scholarly journals Reflection on Criticisms of Critical Geopolitics

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
Gerard Toal

The book Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space was first published twenty-five years ago. In this article, I briefly discuss the geopolitical and intellectual sources of inspiration for the development Critical Geopolitics as a distinctive approach within Anglo-American political geography. In doing so, I distinguish it from other concurrent critical approached to International Relations and the world-system within English-speaking Geography at this time. Thereafter I consider four lines of critique of Critical Geopolitics. The first is the argument that the approach is too political. A subsidiary argument considers its relationship to violence. The second is the argument that it is neglects embodiment and everyday life and that, consequently, a Feminist Geopolitics is needed as a necessary corrective. The third is that claim that the approach is too textual and operates with a flawed conception of discourse, one that neglects practice. The fourth critique is that Critical Geopolitics has an undeveloped conception of materiality and neglects more-than-human agency. In discuss these criticisms, I make an argument for a continuity of concern with latent catastrophism in Critical Geopolitics from the danger of nuclear war in the mid-nineteen eighties to the climate emergency of today.

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.


2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarosław Macała

AbstractCritical geopolitics deals with the deconstruction and analysis of texts and speeches associated with elites of international politics. It shows us how the world and its geographies are formed and shaped by discourse, as well as how discourse is shaped by the world. Feminist geopolitics goes further. It derives from critical geopolitics, but the most apparent difference is that it completely changes the scales of political analysis, away from the masculine discourse of states and international relations. Feminist geopolitics shifts the focus of international politics from state security to human security, and renders traditionally marginalised groups political actors, for example on discriminated women, refugees, social movements.


1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 656-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Wolfers

Often it has been asserted that if the United States had stood by her allies after 1918 and joined the League of Nations, peace in Europe would have been secure. While this overstresses the point, it is certainly true that the lack of unity among the victors, both at Versailles and afterwards, deprived the world of anything like a center of coördination and leadership. Even the Concert of Europe of bygone days could claim greater authority than a League from which five out of seven great powers were either permanently or temporarily absent, and in which the two remaining powers, Britain and France, were rarely in agreement.In view of this experience, it makes sense to regard continued coöperation between at least some of the important allies of this war, assuming the defeat of Hitler and his partners, as being an essential prerequisite for a more durable peace. If at least the two great English-speaking powers could form between themselves a solid partnership, so it is argued, would not their combined strength and their supremacy of the seas quite naturally attract other nations into their orbit and thus enable them to preserve the order and peace of the world? Their rôle is envisaged as a kind of enlarged replica of that which the British Empire fulfilled with no little success throughout most of the nineteenth century.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
A. Lukin

The article explores characteristics of the international relations bipolar system, changes occurred after its collapse and the future of post-bipolar world, focusing on the role of non-Western actors in it. On one hand, the bipolar system provided stability of international relations, but on the other – lead to competition between the U.S. and the USSR for the influence on the third countries, which sometimes resulted in armed conflicts in the third states. The collapse of the Soviet Union convinced the West both in the universality of its development model and the necessity to spread it all over the world. Now it is clear that the “democratism” ideology failed politically and culturally. The Western model has neither become a panacea for eliminating disparities between countries on different stages of development, nor the only example of successful and strong governance. New power centers, such as Russia, China, India and Brazil, have been successfully developing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their influence has been growing along with that of the West, and even though they did not necessarily directly confront it, they never shared all its values, yet never actively imposed their positions on the rest of the world. Regional powers (Nigeria, Venezuela, etc.) are also playing a more significant role in the emerging system, although sometimes they may join the alliances with more powerful countries to achieve their goals (as Vietnam does with the U.S. in its conflict with China). Russia’s reluctance to follow the West in its development created the first serious alternative to the existing unipolar world model and its values, so naturally and widely accepted by the Western actors. Whereas China with its rapid economic development is also posing a challenge to the ideology of "democratism" proving that the economic welfare is achievable outside the Western political model. As for Russia, its role in the modern world is still not defined. The Russian Federation wants to become an independent power unit and a center of the Eurasian integration. However, it is not clear whether it has resources of all kinds to implement this idea, – moreover, its economic dependence on the West is still too strong to insist on further confrontation. Instead, Russia (as well as its partners in the Eurasian Economic Union) could use Eurasian integration platforms to act as an "ambassador" of Asia in Europe and that of Europe in Asia. Acknowledgements. The article has been supported by the grant of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs, National Research University Higher School of Economics in 2016.


Pneuma ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-273
Author(s):  
Christian T. Collins Winn

This essay, the first reception history of proto-Pentecostals Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt in Anglo-American literature, charts three phases of reception of the Blumhardts in English-speaking circles. The first phase focused on the healing ministry of the elder Blumhardt, which took place primarily in the nineteenth century. The second phase began in the mid-twentieth century and was devoted especially to introducing the Blumhardts to English-speaking readers. It included attempts by theologians and ethicists to appropriate the Blumhardts for constructive theological purposes. The third phase, currently underway, is marked by scholarly assessment of the Blumhardts in their historical setting and by an effort to translate more of the Blumhardt corpus into English. The conclusion offers unsystematic interpretive observations culled from the reception history itself, with an eye to the future appropriation of the Blumhardts in the English-speaking world.


Author(s):  
V. V. Kochetkov

International affairs specialists turn to historical sociology to explain the world political realities that remain hidden to other theories of international relations. However, in the national scientific tradition, historians, sociologists, and international affairs specialists give it unjustly little attention, despite the fact that the science of international relations is at the intersection of history and sociology. This article intended to compensate to some extent for the lack of information about this most interesting and promising approach to the study of international relations. The author formulates the concept of historical sociology and characterizes three main directions in its development. The first direction gives priority to the explanation of international relations of such factors, as types of power and methods of production. The second direction considers the events of international life through the prism of morality, culture, emotions and other spiritual components. The third direction seeks to unite the first two groups of research approaches within a single explanatory framework.


Author(s):  
Natalia Vlas

The paper tackled the extremely hot relationship between religion and security and argued that religion is both a threat and a promise for global security. Methodologically, the paper falls within the area of conceptual analysis. By making use of both inductive and deductive reasoning, it tried to find answers to the following questions: Is religion inherently violent? and What are the prospects that religion might contribute rather to peace and stability than to conflict and destruction within the international system? The paper comprised four sections. The first one outlined the background of the discussion, emphasizing that the world is facing a worldwide resurgence of religion, and tried to assess the meaning of the politicization of religion for the global security. The second section comprised a few reflections on the nexus between religion and violence, attempting to prove that no religion is inherently violent or inherently peaceful, as many would assume. The third part explored the positive nexus between religion and security and the last part comprised the conclusions and some recommendations meant to improve the ability of International Relations practitioners and policy-makers to make religion part of the solution to the global security dilemmas, instead of treating it exclusively as part of the problem


Author(s):  
Н.В. Захаров

Изучение творчества Шекспира в парадигме междисциплинарности является актуальной задачей. Тезаурусный подход исследований Шекспира и его современников позволяет сосредоточиться на междисциплинарном изучении шекспировского творчества. В статье анализируются основные направления шекспировских исследований, которые давно вышли за пределы англоязычной культуры. Во многих университетах мира изучают не только литературу позднего Ренессанса, эволюцию шекспировской поэтики, шекспировские реминисценции в национальных литературах, но и другие, казалось бы далеко стоящие от художественной литературы явления. Важными в научной и преподавательской деятельности стали исследования, ориентированные на философское прочтение творчества великого драматурга. Новые возможности открывают Интернет и цифровые технологии. Тезаурусный подход в современной гуманитаристике должен трансформироваться и стать методом анализа концептов и концептосфер, которые образуют тезаурусы. Как инструмент познания, метод способствует формированию полноты и глубины знания в междисциплинарных исследованиях. Каждый их сегмент открывает шекспировскую семантику культурных констант, объединяющих человечество и расширяющих тезаурус мировой культуры, не только национальный, но и мировой тезаурус творчества Шекспира. The background for Shakespearean studies gains importance in an interdisciplinary context. The thesaurus approach of studying Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the daily life of his epoch helps to concentrate on the aspect of interdisciplinary studies of Shakespeare's creative works. Following this task, the author of the article researches the key areas of Shakespearean studies. Today, Shakespeare is not only the genius of Anglo-Saxon literature, but also one of the pillars of Anglo-American educational system both at school and at university. Shakespearean studies have long gone beyond the framework of the English-speaking cultures. Turning to Shakespeare, researchers of the largest educational centers of the world study not only the literature of the late Renaissance period, the evolution of Shakespearean poetics in the context of world culture, Shakespearean allusions in national literatures, not only the development of dramaturgy, the history of the theatre, music, the cinema, but also other disciplines seemingly unconnected to the world artistic culture. The research oriented at philosophical understanding of the great playwright's work has gained special significance for scientific and teaching activity. Studying Shakespeare's work in the 21st Century is closely connected to the Internet and information technologies. In a sense, the thesaurus approach in modern humanities should be transformed and become a method of analyzing the concepts and conceptospheres that form thesauri.


1962 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 200-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. C. Adie

Nearly all Chinese, and many foreign students of China, will have it that China has never been, and is now unlikely to become, an expansionist power. A recent article in The Times said that China, being land-based rather than maritime, “never developed any sense of international relations”; instead of a Foreign Office, the old China had until 1842 an office for the management of barbarians, “whose respect for Chinese supremacy was demanded or exacted.” In other words, China's non-aggressiveness contains an element of semantic jugglery. How could China “expand,” and how could there be international relations when the Emperor was already regarded as ruler of the world? It is worth recalling that when the Ming fleets visited places as distant as Aden to “make known the Imperial commands,” this concept was in fact extended to peoples overseas; on their return, the envoys announced: “The countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the earth have all become subjects … the barbarians from beyond the seas … have come to audience bearing precious objects and presents.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARIN M FIERKE ◽  
VIVIENNE JABRI

Abstract:The ‘global turn’ in International Relations (IR), like postcolonial and decolonising approaches, moves away from the Eurocentric dominance of the discipline, and towards the inclusion of plural perspectives on global politics. The article investigates what such a call means in epistemological and ontological terms by focusing on the concept of ‘global conversations’. In section I, we show that the concept of ‘global’ conversations necessarily shifts from an individual ontology to a relational ontology of intra-action within a global space. In section II we explore why ‘conversation’, as distinct from dialogue fits more comfortably with this relational shift and has practical implications for how the engagement takes place. The third section engages in an exploration of some of the obstacles to global conversation, and not least the emotional obstacles, in light of historically embedded and embodied relations of power that shape who can speak and who is silenced or heard. The final section then engages in a discussion of the types of practical engagement and research that might flow from this analysis. In moving beyond ‘dialogue’, the article reveals the intersection of power, language, emotion and embodiment in the constitution of ‘global conversations’, and how these in turn come to constitute the global, its normative structuring, contestations and transformation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document