新疆的地缘政治与国家安全--历史与现状的考察

本文认为古代新疆西部境外没有出现过能向中国王朝挑战的敌对势力 ;民国时期 ,新疆地缘政治形势危机可用“孤悬塞外”来概括 ;新中国成立后的 30多年间 ,新疆的地缘政治经历了“友好的后院”到“反修前线”的变化 ;冷战结束后 ,新疆地缘政治的新威胁是民族分裂、宗教极端和国际恐怖“三个主义” ;“9·11”事件后 ,克什米尔问题、“后塔利班”问题、“前线”国家的动向、“三个主义”合流问题和美军进驻中亚问题 ,是新疆地缘政治的最严重的问题。新疆的地缘政治愈来愈事关国家安全大局 ,愈来愈受到国际大环境的影响 ,其进程愈来愈复杂多变     

中亚的地缘政治--历史和现实

一个多世纪以来 ,中亚的地缘政治格局和作用不断发生变化 ,并在不同时期以不同的方式影响着中国。“9·11”事件之后 ,中亚的地缘政治形势变得更加复杂 ,大国的、区域的、国际的利益交织在一起 ,成为全球关注的热点。阿富汗反恐战争的结束为中亚国家提供了国际合作的新通道 ,尽管中亚在国际地缘政治格局中的作用将越来越重要 ,但它不会成为新的地缘政治“核心地区”。     

Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven

The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands. Ridley Scott's three movies, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and most recently The Kingdom of Heaven explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable; political violence is presented as something that has both simple and very complicated geographies. The public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” in Western states is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott's work. Analyzing them in terms of the warrior, empire and the particular geographies of combat adds a specifically military dimension to the critical geopolitical literature on war and representation.     

“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.     

The limits of control: Technological agency,urban terrain,strategy and the state in the 2014 Gaza War

This article reassesses of the role of military technologies both in normative strategic thought and in the critical geopolitics literature by problematising their shared tendency towards representing the power of military technologies in a binary and sometimes hyperbolic way in relation to the complexity of terrain and the emergent intensity of war. In order to do so, it borrows theoretically from Object-Oriented-Ontology, using Harman's concept of “duomining” in dialogue with other understandings of material agency from assemblage theory and Actor-Network-Theory. This interstitial epistemology is applied to analyse the political implications for the State of Israel of its military's decisions on the use of weapons in urban warfare during the 2014 Gaza War. Through this framing, the paper argues that technological agency is ambivalent to the project of state stabilisation, and can act across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways unanticipated by political and strategic decisionmakers. It also demonstrates, counterintuitively, that technological objects can exercise agency as much by their absence as their presence in an event. These findings foreground the need for a more accurate accounting of what technological objects are, not just what they do, alongside a more nuanced consideration of the contingency of their power to shape politics in relation to the complex milieu of human and non-human factors that comprise geopolitical phenomena.     

Afghanistan's energy sociotechnical imaginaries: Alternative visions in a conflict zone

Imaginaries are understood to be both discursive and cognitive constructs that shape behaviour, policies, and institutions – but how do longstanding imaginaries evolve in new circumstances, and how do they interact with existing power structures in changed circumstances? Drawing on conceptions of discursive power, this paper investigates the interplay of power with both new and old imaginaries in the case of Afghanistan, specifically regarding alternative energy futures. Employing an interpretive approach, we draw on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with elite stakeholders and policy observers, to provide an account of the relations between alternative energy futures imaginaries and political power. We demonstrate, how certain discursive practices are made possible, authorised and articulated through imaginative geographies. Critically, the government-advocated imaginary of Afghanistan as an energy corridor and hence an energy importer both represents the views of several powerful interests and concurs with the long-held idea of Afghanistan as a buffer state. In this way, political path dependencies are reinforced through a supportive imaginary, just as the dominant imaginary is itself reinforced by the main stakeholders. While in line with our interpretive epistemology we do not make claims for the specific configuration of imaginaries being generalisable elsewhere, we do find the general theoretical approach useful for understanding discursive aspects of conflict zone politics, particularly vis-à-vis energy system trajectories.     

Popular geopolitics and political memoir: Geopolitical expertise and force majeure as foreign policy justifications in Tony Blair's A Journey

Political memoirs are not only popular with a general readership, they can also be useful historical source material. The place, form and function of geopolitics within them have been seldom explored, especially in the context of critical geopolitics. This article redresses this balance by arguing that geopolitics is a crucial salient in representations of foreign policy in that it is both a marker of expertise, power and authority, and an effective force majeure, allowing memoirists to depict constraints on action. These conclusions are reached through a theorisation of the form of memoirs in the light of recent innovations in popular geopolitics, in which I propose that they be studied via socio-discursive and fictive categories, in order to discern modes of representation and interactions with audience in justifying and explaining controversial foreign policies. The case study which demonstrates this concerns former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s, 2010 memoir, A Journey, a paradigmatic text in terms of how geopolitics functions in the above modes, particularly in his representations of globalisation, the War on Terror and the UK's relationships with the USA and Europe. By bringing together approaches from popular geopolitics and discursive theories of memoirs, I am able to make an original contribution that highlights the importance of political space within one particular and popular literary form and how this is used to justify past foreign policies.     

The politics of migration

This editorial introduces the Virtual Special Issue on the Politics of Migration by presenting a review of migration and refugee related articles published in Political Geography. We have identified two major shifts in scope during the last 30 years. First, the scalar focus has changed from nation-state policies to supranational migration agreements and transnational migrant experiences. Second, the theoretical focus has moved from geopolitics to biopolitics. Ten selected articles illustrate three central themes: regulation of migration, practices of border enforcement and migrant experiences.     

The desert,the border,and the city: Staging a spectacle on the Chile-Peru border

The 1970s saw Chile and Peru, both headed by military dictators, come to the brink of war. In order to avoid such a war, the Chilean military in the far north engaged in techniques of ‘spectacle’ for two reasons: firstly, to convince citizens on both sides of the border that Chile had a strong military and would succeed in the event of a war with Peru, and secondly, to create the impression of ‘fraternity’ with Peru. To perform these spectacles, the Chilean military employed the geography of northern Chile in three spaces: the desert, the border, and the city. These spaces became stages where acts of military deception could be implemented with the Chileans using fake tanks, military ceremonies, and bogus parades to appear militarily strong. This extends current scholarship by arguing that multiple environments can be harnessed for their specific geographical qualities in order to stage a unified geopolitical spectacle. Previous geographical scholarship has focused on individual environments as military spaces and scholarship on spectacle has treated environments as a backdrop and not a central part of how the spectacle is enacted. Here I show that it was the precise natures of the border, the desert, and the city that were exploited for a multi-scaled, heterogeneous, and fractured form of spectacle. Through the orchestrated control of these three spaces that define the border region, a clear narrative of military strength matched with a desire for peaceful co-operation with Peru was created.     

Asserting Europe's technological sovereignty amid American platform finance: Countering financial sector dependence on Big Tech?

Spearheaded by major technology companies (Big Tech), digital platforms have rapidly become key infrastructures for accumulation under global financialized capitalism, with consumer convenience and underlying practices of data collection, control and analysis giving rise to platform finance. While financial institutions are partnering with financial technology (FinTech) start-ups to digitally enclose customers, American and Chinese Big Techs increasingly mobilize their platforms to offer payment services, next to expanding their platformed services to financial incumbents. Observing the growing dependence of finance on American Big Tech platforms, this paper investigates how the shift toward platform finance in the European Union (EU) unfolds as a state-mediated and power-laden process between mostly ‘domestic’ (EU) financial incumbents and ‘foreign’ (non-EU) Big Tech firms. The starting point of the analysis is the European Strategy for Data launched by the European Commission in 2020. Through document analysis, we reconstruct the circulation of code words within ‘the Brussels Bubble’ in anticipation of- and in direct response to the proposal. We find that, despite its implication in the global financial crisis, incumbent EU finance presents itself as a fix for non-EU platform domination by Big Tech. The ‘technological sovereignty’ of the EU is marshalled by incumbent finance to defend market share as would-be pan-European digital financial champions. The Big Tech ‘threat’ is thereby transformed into an argument for strategic deregulation and forced data sharing by Big Tech for the sake of maintaining a ‘level playing field’. The outcome of these processes of strategic coupling is an alignment between the interests of EU data protection and the commercial interests of platformizing European banks.