the Dauphin suddenly agreed to a series of truces and then a peace treaty with the Confederates, even though this made it impossible for him to fulfil his original objective. This article reassesses the contradictory course of the Dauphin's expedition in light of the geopolitical forces that shaped it in the political world of the Upper Rhine. It first analyses the political configuration of the region and the place of the ecclesiastical Council of Basel within it, and then demonstrates that these circumstances combined to force the Dauphin radically to alter his plans in late August 1444. The article also points to the wider implications of the episode for our understanding of later-medieval European politics. Highlighting the inadequacy of national or state-oriented paradigms, it suggests that a new vocabulary is needed to make full sense of the aspects of fifteenth-century political life manifested by the Dauphin's expedition.     

Preparing Geography,Earth and Environmental Science (GEES) Students for Employment in the Enterprise Culture

Maps and related graphics are important means of representing key issues in development education and related themes. This paper examines the use of world maps in materials used in teaching development in higher education and concludes that many are not 'fit for purpose'. Many of these maps create false connotations, which can lead to misleading understandings of key issues.     

The geographical and ethical origins of neoliberalism: The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the foundations of a new geopolitical order

Observers tend to overlook the early neoliberalism that derived from the “Lippmann Colloquium” organised in Paris in 1938. Analysis of the discourse produced and books published at this founding moment shows that neoliberalism was then presented as a geopolitical doctrine aimed at redressing the spatial fragmentation of the world into States. The means to achieve this, according to this first neoliberalism, was by implementing what, in 1978, M. Foucault called “governmentality”: a multiscalar political system based on the submission of territories to the transnational discipline of a multilateral free division of labour. This thinking was very similar to the convictions of a number of political leaders who, from the 1940s onwards, were involved in creating a new international order uniting Western Europe and the United States, the foundations of which had many similarities with the principles of the first neoliberalism.