an orphaned sub-field of late imperial geog-
raphy resurrected in neo-imperial America
and, simultaneously, the focus of diverse
forms of demythologization and debunking
by scholars ofcritical human geography,
this is a term that defies easy definition. As a
category of news reporting, it is used in the
media to describeviolencerelating to the
division, control and contestation ofterri-
tory. The business pages of newspapers thus
often feature references to ‘geopolitical con-
cerns’ as a way of describing the impact of
international politics and violence. Afterter-
roristattacks on commuter trains in India
and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the sum-
mer of 2006, for instance,The Financial Times
review of global markets read as follows: ‘Gold
also pushed higher on continued geopolitical
concerns following bomb blasts in Mumbai
and clashes around the Israel–Lebanon bor-
der’ (Tassell, 2006, p. 26). Academically,
however, geopolitics is a much more complex
and contested term, with a long history of
formal definition and redefinition.
The original definitions of the field go back
to the ‘classical geopolitics’ of military-minded
academics such as the British imperialist Half-
ord Mackinder, the Nazi expansionist Karl
Haushofer and the Dutch-American Cold
War strategist Nicholas Spykman. For them,
geopolitics was all about how international
relations relate to the spatial layout of oceans,
continents, naturalresources, military or-
ganization, political systems and perceived ter-
ritorial threats and opportunities (for an
excellent overview, see Foster, 2006). In this
respect, a constant geopolitical focus has been
the Eurasian continental meta-region stretch-
ing from Eastern Europe through Russia to
Central Asia. This was the so-called ‘Heart-
land’ that Mackinder argued was key to global
imperial power (seeimperialism). It was some
of this same territory that Haushofer argued the
Nazis should seize aslebensraum, or living-
space, for their self-described master race.
After the Soviet Union established control
over the region at the end of the Second
World War, it was this same area that Ameri-
cans such as George Kennan argued should be
contained, an argument that underpinned US
cold wargeopolitics aimed at controlling what
Spykman had previously described as the
‘Rimlands’ around the ‘Heartland’ (Dalby,
1990). Isaiah Bowman, the US geographer
and presidential advisor who, early on, advo-
cated American dominance in and around the
region, was once dubbed ‘the American
Haushofer’ (Smith, N., 2003c). However, just
as American imperialists have traditionally
talked about an American Century rather
than a geographically defined american
empire, American advocates of geopolitical
dominance have generally avoided talk of geo-
politics because of its associations with Euro-
peanimperialismandfascism. This reticence
amongst US strategists began to change after
11 September 2001: a shift towards unabashed
imperial attitudes occurred that was also sig-
nalled by the return to influence of the old Cold
War geopolitical grandee Henry Kissinger. But
whether referring explicitly to geopolitics or
not, geopolitical discourse has continued to
develop apace since the end of the Cold
War; the transition from President Reagan’s
anti-Soviet invocation of an ‘Evil Empire’ to
President Bush’s angst about an ‘Axis of Evil’
being just one of the more imaginative and
egregious attempts to remap the terrain of
Mackinder’s Heartland as a way of simultan-
eously defining the American homeland
(Coleman, 2004).
While classical geopolitics continues to in-
form policy-making, critical geographers have
over the past two decades developed a vibrant
new field ofcritical geopolitics. Under this
broad umbrella they have sought to examine
the ways in which a broad range ofimagina-
tive geographies, such as the ‘Evil Empire’,
actively shape world politics (see O ́ Tuathail,
1996b; O ́Tuathail and Dalby, 1998; Agnew,
2003a). Critical geopolitics continues to grow
more diverse by the year: ranging from exam-
inations of geopolitical discourse in the history
of popular culture (Sharp, 2000a), to studies
of theorientalismthat informs the geopolit-
ics of both the colonial past and present
(Gregory, 2004; Slater, 2004), to critiques
of the geopolitical justification of torture
(Hannah, 2006b), to reflections on the geo-
political preoccupations of revolutionary Islam
(Watts, 2007). Thus while practitioners of
classical geopolitics keep producing geopolit-
ical representations that they claim are real,
the core concern for the critics is precisely
this objectivist claim on reality. Critical geo-
politics instead demonstrates the ideological
power of geopolitical representations to
‘script’space– to concoct, for example, a
story about Iraq having weapons of mass de-
struction and then using that script to legitim-
ate war. However, in debunking such
geopolitical scriptings, the critical scholarship
raises at least three further sorts of question
about the relationships between geopolitics
and the real world: the first concerns the rela-
tionship between imaginative geopoliticalGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 301 2.4.2009 6:30pmGEOPOLITICS