Introduction to Geopolitics

Activity
Now is the time for you to begin using the concepts introduced in the text to inter-
pret media reports of current affairs. Look through current newspaper reports and
find one that addresses the politics of a particular place. 
• What components of the definitions of place provided by Agnew and Massey can
you find in the article? 
• What contests are in play? 
• How do collective identities such as race, gender, age, class, and nationality
interact with the concepts identified by Agnew and Massey?

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a political statement. An action such as not singing a national anthem when it is
demanded or expected is another example of political action at the individual scale. 
But protest can also involve vigils outside of, say, abortion clinics or protests at 
animal hunts or laboratories conducting tests on animals. These “localized” acts require
individual commitment and are also often motivated by national campaigns aimed at
influencing the national legislative process. Increasingly, protest politics do not stop 
at the national scale; abortion politics, for example, are a component of discussions 
over the form of US foreign aid as well as a component of the missionary activity of
many churches.
The examples show that geographic scales, like places, are socially constructed or
made by human activity. We wear certain clothes and act in certain ways to create our
own personae. Political parties and social movements are formed and maintained by
individual activity, whether it be the highly public and visible speeches of the leader 
or the “bake sales” and envelope-stuffing activities of committed members. As the 
scope of the geographic scale increases it is harder to envision how they are socially
constructed; but the everyday practices of paying taxes, maintaining national armed
forces, politicking for the “national interest,” and cheering on national teams in the
Olympic Games or World Cup ensure the functional expression of a country, and the
sense of national identity. In the workplace, we act to produce and consume products
that are the outcome of economic activities from across the globe, unconsciously we
reproduce the tea-leaf pickers in Sri Lanka, as well as the brokers who trade the picked
leaves, the bankers who finance the plantations, and the advertisers who suggest the
merits of having a “cuppa” on a regular basis. Though scales are made by human activity,
the larger their scope, the less aware we are of the implications of our actions, and their
importance in sustaining operations at that scale.
Participating in elections is another example of how scales are constructed by people.
By choosing to vote or not to vote, an individual chooses to become involved in a
particular way with the political system, either validating it or not. The aggregate of
individual votes in a particular constituency creates a political jurisdiction as a particular
political locality; either a “safe” or “contested” seat. In addition, the outcome of individ-
ual votes creates a national political system; either maintaining established democratic
practices or forcing a change in the political system. For example, in 2004 the sustained
demonstration of Ukrainian citizens, as well as the actions of government ministers and
army officers who prevented a violent suppression of the actions, overcame electoral
fraud to elect a new president. Finally, the example of elections shows that scales, just
like places, are contested. The individual may well compromise their own beliefs by
voting for a party; for example voting for a party because of their views on member-
ship in the European Union despite being uncomfortable about, say, social or educational
policies. Furthermore, the constituency scale and national scale are the very product of
competing political parties.
The contested nature of scales requires us to think more closely about how scales 
are made by political actions, and with that in mind we will discuss the concept of
geopolitical agents, a key concept for this book. But before we do that, we will give
greater attention to the term geopolitics and briefly discuss the history of geopolitical
theory.
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What is geopolitics?
Geopolitics is a word that conjures up images. In one sense, the word provokes ideas
of war, empire, and diplomacy: geopolitics is the practice of states controlling and
competing for territory. There is another sense by which I mean geopolitics creates
images: geopolitics, in theory, language, and practice, classifies swathes of territory and
masses of people. For instance, the Cold War, was a conflict over the control of terri-
tory that was provoked and justified through geographically based images of “the Iron
Curtain” (see Box 1.2) and the “free world” and the “threat” of Communism from the
perspective of Western governments and the “imperialism” of America from the Soviet
Union’s view (Figure 1.3).
So how should we define geopolitics, in the contemporary world and with the intent
of offering a critical analysis? Our goals of understanding, analyzing, and being able to
critique world politics require us to operate with more than one definition.
First, we must note the connection between geopolitics and statesmanship: the “prac-
tices and representations of territorial strategies” (Gilmartin and Kofman, 2004, p. 113).
For now, we will take a limited perspective on this definition—and note how states or
countries have competed for the control of territory and/or the resources within them.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the European powers indulged in an unseemly
struggle for colonial control over Africa, what is known as the “scramble for Africa.”
In a contemporary sense, the geopolitics of the “War on Terrorism” has produced
alliances between states and the deployment of troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in 
bases across Central Asia. Inseparable from these “practices” of fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan, for example, is the role of representation: the fight against “evil,” the spread
of “democracy,” etc.
Second, geopolitics is more than the competition over territory and the means of
justifying such actions: geopolitics is a way of “seeing” the world. From a feminist
perspective, geopolitics is a masculine practice, hence my use of the term states
man-
ship in the previous paragraph. In the much quoted words of Donna Haraway (1998),
the practices and representations of geopolitics have relied upon “a view from nowhere.”
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