Reflection on Criticisms of Critical Geopolitics

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.

‘Everyday droning’: Towards a feminist geopolitics of the drone-home

We live in an increasingly drone-saturated world. In this article, we bring drone scholarship and feminist geopolitics into dialogue to interrogate the drone-home. We re-orient military- and state-led accounts, foregrounding the growing range of non-state actors enacting and subject to the drone as it is increasingly employed in the Global North. In so doing, we develop the concept of ‘everyday droning’ as the honing and homing of military technology and drone capitalism. Examining militarization and enclosure at the scale of everyday home life, we urge future geographical work to engage with everyday droning being actively seeded in the domestic here-and-now.

A Feminist Geopolitics of Technology

This article proposes a feminist geopolitics of technology framework that analyzes the connections between global politics and techno-empires through the lens of feminist scholarship. This framework has three dimensions: (1) grounding in place, (2) attention to everyday surviving and thriving, and (3) community. We draw on two long-term, community-oriented ethnographic research engagements in Cambodia and Ghana to illustrate how this approach might be used. This framework provides a resource for scholars to make sense of the contrasts between dominant narratives and lived experiences, particularly encouraging more sensitive and generative approaches to analyzing the conditions and dimensions of a shifting geopolitics of technology. In writing stories of caring, thriving, and grounded alternatives, we hope to foster and support initiatives that encourage personal agency and living the full human experience amid inequality and structural violence.

Materials, forensics and feminist geopolitics

This article seeks to advance the case for feminist geopolitics that recognises the challenges both to the Enlightenment individual and the discursive turn in geography posed by ‘new materialisms’. I will argue that for a distinctively feminist geopolitics a consideration of the way that representational categories align the material around bodies is vital. After a brief discussion of feminist geopolitical approaches, the article moves on to consider accounts of new materialism and assemblage approaches as they are applied to geopolitics, before moving on to consider what a forensic approach might offer to a materialist feminist geopolitics.

Fried eggs and all-women gangs: the geopolitics of Chinese gold mining in Ghana, bodily vulnerability, and resistance

Between 2008 and 2016, more than 50,000 Chinese citizens migrated to Ghana to mine gold on small-scale concessions. This is particularly surprising given that small-scale mining is an activity reserved for Ghanaian citizens. Foreign gold mining is mediated by various intersecting political economic and geopolitical shifts, including unprecedented gold demand, economic crisis, and informal conditions to Chinese loans. Based on long-term, mixed-methods fieldwork, and drawing from feminist geopolitics research, we argue Ghana’s recent gold rush portends gendered implications for bodies in rural areas. We center our discussion on bodies to demonstrate the ways extractive practices increase vulnerability among women and children, including teen pregnancy and mercury exposure. Yet, women also contest foreign mining and its myriad implications (e.g., refusing to sell land and entering sites while menstruating despite being “forbidden” to do so). A feminist geopolitics perspective allows the tracing of specific political economic processes (Chinese monetary policies, informal loan conditions) to other sites (Pokukrom, the pregnant teen), thereby enabling a clearer understanding of how supportive interventions might occur.

The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism’s onslaught.

Feminist geopolitics: A contested and rebellious offspring of geopolitical knowledge

The paper discusses the general features of the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological framework of a feminist approach in the early 21st-century Geopolitics with the aim to discover how its proponents challenge the established ?truths? of (neo)classical geopolitics and make innovative interventions to ?repair? and improve the knowledge produced in critical geopolitics. Being the most recent offspring of geopolitical knowledge that emerged only three decades ago, feminist geopolitics provoked an immediate backlash from the colleagues from the mainstream political geography in terms of recognising its disciplinary position. The author gives an overview of the body of a significant feminist geopolitical work drawn up based on a selected batch of most important international journals and edited volumes published since 2001. The author argues that the contribution of theoretical, epistemological and methodological insights of feminist geopolitics should be located in counterbalancing of the rigidity of the discipline mainstream, and in insisting on the analysis of the intersections of the public (state, global) and the private/intimate (body, home), interrelatedness of embodied life practices and abstract/bureaucratic geopolitical projects, as well as on the introduction of post-positivist methodological approaches and techniques. The paper systemises the most important feminist research questions, and particularly legitimate topics of the day, which were ignored or missed by the mainstream geopolitical research. The author concludes that the feminist approach still remains a dissident body of knowledge within the geopolitical thought, but with an emancipatory potential in creating theoretical and political space in which to articulate a more responsive notion of geopolitics - taken both as knowledge and practice - that might address victimisation of marginalised population entangled in imperial projects.