Introduction to Geopolitics

War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
, New York: Anchor Books.
An exploration, sometimes disturbing, into the way that our individual and collective iden-
tities are inseparable from the practice of warfare.
Said, E. (1979) 
Orientalism
, New York: Vintage Books.
The seminal text on the representation of “others” in the popular media.
The following readings provide examples of how the representational strategies of geopolitics
have been studied.
See the special issue of the journal 
Geopolitics
10 (Summer 2005) on geopolitics and the
cinema edited by Marcus Power and Andrew Crampton.
Dodds, K. (2003) “Licensed to Stereotype: Geopolitics, James Bond, and the Spectre of
Balkanism,”
Geopolitics
8, pp. 125–56.
Flint, C. (2004) “The ‘War on Terrorism’ and the ‘Hegemonic Dilemma’: Extraterritoriality,
Reterritorialization, and the Implications for Globalization” in O’Loughlin, J., Staeheli,
I N T R O D U C T I O N   T O   G E O P O L I T I C S
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L., and Greenberg, E. (eds) 
Globalization and Its Outcomes
, New York: The Guilford
Press, pp. 361–85.
Flint, C. and Falah, G.-W. (2004) “How the United States Justified its War on Terrorism:
Prime Morality and the Construction of a ‘Just War’,” 
Third World Quarterly
25,
pp. 1379–99.
Gregory, D. (2004) 
The Colonial Present
, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
McAlister, M. (2001) 
Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East,
1945–2000
, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Sharp, J. (2000a) 
Condensing the Cold War:
Reader’s Digest 
and American Identity
,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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In this chapter we will:
■
define the terms nation, state, and nation-state;
■
discuss nationalism and its different manifestations;
■
discuss the way gender roles are implicated in nationalism;
■
make connections between gender roles, nationalism, and geopolitical
codes;
■
provide a classification of different nationalisms and their impact upon
geopolitical codes;
■
provide a brief case study of an ongoing nationalist conflict: 
Chechnya.
(Misused) terminology
It is important to get our terminology correct, before we proceed. Up to now, I have
mainly used the term “country” when referring to the United States, Great Britain, Iraq,
etc. The more precise term is state. This can be confusing, especially in the US, where
the term state is used to refer to the fifty separate entities that comprise the country. While
discussing geopolitics, however, it is more precise to refer to countries as states. Hence,
the United States is actually a state, as is Great Britain, Kuwait, France, Nigeria, etc.
States are defined by their possession of sovereignty over a territory and its people.
States are the primary political units of the international system. A state is the expres-
sion of government control over a piece of territory and its people. The geographic scope
of the governmental control exists in a series of nested scales. For example, the London
Borough of Hackney is a scale of government, nested within the Greater London
Council, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In another example, the Borough
of Queens is a scale of government within New York City, New York State, and the
United States of America. We would refer to Hackney and Queens as the local state 
or local government. In this book, state means the country: for more discussion on the
political geography of states see Cox (2002) and Painter (1995).
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EMBEDDING GEOPOLITICS 
WITHIN NATIONAL 
IDENTITY
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The terminology may be confusing because it is so widely misused. Instead of using
the term state, the term nation or national is usually substituted. Hence, we stand for the
national anthem, rather than the state anthem, in the World Cup and Olympic Games we
say that national teams compete, rather than state teams. However, the term nation has
a very specific meaning that, if we focus on the definition, should not be used in this
way. A nation is a group of people who believe that they consist of a single “people”
based upon historical and cultural criteria, such as a shared language. In some contexts,
membership of a nation will be granted only if inheritance, or blood ties, to members of
a particular group can be established, but most nations do not require such blood ties.
An introductory discussion of nations and nationalism can be found through the work of
A.D. Smith (1993 and 1995).
The geopolitics of nationalism 1: constructing a 
national identity