When considering the intersection between geographical knowledge and geopolitical practice, emphasis generally falls on the state and the state's self-serving calculations. This paper, instead, focuses on geopolitical civil society, emphasizing the role that rationalized norms and emotive care-ethics play in molding and facilitating certain forms of geographical knowledge and subsequent foreign interventions. The case to illuminate this theoretical focus centers on American evangelical actors and their specific geopolitical vision, which is largely based on the perceived universal authority of the Bible. The case illustrates how the religious normative imperative to evangelize the world has led to geographically blunt imaginaries that present spaces of alterity as being in urgent need of spiritual and also geopolitical intervention. Opposed to such imaginaries, however, this paper also traces the emergence of an ethics of care that has developed within evangelical circles regarding the people of southern Sudan. This more specific and immediately felt ethical impulse is shown to maintain a more nuanced understanding of heterotopic place. It is argued that there is a frequent clash between such universalist ethical impulses, which tend to code global space according to a particular normative paradigm, and particularist ethical impulses, which are based on a care-ethics that is rooted in an attachment too and an understanding of a particular place. This paper makes the case that, given the right communication channels, these varying ethical impulses can lead to a transformative communication in which universalist geopolitical visions are adapted to place-specific heterotopic geographical realities.
A Right to Care: Putting Care Ethics at the Heart of UK Reconciliation Legislation
