GEOPOLITICS

As I planned and conducted a research project on the geopolitical consequences of contemporary US migrant detention and deportation policies, I realized that the project would not fit neatly within any definition of “the political” that did not simultaneously intersect with “the social.” I was interested in the spatial, economic, and social reverberations of these deterrence-driven policies far beyond US borders, as well as evaluation of actual policy outcomes alongside policymakers’ stated objectives. Epistemologically, I approached this study with the belief that consequences not traditionally classified as “political” can and should be investigated; it is important to look for answers beyond political offices and constituencies, and to ask how the effects of policies extend beyond the state. Some of these answers can and must be found in countries of migrant origin – not just in national government offices, but in the communities, homes and webs of daily life where what are sometimes referred to as “politics with a small p” unfold. Methodologically, I was committed to using primarily qualitative research methods, such as interviews, participant observation, and discursive analysis, to get at the everyday impacts of political decisions. I aimed to talk to people rarely considered when such policies are made. I also wanted to consider the role played by my background and biases in the conduct and interpretation of the research. Fieldwork took place in the southern Andes of Ecuador with migrants deported from the United States as well as with their household members. I paid particular attention to the policies’ reverberations in Ecuadorians’ everyday life to explore the various far-reaching impacts of political policies. The research analytically blurred domestic and foreign policy, household and public spheres, and the social and the geopolitical. (Nancy Hiemstra)

Within the discipline of geography, the term “geopolitics” has typically been associated with the subdiscipline of political geography. A long history supports this association, as does the very composition of the word. Indeed, some readers of A Companion to Social Geography may initially wonder why a chapter on geopolitics would be included in this volume. However, as the personal anecdote above shows, contemporary geopolitical questions and research demonstrate a growth in opportunities for intersections between geopolitics and social geography. Indeed, it is becoming clear that geopolitical processes are permeated with and indeed frame sociospatial phenomena.

In order to provide a platform for more conversation between geopolitical inquiry and social geography, this chapter defines the field of geopolitics and then traces its development as various interventions have been made over the years. In the sections that follow, we first offer a brief definition and history of the term and the associated field of “geopolitics.” In the second section, we discuss the contributions made by the subdiscipline of critical geopolitics to geopolitical inquiry. The third section reviews critiques of critical geopolitics that essentially stemmed from geopolitics’ roots in imperialism. Fourth, we examine a number of feminist interventions into the field. Finally, we illustrate how there is growing room for intersection between geopolitics and social geography with illustrative examples from research by contemporary human geographers.

Definition and Brief History of “Geopolitics”

Outside the discipline of geography, geopolitics is generally understood as the political machinations played out between countries around the world, and more specifically the ways in which geography influences the relationships between states (ÓTuathail 2006; Dahlman 2009). Modern geopolitics came into being as a consequence of the Eurocentric drawing of boundaries around the globe in the nineteenth century, and the partitioning of blank spaces into specific domains of power, resulting in a new order of closed space and associated realms of control (ÓTuathail 1996; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). Indeed, from its early stages, geopolitics drew on behavioral practices and socio-spatial relationships associated with states. The assumptions held that “natural” aspects of geographical location influenced the roles of states (Dahlman 2009: 89).

One often hears “geopolitical” employed as an adjective loosely synonymous with international relations, and yet the origins of the term have been more precisely traced and defined. Dahlman (2009: 88), for example, notes the two definitions provided by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the influence of geography on the political character of states” and the “pseudo-science developed in Nationalist Socialist [Nazi] Germany.” Gilmartin and Kofman (2004: 113) define geopolitics as the “practices and representations of territorial strategies.”

The discipline of geography has long been intimately involved in modern geopolitics, from merely mapping new boundaries drawn to furnishing geographical justifications for political hierarchies (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). Early geopoliticians included German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who likened states to living organisms in his writing in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, British academic Halford Mackinder was famous for his study of the expansion of Russian power due to its geographic location. Their work related closely to the purview of nation-states and indeed maintained the centrality of the state in conceptual understandings of international or global fields.1

Geopolitics – both as a discipline and as a guiding political philosophy – generally functioned as a tool of the state in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Geopolitical ideas proved central to the extension of state power and were harnessed to justify imperial aspirations (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). For example, in his position as the US government’s territorial advisor after each of the world wars, geographer Isaiah Bowman was instrumental in the realization of American ambitions for global power (N. Smith 2004).

Geopolitics was also invoked in ways that left the field facing a troubled set of associations within the discipline of geography. In particular, the “pseudo-science” of Nazi Germany, under geopolitician Karl Haushofer, drew on Ratzel’s idea of the state as a living organism that must expand its reach of power in order to survive (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Dahlman 2009). For decades after World War II and this purported use of Geopolitik strategy by the Germans, the term “geopolitics” was tainted by its association with Nazi strategy. Consequently, political geographers carefully avoided the term and sought to portray their work as neutral and objective (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004).2

It was not until the 1980s that geographers once again dared to openly engage with concepts of geopolitics. This academic re-engagement occurred subsequent to political developments at the international level that involved a renewed willingness to embrace the term “geopolitics,” such as the Nixon administration’s (under Secretary of State Kissinger) employment of “Realpolitik,” and in tandem with the end of the cold war (F. Smith 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). Political geographers, partially drawing on the evolution of and debates associated with international relations theory, began to reject the positivist approaches that had dominated human geography since the quantitative revolution. Positivism is a science driven by collection of empirical data which has resulted in social science purporting to be objective and free of social values. Political geographers began to eschew positivism as systematic scientific study of the politics between and within states, instead developing an epistemological approach based in critical theory (Dalby 1991; Dodds 2001). Importantly, geographers started to question the continued centrality of the state in geopolitical analysis (Dalby 1991). These shifts within political geographic thought and practice corresponded with the cultural turn in social geography and set the stage for geography’s re-engagement with geopolitics and subsequently for the emergence of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline in the 1990s (Dodds 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). In the next section, we delve more deeply into critical geopolitics in order to later make the case for inclusion of particular epistemological and methodological tools in social geographical analysis.

Critical Geopolitics

Geography is about power. Although often assumed to be innocent, the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space. (ÓTuathail 1996: 1)

Simon Dalby (1994: 595) defines critical geopolitics as “the critical and poststructuralist intellectual practices of unraveling and deconstructing geographical and related disguises, dissimulations, and rationalisations of power.” The field draws on debates within international relations, critical social theory, political economy, and postmodern theory (Dalby 1991; Dodds 2001). Expanding the work initiated by innovative political geographers in the 1980s, critical geopoliticians soundly reject positivism, taking instead a genealogical and deconstructivist approach that draws heavily on the work of social theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (Dalby 1991; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). Drawing inspiration from Foucault, Dalby (1991: 276) explains that “postmodern and poststructuralist approaches … point to how modes of knowledge are power-related resources, arguing that knowledge of a particular “truth” simultaneously enables and constrains practice.”

Understanding the ways in which power works and how powerful actors shape the outcomes and interpretations of events (and geography) is a primary endeavor of critical geopolitics. In his foundational text, Critical Geopolitics, Gerard ÓTuathail (1996) illustrates that geography is not natural or automatic, but embedded in broader sets of power relations. ÓTuathail (1996) argues that struggles over geography can be understood as struggles over particular visions of the world and determinations about who belongs and who does not to particular spaces. He re-defines “geo-graphing” as an “earth-writing” by ambitious colonizing powers intent on organizing space according to their visions of the world, and he characterizes “geo-politics” as “the politics of writing global space” (p. 18) by powerful intellectuals and institutions. ÓTuathail also uses the work of geographer Halford Mackinder to illustrate how the geopolitical tradition is guilty of erroneously claiming a disembodied, neutral perspective as well as being based on geographical ethnocentrism. The field of critical geopolitics, then, exhorts geographers to question the very realities presented by geopolitical processes. Accordingly, ÓTuathail (1996: 68) describes critical geopolitics as “a tactical form of knowledge” through which political discourses can be re-examined under fresh analytical criteria.

The conceptual work of critical geopolitics has often sought to expose the “master narratives” of political relationships as state-centric and rooted in elitism (ÓTuathail 2006), and to open up consideration of political power not necessarily based in the state (Dalby 1991). The “natural” role of geography and its influence on states should no longer be taken for granted, but rather put into place in a broader constellation of relations between power and knowledge.3 In this global constellation, the writing of space is always an exercise in power (ÓTuathail 1996). Critical geopolitics is centered in this recognition of the power-laden ways in which space is written, and in how power moves through particular spatial orders. Critical geopoliticians take special interest in the way the organization of space is discussed and presented. Indeed, they view geopolitics “as a form of political discourse rather than simply a descriptive term intended to cover the study of foreign policy and grand statecraft” (Dodds 2001: 469). Scrutinizing how we talk about politics and the organization of political space is therefore essential to understanding geopolitics. And “talking about” politics brings us to some of the ways in which critical geopolitics has, in turn, itself been critiqued.

Critiques of Critical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has made significant contributions to both the discipline of geography and the analysis of geopolitical processes. However, particularly since the publication of ÓTuathail’s foundational Critical Geopolitics, substantial critiques have been leveled at the field of critical geopolitics itself, many of them made by feminist geographers. There are, as in most innovative fields, a wide range of critiques. In this chapter we focus on those most important to the connections between geopolitics and social geography we wish to illuminate. In this section, we review the subset of critiques that stem primarily from geopolitics’ roots in imperialism. The subsequent section concentrates on interventions into critical geopolitics that come largely out of arguments for further engagement between feminism and political geography.

It is important to recognize that there are separate sets of critiques of geopolitics and of critical geopolitics. Indeed, as explained earlier, critical geopolitics is grounded in the idea that geopolitics relied on disembodied academic and political epistemology and methodology. However, our review here demonstrates that critiques of geopolitics and critical geopolitics sometimes overlap. Indeed, despite its deconstructionist and analytical intentions, many charge that critical geopolitics has not fully separated from geopolitics’ problematic beginnings in imperialism (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004); it remains an elitist, gendered, disembodied mode of inquiry that continues to focus overmuch on “the state” and fails to provide constructive alternatives to present realities. For example, Gilmartin and Kofman (2004: 123) suggest that both traditional and critical geopoliticians “continue to be bound by masculinist modes of analysis and representation that create binary oppositions between elite and popular, between state and local, and between powerful and powerless, and by those who continue to use language that is marked by its apparent objectivity but that masks fundamentally gendered ideas and concepts.” This quote illustrates that these critiques are circularly linked, making it difficult to discuss one without coming to others. However, for the sake of clarity here we treat each of these charges briefly.

Critics argue that critical geopolitics tends to focus on the western world (N. Smith 2000; Dodds 2001; Dowler and Sharp 2001). Perhaps in response to Said’s (1978) robust assessment of essentializing academic practices that construct “the orient” as region and field of study, many intellectuals have avoided analyses of non-western societies (Dowler and Sharp 2001). Critical geopoliticians have proved no exception; practitioners often fall short in pushing themselves outside the bounds of their western perspective and knowledge, and therefore fail to recognize the Eurocentrism in which their own work is embedded. Dowler and Sharp (2001: 167) charge that though the discourse of critical geopolitics is portrayed as universal, it remains a fundamentally western mode of expression. Accordingly, the subdiscipline has been incapable of evolving beyond the restrictions occasioned by its Eurocentric perspective.

A persistent, troubling elitism is also evident in critical geopolitics (and, of course, traditional geopolitics). Feminists and others charge that despite practitioners’ best intentions, the field hypocritically provides its own elitist, masculinist narrative (Sharp 2000; F. Smith 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004), and practitioners tend to pay attention to “the state” and the actions of state actors as traditionally understood – that is, typically privileged, influential males. Consequently, critical geopolitics perpetuates – instead of destabilizes – the inherently gendered nature of geopolitical discourse (Dalby 1994; F. Smith 2001). Furthermore, in her critique of Critical Geopolitics, Sharp (2000) claims that ÓTuathail reproduces existing power hierarchies in his focus on the already-powerful; ordinary people are given short shrift while elites are portrayed as having all the power and agency.4 This oversight prevents critical geopoliticians from considering the influences of popular culture on geopolitical events and actors, falsely separates state actors from non-state (and non-elite) actors (Sharp 2000), and leads them to ignore diverse experiences and resistances (F. Smith 2001). Importantly, it also “silences a whole range of people and groups from the operations of international politics” (Sharp 2000: 363).

Critics further suggest that critical geopoliticians have been unsuccessful in getting away from that which they critique: a disembodied view from nowhere. In Critical Geopolitics (1996), ÓTuathail states that practitioners of geopolitics falsely claim personal neutrality in their assessments of political relationships, a claim, he says, rooted in geographical ethnocentrism (ÓTuathail 1996). While ÓTuathail’s recognition of some of the faults inherent to the traditional geopolitical gaze is a fair start to bringing marginalized, overlooked people back into analysis (Dowler and Sharp 2001), scholars level the charge of this disembodied gaze right back at the subdiscipline. Neil Smith (2000: 366) argues that Critical Geopolitics contains its own “symptomatic silences,” and ÓTuathail fails to ask what he is not seeing and why. Sharp (2000) suggests that ÓTuathail does not acknowledge the unavoidable influence exerted on his scholarship by his social, economic, and political background, or recognize the role that personal biases also inevitably play. This approach – replicated throughout the subdiscipline – falsely endows scholars with the sense that they are somehow immune to cultural and popular influences (Sharp 2000). Thus, critical geopoliticians engage in a “disembodied critical practice” (Hyndman 2004b: 310), typically far removed from the subjects and people they evaluate (Dowler and Sharp 2001). One consequence of these many silences and false neutralities is that critical geopolitics actually contributes to the reproduction of already-existing power arrangements (Dalby 1994).

An additional charge leveled at critical geopolitics suggests that despite its many deconstructions of geopolitics, the subdiscipline does not itself provide recommendations for resistance and change (Sparke 2000), and supplies few suggestions for or examples of alternatives to contemporary state-centered, elitist, gendered political orders (Sparke 2000; Dowler and Sharp 2001). As Dowler and Sharp (2001: 167) state, “Important interventions have been made and there will always be a need to analyse the distortions of powerful geopolitical discourse; however, can there be a more constructive side to critical geopolitics – a more positive politics?” Critical geopoliticians, charge some scholars, are skilled at deconstructing whatever may be their object of study, but they too rarely offer any suggestions for a better re-construction (Sparke 2000; Dodds 2001; Dowler and Sharp 2001).

A final critical observation holds that traditional geopolitics has silenced, excluded, and “rendered invisible” women (Dalby 1994: 595; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). That geopolitics remains a patriarchal intellectual endeavor (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004) is evident in its highly gendered geopolitical discourse (F. Smith 2001),5 and numerous geographers have charged that the practice of critical geopolitics is steeped in masculine perspectives and methodology (Sharp 2000; Sparke 2000; Hyndman 2004b). For example, Sharp (2000: 363) charges that because ÓTuathail’s approach to presenting critical geopolitics centers on a genealogy of “Big Men,” it reinforces the masculinism embedded in geopolitics instead of destabilizing it. Consequently, the gendered practice of geopolitics precludes fully understanding how political power works, effectively reproducing existing gender hierarchies (Dalby 1994; F. Smith 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004). Dalby (1994) argues insightfully that critical geopolitics would greatly benefit from a de/reconstruction based on feminist ideas on gender. He notes that there are many gendered assumptions behind the study of international relations (which is foundational to critical geopolitics), and that political spatializations often make women most vulnerable.

In the next section, we take up Dalby’s argument by exploring five feminist interventions into critical geopolitics. While it is not our intention to position feminist work on geopolitics as somehow resolving the shortcomings or silences of previous work, we do address feminist contributions in order to explore the fertile connections between geopolitics and social geography as well as some of the exciting directions in which these subfields are moving in tandem.

Feminist Geopolitics and Interventions

Feminist and poststructuralist readings of geopolitics both open up the ontological presuppositions of power to critique and in the process reveal how the taken-for-granted specifications of politics are inherently powerful. (Dalby 1994: 603)

Many of the analytical moves made by political geographers and critical geopoliticians follow the “cultural turn” (Dowler and Sharp 2001), and in so doing their work corresponds with that of social geographers. That is, the subjects of analysis have begun to include the more routine ways in which power operates on a daily basis. However, as evident in the review of critiques above, the field of critical geopolitics still has significant room for improvement. In this section, we explore some of the epistemological standpoints and methodological tools that feminist scholars bring to the field of critical geopolitics. We suggest that collectively, feminist critiques and political perspectives offer openings for stronger links between critical geopolitics and social geography. We begin by briefly discussing proposals for a “feminist geopolitics,” and then explore five feminist interventions that, we believe, broaden and deepen the tools available for geopolitical analysis. In the final section of this chapter, we illustrate these interventions in practice by looking at contemporary geopolitical research projects in geography, paying special attention to the rich ground such projects provide for links with social geography.

Feminist political geographers have advanced the idea of a “feminist geopolitics,” which will strengthen critical geopolitics’ powerful tools of discursive analysis and deconstruction by applying lessons from feminist geography (Dowler and Sharp 2001; F. Smith 2001; Hyndman 2004a, 2004b). Feminists have highlighted the arbitrariness of the division of social realms into public and private and asserted that “the political is personal” (Enloe 1989). They also challenge the idea of “capital P Political” as politics that operate only in formal spheres (Peake and Kofman 1990), and turn attention to “little p” political engagement emanating from intimate sites of daily life (e.g., Cope 2004). These epistemological breakthroughs have opened up understandings of political participation and arenas. Feminist geographers Kofman and Peake (1990) assert that “the political” can occur at any scale, and others have mapped fluid boundaries between the personal and the political (Secor 2001; England 2003; Cope 2004).

A feminist geopolitics calls for an expanded conceptualization of scale. The focus of political geography is usually on scales such as the state, region, and city; other scales have often been overlooked (England 2003; Hyndman 2004a, 2004b). Jennifer Hyndman (2004b: 315) calls for the redefinition of scales of inquiry to those “finer and coarser than that of the nation-state and global economy,” and she also interrogates the notion of “scale as pre-given and discrete from other levels of analysis” (p. 309). Feminist geographers recognize that it is important to look at previously ignored scales such as the body, the household, the locality, and the supranational organization (Marston 2000; Marston and Smith 2001), to link scales to specific places (Brown and Staeheli 2003), and to focus on the local (Dalby 1994; Cope 2002). Furthermore, Kim England (2003: 612), noting the ongoing conflicts over domestic issues (such as reproductive rights and gendered wage differences) at the borders between public and private, points out that the recent “scale debates” in geography may provide spaces for increased exchange between feminist and political geographies. We contend that these debates also make room for increased exchange between social geography and geopolitics by drawing on the socially constructed nature of scale (Marston 2000).6

Feminist geopolitics also reminds scholars to consider the heterogeneity of individual experiences (Moss 2002), and focus on individual, gendered subjects in their daily lives (F. Smith 2001). Ana Secor (2001) proposes an alternative view of the spatialization of politics to that typically explored in critical geopolitics. She focuses on achieving an “understanding of how political life plays out through a multiplicity of alternative, gendered political spaces” (2001: 192), by looking at both formal and informal political practices in Turkey. Her work shows that scholars who privilege the national and international scales in geopolitical analyses risk failure to grasp connections between and across scales. Secor (2001: 193) asserts that “feminist approaches show how the (imminently political) categories of public and private, global and local, formal and informal, ultimately blur, overlap and collapse into one another in the making of political life.”

We now draw on the lessons advanced by feminist geopolitics to suggest interventions in political – and social – inquiry.7 We begin with the recognition that the state is not unitary. By incorporating a new range and understanding of scales of political analysis, feminist geographers have significantly destabilized traditional understandings of “the state” (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Brown and Staeheli 2003; England 2003; Desbiens et al. 2004; Hyndman 2004b). Instead, the state functions as “a set of practices enacted through relationships between people, places, and institutions” (Desbiens et al. 2004: 242; Painter 1995). In Alison Mountz’s (2004) work, for example, bureaucrats managing immigration along borders are embedded in broader networks of social relations that influence their work, including the daily decisions about which immigrants and refugee claimants succeed in entering sovereign territory. Analyses conducted at the scale of the body further amplify geopolitical inquiry beyond the state (Hyndman 2004a, 2004b). Hyndman (2004a: 175) writes, “From a feminist perspective, shifting the focus of security to that of civilian safety and well-being unsettles the state-centric approaches of conventional geopolitics.” Such shifts draw attention to everyday lives instead of high-stakes political actors and their maneuvers (Dodds 2001). Tamar Mayer (2004), for instance, shows how soldiers used rape of women as a tool of ethnic genocide in the Bosnian conflict. Such physical violence to bodies starkly illustrates how the political and the social intersect.

Attention to feminist theory and practice in critical geopolitics has also led to an expanded understanding of “security” in ways that could be useful for geographers in general, particularly in the current climate in which “security” proves a persistent framing of public and political discourse. Geopolitics has traditionally placed “security” in the masculine realm, despite the very direct and dramatic impacts “national security” disruptions typically have on women (Dalby 1994, drawing on Enloe 1989). Geopolitical scholars drawing on feminism have suggested that the idea of “human security” is a more expansive idea of “security” (F. Smith 2001; Hyndman 2004a). Dalby (1994: 601) notes that, “By so bluntly posing the question of “whose security?” feminist critiques challenge the territorial presumptions of states” (see also F. Smith 2001). In short, attention to gender challenges the idea of the territorial state as container (Dalby 1994). Hyndman’s (2007) work, for example, on the displacement caused by political conflict in Sri Lanka illustrates the lived and gendered realities of losing one’s home, community, and family members. Rather than examine only the state as an “actor” in political conflict, Hyndman shifts study of security to center the human suffering and resilience that always accompanies states’ moves to securitize.

The inclusion of feminist political methodological tools offers significant potential for critical political analysis (Dodds 2001; Dowler and Sharp 2001; Sharp 2004). Despite intentions to break through the narrow, elitist perspective endemic to geopolitics, critical geopoliticians have typically failed to employ methods that facilitate such a breakthrough (Dodds 2001; Dowler and Sharp 2001). While deconstructionist scrutiny of the power-knowledge relationships inherent to discourse is important to critical political projects, it does not draw attention beyond traditionally visible state actors. Feminist political geographers frequently employ more localized, qualitative and/or ethnographic methods such as interviews, participatory techniques, and focus groups, often in addition to quantitative methods (Sharp 2004). Qualitative research attempts to “get at the less formal spaces where hidden and marginalized, but no less important, political identities and processes are formed and reformed” (Sharp 2004: 98; Dowler and Sharp 2001). This can be achieved by encouraging focus on everyday lives (Sharp 2000; Staeheli and Kofman 2004), and explicitly endeavoring to include a range of voices and spaces (Sharp 2000). In addition, methodological commitments to understand the richly embedded nature of lived politics has the potential to ground critical geography’s “view from nowhere” (Dowler and Sharp 2001; F. Smith 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Hyndman 2004b). Because of feminism’s insistence on reflexivity and positionality as these methods are carried out, researchers are encouraged to bear in mind that all knowledge is partial and situated (Moss 2002; Sharp 2004).

Feminist attention to the political reveals the need for more attention to the everyday. Indeed, political geographers have long urged that political geographic analysis be attentive to everyday politics, or politics with “the little ‘p’” (Kofman and Peake 1990; Staeheli and Kofman 2004). Thrift (2000) similarly calls for attentiveness to “the little things,” those mundane practices wherein state power is reproduced, and Dalby (1994) has argued that political power need not be synonymous with state power. Feminist scholars, however, charge that political geography’s “global visions and grand theorizing” (Sharp 2000: 94) often overlook “little p” politics. By focusing on women and specifically the “practical power arrangements of everyday life” (Dalby 1994: 599), critical geopoliticians can better understand how politics work. Dowler and Sharp (2001: 171) state,

In order to start to think in terms of a feminist (or post-colonial feminist) geopolitics, it is necessary to think more clearly of the grounding of geopolitical discourse in practice (and in place) – to link international representation to the geographies of everyday life; to understand the ways in which the nation and the international are reproduced in the mundane practices we take for granted.

In short, geopolitical analysis must include a focus on daily life as well as the “Big Men” (Sharp 2000); an interrogation of scales ranging from the global to the body; and a broad conceptualization of what “the political” can be.

Finally, feminist geopolitics aims to add “a potentially reconstructive political dimension to the crucial but at times unsatisfactory deconstructionist political impulses” of critical geopolitics (Hyndman 2004b: 309). As discussed in the previous section, assessments of critical geopolitics have found that it provides few alternative visions of political realities. Feminist geography, with its fundamental interest in empowerment (Staeheli et al. 2004), has altered modes of knowledge construction in political geography. Feminist political geography has worked to “democratize” intellectual endeavors by encouraging scholars to consider positionality and perspective (Staeheli and Kofman 2004: 5). A feminist perspective on the geopolitical includes a commitment to positive social change that goes beyond the mere “textual interventions” of critical geopolitics to actually envision and develop alternative strategies (Dowler and Sharp 2001: 167; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Staeheli and Kofman 2004). Pain and Smith (2008: 2), for example, illustrate poignantly the ways that fear has permeated and now shapes every aspect of our everyday lives, yet lies curiously hidden from discussion. They note the “rarely seriously unpacked engagement between geopolitics and everyday fears” and see potential in sustained study of the geopolitics of fear in everyday life in ways that destabilize the hierarchical fixing of “the global” over “the everyday.”

These key interventions by feminist political geographers offer lessons on how to stretch geographical inquiry in general. Just as feminist inquiry has broadened the range of subjects explored by critical geopolitics, we suggest that inclusion of these five analytical moves to the study of geopolitics positions the subdiscipline for more interactions with social geography, also concerned with how sociospatial relationships unfold in daily practice. In the next section, we extend our discussion of the intersecting realms of the geopolitical and the social by examining new directions in the subfield that bring together the geopolitical, the social, and the everyday.

New Directions: The Geopolitical, the Social, and the Everyday

The contradictions I witnessed while studying immigration and asylum policies and their sometimes devastating effects in migrants’ lives prompted me to turn to the state as subject of analysis. I researched the bureaucracy of Citizenship and Immigration Canada where employees worked daily in the business of making decisions about international border-crossings. I was interested in how they made decisions about who to let in and who to send home. Inspired by the work of feminist theorists on embodiment (e.g., Haraway 1991), I wanted to know how the state was embodied (Mountz 2004) and spent several months observing and interviewing bureaucrats in their day-to-day work on migration. The ethnography of the state examined the response of Canadian federal enforcement to human smuggling from China to North America by boat (Mountz 2010). Immigration policies were implemented unevenly across time and space, and state borders and the very edges of bureaucracy proved blurry. Civil servants interacted daily with other workers in order to do their jobs: immigrants, immigration lawyers, media workers, and refugee advocates, to name but a few. I found this daily process of imagining and enacting the state through bureaucratic work to be intimately bound to the social contexts, rituals, histories, and geographies where workers found themselves. After the federal government intercepted boats carrying migrants from China to Canada, many made claims for refugee status. Although claimants were offered access to the refugee claimant system, mid-level bureaucrats were made aware of the imperative of maintaining smooth diplomatic relations. They knew that the acceptance of refugee claims would embarrass China on the international stage by shaming the country for its poor record on human rights while it was fielding visits by western authorities in anticipation of joining the World Trade Organization. Instead, the claims were aggressively refuted by various arms of the government and most of the claimants ultimately repatriated to China. Ethnographic research exposed important geopolitical contexts that shaped the response to smuggling, but would not have been known without interviews and participant observation. The ethnography of the state uncovered geopolitical forces shaping the outcome of individual refugee claims made by Chinese nationals in Canada, but not written anywhere in official domestic or foreign policy or press releases. (Alison Mountz)

Like other fields of geographic inquiry, geopolitics cuts across subdisciplines and need not remain the sole “jurisdiction” of political geographers. Of course, the field of critical geopolitics is not the only arena where scholars are questioning existing power arrangements. For example, human geography moved toward humanism in the 1970s, made the cultural turn in the 1980s, and saw the rapid development of critical geography in the 1990s. The corresponding wealth of scholarship sought to challenge existing power structures in institutions, in social movements, and with innovative and community-engaged methods. Likewise, as the description of Alison’s work shows, the utility of a feminist geopolitics far exceeds the work done by scholars who study gender. It does much more than just include women in political geographic analysis; it provides a “lens” for making the lived realities of non-elites more apparent (Dowler and Sharp 2001: 169). We suggest that the incorporation of geopolitical analysis into social geography, and vice versa, can lead to more socially conscious, politically engaged scholarship (see Staeheli and Kofman 2004).

In this section we illustrate the intersection between geopolitics and social geography, drawing examples from recent research on human migration and associated state enforcement practices. Scholarship on human migration offers fertile ground from which to understand the intersections of social geographies and geopolitical forces. The state-level political machinations shape many dimensions of the daily lives of international migrants whose legal status, access to livelihoods, health care, and education are influenced by their citizenship status. Relations between states emerge not only in territorial conflicts along borders, but in everyday practices where the power of nation-states and their borders are reproduced through the lives of migrants who cross them. Wastl-Walter and Staeheli (2004: 144) call attention to how boundaries and territories are socially, politically, and culturally constructed, and highlight that “the ways in which they are constructed, performed, and perceived depends on the cultural, religious, social, and economic contexts in which they are located.” Indeed, by challenging commonly accepted ideas of territory and boundaries, the research we highlight here further loosens the state from the center of political geographic and geopolitical analysis (Wastl-Walter and Staeheli 2004), and opens up additional possibilities for epistemological and methodological links with social geography.

Eunyoung Choi (forthcoming) conducted qualitative research with North Korean migrants who crossed the border into China and live and work there without authorization. Mostly women, these are among the most vulnerable migrants in the region and globally precisely because of the geopolitical relationship between North Korea, China, and other states. As a communist country, North Korea has been so isolated since the cold war that its residents live in extreme poverty and widespread hunger. The majority of those who migrate into China are women moving because of their chances of finding particular kinds of work as domestic laborers and sex workers in China. Their criminalization through “illegal” status makes them vulnerable as undocumented workers in China and translates into a need to hide in daily life, exacerbating their exploitation as workers and as women by employers and state authorities alike. By studying geopolitical relations from the scale of the migrant woman’s body, Choi shows that the political arrangements between states indeed shape the contours of everyday social lives and economic livelihoods.

In field studies that unfold on different and distant continents both Choi and Mountz bring the policies and practices of states and the global forces in which they are embedded into the realm of the daily lives and lived spaces of transnational migrants. As such, these cases both demonstrate the feminist interventions detailed in the earlier section. Both scholars jump scale, moving between global and intimate scales of the body, while not prioritizing one over the other, an important distinction made by Pain and Smith (2008). Following Hyndman (2004a), they de-center the state to expand notions of security, moving discourse from national to human security by understanding the state through the migrant. Simultaneously, their analyses show that “the state” does not function as a unitary body. Indeed, both the Chinese and Canadian states benefit from maintaining ambiguity around the legal status and the information available to the public about undocumented migrants, whether Chinese in Canada or North Koreans in China. Qualitative methods in the form of semi-structured interviews and participant observation in both studies enabled Choi and Mountz to center the everyday as geopolitical in these studies. Both offer “little p” analyses of the journeys of undocumented workers and their encounters with state authorities, building political potential to “flip” the scripts of the state about migration and enhance political engagement through coalition-building and collaboration.

Conclusions

Critical geopolitics pushes scholars to consider ways in which power is embedded in and influences space. Feminist geopolitics promulgates an embodied, situated view that pays attention to private as well as public domains, is capable of recognizing “the political” at all scales, and places importance on studying the everyday lives of non-state actors. This chapter suggests that contemporary geopolitics offers tools whose utility extends beyond political geography into social geography, and we have aimed to provide a knowledge base from which more connections can be made. We outlined geopolitical inquiry: its history, evolution, critiques, and recent intellectual moves. In addition, we explored analytical tools developed within the subdiscipline of critical geopolitics – and particularly feminist geopolitics – that can usefully intersect with, shape, and apply to social geographies in significant ways.

We have drawn on examples from research on human migration to illustrate the central point, but the utility of geopolitics for social geography is certainly not limited to migration research. For example, postcolonial theories that attend to the racialized relationships between colonial powers and decolonized populations offer another field of study where the geopolitical and the social prove fertile, interwoven ground. Transnational feminist scholars such as Chandra Mohanty (2003) and Julia Sudbury (2005) offer analyses that center lived experiences such as cross-border solidarity movements and incarceration that – like our discussion here of human migration – disrupt the imperial fixing of the geopolitical.

In closing, we call on critical social and political geographers alike to disrupt, deconstruct and expand the traditional boundaries of subdisciplines. We challenge scholars to evaluate the ways in which they ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically frame geographic inquiry and analysis. A willingness to develop points of intersection between social geography and geopolitics will enrich geographic understanding of how the social is interwoven with the political, and vice versa.

Notes

1 The work of several “anarchist geographers,” such as Reclus and Kropotkin who actively sought to counter the prevailing views on geopolitics and geography, is considered in more detailed historical reviews (see Gilmartin and Kofman 2004).

2 This avoidance of the term “geopolitics,” however, did not preclude geographers from continuing to draw upon what had previously been considered geopolitical ideas (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004).

3 Critical geopolitics’ attempts to de-center the state in geopolitical analysis should not be taken to indicate that states are no longer powerful (Dodds 2001). Indeed, we are reminded of states’ continued importance through, for example, their capability for violence, as seen in relatively recent events, such as in Rwanda, Sudan, and Yugoslavia.

4 While many of these critiques have been directed at O’Tuathail’s 1996 Critical Geopolitics, we believe it is fair to extend these critiques to the subdiscipline as a whole (see Hyndman 2004b).

5 Enloe (1989), for example, points out that although women play an important role in the formation of national and international organizations and identity, this role usually goes unrecognized because women are not among the obvious, conventionally recognized, “political” decision-makers.

6 This point is well-illustrated in the scholarship on migration discussed in the next section.

Written by Nancy Hiemstra and Alison Mountz in "A Companion to Social Geography", edited by Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., Mary E.Thomas, Paul Cloke, and Ruth Panelli, Blackwell Publishing, USA, 2011, chapter 24. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. (Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007)