Teaching terrorism,saving the state? Education and geopolitical imaginations of terrorism in 12 violently challenged states

The role of education in political socialisation and the importance of terrorism discourses in promoting (or silencing) certain interests have long been acknowledged. This study combines both themes by asking: How do school textbooks, sanctioned by states that are violently challenged by internal opposition, discuss the issue of terrorism? I draw on, and contribute to, four distinct, yet related streams of research: critical geopolitics, critical terrorism studies, geographies of education, and young people's geographies. Simultaneously, while most work on the topic focuses on individual cases (typically of Western countries), I conduct the first comparative analysis of twelve countries from different world regions: China, Egypt, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Contrary to recent claims, considerable heterogeneity persists regarding geopolitical imaginations of terrorism, while US-coined discourses are only infrequently adapted. However, there is still recognisable functionalist convergence as the states under analysis utilise their control of the education system in their internal struggles, mainly by portraying their opponents as evil, by ascribing a positive identity to themselves, and by calling for support by their citizens (including restrictions of human rights and democracy).     

Commentary: Philip Hirsch's “The shifting regional geopolitics of Mekong dams”

Understanding the complex shifting geopolitics of the Mekong at a time when many networked arrangements and economic flows are disrupting earlier forms of regulation must involve a multidimensional view of geopolitical practices across time and engagement with their representations. This commentary on Hirsch (2016) underscores the importance of the local struggles and people whose voice is often silenced. For a multidimensional view, it is particularly important to include voices that too easily become omissions.     

地缘政治学理论、方法与九十年代的地缘政治学

本文介绍了地缘政治学家关于地缘政治学学科的不同定义;探讨了不同层次地缘政治学研究的核心概念和研究方法论,分析了长期存在的学科内涵争论;探索了九十年代地缘政治学新的研究领域和发展方向:旨在推动我国地理学家参与国家和全球的地缘政治,地缘战略研究,繁荣和发展我国人文地理学的学科体系。     

国际关系的变化趋势与地缘关系理论的变革

国际关系的发展趋势将以经济为主题、以和平合作为主调。相应的地缘关系理论也应作如下调整:从"争夺霸权"向"寻求合作"的目标转换、从地缘政治向地缘经济的主题转换、从地理位置向科技人才的解释因子转换、从欧洲中心论向全球一体化的空间转换。     

The Great Game in Antarctica: Britain and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty

This article is concerned with Britain's political and territorial interests in the Antarctic in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the signing of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Using in part the diaries of a Foreign Office advisor, Dr Brian Roberts, attention is given as to how successive British governments and their officials sustained a presence in the remote polar continent. Rival claimants in the form of Argentina and Chile made the task all the more difficult. Mapping and surveying were essential in maintaining British sovereignty even if the end results were at times disappointing. The article concludes by suggesting that the Antarctic Treaty, while important in promoting international scientific collaboration, did not manage to resolve the political and territorial disputes surrounding the Antarctic. Arguably, the 1982 Falklands War and its aftermath provided a vivid reminder that Britain's most southerly possessions still remain deeply contested.     

Carl Schmitt on land and sea

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support.     

Enabling persistent presence? Performing the embodied geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assemblage

Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used to provide surveillance and attack capabilities within war zones. At the heart of much of the rhetoric about these aircraft is their supposed ability to enable persistent presence across the battlespace. They are also unique in that they actively distance the aircrew from the aircraft. This paper seeks to question whether this claim to persistent presence can be justified and considers the implications of the distancing of pilot from machine in this. In order to achieve this, the paper focuses upon conceptualising UAVs as assemblages, composed of both human and machine elements. It uses firsthand accounts from a Royal Air Force Reaper UAV aircrew as a basis to analyse the ways in which the deployment of these aircraft in Afghanistan is changing the ways that war is experienced by aerial combatants. It does this through the utilisation of a feminist, embodied geopolitics, refiguring it from a concern with victims of war to argue for its use to understand the micro-scale of how the humans within these UAV assemblages experience combat. This paper thus focuses upon the extent to which the Reaper UAV achieves a persistent presence through analysis of its supposed more-than-human loitering and vision abilities, and the limitations associated with the requirement for a human-in-the loop. The paper contends that although UAVs like the Reaper change the geopolitics of combat, the continuing requirement for the human element of the assemblage restricts their ability to provide persistent presence.     

Cartographies of supranationalism: Creating and silencing territories in the “Arab Homeland”

In the predominately Arab states of north Africa and southwest Asia, a geopolitical entity exists that is rather uncommon elsewhere in the world. The “Arab Homeland,” as it is referred, is a readily accepted cartographic discourse throughout much of this extensive region. The construction of this entity emerged at the same time as the pan-Arab movement of the mid-twentieth century, which was fueled and motivated by 20th century geopolitical conflicts between Arabs and European imperialists, and between Arabs and Israelis. Through a critical reading of its cartographic construction since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, I provide unique insights into the numerous, complex, and even contradictory geopolitics of the construction of the Arab Homeland. My analysis of several hundred maps produced in eight different states of the Arab Homeland reveals that from the mid 1950s onward that the Arab Homeland was not only commonplace, but also how this supranational territorial entity confused and at times defied generally accepted divisions of the world. Expanding upon literature on supranational entities and the state, I show that territory is not only still important in our globalized world, but that it also has a complex and at times contradictory relationship with the concepts and scales of the state and the supranational. In emphasizing the role of territory in its construction, I also inject the importance of geography and territory for the pan-Arab movement, which is a factor that has been greatly under-theorized.     

Consuming geopolitics and feeling maritime territoriality: The case of China's patriotic tourism in the South China Sea

This paper develops the concept of territorial socialisation and explores the process and effect of tourism in China's maritime territorialisation of the South China Sea. The research demonstrates the mutual constitution of tourism and territorialisation and suggests that tourism is playing an increasingly important role in everyday contexts to socialise individuals into national-territorial thinking. However, tourism alone does not decidedly stoke strong territorial nationalism, instead it produces uneven bordering or territorialisation effects at the personal level. Tourism practices, tourist agency, and the distinct wet ontology of the sea complicate the state maritime territorialisation process. The research also shows that the Chinese tourists are pragmatic, calculative geopolitical actors. Their geopolitical experiences through tourism are connected to, and embedded in, the broad geopolitical realities of China's rising and unjust international orders, while informed by official territorial rhetoric and traditional political culture.     

Intimate bordering: Intimacy,anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border

This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.