International Studies Compendium Project

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Comment on this article   Critical geopolitics investigates the geographical assumptions and designations that enter into the making of world politics ( Agnew 2003 :2). It seeks to illuminate and explain the practices by which political actors spatialize international politics and represent it as a “world” characterized by particular types of places ( Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992 :190). This strand of analysis approaches geopolitics not as a neutral consideration of pregiven “geographical” facts, but as a deeply ideological and politicized form of analysis. Eschewing the traditional question of how geography does or can influence politics, it investigates how geographical claims and assumptions function in political debates and political practice. In so doing, it seeks to disrupt mainstream geopolitical discourses: not to study the geography of politics within pregiven, commonsense places, but to foreground “the politics of the geographical specification of politics” ( Dalby 1991 :274). Critical geopolitics is not a neatly delimited field, but the diverse works characterized as such all focus on the processes through which political practice is bound up with territorial definition. This essay reviews critical geopolitics as a subfield of human geography: its intellectual roots, trajectories, internal debates, and interactions with other fields of inquiry. Its goal is to situate critical ... log in or subscribe to read full text