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Article contents

Critical geopolitics.

• Merje Kuus Merje Kuus Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.137
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 30 November 2017

Critical geopolitics is concerned with the geographical assumptions and designations that underlie the making of world politics. The goal of critical geopolitics is to elucidate and explain how political actors spatialize international politics and represent it as a “world” characterized by particular types of places. Eschewing the traditional question of how geography does or can influence politics, critical geopolitics foregrounds “the politics of the geographical specification of politics.” By questioning the assumptions that underpin geopolitical claims, critical geopolitics has evolved from its roots in the poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial critique of traditional geopolitics into a major subfield of mainstream human geography. This essay shows that much of critical geopolitics problematizes the statist conceptions of power in social sciences, a conceptualization that John Agnew has called the “territorial trap.” Along with political geography more generally, critical geopolitics argues that spatiality is not confined to territoriality. The discursive construction of social reality is shaped by specific political agents, including intellectuals of statecraft. In addition to the scholarship that draws empirically on the rhetorical strategies of intellectuals of statecraft, there is also a rich body of work on popular geopolitics, and more specifically on resistance geopolitics or anti-geopolitics. Another emerging field of inquiry within critical geopolitics is feminist geopolitics, which shifts the focus from the operations of elite agents to the constructions of political subjects in everyday political practice. Clearly, the heterogeneity of critical geopolitics is central to its vibrancy and success.

• world politics
• critical geopolitics
• human geography
• political agents
• intellectuals of statecraft
• popular geopolitics
• anti-geopolitics
• feminist geopolitics

Introduction

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 geopolitics in the study of international affairs and to highlight its contribution to that study. To underscore the spatiality of world affairs is not to add a token “geographical” perspective to international studies. It is rather to insist that a critical inquiry into the spatiality of world affairs must be central to the study of politics. All analyses of international affairs make geographical assumptions, whether acknowledged or not. Critical geopolitics seeks to make these assumptions visible so as to submit them to analytical scrutiny.

The essay proceeds in four steps. The next section (“Geopolitics and its Discontents”) briefly situates critical geopolitics in the scholarship that preceded it and lays out the principal theoretical and empirical concerns of this subfield. The following two sections discuss some key strands of and debates within critical geopolitics in more detail. Thus, the third section (“Locating Critical Geopolitics”) addresses the debates over the “location” of critical geopolitics in two senses of the term. It first discusses the location of that scholarship within human geography and the social sciences more broadly, and then addresses its geographical scope. The subsequent section (“Geopolitics and Agency”) tackles questions about who produces geopolitical discourses. In particular, it foregrounds the substantial work on intellectuals of statecraft, popular geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, and resistance or antigeopolitics. In so doing, the section seeks to illuminate the role of human agency (capacity to act) in geopolitical practices. The final section (“Critical Geopolitics as the Fragmented Mainstream”) summarizes the position of the field within human geography today. Throughout, the focus is not only on studies that are self-consciously “critical geopolitical,” although these are central to the essay. Rather, the essay takes a broader look at geographic analyses on the spatiality of international affairs, regardless of whether they are commonly labeled as critical geopolitics.

Geopolitics and its Discontents

To understand the intellectual and political concerns of critical geopolitics, we must briefly consider the troubled relationship between academic geography and classical geopolitical thought. Classical geopolitics, taken to mean the statist, Eurocentric, balance-of-power conception of world politics that dominated much of the twentieth century , is closely bound up with the discipline of geography. This is an association of which geography unfortunately cannot be proud. It goes back to the birth of self-consciously geopolitical analysis in the nationalism and imperialism of fin-de-siècle Europe. From the beginning, geopolitics was intimately connected to the competitive ambitions of European states (Parker 1998 ; Heffernan 2000 ). For example, Friedrich Ratzel ’s ideas of living space grew out of the widespread anxiety about the position of Germany in European politics, and Halford Mackinder ’s heartland theory reflected similar anxieties in Britain (Ó Tuathail 1996b ). For many writers inside and outside academic geography, geopolitics promised a privileged “scientific” perspective on world affairs. It appeared as an objective science, a detached “god’s eye” view of the material (or geographical) realities of world politics (Ó Tuathail 1996b ). This so-called classical geopolitics conceptualized politics as a territorial practice in which states and nations naturally vie for power over territory and resources quite similarly to evolutionary struggles. As such, it served to justify interstate rivalry throughout the twentieth century (Atkinson and Dodds 2000 ; Agnew 2003 ). In the 1930s and 1940s, geopolitics acquired an association with the intellectual apparatus of the Third Reich, in part because of the works of the prominent German geographer Karl Haushofer . This episode was subsequently used in American geography and political propaganda to vilify the whole field of geopolitics and to treat is as synonymous with Nazi expansionism (even though there is no evidence of the far-reaching influence on Hitler that Haushofer was said to have had). Geopolitics became one of the most controversial terms in the modern history of the discipline (Atkinson and Dodds 2000 :1).

Because of its negative image in the decades after World War II, academic geographers virtually ignored geopolitics. Geography’s way of dealing with the troubling baggage of the term was to exclude it from the discipline’s historiography (Livingstone 1993 ). Of the numerous books and articles on geopolitics during the Cold War, most have little to do with the discipline of geography. Geopolitical writing of that time was an explicitly strategic analysis closely bound up with foreign and security policies of core states (Ó Tuathail 1986 ; 1996b ; Hepple 1986 ; Parker 1998 ). Its assumption of state-based bipolarity dovetailed neatly with the statism of the postwar social sciences more generally (Herb 2008 ). Although the tradition of “classical” geopolitics had been discredited by its (presumed) connection to the Nazi regime, the everyday use of the term geopolitics treated geography as a stable given – an independent variable of sorts. To speak of geopolitics was to speak of seemingly natural realities. The rhetorical power of geopolitical claims stems in significant part from their link to such supposedly self-evident “geographical” facts.

The end of the Cold War, which had been the containing territorial structure of political thought for over forty years, fueled anxiety about the spatial organization of power (Agnew and Corbridge 1995 ). It spelled trouble to the analyses that were analytically premised on superpower rivalry within the state system, brought increased interest in the spatiality of power across the social sciences, and rejuvenated the subdiscipline of political geography (Hepple 1986 ; Agnew 2003 ; Herb 2008 ). Geographic work concentrating explicitly on geopolitical thought and practice was not long in coming.

This new work was an integral part of a broader rethinking of power in the social sciences. In geography as well as other disciplines, it grew out in particular of the wide-ranging interest in Foucauldian genealogy. This work approaches power not only as coercive and disabling but also as productive and enabling. It contends that power relations are not imposed on already existing subjects: rather, it is within and through power relations that political subjects come into being. Such processes of subject-making are among the key themes of analysis in that broadly Foucauldian scholarship.

In geography, this relational and anti-essentialist work produced a marked interest in the discursive construction of political space and the role of geographic knowledge in this process. Approaching geographical knowledge as a technology of power – both the result and a constitutive element of power relations – it pushed geography out of the illusion of political neutrality and fueled a critical examination of the discipline itself. Whereas traditional geopolitics treats geography as a nondiscursive terrain that preexists geopolitical claims, critical geopolitics approaches geographical knowledge as an essential part of the modern discourses of power. Thus, the 1990s produced numerous analyses of the complicity of geography and geographers in colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and Cold War superpower enmity (Livingstone 1993 ; Gregory 1994 ; Ó Tuathail 1996b ).

Many of these early analyses were historical. They traced geopolitical theorizing to the emergence of European geopolitical imagination during the Age of Exploration (Gregory 1994 ; Agnew 2003 ; Heffernan 2007 ). They showed how geopolitical thought – the god’s eye view of the world as a structured whole that can be captured and managed from one (European) viewpoint – emerged as a part and parcel of European exploration and colonialism. Highlighting that many of the key territorial assumptions of international politics have European origins – often more specifically northern European origins – this work showed that the history of geopolitics is also the history of imposing these concepts inside and outside Europe. It also reexamined the key writers of classical geopolitics, illuminating the role of geographical knowledge in legitimizing the balance-of-power politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Holdar 1992 ; Crampton and Ó Tuathail 1996 ; Ó Tuathail 1996b ).

The critical work on geopolitics was further fueled by the increased popularity of explicitly geopolitical claims in mainstream political analysis. The term critical geopolitics was first coined by Simon Dalby ( 1990 ) in his analysis of the representational strategies of the Committee on Present Danger (a conservative foreign policy interest group) in the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1990s, after numerous articles and several further books (e.g. Agnew and Corbridge 1995 ; Ó Tuathail 1996b ; Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998 ), critical geopolitics was a clearly discernible and rapidly growing strand within political geography.

Much of this early self-consciously critical work tackled the legacies of the Cold War. It highlighted the ways in which the Cold War and international politics in general were informed by entrenched geographical and territorial assumptions about East and West, freedom and unfreedom, development and underdevelopment. It showed that these supposedly universal concepts were highly parochial, coming out of a particular corner of Western intellectual and political circles. This early work also situated critical geopolitics in other strands of the social sciences, including International Relations (IR) theory, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory (Dalby 1991 ; Ó Tuathail 1996b ). At the same time, critical geopolitics also differentiated itself from political theory by its more sustained engagement with political economy and the materiality of power more generally.

Although one can tentatively trace critical geopolitics back to the early 1990s, as has been done here, it has never connoted a clearly delimited or internally coherent research program. It is rather a set of approaches that borrow particularly, but not exclusively, from poststructuralist strands of social theory. It is distinct from other themes in political geography not by its empirical focus but by its theoretical and methodological underpinnings. In broad terms, critical geopolitics does tend to differ from other strands of critical scholarship, such as Marxism, by its explicitly Foucauldian underpinnings. Like much of poststructuralist analysis, it pays greater attention to micro-level capillaries of power than to macro-level or global economic developments. However, there is no neat distinction between poststructuralist and other critical approaches. Thus, the subfield includes a range of works that explicitly address economic structures and/or utilize Marxist perspectives, among others (e.g. Agnew and Corbridge 1995 ; Herod et al. 1997 ; Agnew 2005b ). The key trait of critical geopolitics is that it is not a theory-based approach – there is no “critical geopolitical” theory. The concerns of critical geopolitics are problem-based and present-oriented; they have to do not so much with sources and structures of power as with the everyday technologies of power relations. The field’s key claim is that although (classical) geopolitics proclaims to understand “geographical facts,” it in fact disengages from geographical complexities in favor of simplistic territorial demarcations of inside and outside, Us and Them. Critical geopolitics seeks to destabilize such binaries so that new space for debate and action can be established. Conceptualizing geopolitics as an interpretative cultural practice and a discursive construction of ontological claims, it foregrounds the necessarily contextual, conflictual, and messy spatiality of international politics (Herod et al. 1997 ; Toal and Agnew 2005 ; see also Campbell 1993 ). In so doing, it offers richer accounts of space and power than those allowed within mainstream geopolitical analysis. Geography in that conceptualization does not precede geopolitics as its natural basis. Rather, claims about geographical bases of politics are themselves geopolitical practices.

Nearly twenty years later, critical geopolitics has influenced every strand of geographic scholarship. From its beginnings as a primarily historical investigation informed by poststructuralist political theory, it has fanned out to virtually all aspects of human geography. The field is prominently represented in major political geographic journals like Political Geography and Geopolitics . There are now several textbooks that take an explicitly critical geopolitical position as their starting point (Agnew 2003 ; Dodds 2005 ; Ó Tuathail et al. 2006 ). Given the diversity of critical geopolitics, it is difficult and indeed pointless to catalogue its main themes and arguments. Any such themes are subject to voluminous internal debate. With these caveats in mind, and in an effort to nonetheless offer a tentative guide to the field, the essay proceeds to highlight some key clusters of work and lines of debate.

Locating Critical Geopolitics

Spatiality and subjectivity.

A substantial part of critical geopolitics seeks to unpack the rigid territorial assumptions of traditional geopolitical thinking. Thus, numerous analyses dissect post–Cold War geopolitics to reveal the continued reliance on binary understandings of power and spatiality, on notions of East and West, security and danger, freedom and oppression. More recently, geographic scholarship has foregrounded how the “war on terror” works with these same binaries (Agnew 2003 ; Gregory 2004 ; Gregory and Pred 2006 ).

In particular, much of critical geopolitics problematizes the statist conceptions of power in social sciences – a conceptualization that John Agnew (e.g. 1999 ) calls the “territorial trap.” Along with political geography more generally, critical geopolitics argues that spatiality is not confined to territoriality, either historically or today (Murphy 1996 ). It advances the drift away from rigidly territorialized understandings of politics toward more nuanced understandings of the complex spatialities of power (Agnew 1999 ; 2005b ; Dalby 2002 ; Elden 2005 ; Sparke 2005 ). State power, it shows, is not limited to or contained within the territory of the state; it is also exercised nonterritorially or in space-spanning networks (Kuus and Agnew 2008 ). It is applied differentially in different spheres and to different subjects (Gregory 2006 ; Painter 2006 ; Sparke 2006 ). The argument is not that geography or borders no longer matter. In fact, the celebrations of borderless world also equate spatiality with state territoriality, mistakenly taking the transformations of state power for the “end of geography” (Agnew 2005b ). This applies not just to popular writers like Thomas Friedman (for a critique, see Sparke 2005 ). Proclamations of the transnational governmentality termed “Empire” by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ( 2000 ) also betray insensitivity to the intricate topographies or power (Sparke 2005 ; Coleman and Agnew 2007 ). Critical geopolitics argues that the emerging forms of global governance do not “flatten” space; to the contrary, they increase spatial differentiation globally (Albert and Reuber 2007 :550). In terms of the state, the key questions to address are not about the “real” sources, meanings or limits of state sovereignty in some general or universal sense, but, more specifically, about how state power is discursively and practically produced in territorial and nonterritorial forms (Kuus and Agnew 2008 ; Painter 2008 ). The task is to decenter but not to write off state power by examining its incoherencies and contradictions (Coleman 2005 :202). Such investigations must also be mindful of the increasing complexity of regional integration and differentiation (Agnew 2005a ). Regionality here does not refer to any pregiven constellation, such as the European Union (EU) or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It rather refers to the multilayered socioeconomic and cultural processes through which “regionness” is produced and sustained (Sidaway 2002 ; Albert and Reuber 2007 :551).

This drift away from state-based analysis of world politics links up with interest in subjectivity and identity across the social sciences. For the assumption that international politics is a fundamentally territorial (as distinct from spatial) politics of states is closely bound up with the notion that states are the basic subjects of international politics (Kuus and Agnew 2008 ). Critical geopolitics departs from both of these assumptions. It does not examine the identities or actions of pregiven subjects; it rather investigates the processes by which political subjects are formed in the first place. It shows that the sovereign state is not the basis for, but the effect of, discourses of sovereignty, security, and identity. Put differently, state identity and interest do not precede foreign policy, but are forged through foreign policy practices. The enactments of state interest and identity are therefore among the key themes of critical geopolitics. The principal object of this scholarship is not the state as an object but statecraft as a multitude of practices (Coleman 2007 :609).

As a part of this interest in political subjectivity and subject-formation, there has been tremendous interest in identity politics, that is, in the geographical demarcation of Self and Other, “our” space and “theirs.” This strand of work has been so voluminous that critical geopolitics is sometimes accused of overvalorizing culture and identity at the expense of economic issues (e.g. Thrift 2000 ). Much of this “cultural” work has focused on the construction of national spaces and the geopolitical cultures of particular states (e.g. Campbell 1998 ; Sharp 2000 ; Toal 2003 ; Jeffrey 2008 ). It shows that geographical claims about cultural borders and homelands are central to narratives of national identity. There is also an extensive literature on bordering practices (Paasi 1998 ; 2005a ; Newman 2006 ; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007 ; Agnew 2007b ; Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008 ). It argues that international borders are best viewed not as lines representing already existing political entities called states or nations. Rather, these entities themselves are constituted through bordering practices. In John Agnew’s ( 2007b :399) succinct formulation, “borders […] make the nation rather than vice versa.” It is indeed at borders first and foremost where these entities are defined: where the inside is demarcated from the outside and Self is differentiated from the Other. This process is not only about exclusion. It is also about borrowing and adaptation – for example, of the concepts of statehood and nationhood. Borders thus have multiple functions: they serve as barriers, but they must also necessarily allow movement across in order to reproduce the entities they supposedly contain. Statecraft is being activated and transformed at multiple scales at and far away from borders (Coleman 2007 ). Borders do not simply differentiate space. They are spaces where both different as well as similar conceptions of citizenship and belonging are operationalized. State borders are becoming markedly more porous in some spheres and for some groups, while being securitized for other flows of goods, people, and ideas (Sparke 2006 ).

These processes of geopolitical subject-making are not limited to nation-states. On the supranational level, region-building processes, such as the processes of European integration, are deeply geopolitical exercises in the same way (Moisio 2002 ; Kuus 2007 ). European integration, for example, may well overcome nationalist narratives of territory and identity, but it entails powerful claims about Europe as a territorial and cultural unit (Bialasiewicz 2008 ; Heffernan 2007 ). This process is a particularly fascinating geopolitical project because it explicitly moves beyond the state-centered understandings of space. The power of the EU is the governmentalized power of technical and political standards. There is an emerging literature that explores the intricate reworking of political, economic, and juridical borders inside and around the EU. This reworking is richly illustrative of processes of regionalization and the respatialization of borders today (Agnew 2005b ).

Given the large-scale violence engendered by the “war on terror,” the scholarship on subject-making includes substantial work on militarization. It seeks to analyse the current period of militarization without uncritically reifying the role of the state in this process (Flint 2003 ; Kuus 2009 ). It focuses not so much on military institutions and military conflict – although these issues are undoubtedly important – as on the structures of legitimacy on which military force depends. For as Enloe ( 2004 :220) points out, most of the militarization of social life, a process in which social practices gain value and legitimacy by being associated with military force, occurs in peacetime. To understand the dynamics of this process, then, we need to look at the civilian rather than the military. Critical geopolitics documents the explicit glorification and implicit normalization of military force and military institutions throughout society (Hannah 2006 ; Cowen and Gilbert 2007 ; Flusty 2008 ; Gregory 2008 ; Sidaway 2008 ; Pain and Smith 2008 ). It also exposes the intellectual apparatus of militarization; for example, an integral part of academic geography is the development of the US military-industrial complex (Barnes and Farish 2006 ). This work is part and parcel of the growing work on security as a key concept and trope in political life today. The “war on terror” has clearly fueled (uncritical) geopolitical analysis that operates with explicitly militaristic and imperialist language (Retort 2005 ; Dalby 2007 ). This analysis maps some parts of the world in an imperial register as spaces in need of military pacification; understanding that process requires that we first unpack such maps (Gregory 2004 ; Dalby 2007 ). Geographers were latecomers to the critical study of security, but there are now a number of specifically geographic studies on the processes of securitization. They flesh out the inherent spatiality of these processes – the ways in which practices of securitization necessarily locate security and danger (e.g. Dalby 2002 ; Gregory 2004 ; Kuus 2007 ; Dodds and Ingram 2009 ).

Although the bodies of work above do not make up one set of literature, they all investigate the processes by which people are socialized as members of territorial groups, be it at subnational, national, or broader regional level. Their focus is not simply on what various actors think or believe. It is rather on the discursive constructions of ontological claims – the ways in which material reality of politics is problematized within geopolitical discourses (Toal and Agnew 2005 ). The argument in that work is not that objects cannot exist externally to thought or that they are not produced through material forces. The contention rather is that objects cannot be represented as outside any discursive formation (Campbell 1993 :9).

Geographical Scope

Much of critical geopolitics focuses empirically on the core states of the West, especially the US. This is not surprising given that US foreign policy, scholarship, and popular culture have been hegemonic in the exercise of geopolitics for over sixty years now. As Agnew points out (2007a:138), much of what goes for geopolitical writing involves projecting US context and US interests onto the world at large. Geographers have therefore looked closely at the geographs of American political elites and popular culture, as well as the processes through which these are projected onto the world at large.

In parallel, there has been substantial interest in broadening critical geopolitics empirically outside the core states. If critical geopolitics is to disrupt commonsense geopolitical narratives, it must first undermine the tacit assumption of American (or Western) universalism that underpins these narratives. Furthermore, numerous other countries have rich geopolitical literatures. There are now substantial literatures on key states such as Britain, Germany, France, and Russia (see Hepple 2000 ; Ingram 2001 ; Dodds 2002 ; Bassin 2003 ; O’Loughlin et al. 2005 ). In addition to these obvious cases, and perhaps more interestingly, there are also numerous studies of geopolitical traditions of smaller and historically more peripheral states (see Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998 ; Dodds and Atkinson 2000 ; see also Berg and Oras 2000 ; Megoran 2005 ; Sidaway and Power 2005 ; Kuus 2007 ). This work amply demonstrates both the consistency and diversity of geopolitical thought. In terms of the former, for example, claims of national exceptionalism or external threat are extraordinarily consistent throughout the twentieth century . As for diversity, geopolitical practices are deeply rooted in the specific political circumstances of particular countries. They involve not only the predictable right-wing tradition of geopolitical analyses, but also a critical and radical tradition of geopolitics, as for example in the pages of the French journal Herodote (Hepple 2000 ). Some claims are repeated, but their specific political functions and effects vary considerably. By highlighting such variation, critical geopolitics shows that there is no single tradition of geopolitical thought or practice. There are, rather, different geopolitical cultures owing to specific geographical contexts and intellectual traditions.

These case studies notwithstanding, critical geopolitics still tends to concentrate on North America and Western Europe. This narrow focus has been pointed out repeatedly since the 1990s (Dodds and Sidaway 1994 ; Dowler and Sharp 2001 ; Chaturvedi 2003 ; Kuus 2004 ), but it is still relevant today. The case studies of other countries, as valuable as they are, have not shifted the center of gravity of the subfield as a whole. They tend to be cited mostly as examples of particular empirical contexts rather than as instances of broader geopolitical theorizing. The subfield in this sense mirrors the focus on the Anglo-American realm in human geography more broadly (Paasi 2005b ). This is a problem because it impoverishes our understanding of the very geographical complexities that critical geopolitics seeks to foreground. If critical geopolitics is about geographical context, then it must be empirically and theoretically firmly grounded in contexts outside North America and Western Europe. Ideas move and their political uses and functions change in the process (Agnew 2007a ). Disrupting the hegemonic status of certain geopolitical claims requires that we show their empirical flatness as an integral part of their conceptual primitivism.

This is not simply a matter of cataloging distinct geopolitical cultures: British, Russian, Estonian, and so on. Such glamorization of local knowledge would be as problematic as the assumption of geopolitical universals. Rather, in addition to tracing the geopolitical traditions of different countries, and perhaps more importantly, we must also examine the power relationships between centers and margins of dominant geopolitical discourses. For example, as Sergei Prozorov ( 2007 ) compellingly shows, contemporary Russian geopolitical thought has as much to do with Russia’s relations with the West as it has with any quintessentially Russian identity or interests. At the same time, although Russians work with hegemonic concepts from the West, they do not necessarily adopt these concepts at face value. Geopolitics is not simply written in the concert of great powers and then handed down to the smaller, relatively marginal, states. Geopolitical discourses in central locations, such as North America and Western Europe, are not only constitutive of such discourses elsewhere, but are also in part constituted by these “other” discourses.

This foregrounds the role of political actors on the margins – outside the main power centers of the US and Western Europe. These actors do not simply bear witness to dominant geopolitical discourses; they also appropriate these discourses for their own purposes. Put differently, these actors do not only consume geopolitical concepts; they also produce these concepts. We therefore have to unravel the maneuvers of relatively marginal actors vis-à-vis the dominant narratives of the center, and vice versa (Kuus 2004 ). Concepts are not misinterpreted, but they are interpreted in particular ways. For example, the work of Mackinder or Samuel Huntington has been utilized for particular nationalist goals in a variety of contexts (for examples, see Ingram 2001 ; Moisio 2002 ; Dodds and Sidaway 2004 ; Megoran 2004 ; Kuus 2007 ). What functions as state-of-the-art geopolitical thinking in particular social contexts has as much to do with such appropriation as it does with the original objects of appropriation. In the Central Europe of the 1990s, for example, these were not simply “Western” views, but a very narrow range of Western views that were influential there. These views did not present themselves to the people in the marginal states; they were translated, literally and figuratively, by local intellectuals of statecraft. For example, to say that Huntington’s thesis of civilizational clash is influential in Central Europe tells us little. We need to understand how specifically it has been made influential locally. Huntington’s thesis would not be as influential in Central Europe if it was not actively promoted by influential individuals in the region. The Huntingtonian arguments of these individuals, in turn, were legitimized by Huntington’s prestigious position at the center of the Western security establishment. The reverse flow of information and influence is at play as well. Local intellectuals of statecraft are often the main sources of the so-called local insight to Western scholars and journalists. They are key players in mapping places for Western scholars and diplomats alike. Hegemonic discourses of the center are so powerful in part because they are bolstered on the margins. In terms of Huntington, then, being cited at a putative civilizational faultline like Central Europe has greatly enhanced the standing of Huntington’s thesis in the West itself. Both sides – the center and the margin – need each other for the Huntingtonian narrative to work (Kuus 2007 : ch. 3).

This example underscores the need to examine how broad politically charged categories, such as security, identity, and geopolitics, are problematized and used by different groups in different circumstances. In particular, it shows that this process has to do not only with the substance of the ideas but also with the power relationships among the actors who promote them. The task is not only to look at more actors – not only the United States but also Hungary or Morocco, for instance – but also to unpack the power relationships among these actors. In other words, we need to look not at “marginal perspectives” as such, but to flesh out the relationships between centers and margins (Paasi 2005b ; Parker 2008 ). We need to analyze how some Western views become “state of the art” while other views do not even reach political debates in the margins – and vice versa. To do so is not to romanticize “local knowledge” but to acknowledge the complexity of knowledge production.

This highlights the need to investigate the practitioners of geopolitics – from presidents and foreign ministers, through a wide range of journalists, government officials, leaders of nongovernmental organizations, and activists, to the so-called average people. Arguments about the discursive construction of social reality remain flat unless they illuminate how this process is shaped by specific political agents. The agency or capacity to act of all these actors is the realm of numerous debates in critical geopolitics. This is the subject of the next section.

Geopolitics and Agency

Intellectuals of statecraft.

Geopolitics is traditionally conceived as a highbrow matter – too important and too specialized for a lay person. An aura of dignity sets off the statesman from the politician (Kuklick 2006 ). Foreign policy is in substantial measure a realm of elite-level pronouncements and well-established state institutions. Although the practices of modern state are highly diffuse and operate throughout social life, foreign policy has remained a relatively concentrated realm of specialized elites. These elite circles extend beyond elected and appointed officials; they include academics, journalists, and various analysts and pundits who gain social acceptance for their (presumed) expertise in international affairs. Located within the government apparatus as well as universities and think tanks, these intellectuals of statecraft explain international politics to the domestic audience and translate (figuratively and sometimes literally) national debates to foreign audiences. They offer a map of the world as a collection of particular kinds of places, and they narrate the dominant story of the nation’s place in that world.

Not surprisingly, a substantial part of critical geopolitics has focused empirically on intellectuals of statecraft – the academics, politicians, government officials and various commentators who regularly participate and comment on the activities of statecraft. This is the case especially with the early work, which indeed defined geopolitics in terms of that group of professionals – as the study of how intellectuals of statecraft represent international politics (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992 :193). In order to unpack the influence of that group in more detail, that work loosely divided geopolitical reasoning into formal, practical, and popular geopolitics. In this division, formal geopolitics denotes formal highbrow analysis, practical geopolitics refers to the reasoning of politicians, pundits and specialized journals, and popular geopolitics encompasses the ways in which world politics is spatialized in popular culture. The three levels are closely intertwined (as will be elaborated below) and none should be treated as primary. This notwithstanding, practical geopolitics – the realm of intellectuals of statecraft – is particularly effective because it combines the clout and authoritative tone of formal geopolitical reasoning with commonsense metaphors from popular culture. Critical geopolitics has thus paid close attention to the production of geopolitical knowledge in these elite circles. Even today, a large share of the critical scholarship focuses on the cultural and organizational processes by which foreign policy is made in states. It investigates the geographs of elected and appointed government elites as well as popular commentators like Robert Kaplan , Samuel Huntington , Thomas Friedman or Thomas Barnett . In one sense, this work dovetails with critical analyses of intellectuals of statecraft within IR (e.g. Campbell 1998 ; 1999 ). Yet it also differs from these other critiques by focusing explicitly on the spatial assumptions underpinning their arguments (Roberts et al. 2003 ; Sparke 2005 ; Dalby 2007 ).

The point of this scholarship is not to uncover what the “wise men” think. It rather dissects the assumptions that enable and constrain elite geopolitical practices. True, even a cursory investigation of geopolitical practices quickly reveals that these assumptions are not homogeneous. Disagreements and power struggles among different state institutions, think tanks, news organizations or schools of scholarship are well known (for geographical analyses, see Dalby 1990 ; Flint 2005 ; Gregory 2006 ). Indeed, as Gertjan Dijkink ( 2004 ) points out, a great deal of geopolitical writing is penned by elites who are frustrated with received wisdom (see also Coleman 2004 ). However, although intellectuals of statecraft do not work in the same end of the political spectrum, they tend to draw on and embellish a loosely coherent set of myths about nature, culture, and geography (Gusterson and Besteman 2005 :2). As a result, vigorous debates are often contained in simplistic unexamined assumptions about geography and territoriality (Campbell 1999 ; Dahlman and Ó Tuathail 2005 ).

A problem with this emphasis on intellectuals of statecraft is that it focuses on a very narrow range of geopolitical actors. In response, recent work has paid greater attention to geopolitical practices outside state structures (and these strands of work will be discussed below). In addition, there have also been attempts to analyze state bureaucracies in more detail. Especially in the context of increased state power in the realms of security, state institutions require renewed scrutiny as sites of geopolitical practice (Agnew 2005b ; Coleman 2005 ; Retort 2005 ). This attention to the fragmented and articulated institutional structures of geopolitics links up with analyses of policy. For policy impinges on all aspects of self and society. It shapes not just societal outcomes but, more importantly, the processes that produce these outcomes. To study policy is to investigate not a ready-made blueprint but a dynamic and unpredictable process. In geography as well as other social sciences, there is today a growing recognition of the need for utilizing ethnographic methods to understand policy (Megoran 2006 ; see also Mitchell 2005 ; Agnew 2007a ; Neumann 2007 ). Ethnographic work is especially helpful for dislodging studies from the stereotype that policy professionals merely execute pregiven political and juridical blueprints without any significant agency of their own.

Ultimately, this closer focus on policy procedures is about sensitivity to specific geographical contexts. Such contexts include the personal backgrounds, interests, and identities of the individuals who actually articulate geopolitical claims. Intellectuals of statecraft are not synonymous with the state and we cannot assume that they merely voice some pregiven state interest. Rather, their geopolitical practices need to be carefully contextualized in their specific societal settings. For example, we cannot understand American geopolitics of the Cold War era without considering the personal anticommunism of some of the leading writers – in some cases because of their personal contacts among Russian émigré circles (Crampton and Ó Tuathail 1996 ; Ó Tuathail 2000 ). We likewise cannot comprehend the culturalist flavor of Central European geopolitics without considering the arts and humanities backgrounds of many of the region’s leading politicians (Kuus 2007 : ch. 5). In that example, humanities backgrounds give these individuals special legitimacy to speak in the name of culture and identity. The culturalist narratives of foreign policy in Central Europe – for example, the “return to Europe” narrative – points to the need to carefully unpack such cultural resources.

In addition to adding nuance and color to analyses, there are at least two further reasons why a close examination of agency in geopolitics must include in-depth studies of intellectuals of statecraft. The first reason has to do with their influence. Other actors undoubtedly contest the dominant geopolitical discourses, but their arguments are still positioned in relation to intellectuals of statecraft. Over the long run, the institutional and cultural resources available to them serve to systematically push the game in their direction. As James Scott ( 2005 :401) puts it, even though the dominant arguments do not reach the ground uncompromised, “can there be much doubt about which players in this […] encounter hold most of the high cards?” The “war on terror” has further highlighted the crucial importance of a few state agencies, particularly those connected to the national security apparatus, in mainstream conceptions of world affairs (Gregory and Pred 2006 ; Coleman 2007 ; Dalby 2007 ). It is easy to say that we need to look beyond elites and beyond the state. Yet this process of producing hegemonic norms outside the sphere of the state is still heavily influenced by state elites.

The second reason why we need more studies of these professionals has to do with their diversity. Simply speaking of power discourses can overlook the conscious manipulation of (geo)political claims by specific well-placed individuals. If we broaden our definition of geopolitics from the narrowest circles of officials in the highest echelons of the state apparatus, we need to analyze more diverse settings of policy. These settings include immigration, trade and aid policies, as well as international and supranational institutions – and all of these in addition to locations like foreign ministries. The study of geopolitics must not be limited to the handful of men at the key nodes of state power, but neither should it exclude these men. Given the relatively closed nature of foreign policy, challenges to dominant geopolitical narratives come as much from the inside as from the outside of policy structures (see Ó Tuathail 1999 ; Dijkink 2004 ). The challenge, then, is not to bypass intellectuals of statecraft, but, to the contrary, to offer more nuanced accounts of them. There is no easy way around the methodological difficulties (e.g. access) in attempting such accounts, but they should be pursued nonetheless. Critical geopolitics is indeed increasingly engaged with fieldwork in diverse empirical settings (Megoran 2006 ; see also Pain and Smith 2008 ).

To argue for a closer engagement with intellectuals of statecraft is not to imply that we should try to uncover their “identities” in some abstract sense disconnected from their social context. It is likewise not an attempt to uncover some “real story” in the corridors of power. It is rather to argue for a closer examination of the interconnections between geopolitical practices and the agents of these practices (Agnew 2007a ). It is to more closely consider the daily production of geopolitical knowledge – the mundane repetition of claims not just in official speeches, but also around the coffee machine (e.g. Neumann 2007 ). This would help us to bring into focus the multiple structures of authority and legitimacy through which geopolitical arguments work.

Popular Geopolitics and Anti-geopolitics

The same air of power and secrecy that seems to set geopolitics apart from “normal boring” politics also feeds popular fascination with it. Although explicitly geopolitical arguments evoke exclusive expertise, the categories of security and danger, community and enmity, Us and Them on which these claims rely are formed at the popular level. The “expert” statements would not hold if they were not legitimized at the popular level. This duality, whereby security and geopolitics excite popular fascination and play on popular beliefs, and yet the authority to speak on them is relatively limited, is a necessary part of geopolitical arguments. To be effective, these arguments need both sides.

Not surprisingly, then, in addition to the scholarship that draws empirically on the rhetorical strategies of intellectuals of statecraft, there is also a rich body of work on popular geopolitics – that is, the geopolitical narratives that circulate in popular culture. Investigating various cultural products as well as their producers and audiences, it offers insights into a range of locations and agents of geopolitics outside the realm of the state: popular magazines, newspaper reporters, cartoonists, film directors, and social activists of various kinds (see Power and Crampton 2005 ). Thus, there is extensive literature on the narratives that animate James Bond films (Dodds 2003 ; 2006 ), the Captain America comic strip (Dittmer 2005 ; 2007 ), or the Readers Digest magazine (Sharp 2000 ). There is also a substantial popular geopolitics scholarship on the “war on terror.” This work situates the spatiality of everyday life and popular culture specifically in the current period of militarization and political violence (e.g. Toal 2003 ; Falah et al. 2006 ; Flusty 2008 ; Pain and Smith 2008 ; Dodds and Ingram 2009 ). In that effort to understand current political violence, geographers are also paying more attention to the linkages between religion and geopolitical thought (e.g. Agnew 2006 and the special issue it introduces). Much of this work analyzes the structure of the texts and the techniques used to make them credible: the metaphors, the repetitions, the claims of authority and authenticity. It thereby brings into relief the broader cultural milieu in which particular geopolitical claims thrive.

One part of this inquiry into popular culture and everyday life is the work on resistance geopolitics or anti-geopolitics. Paul Routledge ( 2006 :234) defines anti-geopolitics as “an ambiguous political and cultural force within civil society that articulates forms of counter-hegemonic struggle.” By civil society, Routledge means those institutions that are not part of either material production in the economy or the formal sphere of the state. By counter-hegemonic, he means resistances that challenge the material and cultural power of dominant geopolitical interests or states and their elites ( 2006 :234). The work focusing explicitly on resistance geopolitics is still relatively slim, but there are studies of activist groups (Routledge 2008 ; Slater 2004 : ch. 8), journalists (Ó Tuathail 1996a ; Dodds 1996 ), as well as the so-called average citizens (Mamadouh 2003 ; Secor 2004 ) who challenge dominant geopolitical representations.

A key challenge in this scholarship, as in resistance studies more broadly, is to avoid glamorizing resistance and the civil society in general: to show the diversity of resistance, the entanglements of domination and resistance, and the futility of looking for the “self-evidently good” (Sharp et al. 2000 ; Kuus 2008 ). For elite discourses are not only resisted but also reproduced by nongovernmental organizations in the civil society. Moreover, resistance involves much more than conscious overt dissent. In today’s society it is increasingly difficult to stand heroically on the edge of the system of power one opposes and to practice dissent as an overt, conscience-driven rejection of an official practice. Rather, we need to look at passiveness, irony, and anonymity as resources for resistance. To do justice to the entanglements of domination and resistance, critical geopolitics increasingly foregrounds the practices that “pursue a certain anonymity, prefer tactics of evasion and obfuscation over those of repudiation and confrontation, and seek a loose or vague or superficial rather than definitive, weighty or substantial identity” (Bennett 1992 :152–3).

Feminist Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics emerged out of the same postpositivist and anti-essentialist intellectual ferment as feminist work. It undermines the “view from nowhere” of the traditional geopolitical reasoning by offering more situated and embodied accounts of power. Yet ironically, the initial wave of critical geopolitics in the 1990s focused empirically almost exclusively on male intellectuals of statecraft at the centers of state power. In part, this focus has to do with its subject matter – Cold War superpower politics was a heavily male dominated affair. However, the effect of studying such a small group of individuals was not only to describe but also to tacitly prescribe geopolitics as a narrow field of male practice and analysis. From early on, feminist research has sought to broaden the conception of agency in critical geopolitics beyond such a narrow field of inquiry. There is now a discernible subfield of feminist geopolitics.

This work – and feminist political geography of which it is a part – argues that the focus on policy elites implies an untenable conceptual division between the public sphere of international relations and the private sphere of everyday life. As a result, even though critical geopolitics compellingly challenges the power relations embedded in dominant geopolitical narratives, it still tends to offer a disembodied “spectator” theory of knowledge (Hyndman 2004 :6; see also Dowler and Sharp 2001 ; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004 ; Staeheli et al. 2004 ). In other words, despite the subfield’s avowed critical stance toward power structures, critical geopolitics to some extent reproduces the view from the center that it critiques.

Feminist geopolitics aims to rectify this gap by engaging closely with actors and locations outside the formal sphere of the state (Hyndman 2007 ). It takes the central tenet of feminist work – that the personal is also political – to posit that the personal is also geopolitical (e.g. Sharp 2005 ). Approaching the so-called average people as political subjects, it seeks to understand “how political life plays out through a multiplicity of alternative, gendered political spaces” (Hyndman 2000 ; Secor 2001 :192). By highlighting the geopolitical practices of those located outside the top echelons of the state apparatus, it brings into focus the institutional structure through which the illusory division between political and “nonpolitical” spheres, or the realm of “geopolitics” and “normal” or “domestic” politics is constructed (Hyndman 2004 ; Sharp 2005 ). As a body of work, feminist geopolitics shifts the focus from the operations of elite agents to the constructions of political subjects in everyday political practice (Kofman and Staeheli 2004 ). It thereby links up with the broader efforts to produce more embodied accounts of power (e.g. Marston 2003 ; Pratt 2003 ; Mountz 2004 ; Staeheli et al. 2004 ). This strand of work is relatively new and there are few empirical investigations to follow up on its theoretical exposés (but see Secor 2004 ; Hyndman 2007 ; Sundberg 2009 ). However, feminist geopolitics is clearly one the growing fields of inquiry within critical geopolitics.

Critical Geopolitics as the Fragmented Mainstream

This essay charted the development of critical geopolitics as a subfield of human geography since the 1990s. It highlighted the field’s intellectual roots as well as its engagements with other strands of inquiry within and beyond geography. To discuss critical geopolitics as a distinct subfield is not to essentialize or to homogenize it. To the contrary, perhaps the principal conclusion of the essay is that we should resist temptations to delimit critical geopolitics by subject matter, theoretical concerns or methodology. Such limitations would create an illusion of internal coherence and external differentiation that this work does not possess or claim. Critical geopolitics is concerned not with power in general but with the operation of power relations in particular places. To treat critical geopolitics as a subfield of human geography is rather to foreground the sustained engagement in geography with the spatiality of power and politics on the global scale.

The essay also highlighted some ongoing debates on the geographical scope and theoretical reach of critical geopolitics. In particular, it has been argued that more work still needs to be done to illuminate the diversity of geopolitical arguments in different countries and in different spheres of social life. Debates on agency in geopolitics – that is, questions about the capacity of various groups to participate in and influence the production of geopolitical discourses – form an integral part of that effort. There has been indeed a discernible shift toward a more explicit analytical emphasis not just on political processes, but, more specifically, on political agency within these processes (Albert and Reuber 2007 :553). The various strands of work on agency all problematize the notion of pregiven political subjects to investigate the processes of subject-making. They all share the sustained attention on nonstate and nonelite actors in the spatialization of world politics. As a field, critical geopolitics has engaged more closely with not just formal and practical geopolitical reasoning but also with the prosaic and mundane geopolitics of everyday life. This line of inquiry requires considerable methodological diversity, as well as sensitivity to the geography of knowledge production (Agnew 2007a ).

The heterogeneity of critical geopolitics is central to its vibrancy and success. This field is not about producing core texts but about questioning the assumptions that underpin geopolitical claims. Through such efforts, critical geopolitics has emerged from its roots in the poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial critique of traditional geopolitics to become an integral part of mainstream human geography. To study geopolitics within the discipline of geography today is to study it critically. Even treatments that are not labeled “critical” as such draw from various anti-essentialist nonpositivist approaches to power, be it various strands of Marxism, feminism, or postcolonial work, or world systems theory (e.g. Flint 2005 ; Cowen and Gilbert 2007 ). These analyses may not necessarily seek the label of critical geopolitics, but this is not because they are not critical but because their critical stance can be taken for granted. The debate in geography has moved beyond critiquing mainstream geopolitics; it is now about how specifically such critique can be combined with effective visions for alternative political spaces.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Colin Flint , Klaus Dodds , and two anonymous referees for constructive feedback on earlier versions of the essay. Research for the essay was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Lawrence Santiago provided helpful research assistance.

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• 26 May 2021

Protect precious scientific collaboration from geopolitics

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Addressing challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic demands scientific collaboration across national borders. Credit: Douglas Magno/AFP/Getty

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided striking demonstrations of the value of research cooperation across borders. From sharing SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences to piecing together how the virus behaves, international research teams have worked together to the benefit of all.

At the same time, there are signs that mounting geopolitical tensions — particularly between the United States and China — might be diminishing the exchange of people and knowledge between nations. As countries move to protect their own interests, effort is needed on all sides to strike an appropriate balance that safeguards the great rewards that flow from mutually beneficial cooperation between researchers.

The stakes could not be higher. Problems such as climate change, environmental degradation and infectious diseases cannot be addressed fully without global scientific collaboration. International research teams help lower-income countries to build the knowledge required to sustain progress; they also help wealthier nations to pursue equitable, inclusive research based on diverse sources.

Regional collaborations — which are encouraged by the European Union and much-needed in Africa — are likewise crucial to collective science advancement.

Scientists in China say US government crackdown is harming collaborations

An analysis 1 of more than 10 million papers tracked by Web of Science found that the number of internationally co-authored papers rose from 10.7% to 21.3% between 2000 and 2015. By 2015, some 200 countries were represented in the collaborative literature. But there is a risk that a golden era of open scientific cooperation is coming to an end.

In 2018, the FBI warned that China was exploiting the open research and development environment in the United States. A tsunami of investigations by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies identified hundreds of federally funded scientists suspected of breaking the rules on disclosing foreign ties. Although many were later exonerated, several were found guilty or are facing charges.

The United States is not alone. Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and India have also increased their scrutiny of international research relationships in the interests of protecting national security, with China widely understood to be the country of primary concern.

Research leaders are worried that researchers in Western nations are shying away from collaborations with those in China, partly for fear of being caught up in geopolitical tensions, and also because of the administrative burden of complying with beefed-up regulations.

In Australia, higher-education enrolments from China are down compared with pre-pandemic levels. In the United States, although student intake from China held steady in the 2019–20 academic year compared with the previous one, the number of scholars visiting from China on temporary visas fell. Pandemic-related travel restrictions mean it is not possible to blame geopolitics alone. But the publication record also suggests that collaborations between the United States and China might be under threat.

Nature Index 2021 China

An analysis published in this issue shows zero growth between 2019 and 2020 in US–China co-authored publications in the Nature Index, which tracks the author affiliations in 82 natural-sciences journals selected by reputation. By contrast, during the previous four years the growth was more than 10% annually. Publications co-authored by researchers in China and Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan all increased during the same period. (Nature Index is published by Springer Nature; Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)

Studies that look at a broader swathe of journals also hint that collaborations between the United States and China are changing.

An analysis of science and engineering papers in the Scopus database shows that international collaboration on COVID-19-related research in the first five months of 2020 — including that between the United States and China — was higher than the average for the previous five years across all subjects 2 . On non-COVID-19 research, the proportion of China’s collaborations that were with the United States was lower during those months compared with the previous five years, although this might be because collaborations with other countries rose, or because some collaborations switched to focus on COVID-19.

US universities call for clearer rules on science espionage amid China crackdown

A later study shows that China–US collaborations in COVID-19 research dropped as the pandemic wore on 3 . This could be due to China’s lower publication rate on the topic as infections there waned, political obstacles, or both.

As more data accumulate, researchers, institutions and governments must all play their part to guard against a chill in scientific collaboration. Countries erecting barriers need to set unified and consistent research-security guidelines to give researchers the confidence to collaborate across borders. China, meanwhile, could help to ease tensions by providing greater transparency, in particular about the workings of Chinese science, its policy motivations and priorities, and how decisions are made.

In a landmark speech on science and technology in September, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged scientists to “adhere to the supremacy of the national interest”, but also highlighted the need for international cooperation. As China’s scientific strength grows, so, too, does the responsibility on all sides to retain a clear-eyed view of the global benefits of collaboration relative to any risks.

Nature 593 , 477 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01386-0

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Twenty-five years of progress in geopolitics research: Efforts from China’s geographers

• Published: 09 July 2016
• Volume 26 , pages 1223–1242, ( 2016 )

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• Debin Du 1 , 2 ,
• Dezhong Duan 1 , 2 ,
• Chengliang Liu 1 , 2 &
• Yahua Ma 3  

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The world is currently undergoing profound changes, with a shift in global power centers and reordering of international power spaces, assigning new theoretical tasks as well as providing new opportunities for geopolitics research in China. Despite the peripheral nature of geopolitics research within their discipline, geographers have played a fundamental role in its origins and revival, from classical geopolitics (i.e., the German school of geopolitics and the Anglo-American school of geo-strategy), to internal geopolitics (i.e., electoral geography and administrative geography), to the new geopolitics (i.e., formal geopolitics), and to recent critical geopolitics (i.e., popular geopolitics). Although only few of these researchers were from China, great strides have been made in geopolitics and political geography research in China, with useful results being obtained. After demonstrating the importance of geopolitics research for the rising China, this review provides an overview of geopolitics papers led by China’s geographers in the past few decades, describing their achievements, the problems they have faced, and the directions they have taken. Twenty-five years of geopolitics have produced a range of accomplishments, with a growth in the quality and size of research groups and institutions, an expanding literature, and some geo-strategic break-throughs. Obviously, geographers have successfully reclaimed geopolitics, but some crucial topics are still absent or weak in the geopolitical research agenda, and need to be pursued vigorously. Most of the attention, from a positivistic perspective, has been paid to reflecting Western geopolitical thoughts, describing patterns of international power relations, and offering foreign policy advice (in a problem-focused orientation), rather than determining mechanisms and performing theoretical analyses (in a theoretical orientation), resulting in a lack of independent value judgments and of a theoretical basis for the subject. Moreover, in comparison with other disciplines, in terms of its academic community, research output, and status as a discipline, geopolitics research is very different from how it was three or four decades ago, when it was mainly the property of geographers, rather than political scientists and diplomats. For now, whether to support national geo-strategies or to enhance the diversity of the discipline, the involvement of geographers in geopolitics needs to become both more intensive and more extensive. The top priority is to strengthen theoretical, methodological, and problem- oriented research, including studies of geopolitical philosophy and methodology, the theoretical framework of the subject, global geopolitical evolution and shifts in power space, the roles of major powers and their geo-strategies, as well as China’s surrounding geopolitical environment.

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School of Urban and Regional Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

Debin Du, Dezhong Duan & Chengliang Liu

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National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 41471108, No.41501141, No. 41571123.

Du Debin (1963–), Professor, specialized in world geography and technological innovation.

Liu Chengliang (1979–), Associate Professor, specialized in transport geo-complexity, regional sustainability and world geography.

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Du, D., Duan, D., Liu, C. et al. Twenty-five years of progress in geopolitics research: Efforts from China’s geographers. J. Geogr. Sci. 26 , 1223–1242 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11442-016-1323-y

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Received : 23 December 2015

Accepted : 06 May 2016

Published : 09 July 2016

Issue Date : August 2016

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11442-016-1323-y

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The Geopolitics of International Trade in Southeast Asia

Motivated by the historically tense geopolitical situation in Southeast Asia, we simulate the potential closure of key maritime waterways in the region to predict the impact on trade and welfare. We generate initial (unobstructed) and counterfactual (rerouted) least-cost maritime paths between trading countries, and use the distances of these routes in a workhorse model of international trade to estimate welfare effects. We find heterogeneous and economically significant reductions in real GDP, and show the magnitude of welfare loss is directly correlated with military spending as a proportion of GDP, suggesting nations may be responding to economic security threats posed by such potential conflicts.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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1 (page 1) p. 1 What is geopolitics?

• Published: July 2019
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‘What is geopolitics?’ explains that geopolitics involves three qualities. First, it is concerned with questions of influence and power over space and territory. Second, it uses geographical frames to make sense of world affairs. Third, geopolitics is future-oriented. It offers insights into the likely behaviour of states because their interests are fundamentally unchanging. States need to secure resources, protect their territory including borderlands, and manage their populations. Two fundamental ways of understanding the term geopolitics are offered: classical geopolitics that focuses on the interrelationship between the territorial interests and power of the state and geographical environments, and critical geopolitics, which tends to focus more on the role of discourse and ideology.

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Articles on Geopolitics

Displaying 1 - 20 of 152 articles.

Burundi-Rwanda rivalry: RED-Tabara rebel attacks add to regional tensions

Patrick Hajayandi , University of Pretoria

Olympic Games 2024: France faces serious hurdles in the race to create a meaningful legacy

Simon Chadwick , SKEMA Business School and Paul Widdop , Manchester Metropolitan University

Invisible lines: how unseen boundaries shape the world around us

Mend Mariwany , The Conversation

China: why the country’s economy has hit a wall – and what it plans to do about it

Hong Bo , SOAS, University of London

Paris 2024: conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East threaten to turn the Olympic Games into a geopolitical battleground

Jung Woo Lee , The University of Edinburgh

Demand for computer chips fuelled by AI could reshape global politics and security

Kirk Chang , University of East London and Alina Vaduva , University of East London

Is the United States overestimating China’s power?

Dan Murphy , Harvard Kennedy School

The 100-hour war between El Salvador and Honduras is famous for starting with a football match – the truth is more complicated

Pedro Dutra Salgado , University of Portsmouth

This course examines how conflicts arise over borders

Nita Prasad , Quinnipiac University

A net-zero world will be more peaceful, it’s assumed – but first we have to get there

Michael Bradshaw , Warwick Business School, University of Warwick

Don’t be fooled by Biden and Xi talks − China and the US are enduring rivals rather than engaged partners

Michael Beckley , Tufts University

International reaction to Gaza siege has exposed the growing rift between the West and the Global South

Jorge Heine , Boston University

Who will write the rules for AI? How nations are racing to regulate artificial intelligence

Fan Yang , The University of Melbourne and Ausma Bernot , Charles Sturt University

Agoa trade deal talks: South Africa will need to carefully manage relations with the US and China

Arno J. van Niekerk , University of the Free State

Four reasons why western companies have been ‘trapped’ in Russia since it invaded Ukraine

Simon Evenett , University of St.Gallen and Niccolò Pisani , International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

Book review: African thinkers analyse some of the big issues of our time - race, belonging and identity

Ademola Adesola , Mount Royal University

G20 summit proved naysayers wrong – and showed Global South’s potential to address world’s biggest problems

As BRICS cooperation accelerates, is it time for the US to develop a BRICS policy?

Mihaela Papa , Tufts University ; Frank O'Donnell , Boston College , and Zhen Han , Sacred Heart University

An expanded BRICS could reset world politics but picking new members isn’t straightforward

Bhaso Ndzendze , University of Johannesburg and Siphamandla Zondi , University of Johannesburg

African Union: climate action offers organisation unique chance for revival

Nsah Mala , Université de Lille and Eric Tevoedjre , Institut catholique de Lille (ICL)

Related Topics

• Donald Trump
• The Conversation France
• Ukraine invasion 2022
• United States
• Vladimir Putin

Top contributors

Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan

Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy, SKEMA Business School

Lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Interim Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University

Associate Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University., La Trobe University

Assistant Professor, Kinesiology, Western University

Distinguished Professor of History and Environmental Studies, Penn State

Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Presidential History, Southern Methodist University

Professor of Political Science, Macalester College

Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, University of Oxford

Distinguished Professor, Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics, & Interim Head, Department of Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology

Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

Professor and Head, School of Business, Monash University

Project scientist, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam

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Research: When Geopolitical Risk Rises, Innovation Stalls

• Vivek Astvansh,
• Wesley Deng,
• Adnan Habib

An analysis of more than 4,600 U.S. companies suggests that the negative impact can persist for three to five years.

The impact of geopolitical conflict on global trade and security is clear. But how do rising geopolitical risk levels affect corporate innovation? The authors cross-referenced data from 4,625 U.S. companies over 32 years with a global index of geopolitical risk to quantify the link between geopolitics and innovation. At a high level, their analysis suggests that geopolitical risk has a substantial stifling effect on private sector innovation, in particular for companies with substantial exposure to foreign markets, and that that negative impact can persist for three to five years after the initial conflict. In light of these findings, the authors offer strategies to help companies minimize the impact of geopolitical risk on their own innovation, but argue that ultimately, the only way to address the underlying issue is for political and business leaders (alongside other key players, such as lawmakers and media platforms) to work together to reduce global tensions and build a more peaceful — and innovative — future.

Geopolitical risk — that is, the wide array of risks associated with any sort of conflict or tension between states — has a clear impact on global trade, security, and political relations. But how does it affect innovation in the private sector?

• VA Vivek Astvansh is an associate professor of quantitative marketing and analytics at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management and an adjunct associate professor at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.
• WD Wesley Deng is a finance professor at the business school of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He studies how short selling affects corporate performance and managerial decisions.
• AH Adnan Habib is a doctoral student in finance at the Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania, Australia. He studies geopolitical risk and the spillover of stock volatility from a company to its suppliers and customers.

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Geopolitics and Political Geography in Russia: Global Context and National Characteristics

V. a. kolosov.

Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

M. V. Zotova

N. l. turov.

Against the backdrop of global trends, the main directions, methodological approaches, and the most striking research results in the field of geopolitics and political geography in 2011–2021 are considered. Political geography is being widely integrated with neighboring scientific fields. Russian political geography and, to a much lesser extent, geopolitics are based on a wide range of concepts known in world literature. Researchers in these areas are promptly responding to current foreign policy and other challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic. Particular attention is paid to geopolitical publications about the pivot of Russian foreign policy to the East and the Greater Eurasia concept. Since the 2010s, the theory of critical geopolitics has become more widespread in Russia, operating not with speculative reasoning, but with large amounts of information analyzed by modern quantitative methods. The flow of studies of state borders and frontiers is growing. In such publications, a large place belongs to the works devoted to the growing gaps in the pace and directions of economic development between former USSR countries. Shifts in the topics of border studies are associated with a deeper study of security issues. Many works reflect the desire to preserve the positive experience of cross-border cooperation between Russian and European partners in a deteriorating environment. Most of Russian publications on regionalization at different spatial levels involve the Baltic Basin. The body of research on territorial conflicts and separatism is growing. Russian geographers and other scholars have made a significant contribution to studying the problems of uncontrolled territories and unrecognized (partially recognized) post-Soviet states. Conflicts around them are considered in relation to their internal differences, complex composition, intricacies of formation and identity of the population, influence on neighboring regions and in historical retrospect.

INTRODUCTION

Geopolitics was considered in the USSR until the last years of its existence as a reactionary bourgeois science aimed at justifying the expansion of international imperialism, while political geography remained a peripheral area of human geography, developing almost exclusively using the data on foreign countries. Turbulent political events during the collapse of the Soviet Union—the search by newly independent states for their place on the global political map and identity building, the outbreak of ethnoterritorial conflicts and heated discussions on border issues, the first democratic elections and reform projects of state structure and administrative division—caused a spike in attention to geopolitics and political geography. The 1990s were marked by a rapid increase in the number of publications in these fields; their authors were not only, and often not so much geographers, but political scientists and, in particular, former professors of Marxist–Leninist philosophy and scientific communism.

Today, scientific and public interest in geopolitics and political geography remains high. A Department of Regional Policy and Political Geography has been created at St. Petersburg University, and political and geographical divisions have also appeared in the leading universities of Moscow: MGIMO and National Research University “Higher School of Economics.” Noteworthy works have been published by scholars from other Russian research centers: Orenburg and Irkutsk, Vladivostok and Kaliningrad, Smolensk and Ulan-Ude. An evident trend in the development of geopolitics and political geography has been the blurring of formal boundaries between disciplines, especially between geography, political science, and sociology. Over the past decade, the relation in the number of studies in individual fields has also changed: interest in electoral geography has fallen, but attention to the study of borders, regionalism, and citizens’ representations about the their country and region’s place in the world has increased.

It is unfeasible to give a complete picture of the current state of geopolitics and political geography in Russia within one article, so we have opted to briefly review the most popular fields or the topics in which, in our opinion, the most interesting results have been achieved. As with other papers in this special issue, it includes mainly publications from 2011–2021. The objective of this paper is to identify the main features of development of geopolitics and political geography in Russia over the past decade and their relationship with global trends and modern theoretical concepts. The authors begin with geopolitical publications. Particular attention is paid to the “pivot to the East” in Russian foreign policy and the Greater Eurasia concept. We then move on to border studies, an expanding interdisciplinary field where geographers play a prominent role, as well as on regionalization, an important factor in changing and redistributing the functions of borders. The article concludes with an assessment of the contribution of Russian political geography to the study of uncontrolled territories and unrecognized states as an integral element of the modern world geopolitical order.

GEOPOLITICS: THE BOOM CONTINUES

Geopolitics remains extremely popular in Russia as an interdisciplinary area of scientific or pseudoscientific publications. As in the 1990s (Kolosov and Turovsky, 2000), one can find many attempts at simple explanations for complex political phenomena that refer to the peculiarities of Russia’s geographical location or its supposedly permanent and indisputable national interests. Geopolitics is taught in universities and various faculties (Mäkinen, 2008): more than 100 textbooks, teaching aids, and anthologies have been published in Russia, the titles of which include the terms “geopolitics” or “geopolitical.” The global amount of publications on this topic is also increasing, as is the share of publications with the participation of Russian scholars. According to Scopus, in 2017 it reached 10%, which is about four times more than the total share of works by Russian authors indexed by international bibliographic databases. A particularly significant increase in publication activity was noted after 2012, and 2015 became the peak year (Silnichaya and Gumenyuk, 2020). This reflected a deep transformation of the international system and a double crisis: the conflict in the south-east of Ukraine and the actual rupture of Russian-Ukrainian relations, and the sharp deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, sanctions and counter-sanctions. As before, neoclassical publications by political scientists, sociologists, and economists predominate. Geographical studies in the Russian database “eLibrary,” containing the named terms in the title, keywords and annotations, in 1991–2015 amounted to only 2.5% of the total number of materials (Pototskaya and Silnichaya, 2019).

Despite the abundance of publications Russian geopolitics still appears to be a vague subject area. In world science there has not yet been a consensus, too, either in defining its content, or in approaches and methods. An alternative to neoclassical geopolitics since the early 1990s has been critical geopolitics, which operates not with speculative reasoning, but large amounts of information analyzed using modern quantitative methods. In critical geopolitics, it was possible to “remove” the contradiction between the use of geopolitical ideas to justify political decisions (geopolitics as an ideology and political practice) and the study of spatial factors influencing foreign policy or political activity in general. The authors of the concept of critical geopolitics proposed considering it as a discourse that reflects the interests of various social strata and political forces. Later, its scope was broadened with studying the role of geopolitical symbols, images, and ideas contained not only in the discourse of political leaders, but also in media reports, advertising, cartoons, movies and caricatures.

In Russia, critical geopolitics was little known until the early 2010s. One of the first to use its methods were the scholars of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who developed ideas about the integration of individual geopolitical images into the geopolitical picture of the world formed in the collective consciousness of social groups and individuals. It includes representations about the country’s place in the world, its foreign policy orientation, ”natural” and desirable allies, major political players, national security threats, historical mission and shared past with neighboring countries, as well as advantages and disadvantages of certain foreign policy strategies. The geopolitical picture of the world is a product of national history and culture, the result of the synthesis of views professed by various strata of the political elite, academic experts, creative intellectuals, and public opinion in general (Kolosov, 2011).

The methodology used by the authors is aimed at an analysis of the relationship between the “high” geopolitics developed by political leaders and experts (academic scientists, well-known journalists, etc.), and “low” geopolitics, i.e., the geopolitical picture of the world in the minds of citizens. The tool for studying high geopolitics is qualitative and quantitative analyses of discourse. Low geopolitics is studied with sociological methods: mass surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews.

The staff of the Institute published, including with foreign coauthors, a number of works devoted to Russian political discourse in relation to the attack of American cities by terrorists and an attempt at rapprochement with the West, comparisons of discourses of various political forces with the opinions of ordinary citizens in different areas, identified through mass surveys, representations of the population about the foreign world and their origin, etc. (O’Loughlin et al., 2004a, 2004b). Based on the materials of the project of the Fifth European Framework Program “Vision of Europe in the world” (EuroBroadMap) and surveys among about 10 thousand students in 18 countries according to a single methodology, the dependence of representations about the world on social stratification, spatial mobility of respondents and their families, and their knowledge of foreign languages was studied. The resulting geopolitical vision of the world was compared with the global “space of flows”—the geographical distribution of foreign trade, foreign direct investments, migrations, international flights, arms supplies, political relations, expressed in solidarity voting in the UN, etc. In other words, the aim was to find out to what extent the “visibility” and image of a country depend on its “actual” place in the world, the intensity and nature of its external contacts. The initial hypothesis also assumed that the vision of the world depends on the physical and cultural distance between countries (similarity of language and religion).

The study showed that in Russia, as in other countries, the respondents are most familiar with the world’s major powers, neighboring countries and “newsmakers” —the regions of international conflicts regularly covered by the media. The countries of Africa and significant parts of Asia and Latin America were rarely mentioned. The most known and attractive for Russian students were Western European countries, which were associated primarily with a high living standard, tourism, and consumption of goods and services, but also with a rich cultural heritage and democratic regimes. In most of the countries where the survey was conducted, Russia iself was well known, but mostly inattractive.

Political discourse in Russia and other countries—official (interviews and statements of political leaders), media (media materials) and expert (academic publications)—was compared with the results of specially conducted and/or available public opinion polls. A study of Russian official discourse and publications in a number of newspapers over several years showed in particular the ambiguity and divergence in interpreting the concept of the “Russian world.” Simultaneous mass surveys carried out at the end of 2014 in the regions of southeastern Ukraine and in all post-Soviet unrecognized republics revealed large territorial differences in the self-identification of respondents with the “Russian world,” their high correlation with Russian or Ukrainian identity (for the first time in the post-Soviet years; such a dependence has not been observed before) and orientation towards Russian or Ukrainian TV channels. Statistical modeling helped to create a portrait of a typical supporter of the Russian world, i.e., the interdependence of sociodemographic characteristics, ways of socialization, and trust in political leaders and electoral behavior (O’Loughlin et al., 2016).

In subsequent studies in political geography, much attention was paid to tools used by states and individual political forces to convince citizens of the validity of a certain geopolitical vision of the world and foreign policy strategy based on it (Kolosov et al., 2018). This task is becoming more difficult due to the rise of individualism and the spread of the Internet and social networks. At the same time, control over telecommunications and, in particular, the main TV channels has made it easier for the authorities to manipulate public opinion. The socialization of schoolchildren, including the content of history and geography textbooks, plays an important role in shaping the geopolitical vision of the world. The official discourse and content of several generations of school textbooks in Ukraine (Vendina et al., 2014a) and Estonia (Vendina et al., 2014b) were compared. This analysis led to the conclusion that the model of strengthening Ukrainian identity through sharp opposition to Russia undermined, rather than supported, Ukrainian statehood. It was manifested in the events of February 2014.

Since the 2010s, the theory of critical geopolitics has become more widespread, in particular, thanks to the works of I. Okunev and other MGIMO scholars. They examined the relationship between official Moldovan political discourse and everyday discourse of minorities—the Gagauz and Bulgarians—using the idea that collective identities can be based on the images of “others” as constitutive markers, in this case, Russia (Okunev, 2016). L. Zhirnova (2021) highlighted the role of Russia as a significant “Other” in cartoons published in Latvian newspapers, and N. Radina (2021) conducted a semantic analysis of a vast array of publications in Russian newspapers, in 2019 and early 2020 with the keyword “coronavirus.” She showed how the impending pandemic served as an excuse both to demonize China and condemn American hegemonism and D. Trump. A series of works by K. Aksenov et al. considers the “ideologization” of the urban space of CIS countries. The emergence of new states in the post-Soviet space was accompanied by the nationalization of urban toponyms, the transition from their single “matrix,” which formed a common Soviet identity, to the regional diversification of approaches to changing toponyms (Aksenov, 2020; Aksenov and Andreev, 2021; Axenov and Yaralyan, 2012).

Analyzing the world literature on geopolitics, including critical geopolitics, St. Petersburg geographer A. Elatskov proffered a broad theoretical concept, presented in a large series of articles (2012, 2013) and then a monograph (2017). He considers a geopolitical relation (GR) the key object of geopolitics— combination of geographical and political relations in different proportions, the synthesis of which gives it a new quality. In the geographical component of GR, Elatskov singles out formal-spatial (positional) and content-related elements. An example is different kinds of cross-border movements that have a certain territorial pattern, geographical (e.g., as part of value added chains) and at the same time political meaning (e.g., the impact of migration on the domestic political situation in a country and areas of the largest inflow of migrants). Elatskov understands geopolitics as the organization of geopolitical relations between different actors and, at the same time, a field of knowledge and thought aimed at identifying and transforming these relations. He subdivides “geopolitical thought” into three levels. The ordinary level is predominantly an unsystematic, emotionally colored set of stereotypes, myths, and psychological complexes, called “low geopolitics” in critical geopolitics. Practical geopolitical thought is dominated by an applied component related to the everyday level and using ready-made concepts. Finally, the top level is conceptual geopolitics involving research, ideas, and generalizations (“high geopolitics”). Elatskov divides geopolitical knowledge into several geospatial types according to the method of analysis, theoretical and ideological directions, etc., including contextual, reflecting the balance of external and internal conditions of GR. In his opinion, critical geopolitics, which claims to be impartial, cannot remain politically neutral, and through its optics geography appears not as a reality, but an image of it. The author proposes calling the synthesis of modernized classical and critical geopolitics “postclassical.” I. Okunev (2014) arrived at similar opinion.

Achievements in the theory of geopolitics and political geography include a review of their state-of-the-art at St. Petersburg University over nearly three centuries (Kaledin et al., 2019). A. Fartyshev, geographer based in Irkutsk, used game theory for the first time to formalize the category of “geopolitical location.” Based on the Soviet–Russian concept of geographical position, he distinguished passive (a set of factors contributing to protection against expansion), active (factors contributing to the expansion and broadening of the country’s influence) and geoeconomic (factors contributing to economic development) geopolitical position. Fartyshev focused on assessing the geoeconomic position of Siberia, the uniqueness of which is largely determined by its “ultra-continentality” in terms of L. Bezrukov. Similarly to papers of many political scientists who developed synthetic indicators of a country’s power, Fartyshev used in his reasoning the concept of geopolitical power. In his opinion, the geopolitical position of a territory in general is determined by the ratio of its geopolitical power to the aggregated geopolitical power of the other (neighboring) territories, adjusted for the degree of influence of each of them on the territory in question and the political relations with it. Fartyshev proposed a set of specific variables for assessing these indicators, including political relations on a friendliness–hostility scale (2017, 2019).

PIVOT TO THE EAST AND THE GREATER EURASIA CONCEPT

One of the most important topics of geopolitical publications in recent years has been the “pivot to the east,” which refers to the need to diversify the country’s external sources of development and strategic interaction with China and Asia-Pacific countries. The pivot to the east was accelerated by the geopolitical crisis provoked by the events in Ukraine and sharply aggravating relations between Russia and the West. The presumption was to use relations with China to modernize the economy, attract new direct investments, accelerate structural changes in the economies of the Far East and Eastern Siberia, and halt the depopulation of these regions.

In the late 2010s, the discussion about Greater Eurasia, closely related to the pivot to the east intensified. Political scientists, including leaders and high-ranking experts of the influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, have played the main role, but geographers have also actively joined this debate, since this topic of Greater Eurasia has not only an external, geopolitical, but also an internal dimension.

The essence of this concept is the formation of new economic, political and cultural space “from Vladivostok (or Shanghai) to Lisbon”—“a space of free trade, development, peace and security, conditions for the sovereign development of all its member countries, cultures and civilizations” (Karaganov, 2019, pp. 9, 12). The theory of Greater Eurasia is outwardly similar to the concept of Eurasianism, one of the main elements of Russia’s geopolitical tradition. However, Eurasianism arose as a reaction to contradictions between the Russian Empire and European powers pitting the East against the West. Its ideological basis was the idea of Russia as a special cultural and historical community, different from both Asia and Europe, but equal to it, coinciding more or less exactly with the borders of the Russian Empire (Laruelle, 2008).

Greater Eurasia is not only much larger than Eurasia–Russia, but it also has a different architecture. It is based not so much on adjacency but on network interaction, with a multipolar and multiscale structure created by regional integration processes at different levels. Therefore, one of the main geopolitical arguments is Russia’s possibility to maintain its position as an independent great power in conditions of a multipolar Eurasia, despite its economic growth rates lagging behind the United States, China, and India, a decrease in population, and, accordingly, a drop in “weight” in the world. The pivot to the east corresponds to the fundamental orientation of post-Soviet Russia towards the creation of a multipolar geopolitical order and prevention of hegemony of any individual country or group of countries (Suslov and Pyatachkova, 2019). Another important geopolitical argument is avoidance of the alternative of turning Russia into a junior partner either of the collective West or Beijing. In the Greater Europe that never evolved, Russia would have remained a marginal periphery, an eternally lagging pupil in the school of European values, forced to follow norms established without its participation. In addition, with the stark and increasing asymmetry in the Russia and its great eastern neighbor potential, Moscow is interested in balancing China’s power in a system of diverse network relations and institutions.

In the opinion of the supporters of Greater Eurasia, there are the prerequisites for its formation, which Russia cannot ignore. These include actual stagnation of the EU economy, the crisis of European integration, and the obvious shift of the gravity center of the world economy to Asia. At the core of the Greater Eurasia concept are the priority of economic interactions, separation of the economy from the burden of geopolitics, overcoming the differences inherited from the Cold War and preventing the emergence of new ones, and resolving disagreements and frictions between the participants (Toward …, 2018, p. 29).

The pivot to the east and Greater Eurasia concept are also justified by internal Russian reasons: the need to accelerate and eliminate distortions in the development of Siberia and the Far East and use their rich natural resources more efficiently (Kotlyakov and Shuper, 2019). These problems are directly linked to the discussion about the “continental and resource curses” of Russia, and Siberia in particular; i.e., the fatal low efficiency of economy because of vast distances and high transport expenses (Bezrukov, 2008), and international specialization on the export of fuel and raw materials (Kryukov and Seliverstov, 2022).

However, the Greater Eurasia concept has triggered a cautious or openly skeptical attitude among some Russian authors. They argue that, despite real common interests, the states of Europe and Asia, primarily China and India, are involved in conflicts among themselves, have different political regimes and orientations, and profess fundamentally different views on state sovereignty and the nature of international relations (Kortunov, 2019). Critics emphasize that small and medium-sized countries are wary of using the Greater Eurasia concept by China, Russia, and other major powers in their struggle for political influence. They note the lack of an adequate political infrastructure as a common forum for the Eurasian states, especially in the field of security (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization cannot satisfy such ambitions).

Other authors argue that hopes for a sharp increase in Chinese investment in the manufacturing industry, an increase in the share of high-value-added goods in Russian exports to China, and the implementation of large infrastructure projects in Russia did not materialize. Chinese partners are interested in access to Russian raw materials, but not in investing in high-tech industry. The growth of Russian–Chinese trade turnover is hampered by noneconomic obstacles (Kolosov and Zotova, 2021b). Although the share of EU countries in Russian foreign trade has been declining, changes in its distribution across countries since 2014 showing no a decisive pivot to the East. China confidently took first place among Russia’s trading partners, ahead of Germany, but the EU as a whole still accounts for most of trade (43% in 2019). In Chinese foreign trade, Russia occupies a very modest place accounting for 2.9% of imports and 1.3% of exports (2019)—far less than the turnover with the US or major EU countries. The emerging Greater Eurasia promises the Russian Federation not only new geostrategic opportunities, but also fundamental risks. The growing specialization of Asian Russia in the export of energy, minerals, and timber to China and Asian countries exacerbates its lag behind partners, stimulates the concentration of the population and economy in few foci, and contributes to the involvement of the eastern regions in foreign economic relations to the detriment of the domestic (Druzhinin, 2020).

BORDER STUDIES: CHALLENGES OF RUSSIA’S MULTINEIGHBOR POSITION

The global upheavals in recent years have highlighted with renewed vigor the importance of state borders in the life of society. The coronavirus pandemic has led to the closing and sharp asymmetry in the functions of many interstate borders. A series of migration crises in Europe and other parts of the world have given impetus to securitization policies that have increased use of the latest technologies in border security and combating illegal migration, as well as accelerating the construction of physical barriers along borders. In Russia, which borders 16 countries (including Abkhazia and South Ossetia, recognized by Moscow), additional factors that have increased attention to borders in the 2010s were the creation of the EAEU, the annexation of Crimea, the civil war in the Donbass, international sanctions and countersanctions, aggravation of relations with neighboring EU countries and, at the same time, intensification of cooperation with China. Border studies, just like abroad, have become a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field of knowledge, remaining one of the classic areas of political geography.

The central concept in modern border studies has been understanding of borders as a complex social category created as a result of bordering—constant reproduction of distinctions by various social and political actors in the course of their activities (Brambilla and Jones, 2020; Konrad, 2015; Paasi, 2021; Paasi and Prokkola, 2008; Scott 2021). In this way, a border is at the same time a self-developing legal institution, a material phenomenon (crossing points and other infrastructure), a dividing line and the adjacent space it affects, a social practice, a symbol, and a set of social concepts.

The topics of border studies by Russian authors are in general similar to their European colleagues. For EU countries and Russia, the problem of redistributing functions between borders is very important ( debordering and rebordering ). As is known, in the EU, many functions of state borders have been transferred to the external borders, while internal borders have become more open. In the post-Soviet space, conversely, the borders between the former republics of the USSR have become state borders. The zero-sum game in relations between Russia and the West in the struggle for influence in former USSR countries determined the redistribution of barrier and contact functions of borders: they increasingly depended on the involvement of post-Soviet states in integration processes under the auspices of the Russian Federation.

There are also two obvious differences in the directions of border studies in Russia and European countries. First, there are much fewer studies on the relationship between borders and migration in Russia. Although Russia is the third largest world destination for international migrants after the US and the EU, this problem is less acute due to the openness of borders, especially between EAEU countries. Second, in Russia, on the contrary, there are relatively more publications about the “material” functions of borders—their role in the formation of cross-border socioeconomic and cultural contrasts, regulation of cross-border flows, and the impact of interactions between neighboring countries on border regions.

This topic is the most important both in terms of the number of studies and geographical coverage. In the West, attention to studying cross-border contrasts peaked in the 1980s–2000s, when similar studies were carried out on the border between the “old” EU members and former socialist countries seeking to join it (Stryjakiewicz, 1998), between the United States and Mexico (Martinez, 1994). Borders are a powerful tool for reproducing spatial inequality. In Russia, special interest in the analysis of border gradients was caused by the growing asymmetry in the rates and directions of economic development of the former Soviet republics, the differences between their economic and political and legal space increasing in the course of state building (Kolosov and Morachevskaya, 2020). An analysis of contrasts focused in particular on settlement systems and the territorial structure of the economy of border regions makes it possible to assess the prospects for cross-border cooperation. Economic peripherality and the largest gradients in the level of economic development between Russian regions and their neighbors are most noticeable on the old borders inherited from the USSR in the European part of Russia (Zotova et al., 2018a) and reflect its relative lagging behind the EU countries. A significant gap in socioeconomic indicators, as a rule, reduces interest in cooperation and increases the risk of unequal relations, when the stronger party receives the greatest benefits. An example is economic relations between border regions of Russia and China. At the same time, cross-border differences between adjacent territories can also serve a significant resource for them, allowing them to expand the domestic market thanks to customers from neighboring countries, to better meet the demand for goods and services, improve the culture of production, etc. (Zotova et al., 2018b).

As many Russian authors have shown, in the post-Soviet borderlands, there is increasing contrast in the level of development both between the border areas of neighboring countries and within each the border zone. The priority of state building in the post-Soviet states leads to an increase in the peripherality of territories far from urban centers along new borders, which interferes with the negative influence of the border. It becomes a significant obstacle to interaction between EAEU countries (Morachevskaya, 2010; Rossiiskoe …, 2018). The depression of most municipal districts along the Russian–Belarusian border is also associated with the hyperconcentration of economic activity in metropolitan agglomerations, which creates deep contrasts (Yas’kova, 2021).

An important aspect of studying post-Soviet borderlands is analysis of demographic and migration processes, the ethnocultural situation, the settlement pattern on both sides of the state border (Popkova, 2011), as well as their role in the formation of cross-border regions and the development of cross-border cooperation (Gerasimenko, 2011; Karpenko, 2019; Novikov, 2015).

The development potential of border areas was assessed via analysis of foreign economic relations. Their effectiveness was estimated by multifactor modeling in terms of the ratio and composition of exports and imports and intersectoral balance (Bilchak, 2011). The indicators of transport and border infrastructure were also considered as a factor in interactions between states. A borderland was zoned according to the level of its infrastructural development (Rygnyzov and Batomunkuev, 2016).

Studies by a number of geographers have assessed the influence of different types of borders (natural, economic, administrative, state) on the agricultural specialization of border areas. Whereas the role of administrative boundaries has sharply decreased due to the development of market relations, the influence of natural and state boundaries remains significant (Baburin et al., 2019).

The French geographer M. Foucher called borders a “factory of identities.” The relationship between borders, territory, and identity is the core not only of border studies, but whole political geography. Research on this topic—the symbolic function of borders constitutes the second main direction of border studies in Russia. Their objective is to analyze social representations about the optimal configuration of a state border based on citizen’s views on the criteria that separate “us” from “them,” and the regime and functions of borders. Many authors considered the role of borders in national identity, political discourse, historical narratives, as well as the symbolic landscape of borders, etc. Such studies are often based on sociological data and study of socialization of different generations, i.e., on the paradigm of critical geopolitics (Amilhat Szary, 2020; Paasi, 1996; Scott, 2021; Vendina and Gritsenko, 2017).

In the post-Soviet space, state and administrative boundaries are often seen as boundaries between identities in the geographical space. The delimitation between the republics and territorial autonomies of the former USSR was based precisely on this principle: the more the formal border coincided with the border of identities, the more it was interpreted as fair. Meanwhile, in many areas of a mixed settlement pattern of different ethnic groups, such correspondence cannot be achieved. Studies by D. Newman and other Western authors well demonstrate that the problem of primacy of identity or boundaries is the chicken and egg question.

This phenomenon is shown in studies of relict (historical) borders that have lost the most important functions of dividing lines between states, but have remained significant political, economic, and cultural barriers. Past belonging to other historical, cultural, and political regions has a significant impact on the social practices and identity of their inhabitants and on various activities; it manifests itself in the cultural landscape and can be used to mobilize public opinion, e.g. for the purposes of secession. These are called phantom boundaries. Their significance is well analyzed in (Janczak, 2015; von Hirschhausen et al., 2019; etc.). In Russia, typical phantom borders are those of territories joined to the former Soviet Union (RSFSR) before World War II and as its result, as well as former frontiers and linear defense systems which have existed in the 16th–19th centuries in Russia’s South and East. The visibility of phantom borders is also determined by the depth of the wealth gap between the territories they separate, political differences between countries, memory politics, and other factors (Kolosov, 2017).

Russian researchers have often studied the mutual influence of formal borders and identities with case studies of the borders between Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltics (Krylov and Gritsenko, 2015; Vendina et al., 2014b, 2021)—territories that for a long time existed within the borders matching the current Russian Federation and with a mixed ethnic composition, now included in different economic and political unions and security systems. These factors have led to the formation of complex, mixed, or transitional models of identity. A case study of Pskov oblast was focused on the role of the media and regular cross-border contacts in the formation of models of good neighborly or oppositional identity (Manakov, 2010).

In the world literature, studies of the impact of borders on identity, social concepts, and daily life of society usually focus on the adaptation of local communities to different types of borders, their role in shaping the differences between people and social systems, and the specific border culture; they are associated with the uniqueness of border crossing practices, ambivalence of identities, and tolerance for otherness (Anzaldua, 1999). Similar processes were considered in the Russian borderland with Poland and Finland (before the COVID-19 pandemic). In these areas, everyday cross-border contacts expanded people’s life plans, gave them the opportunity to accumulate and put into practice the experience of acting in a different social environment, contributed to the growth in interest and trust of citizens in neighboring countries in each other, and, as a result, the formation of the identity of a “cross-border resident” who feels comfortable on both sides of the border (Brednikova, 2008; Zotova et al., 2018a). At the same time, in the Russian–Ukrainian and Russian–Estonian borderlands, citizens perceive that, instead of a conditional line on the map, it has become an important border felt in everyday life. According to O. Martinez’s typology (1994), the border has turned from integration to “coexisting,” and then alienating, and the borderland from a largely unified territory into border strips (Zotova and Gritsenko, 2021).

Borders simultaneously reflect local, interstate, and global consequences of economic and political processes and identity battles. They are an extremely dynamic social institution: their functions and regimes are constantly changing depending on bilateral relations between neighboring countries, the global political situation, global and regional economic conditions, and exchange rates and world prices. Therefore, the third leading direction in Russian border studies is now study of the dynamics of borders under the impact of the dialectical combination of globalization and regionalization processes (fragmentation of the political space).

Foreign studies of this type examine the contradictions between growing international and cross-border interactions, the objective need for highly permeable borders, on the one hand, and the interests of national and regional security, on the other. Back in the early 2010s, researchers noted trends towards “enclosing” of state territory from the negative and unforeseen consequences of globalization, including the erection of thousands of kilometers of physical barriers along borders, based on the desire to more fully control commodity, financial, and sometimes information flows, to protect the national economic space from excessive competition (Ghorra-Gobin, 2012; Jones, 2012; Rosière and Jones, 2012; Vallet, 2019). These processes became especially acute with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the inconsistency of the ideas of the 1990s about the gradual increase in contact functions of borders at the expense of barriers finally became apparent (Böhm, 2021; Chaulagain et al., 2021; Rothmüller, 2021).

New work has shown that the pandemic has partially refuted the concept of weakening of the state as a result of globalization processes (Golunov, 2021; Golunov and Smirnova, 2021). The most obvious geopolitical consequence of the pandemic was further fragmentation of the political and socioeconomic space, the instrument of which was not only state, but also internal administrative borders. Border closures occurred asynchronously and asymmetrically, were not coordinated even between EU countries, and affected the mobility and daily interests of more than 90% of the world’s population (Gossling et al., 2020). As a result, the pandemic contributed to further division of the world into “us” and “them.” Invisible borders of regions with different levels of morbidity have divided territories with different levels of urbanization, age structures, incomes, and mobility of the population, and ultimately, different cultural characteristics and lifestyles (Kolosov et al., 2021).

At the intersection of political and physical geography and other sciences are studies of sustainable development and management of cross-border natural systems—international river basins, mountain ridges, inland seas, protected natural areas, etc. Their economic use gives rise to contradictions between the countries in which these objects are located. However, well-thought-out institutional mechanisms make it possible to smooth out disagreements and contribute to stabilization of the cross-border natural systems even in the face of tense interstate relations (Seliverstova, 2009). Although the necessary level of coordination has not been achieved in any of the main cross-border basins of the Russian Federation, a positive experience of interaction has been accumulated in some areas (Frolova, Samokhin, 2018). Works by the joint Russian–Azerbaijani commission for the distribution of water resources of the Samur River, development of a comprehensive program of Russian–Kazakh cooperation to preserve the ecosystem of Ural River (Chibilev, 2018; Sokolov et al., 2020), and joint (until 2014) efforts of Ukrainian and Russian specialists in the use and protection of the Seversky Donets River demonstrate that effective and coordinated management of a cross-border natural object can be successful (Demin and Shatalova, 2015).

New areas of border studies emerging in Russia are associated with assessment of the role of borders in international tourism. Border problems are reflected in “high” and popular culture—literature, cinema, painting, architecture. In publications by Russian authors, the development of tourism is considered as one of the important areas of cross-border cooperation (Sebentsov and Zotova, 2018) in relation with the dynamics of the functions and regimes of borders, the cross-border price gradient, and the attractiveness of borders for tourists (Katrovsky et al., 2017 ). An important contribution to the development of this direction has been made by A. Alexandrova and co-authors, who consider borders as a mean for regulating international tourist flows and, at the same time, a factor in the development of tourism in border areas. Much attention is given to the transformation of borders from a barrier hindering international tourist exchange into a resource giving an important competitive advantage to border areas (Aleksandrova and Shipugina, 2020; Aleksandrova and Stupina, 2014).

REGIONALIZATION AT DIFFERENT SPATIAL LEVELS

An important factor in the redistribution of functions between political boundaries of different levels was the formation of international regions of different levels (regionalization) as a response to the challenges of international competition, which requires the expansion of markets, cross-border cooperation and new approaches to territorial organization of the economy (Fedorov and Korneevets, 2010; Korneevets, 2010).

Modern approaches to regionalization are based on the combination of constructivist and functional understanding of this process. In other words, cross-border regions can be formed both “from below,” on the basis of an increasingly dense network of production, marketing, migration, and other interactions, sociocultural commonality, and increased interdependence between territories, and “from above,” by the efforts of interested states, business and public organizations. The principles of “new regionalism” developed in Europe provide the most flexible approach to regionalization. It is based on depoliticization, multilevel governance, a combination of different models, optional reliance on existing norms, a multilateral nature, that is, the use of not only economic, but also social, cultural, and environmental factors of cooperation, the participation of regions and municipalities of countries with different state structures and legal systems, and the ability to agree upon only those issues on which a compromise has been reached, without trying to immediately solve the most difficult problems (Fawcett, 1995; Kolosov and Sebentsov, 2019).

Analysis of regionalization has acquired high importance for Russian political geographers, including the fact that at the interstate level, the Russian Federation is involved in the activities of many regional organizations, and at the substate level, in the formation of cross-border regions, primarily on borders with the EU (Kolosov and Sebentsov, 2019). The central place in research on this topic belongs to the studies devoted to cross-border regionalization in the Baltic Sea basin, authored mainly to Kaliningrad scholars (Fedorov and Korneevets, 2010; Korneevets, 2010). These studies were supplemented and often carried out with the participation of European authors (Palmowski and Fedorov 2020; Sagan et al., 2018). The course and results of regionalization were assessed based on analysis of the intensity and structure of relations between various actors: foreign trade, investment, and agreements between various partners (Korneevets, 2010; Fedorov et al., 2013). The specifics and implementation of EU projects aimed at supporting cross-border cooperation and integration processes on external borders have been studied, e.g. the prospects for creating cross-border region Gdansk/Sopot/Gdynia–Kaliningrad–Klaipeda (Palmovski and Fedorov, 2019).

Despite some successes in cooperation with European partners, some Russian authors have emphasized that Russia’s interests have not always been taken into account. Interactions across different platforms, e.g., the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS), the Northern Dimension Initiative, the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR), the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM), the Union of Baltic Cities (BCU), the Baltic Development Forum (BDF), Euroregion “Baltic,” etc., have faced a lack of necessary funding and limited opportunities for the Russian side to influence decision-making (Bolotnikova and Mezhevich, 2012). Overbureaucratization and, since 2014, blocking of cooperation channels at the interstate level by the Baltic countries and other partners, prevented implementation of many promising initiatives at the regional and local levels (Euroregions, “twin cities”) and rapprochement of the Baltic strategies of the Russian Federation and the EU during the Russian presidency in the CBSS in 2012–2013 (Sergunin, 2013). The assessment of the Northern Dimension initiative as one of the model areas of cross-border cooperation in federal and regional discourse revealed a certain discrepancy between the expectations and results of cooperation, including the lack of unified mechanisms for financing and administering the program (Kolosov and Sebentsov, 2019).

ENPI’s cross-border cooperation programs have been the real mechanism for interaction between Russia and the EU at the regional and local level, making it possible to attract investments and promote the development of the economy and social infrastructure of border regions. Analysis of the projects in different areas (Gritsenko et al., 2013; Kropinova, 2013; Kuznetsova and Gapanovich, 2012) showed that in the regions bordering the EU (Kaliningrad, Leningrad, Pskov oblasts, the Republic of Karelia), an institutional model of cooperation was gradually constructed, which led to the formation of real network partnerships, both intersectoral and in individual sectors of activity (environmental protection, tourism, etc.) (Sebentsov and Zotova, 2018). The establishment of simplified (virtually visa free) regime for local border traffic (LBT) was considered an effective tool for intensification of cross-border coopration in the Russian–Polish, Russian–Latvian and Russian–Norwegian border areas (Gumenyuk et al., 2019; Sagan et al., 2018). The LBT regime had a positive effect on contacts between countries and contributed to an increase in cross-border mobility and the socioeconomic development of border areas.

Since 2016–2018, the topics of publications on cross-border cooperation between Russia and the EU have changed significantly. When it became obvious that no improvement in relations should be expected in the near future, a significant number of studies appeared on the security agenda—economic, political, military, and societal (Fedorov, 2020; Mezhevich and Zverev, 2018; Sergunin, 2021; Volovoy and Batorshina, 2017). Researchers focused on the place of the Baltic region in the modern strategies of its member states. Current processes were examined in terms of Karl Deutsch’s concept of security community and Barry Buzan’s regional security complex. Important topics were increased risks of local conflicts and political instability, ensuring military security and militarization of the region, including analysis of the military spending of the Baltic countries, which in 2015-2016 alone increased by 45%—almost 6% of budget incomes (Mezhevich and Zverev, 2018). An important area of confrontation between Russia and the West, including in the Baltic Sea region, was the economy. As a result, due to the curtailment of economic ties with Russia, the GDPs of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania decreased in 2015–2016 by 8–12% (Mezhevich, 2016). As a result of sanctions and countersanctions, Russia’s trade with countries of the Baltic Sea region has significantly decreased.

Studies of societal security in accordance with the concepts of the Copenhagen School of International Studies have shown that despite the existing contradictions, the Baltic region managed to develop a common approach to understanding the threats and challenges to public security, including uneven regional development, social and gender inequality, unemployment, poverty, intolerance, religious and political extremism, climate change, natural and man-made disasters, epidemics, cybercrime, international terrorism, etc. (Sergunin, 2021). Russia was involved in the development of the Baltic 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy, which gave grounds for cautious optimism in assessing the prospects for cooperation.

Relations in the spheres of culture, education, and science were hardly affected at all, and interactions within the framework of cross-border cooperation programs were also preserved (Kondratieva, 2021; Mironyuk and Zhengota, 2017). This confirms the thesis that, thanks to implementation of joint programs since the early 2000s, a network of contacts has been created at the regional and local levels, which played a key role in strengthening trust between parties, based on rational choice, sociocultural community, and personal relations (Kolosov and Sebentsov, 2019).

SEPARATISM, TERRITORIAL CONFLICTS, AND PROBLEMS OF UNRECOGNIZED STATES

The topic of territorial conflicts got relevant in Russia during the collapse of the USSR, when a number of pioneering studies were published on the claims of various political forces and potential territorial claims of the union republics and territorial autonomies to each other and their causes. In the 1990s, this field, geoconflictology, was developed by O. Glezer, V. Kolosov, N. Mironenko, N. Petrov, A. Treivish, and R. Turovsky. Later, as a result of state building in the post-Soviet countries, the situation stabilized, and political scientists and ethnologists began to study in depth the remaining territorial conflicts. The number of geographical studies on geoconflictology has decreased. It is worth notings the studies by I. Suprunchuk on the geography of terrorism (Suprunchuk et al., 2017). Several studies on territorial conflicts in foreign countries were published in the 2010s (Brazhalovich et al., 2016; Skachkov, 2019; Zakharov et al., 2020).

One of the main topics of geoconflictology is the conflict between a secessionist movement operating in a certain territory and a mother state (Popov, 2012). Most political geographers (Krotov, 2016; Zayats, 2022) examine separatism in the conflictological paradigm. Related studies by political scientists can be divided into two groups. The first includes geographical and political research on individual countries and regions (Catalonia, Azavad, etc.). The second group focuses on separatism as a social phenomenon, either by explaining the reasons why the separatist movement arose, or by considering the factors of its success or failure. Since there are many research institutes in Russia dealing with the problems of certain regions (Europe, Latin America, etc.), most of the studies are devoted to global experience, especially the European (Prokhorenko, 2018; Semenenko, 2018).

Another characteristic feature of Russian research is the predominant emphasis on the ethnic genesis of separatism (Kuznetsov, 2015; Oskolkov, 2021). Thus, A. Wimmer et al. (2009) indicate that 57 of the 60 considered separatist conflicts in the world were of an ethnocultural nature. F. Popov (2012), like many Western researchers, calls them pseudo-ethnic, believing that the causes of separatism lie in the conflict of identities. Their markers are very different. In many Russian geographical studies on separatism, the center–periphery model is used to analyze conflicts between the dominant identity, the culture of the “center” and the periphery opposing it. (D. Zayats’ “separatism centers,” R. Turovsky’s “areas of conflicts,” and F. Popov’s “proliferation zones of separatism”).

Next hallmark of Russian studies of separatism (Popov, 2012; Turov, 2021) is attention to its diffusion, based on the hypothesis that the success of a separatist movement in one territory prompts that similar demands be made in another. Such a domino effect was observed during the collapse of the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s–1990s. Britain’s exit from the EU, which can be seen as a form of separatism, has intensified “Eurosceptic” sentiments in other EU countries, such as Hungary, France, and Poland.

Separatism is closely related to growth in the number, total area, and population of uncontrolled territories. Dozens of states in the world have not fully controlled their territory for many years. Power over vast regions is wielded by the leaders of partisan movements, warlords, drug lords, and local leaders. The de facto secession most affected vast areas of problematic statehood in Asia and Africa, which are home to about 45 mln and 138 mln people, respectively. An adequate assessment of this phenomenon, which has become an integral feature of the political map of the world, can only be given if a rigorous definition of the concept of “control over a territory” is worked out. Like state sovereignty, this concept is “divisible.” For various reasons, it is proposed to distinguish several kinds of control. They differ in type (power, political, ideological, economic), temporal (permanent, temporary, including seasonal, daily) and territorial pattern (solid, focal, network). The types of territories not controlled by legitimate governments have been identified. In stateless zones, the mother state is unwilling or unable to exercise control, and neither the state nor the rebels perform most state functions. Rebel states are territories over which opposition forces exercise continuous or patchy control and where rebel authorities perform some state functions. Lastly, unrecognized republics, or de facto states, possess all or most of the attributes of a state and rely on high internal sovereignty (Kolosov et al., 2021; Sebentsov and Kolosov 2012).

There is no generally accepted terminology in studies of uncontrolled territories (Popov, 2011), and there is no consensus on the number of unrecognized states. However, most authors include six states in the former USSR (Dembinska and Campana, 2017; Popov, 2015; Zayats, 2020): Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in recent years, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Russia is deeply involved in the conflicts around these states; four of them are its immediate neighbors. Naturally, factors of their viability, correlation and dynamics of internal and external sovereignty attract considerable attention of Russian scholars, primarily political scientists and geographers.

There has been growing foreign interest also in the fate of the unrecognized (partially recognized) states in the post-Soviet space. Interesting reviews of their studies are contained in papers by S. Pegg (2017) and M. Dembinska and A. Campana (2017). In the 2010s, foreign publications have increasingly gone beyond long-established topics: the role of unrecognized republics in international relations, the negotiation process, and possible ways to resolve conflicts. The problems and features of state building, the consequences and benefits of the lack of international legitimacy, the state of the economy, and political life are highlighted. The unrecognized states are no longer regarded as Russian puppets, but as independent polities. Russian authors have focused on these topics from the very beginning, considering conflicts between the unrecognized republics and their mother states as multidimensional phenomena associated with events not only during the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also in the much more distant past: internal differences, complex composition, the formation and identity of the population, and influence on the neighboring regions of Russia and other countries. In the foreground, therefore, are the factors of internal sovereignty: the ability of the state to retain population, providing it with jobs, a decent income level, and public services as the most important criterion for the legitimacy of political regimes in power and the success of claims for independence (Bratersky et al., 2021; Kazantsev et al., 2020; Markedonov 2015; Tokarev et al., 2020; Kolosov and Crivenco, 2021 Yagya and Antonova, 2020).

John O’Loughlin (2018) bittrely pointed that, unlike most other branches of geography, fieldwork is not used as much in political geography. Studies of post-Soviet unrecognized states compare favorably with this. Polls in breakaway regions, in most cases the first after declaration of de facto independence, analyzed jointly with “objective” indicators (population and its composition dynamics, the state of the economy, etc.), made it possible to determine the degree of their internal sovereignty in accordance with modern ideas about its “divisibility.” The trust of various ethnic and social groups in political regimes, their assessment of the prospects of their republic, their attitudes towards Russia and other leading world political actors, and their opinions on ways to resolve conflicts have been explained. According to statistical models, in the multinational republics of Transnistria and Abkhazia, ethnicity was the main predictor of citizens’ sentiments (see, for instance, O’Loughlin et al., 2015).

The role of iconography (J. Gottmann’s concept) in strengthening or building a common identity of the unrecognized post-Soviet republics and their mother states was studied through the example of symbolic figures: outstanding political leaders and figures of culture and art from different countries and eras, whom the respondents admired. It turned out that the set of such figures among Russians and Ukrainians of Transnistria and Moldova have almost nothing in common, which reflects both the influence of the media on mass consciousness and differences in socialization (O’Loughlin and Kolosov, 2017). The functions and regimes of the borders of unrecognized states, including during the pandemic (Brazhalovich et al., 2017; Galkina and Popov, 2016; Golunov, 2021; Kolosov and Zotova, 2021a), as well as the tourism industry, which occupies a prominent place in the economy of some of them, have also been examined (Golunov and Zotova, 2021), etc.

CONCLUSIONS

Russian political geography and geopolitics preserved the pluralism of approaches inherited from the 1990s. Using the typology of A. Elatskov, we can say that all three “levels” of geopolitical thought are represented in Russian literature: “ordinary,” stereotyped and highly ideological, “applied,” and “conceptual.” Neoclassical concepts still occupy a central place, but critical geopolitics has also gained prominence, and there have been relatively more “conceptual” studies. In publications on geopolitics, studies carried out by geographers occupy a modest place due to the comparatively small size of the geographical community, but at the same time, they are very visible and cited frequently.

Geopolitical and political–geographical research is characterized by a high ability to respond quickly to sometimes kaleidoscopically changing challenges, new urgent problems, and the demands of political practice. An example is the response of the geographical community to the coronavirus pandemic and analysis of measures taken to combat it in Russia and abroad, the emergence of the Greater Eurasia concept, or shifts in border studies to studying security issues and reflecting the desire to preserve the positive experience of cross-border cooperation between Russian, European, and other partners in a deteriorating environment.

Russian political geography and, to a much lesser extent, geopolitics are developing on the basis of a wide range of concepts known in the world literature, and sometimes creatively reworking these concepts in accordance with Russian specifics and national interests understood differently by supporters of distinct ideological trends. It is often impossible to distinguish between the studies on geopolitics and political geography carried out by scholars from different countries and disciplines: geography, political science, sociology, etc. Deeper integration into the global process of accumulating scientific knowledge has become possible due to the sharp increase in the mobility of researchers (at least before the pandemic), their participation in the activities of the International Geographical Union and other associations, and involvement in joint projects.

The study was carried out within the state task of the Institute of Geography RAS no. AAAA-A19-119022190170-1 (FMGE-2019-0008).

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Contributor Information

V. A. Kolosov, Email: ur.sargi@vosolok .

M. V. Zotova, Email: ur.sargi@avotoz .

N. L. Turov, Email: ur.sargi@vorut .

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From “Asia Pacific” to “Indo Pacific”: The Adjustment of American Asia Pacific Strategy from the Perspective of Critical Geopolitics

After taking office, the Trump administration has shifted the U.S. strategy in the Asia Pacific region from “Asia Pacific” to “Indo-Pacific”. This paper attempts to start with critical geopolitics, compare the “Asia Pacific” strategy of the United States with the “Indo-Pacific” strategy, and investigate the changes and dynamics of the geopolitical imagination of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region. Through the investigation, it can be found that the strategic transformation from “Asia-Pacific” to “Indo-Pacific” reflects the transformation of the U.S. strategy towards China from “L-shaped defense” to “half-mouth encirclement”, as well as the Trump government’s attempt to rebuild the U.S. hegemony in various fields through all-round competition, reshape its identity and confidence as a great power by changing its self-identity and consolidating and expanding the alliance of Western style liberal democratic countries by looking for strategic fulcrum to reconstruct the strategic demands of the key geopolitical space. After Biden’s administration took office, it has inherited and strengthened the Trump administration’s “Indo-Pacific” strategy, which means that the strategic game between the United States and China in the “Indo-Pacific” region and even the global stage will continue for a long time. In order to safeguard China’s national interests and effectively respond to the “Indo-Pacific” strategy, China should enhance its influence and maintain the mentality as a great power, adopt social creation strategies to seek identity and recognition, and make plans based on the “Belt and Road Initiative”, “Polar Silk Road”, “Belt and Road Initiative” and other initiatives; if pushed forward smoothly, it will effectively crack down on the U.S.’s attempt to contain China through the “Indo-Pacific” strategy.

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Critical geopolitics, the shanghai cooperation organization and the sino-kazakh water agreements.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), previously known as the Shanghai Five, was formed in June 2001 as a security engagement organization. It is a highly influential organization in the Eurasian continent, and most Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan included - are members of SCO, as well as China. In recent years, the Chinese water diplomacy towards Kazakhstan has advanced in different agreements that are shaping the patterns of water security in Central Asia. The Chinese strategic interest in the development of the scope of the SCO in this region has made Kazakh transboundary water issues to advance in negotiations. However, these agreements have been made in a bilateral scheme, which is considered relatively unequal towards Kazakh interests; therefore, in spite of the Kazakh efforts, the SCO so far has not turned into a water security organization. This paper is going to analyze the current trends in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as the Sino-Kazakh cooperation platform, especially regarding transboundary water resources. From the perspective of the critical geopolitics scholarship and its considerations regarding the concepts of hegemony and zones of influence, the idea that the Sino-Kazakh cooperation has advanced following Chinese interests is going to be defended. In conclusion, this paper states that due to the lack of interest regarding Chinese water diplomacy, and despite of Kazakh efforts, the SCO is not in the near future launching great initiatives regarding water security in the region, reinforcing the Chinese diplomacy of bilateral water agreements. Recebido em 14/04/2021Aprovado em 19/09/2021

Reflection on Criticisms of Critical Geopolitics

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Masyarakat Adat dan Diskursus Representasi di Lingkar Artik: Tinjauan Kosmopolitanisme dan Geopolitik Kritis

The Arctic Circle, without a doubt, has turned into a region of various complexities and holds a huge prominence in the contemporary world; especially if one link it with discourses regarding energy, resources, and maritime issues which have helped in triggering wide international contestations. These discourses, consequently, are getting more proliferated as the polar ice melting. However, the existing paradigm carried about within the research of the region tends to be ignorant of those whom are marginalized, yet distinctly significant to the shaping of the Arctic environment, under the shadows of nation-states and high politics agendas: the indigenous peoples. This article, therefore, would contribute to the political discourse of the Arctic by elaborating the perspective of indigenous people in regards of the ongoing dynamics. Utilizing Critical Cosmopolitanism as a normative basis, as well as taking the approach offered by Critical Geopolitics, this writing will try to deconstruct how the nation state’s prolonged hegemony impacting the Arctic Circle, displaying the significance held by indigenous communities, as well as factors leading to its heighten representation—with a more through focus on Inuit Peoples in regard of their population and prominence within the discourse. This article reveals that the shifting global paradigm which, in time, echoing Cosmopolitanism values, such as inclusivity, paves a way to the growing representation to the indigenous peoples.

Promises Made to Be Broken: Performance and Performativity in Digital Vaccine and Immunity Certification

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Why a critical geopolitics cannot be Confucian

In this commentary, I welcome An et al.’s (2021) commitment to explore the role of Confucian thought in the contemporary practices of statehood in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nonetheless, I also take issue with the authors’ argument that a Confucian geopolitics is needed to replace inadequate ‘Western geopolitical frameworks’. Confucian philosophies promote a hierarchical social order based on authority and subordination, and the way in which they are selectively and strategically utilized in contemporary China represents an important subject of analysis. However, they should not be viewed as a framework of analysis, as they obscure rather than shed light on spatial and class struggles – even in the hybridized stylization endorsed by An et al. Critical political economic and critical geopolitical perspectives with a global theoretical orientation and a knowledge of place and culture offer more promise in the disentangling of state practices and social relations in the PRC.

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This essay deals with the question to what extent perspectives of classical and critical geopolitical thought are suitable for analysing geopolitical structures of world politics. The following article discusses the potential that opens up a constructivist perspective for the conceptualisation of space and spatiality in geopolitics. This article is about links between geopolitics and international relations for a theoretical rebuilding of geopolitics. It focuses on the constructivist geopolitics and thus questions of power, space, politics and new political spaces; however, not only in a global and national context but also on a local and regional scale. According to the basic premises of constructivist geopolitics, geopolitical constructions and conceptions of space can be asserted as subjective and objective categories. From this perspective, it also shows that the geopolitical world order can be understood not only objectively but also subjectively in reciprocal interaction. These discussions are seen as an interrelated contribution to combine two different paradigms and to promote the synergy of scientific expertise to understand world politics and for the management of temporary global problems. Constructivist geopolitics attempts to conceptually rethink classical geopolitics and critical geopolitics together in a new way to enrich the subject of geopolitics as a possible approach.

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Researchers detect a new molecule in space

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New research from the group of MIT Professor Brett McGuire has revealed the presence of a previously unknown molecule in space. The team's open-access paper, “ Rotational Spectrum and First Interstellar Detection of 2-Methoxyethanol Using ALMA Observations of NGC 6334I ,” appears in April 12 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters .

Zachary T.P. Fried , a graduate student in the McGuire group and the lead author of the publication, worked to assemble a puzzle comprised of pieces collected from across the globe, extending beyond MIT to France, Florida, Virginia, and Copenhagen, to achieve this exciting discovery. 

“Our group tries to understand what molecules are present in regions of space where stars and solar systems will eventually take shape,” explains Fried. “This allows us to piece together how chemistry evolves alongside the process of star and planet formation. We do this by looking at the rotational spectra of molecules, the unique patterns of light they give off as they tumble end-over-end in space. These patterns are fingerprints (barcodes) for molecules. To detect new molecules in space, we first must have an idea of what molecule we want to look for, then we can record its spectrum in the lab here on Earth, and then finally we look for that spectrum in space using telescopes.”

Searching for molecules in space

The McGuire Group has recently begun to utilize machine learning to suggest good target molecules to search for. In 2023, one of these machine learning models suggested the researchers target a molecule known as 2-methoxyethanol. 

“There are a number of 'methoxy' molecules in space, like dimethyl ether, methoxymethanol, ethyl methyl ether, and methyl formate, but 2-methoxyethanol would be the largest and most complex ever seen,” says Fried. To detect this molecule using radiotelescope observations, the group first needed to measure and analyze its rotational spectrum on Earth. The researchers combined experiments from the University of Lille (Lille, France), the New College of Florida (Sarasota, Florida), and the McGuire lab at MIT to measure this spectrum over a broadband region of frequencies ranging from the microwave to sub-millimeter wave regimes (approximately 8 to 500 gigahertz). 

The data gleaned from these measurements permitted a search for the molecule using Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations toward two separate star-forming regions: NGC 6334I and IRAS 16293-2422B. Members of the McGuire group analyzed these telescope observations alongside researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Charlottesville, Virginia) and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. 

“Ultimately, we observed 25 rotational lines of 2-methoxyethanol that lined up with the molecular signal observed toward NGC 6334I (the barcode matched!), thus resulting in a secure detection of 2-methoxyethanol in this source,” says Fried. “This allowed us to then derive physical parameters of the molecule toward NGC 6334I, such as its abundance and excitation temperature. It also enabled an investigation of the possible chemical formation pathways from known interstellar precursors.”

Looking forward

Molecular discoveries like this one help the researchers to better understand the development of molecular complexity in space during the star formation process. 2-methoxyethanol, which contains 13 atoms, is quite large for interstellar standards — as of 2021, only six species larger than 13 atoms were detected outside the solar system , many by McGuire’s group, and all of them existing as ringed structures.  

“Continued observations of large molecules and subsequent derivations of their abundances allows us to advance our knowledge of how efficiently large molecules can form and by which specific reactions they may be produced,” says Fried. “Additionally, since we detected this molecule in NGC 6334I but not in IRAS 16293-2422B, we were presented with a unique opportunity to look into how the differing physical conditions of these two sources may be affecting the chemistry that can occur.”

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How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward

Journalists, researchers and the public often look at society through the lens of generation, using terms like Millennial or Gen Z to describe groups of similarly aged people. This approach can help readers see themselves in the data and assess where we are and where we’re headed as a country.

Pew Research Center has been at the forefront of generational research over the years, telling the story of Millennials as they came of age politically and as they moved more firmly into adult life . In recent years, we’ve also been eager to learn about Gen Z as the leading edge of this generation moves into adulthood.

But generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.

Recently, as we were preparing to embark on a major research project related to Gen Z, we decided to take a step back and consider how we can study generations in a way that aligns with our values of accuracy, rigor and providing a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue.

A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations.

We set out on a yearlong process of assessing the landscape of generational research. We spoke with experts from outside Pew Research Center, including those who have been publicly critical of our generational analysis, to get their take on the pros and cons of this type of work. We invested in methodological testing to determine whether we could compare findings from our earlier telephone surveys to the online ones we’re conducting now. And we experimented with higher-level statistical analyses that would allow us to isolate the effect of generation.

What emerged from this process was a set of clear guidelines that will help frame our approach going forward. Many of these are principles we’ve always adhered to , but others will require us to change the way we’ve been doing things in recent years.

Here’s a short overview of how we’ll approach generational research in the future:

We’ll only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life. When comparing generations, it’s crucial to control for age. In other words, researchers need to look at each generation or age cohort at a similar point in the life cycle. (“Age cohort” is a fancy way of referring to a group of people who were born around the same time.)

When doing this kind of research, the question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today. The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.

To answer this question, it’s necessary to have data that’s been collected over a considerable amount of time – think decades. Standard surveys don’t allow for this type of analysis. We can look at differences across age groups, but we can’t compare age groups over time.

Another complication is that the surveys we conducted 20 or 30 years ago aren’t usually comparable enough to the surveys we’re doing today. Our earlier surveys were done over the phone, and we’ve since transitioned to our nationally representative online survey panel , the American Trends Panel . Our internal testing showed that on many topics, respondents answer questions differently depending on the way they’re being interviewed. So we can’t use most of our surveys from the late 1980s and early 2000s to compare Gen Z with Millennials and Gen Xers at a similar stage of life.

This means that most generational analysis we do will use datasets that have employed similar methodologies over a long period of time, such as surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau. A good example is our 2020 report on Millennial families , which used census data going back to the late 1960s. The report showed that Millennials are marrying and forming families at a much different pace than the generations that came before them.

Even when we have historical data, we will attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons. If we accept that there are real differences across generations, we’re basically saying that people who were born around the same time share certain attitudes or beliefs – and that their views have been influenced by external forces that uniquely shaped them during their formative years. Those forces may have been social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances or political movements.

When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

The tricky part is isolating those forces from events or circumstances that have affected all age groups, not just one generation. These are often called “period effects.” An example of a period effect is the Watergate scandal, which drove down trust in government among all age groups. Differences in trust across age groups in the wake of Watergate shouldn’t be attributed to the outsize impact that event had on one age group or another, because the change occurred across the board.

Changing demographics also may play a role in patterns that might at first seem like generational differences. We know that the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and that race and ethnicity are linked with certain key social and political views. When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

Controlling for these factors can involve complicated statistical analysis that helps determine whether the differences we see across age groups are indeed due to generation or not. This additional step adds rigor to the process. Unfortunately, it’s often absent from current discussions about Gen Z, Millennials and other generations.

When we can’t do generational analysis, we still see value in looking at differences by age and will do so where it makes sense. Age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. And even if age gaps aren’t rooted in generational differences, they can still be illuminating. They help us understand how people across the age spectrum are responding to key trends, technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Each stage of life comes with a unique set of experiences. Young adults are often at the leading edge of changing attitudes on emerging social trends. Take views on same-sex marriage , for example, or attitudes about gender identity .

Many middle-aged adults, in turn, face the challenge of raising children while also providing care and support to their aging parents. And older adults have their own obstacles and opportunities. All of these stories – rooted in the life cycle, not in generations – are important and compelling, and we can tell them by analyzing our surveys at any given point in time.

When we do have the data to study groups of similarly aged people over time, we won’t always default to using the standard generational definitions and labels. While generational labels are simple and catchy, there are other ways to analyze age cohorts. For example, some observers have suggested grouping people by the decade in which they were born. This would create narrower cohorts in which the members may share more in common. People could also be grouped relative to their age during key historical events (such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic) or technological innovations (like the invention of the iPhone).

By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences.

Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts. A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.

With these considerations in mind, our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

• Age & Generations
• Demographic Research
• Generation X
• Generation Z
• Generations
• Greatest Generation
• Methodological Research
• Millennials
• Silent Generation

Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center

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