Geopolitics @ Virginia Tech

Geopolitics at Virginia Tech presents:  GEOPOL 2010

A one-day conference,Tuesday 13 April 2010, at the Alexandria Lyceum Hall, 201 South Washington Street, Alexandria, Virginia.

‘Geopolitics’ is an essentially contested concept associated with a variety of traditions of thought. Recent works in academia and beyond have sharpened understanding of these traditions. To some geopolitics is a tradition of thinking about the relationship between geographic setting, technology and forms of government, a tradition that dates back to classical times. Dan Deudney’s 2007 book Bounding Power recovers this meaning for theorists of International Relations. For others, geopolitics is a late nineteenth century imperial  discourse that projected social Darwinism onto the global map and outlined a struggle for living space and resources between competing nations qua races. Gerry Kearns’ 2009 biography of Halford Mackinder Geopolitics and Empire, provides a compelling portrait of this understanding and conjuncture.

For most beyond academia, geopolitics is simply shorthand for the management of competition between Great Powers, a meaning that Henry Kissinger first helped popularize in the 1970s. Disguised by this seemingly benign understanding is its controversial application in Angola, Afghanistan, Chile, Cambodia, Cyprus, Nicaragua, Vietnam and many other places. A variety of critical Enlightenment-based perspectives (Marxist, anarchist, anti-imperialist, feminist, libertarian) have long sought to expose the imperial history of geopolitics. For the last quarter century, Critical Geopolitics has sought to do this while engaging the ethical dilemmas of our time (ethnic cleansing, environmental change and terrorism). The Global War on Terror and seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred important works within the discipline of Geography, most prominently Derek Gregory’s 2004 The Colonial Present and David Harvey’s 2009 Cosmopolitanisn and Geographies of Freedom. Critique of Bush era geopolitics has come from the academic Left and from bipartisan policy groups like the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy led by Charles Kupchan, at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Chris Preble of the Cato Institute.

In the era of Obama concern about global climate change and the problems of ‘our common humanity’ appear to be eclipsing longstanding fear about rising state competitors to the US. A new green geopolitics is emergent but its political character is uncertain. Blending a collection of anxieties together, the writer Robert Kaplan recently revived Mackinder as a guide to understand what he termed ‘the revenge of geography.’

What does geopolitics mean in the twenty-first century, and in the era of Obama? What do the recent works on its  past teach us about the present? How can and should the constellation of geography-technology-power be re-imagined? How are contemporary ethical dilemmas and challenges in international affairs to be understood? Can geopolitics be critical and progressive, or is it inevitably entwined with imperial and state-aggrandizing agendas?

The Association of American Geographers conference convenes in Washington DC 14-18 April 2010.  Travel to the conference by political geographers from around the world provides a unique opportunity for a conversation between them, political scientists and think-tank intellectuals in the Washington metropolitan area. We have three aims for the conference:

  1. to bring together a diversity of speakers and stimulate conversations across disciplinary, theoretical, and political lines
  2. to reflect upon the history and practice of geographical reasoning in public affairs
  3. to consider and review the geopolitical challenges of the present-day in a critical open minded manner.