Geopolitical Approach Number Two – Critical Geopolitics

 Classical geopolitical theorists such as Zbigniew Brzezinksi and Colin Gray argue that the role of geography in international politics is an inescapable existential fact. There just is no getting around it, even in supposedly ‘deterritorialized’ times.  Brzezinski, in his post-Cold War The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, invokes the memory of Sir Halford MacKinder and argues that, even today, domination of the Eurasian landmass means domination of the world. Now, for traditional continental powers this aim might be a geopolitical given, but for maritime powers such as the United States and Great Britain preventing any single power from dominating Eurasia remains a top foreign policy priority, or so Robert Kaplan and George Friedman argued in yesterday’s case study on China. Obviously, practitioners of classical geopolitics remain among us. They do not represent, however, the only approach to this type of analysis. Critical geopolitics, as represented by Simon Dalby’s external page“Imperialism, Domination and Culture: The Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics,”call_madeand Nick Megoran’s empirical case study, external pageThe Critical Geopolitics of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley Boundary Dispute, 1999-2000call_made, is an entirely different kettle of fish, as we will discuss today.

Yes, both classical and critical geopolitics are concerned with how geography shapes international relations. Critical geopolitics however is also concerned with how foreign policy shapes our understanding of geography. Its central concern is how geographies are represented in words and images, and how those representations in turn shape how we structure the international system. Because the geography of the world is too vast and complex to grasp all at once, representations of geography – rather than geography itself – are what actually shape a state’s foreign policy, or so students of critical geopolitics argue. These representations, in turn, inevitably distort or obscure what they represent, which make it critically important to pay close attention to this process. Indeed, the requirement is not only to prevent these distortions from misleading us about what policies to pursue in practice, but also to make explicit moral or aesthetic choices about how exactly to represent geography ourselves.

As a result of its emphasis on representation, the structure of the international system is not a direct concern of critical geopolitics. In general, the representational choices we often (and unwittingly) make are far more influential than the structures we build. Such an argument may be a bridge too far for the Brzezinskis and Kaplans of the world, but it is undeniable that the insights and concerns raised by critical geopolitics are getting more traction today than they did at the height of the Cold War. Ironically, this shift in perspective may be indicative of the kind of structural change that the practitioners of critical geopolitics tend to discount.

Critical geopolitics in theory

Simon Dalby begins his “Imperialism, Domination and Culture: The Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics,” by arguing that paying attention to geopolitical representation is critical today. It is absolutely necessity, he argues, to consider the spatial framings of politics and the geographical tropes used in security, defense, and foreign policy thinking, in order to expose the ways in which they can conspire to misunderstand world geography and misdirect foreign policy. But what do these framings and tropes tell us? Well, even the sainted Mackinder admitted that the geopolitics of his time was, essentially, the systematic study of the geographical pre-requisites of imperialism and domination. Gerard Toal then built on this admission to provide THE central insight of modern critical geopolitics – e.g., representations of the world of classical are implicitly (and usually unwittingly) premised on imperialism and domination.

As a well-tutored student of classical geopolitics, he initially saw the Cold War as a period defined by the language of states and power, territorial strategies and realpolitik. However, it increasingly became obvious that this plainly imperialistic language was not up to the task of bounding a nascent post-Cold War reality properly. As a result, a fierce competition arose among foreign policy intellectuals to represent or map the emerging order in new and politically meaningful ways. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, and Edward Luttwak’s advocacy of geo-economics were prominent examples of these efforts at the time. This period of intellectual ferment did not last, however. The seemingly dead ‘imperial’ language of the Cold War era resurfaced with the return to power of the neo-conservatives in the George W. Bush administration. They used the Project for a New American Century, a Washington think tank, as a bully pulpit to promote a 21^st century Pax Americana based on a preponderance of traditional hard power. This revived ‘imperial’ Cold War-era orientation, naturally enough, downplayed asymmetric threats and reasserted the role of the state as the geopolitical lens through which the world should be viewed.

Well, then came 911 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In Dalby’s view, the anachronistic and imperialistic Cold War-era language that was then prevalent in the American foreign policy establishment was central to its ineffective response to the attacks, as well as its inability to prevent them. According to Dalby, the inability of the Bush Administration to characterize new realities of international politics coherently was nowhere more clear than in the phrase ‘war on terror’ itself. How do you war against a method, critics repeatedly asked? More to the point, however, was how could you embrace a geopolitical representation of the world that was so completely at odds with the actual world it purported to speak about? For Dalby, this sort of confusion was indicative of a political culture which went on ‘tilt’ trying to understand how 19 individuals with box-cutters could seriously threaten U.S. national security, let alone carry out the equivalent of cruise missile strikes in the heart of Manhattan. Additionally, only confusion of this magnitude could explain why the invasion and occupation of two territorial states seemed the appropriate response to an attack from a decentralized, transnational terrorist network.

Again, the problem here was not that the foreign policy representations of the Bush Administration at the time of 911 were imperialistic per se. The reason that the administration was caught so off guard was that the American foreign policy establishment was unaware that its worldview was so laden with the outdated geopolitical representations of the Cold War. The neo-conservatives wrongly believed that their painting of the world was neutral and descriptive. Wrong – seen from the perspective of critical geopolitics, neutral representation is by definition impossible.

Well, if the neo-conservative’s representation of the world was so disastrously wrong, are there better or more coherent ones to be had? In the case of America, three prominent alternatives immediately come to mind. First, America is an outright empire, even if it is an empire in decline. Second, America is an informal empire that “exercises power without conquest," as Alain Joxe argues. Its mode of imperial rule is to impose unequal terms, both politically and economically, on poorer countries. By doing so, Joxe continues, America gets to avoid the traditional imperial obligation of having to enrich tributary and satellite powers, and thereby gets to line only its own pockets. Such an empire is thus an ‘empire of disorder’ – it is the poverty and instability of tributary and satellite powers that sustains the core’s own wealth and power. Finally there is Thomas Barnett’s view of America as a normative power. Sinceit exists in a external pagedivided planetcall_made where most people live in a non-integrated ‘Gap’ that is cut off from the benefits of connectivity (Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South East Asia, the Balkans, and much of Latin America), and an integrated Core which is connected to the “circuits of capital and cultural communication,” America offers the rest of the world the power of its example and champions values that invite “two billion people to join something better and safer in the Core.”

When we refer back to Dalby’s article, it is obvious that he prefers Joxe’s geopolitical representation. But the basis of his preference is not necessarily that Joxe’s interpretation is the most faithful or neutral one available. Again, one of the goals of critical geopolitics is to show how all representations of the world are distorted and that choosing among them requires other criteria. Dalby, for instance, admits partisanship. He prefers Joxe’s world geography for moral reasons: the purpose of critical geopolitics is to oppose imperialism and domination wherever and in whatever forms it takes. And, as he indicates “whether Washington is seen in the rest of the world as either the oppressor or the vehicle of salvation” – a matter of urgency for American foreign policy – “all depends on the geographical analogy invoked.”

Critical geopolitics in practice

As the above discussion may in fact illustrate, a common objection about critical geopolitics is that it may be theoretically satisfying but it actually fails to address real world policy concerns in useful ways. To challenge this assertion, let’s now turn to Nick Megoran’s critical geopolitical analysis of the border dispute between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the Ferghana Valley.

The Ferghana Valley is a fertile region in Central Asia watered by the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers, which join to form the Syr Darya River near Namangan in present-day Uzbekistan. Though Soviet planners divided the region into the Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR), the expectation that nationalist sentiment would eventually wither away resulted in a highly complicated pattern of land-use that wantonly violated the administrative boundaries of the republics. In 1999, eight years after the former SSRs had become independent states, conflict erupted on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Barbed-wire fences were erected in disputed territory, bridges were destroyed, cross-border bus routes were terminated and customs inspections stepped up. People attempting to cross the border were denied access or seriously impeded, and unmarked minefields were laid in what in time amounted to “a low- level border war.”

Megoran argues that the origins of this conflict cannot be adequately understood without using critical geopolitics as an analytic tool. Conventional explanations, in this case focusing either on divergent macroeconomic policies or the international structure of the post-Soviet space, ultimately cannot explain why the conflict occurred. For that to occur, we need to examine political representations of the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border in the media and political culture of both countries.

In Uzbekistan, Megoran finds evidence of a concerted state-driven media campaign to portray the border as “the division between two moral orders” – between a happy, well-governed Uzbekistan and the vulnerable, chaotic rest of Central Asia. In this context, the aggressive defense of the border was used (mainly by the government press) to cast President Islam Karimov in the mold of Mongol emperor Timur-Aimur (or Tamerlane), who in the 14 ^th and 15^th centuries conquered much of Central Asia from a capital in present-day Uzbekistan. By invoking this historical analogy, the Uzbek media machine made it politically treacherous for President Karimov to represent this border dispute in anything but either/or terms. In Krygyzstan, Megoran found much the same thing. The border came to be associated with the legitimate patrimony bestowed by “the cult of Manas,” Kyrgyzstan’s mythical founder. As the border dispute escalated, the Kyrgyz opposition press used the perceived frailty of the border to undermine the incumbent President, Askar Akaev, to the point that he abandoned his ‘civic,’ ethnically inclusive version of Krygyz nationalism and embraced the opposition’s ethnically exclusive, xenophobic one.

So, in both countries we saw territorial representations become intertwined with mythic (and therefore potent) forms of national heritage, all for short-term political gain. Even worse, these representations soon became cornerstones for the basic legitimacy of each regime. For both Islam Karimov and Askar Akaev, a common view of the border therefore became practically impossible. For Karimov, backing down would not only have broken the link he was trying to establish between himself and past Uzbek grandeur, but it would have seriously undercut support for his regime. Likewise, for Akaev any perceived further weakness on the border issue would have played into the opposition’s hands and could have meant the end of his regime. Accordingly, as Megoran argues, it was these irreconcilable representations of the political geography of the Ferghana Valley, more than anything else, which caused this conflict.

 Conclusion

As we noted at the beginning of this article, for devotees of critical geopolitics it is unlikely that the physical geography of Eurasia or the World-Island has much determinate influence in world affairs. Far more important is the presence in the language and culture of foreign policy establishments of images of the world in which physical geography plays a causal role. As we saw in the Ferghana Valley, geographical representations can cause real conflict and even war, which makes it dangerous to ignore them.

And the less we ignore them, according to Dalby, the more we empower individuals against determinate geographies and the forces that produce them. In other words, the more we understand the pervasiveness of particular geopolitical representations in world affairs – representations which are neither natural nor inevitable – the wider the scope for human agency and influence in those affairs. That’s all well and good, a practitioner of classical geopolitics might rebut, but a representation is no substitute for ground truth. The rising popularity of critical geopolitics may be a testament to the truth and power of its arguments. A more plausible explanation, however, might be that its new popularity is evidence of a structurally different or structurally changing world in which individuals are more empowered – against nature, context and authority – than ever before.

Resources:

 external pageDoing Discourse Analysis in Critical Geopoliticscall_made , in L’espace Politique; Martin Muller, 2011

 external pagePostcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relationscall_made, in Millenium; Sanjay Seth, 2011

 external pageThe Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections of Critical and Philosophical IR Scholarship Todaycall_made, in Millenium; Mija Kurki, 2011

 external pageThe Border between Core and Periphery: Geographical Representations of the World Systemcall_made; Royal Dutch Geographical Society, Alberto Vanolo, 2009

 external pageReconsidering the Concept of Discourse for the Field of Critical Geopolitics: Towards Discourse as Language and Practicecall_made, in Political Geography; Martin Muller, 2008

 external pageMind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through Geopoliticscall_made , in Political Geography; Jennifer Hyndman, 2004

 external pageThe Critical Geopolitics of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley Boundary Dispute, 1999–2000call_made, in Political Geography; Nick Megoran, 2004

 external pageGraphing the Geo in Geo-political: Critical Geopolitics and the Re-visioning of Responsibilitycall_made, in Political Geography; Matthew Sparke, 2000

 external pageCritical Geopolitics and Development Theory: Intensifying the Dialoguecall_made , in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Gerard Toal, 1994

 Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy, in Political Geography Quarterly; Gerard Toal and John Agnew, 1992

In case you have missed any of our previous content on competing views of geopolitics, you can catch up here on: Geospatial Politics, Geopolitical Approach Number One -- Current Justifications of Classical Geopolitics and Classical Geopolitics Today