Intimate war

Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.     

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.     

油气地缘经济与中国油气安全

本文从地缘政治观念向地缘经济观念发展的观点出发,通过对全球油气中心随时空转移和变化的分析,着重阐述了冷战以后全球形成的"石油心脏地带"和"内需求月形地带"及"外需求月形地块"的油气地缘经济格局以及有关国家围绕争夺中亚油气资源和跨国运输通道构成的内外两个三角之间的油气地缘战略竞赛,在此基础上讨论了中国油气安全所面临的处境与应采取的对策。     

The IGY and the ice sheet: surveying Antarctica

This paper considers the significance of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the development of new knowledge of the shape of the Antarctic bed surface and the ice sheet that covers it. It also situates the Antarctic geophysical work done during the IGY within a longer history that begins in the immediate post-WWII period and extends up to the 1970s. The paper pays particular attention to the US IGY seismic traverses, which were the centrepiece of US IGY activities in Antarctica. We argue that these traverses should be understood as part of a broader set of geopolitical, military and governmental strategies that the USA pursued through the IGY and afterwards. In this sense we agree with other students of Cold War science who suggest that the IGY was far from being the beginning of the end for geopolitics in Antarctica. Instead we demonstrate that US scientific activities in Antarctica during the IGY and after were a form of geopolitics in themselves.     

Linguistic boundaries and geopolitical interests: the Albanian boundary commissions, 1878–1926

Since 1999, there has been much debate within the international community on what the future status of the autonomous province of Kosovo should be. However, there seems to have been little consideration as to why the Ottoman vilayet of Kosovo and the other majority Albanian-speaking areas (now parts of Montenegro, western Macedonia and north-western Greece) did not become either independent or part of an independent Albanian state, despite the legacy of these decisions. Focussing on British policy and perceptions, this article explores the role of the great powers in the delimitation of Albanian boundaries, particularly in two boundary commissions in 1913 and 1914: one determining the southern Albanian boundary with Greece and the other concerning the northern and north-eastern boundary with Serbia and Montenegro. The first part of the article considers the influences and interactions of two sets of factors in the boundary deliberations: the declared rationale of creating nation-states in south-eastern Europe based upon ethnographic criteria (linguistic boundaries) and the competing role of geopolitical interests in their decision-making, focussing particularly upon British interests. It illustrates that the decisions made to delimit the newly independent Albanian state primarily reflected the resulting great power conflicts and compensations, rather than the professed ethnographic rationale. The second part of the article explores some of the consequences of the decisions made to delimit Albanian boundaries, especially in ‘ethnic’ or national terms.     

Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim,India

Sikkim is a geopolitically sensitive frontier state in India sharing borders with Bhutan, China and Nepal. As distinctions between urban and rural dissolve across the Himalaya, concrete narrates the transformation of these landscapes and the assemblages that hold them together. Using Cloke and Jones’s (2001) notion of ‘dwelling’ we explore Sikkim's concrete manifested in tourism, hydropower and housing to make four arguments. First, concrete is central to the way development is conceived and enacted in Sikkim and offers a critical reading of the ways landscape is imagined, reproduced and politicised. Second, concrete foregrounds the ways peoples' aspirations are materialised in the built environment of a ‘remote’, yet geopolitically significant territory. Third, concrete is an integral component of Sikkim's political culture, part of the assemblage of incongruent elements that undergird the state's dependency. Finally, concrete has further entangled Sikkim within India, producing a loyal border state out of a recently independent polity.     

战后西方地缘政治学的发展与特征

本文在简要回顾二战前西方地缘政治学发展历史的基础上,介绍了"多极世界"模式,地缘经济学,文明冲突论等战后及冷战后西方地缘政治理论发展过程中有代表性的学说。分析评价了它们产生的思想基础,历史背景及发展特征,并预测了今后西方地缘政治学的发展趋势与方向。     

“The need and ability for expansion”: Conceptions of living space in the small-state geopolitics of Gudmund Hatt

Although they are often subjected to critical scrutiny, formal geopolitical practices have rarely been put on trial. One exception is the case of Gudmund Hatt (1884-1960), professor of human geography at Copenhagen University from 1929 to 1947, who was found guilty of “dishonorable national conduct” for his geopolitics during the German occupation. As a contribution to the critical history of geopolitical traditions, this article investigates Hatt as an example of a small-state geopolitician. Particular attention is given to his view of geopolitics as a practice and as an essentially material struggle for Livsrum (living space), and what this made him infer for the great powers and for small-state Denmark. Hatt’s geopolitical ideas had many parallels to those of his great-power contemporaries, but in important respects, his analyses also differed from traditional geopolitics. It is argued that, to a significant degree, this difference is related to the fact that Hatt narrated geographies of world politics from a small and exposed state with few territorial ambitions. This made him emphasize economic relations, efficiency rather than territorial size, and the geopolitical role of the Danish Folk (i.e., the nation). Hatt’s position as a peripheral observer to the geopolitical mainstream may also explain his understanding of geopolitics and living-space politics as practices pursued by all great powers.     

对地缘政治学批判的再思考

本文探讨了政治地理学最重要流派的地缘政治学的理论、发展和实践;对“反动”的德国地缘政治学历史批判的渊源进行了探索。作者认为,地缘政治学在二次大战后的一度衰落,仅是其理论组成之一的国家有机体学说,而另一理论组成的地缘战略学研究一直是地缘政治学研究的主流,是历史和当今国际关系研究的重要基础;德国的地缘政治学,其理论的合理部分,其研究所用的方法,对今天的地缘政治学研究仍有意义,应该历史地、客观地、科学地探讨德国地缘政治学的合理内核,恢复其作为一门科学的应有地位,促进政治地理学学科的发展。