Diskurse von Geopolitik und ‚Neuem Kaltem Krieg‘ – Zur Veränderung medialer Repräsentationen von Russland und ‚dem Osten‘

Thirty years after the Cold War, many aspects of the West's self-identification are still shaped by othering ‚the East‘. This geographical identity-building in Western media discourses is indicated by terms like geopolitics and the (New/Second) Cold War. The paper scrutinizes ‚grand‘ narratives behind the appearances of such concepts and observes their continuities, dislocations, and disruptions. Taking a critical geopolitical perspective informed by discourse theory and based on Foucault's conceptualization of the archive, the paper introduces aspects of the transformation of geopolitical imaginations of the East and the West: (1) it reconstructs phases of the rebirth of geopolitics after WW2 until today. (2) It focuses on the changes in the East-West relations after 1990 and shows how the imagination of the ‚cold war‘ disappears from media discourse. (3) Finally, it analyses the revival through rising geopolitical risk-narratives since the crises and wars in Georgia and Ukraine.

The Role of India in the Indo-Pacific

The construct of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as a new ‘regional’ identity is garnering recognition in both foreign and defence policy institutions in India. Although the Indo-Pacific concept is currently ‘in vogue’, the essential motivations behind India’s self-proclaimed—and alleged centrality—in the Asian strategic space, are not particularly new. In fact, in this chapter we posit that it is quite the opposite: the construction of the ‘region’ possesses enduring historical connections to British imperialism alongside Indian nationalism. The works of post-independence Indian strategic thinkers such as Caroe and Panikkar will be further drawn upon to illustrate how their traditional geopolitical rationales and arguments remain integral to contemporary Indian framings of the Indo-Pacific. Examples taken from current Indian government policies and projects, such as Project Mausam, will be utilized to contextualize these concepts and geopolitical imaginations.

The Geopolitics of Environmental Education

This article analyzes the geopolitical imaginations promoted via environmental education in the school textbooks of five states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In doing so, it builds bridges between critical studies of education and political ecology. It shows that, when addressing environmental problems, the textbooks examined depoliticize environmental problems and sustain political and economic power structures. They do so by individualizing responsibility for environmental problems, legitimizing political and economic elites, associating environmental protection with wider societal goals, and externalizing environmental problems.