across actor networks (for example, Sharp,
2000, versus Thrift, 2000).
The chapters in this section showcase cultural
geopolitics in all of its richness, featuring
scholars who are today making signal contri-
butions to cultural geopolitics beyond the
confines of this Handbook(Dalby, 2002; Paasi,
1996; Sharp, 2000; Sparke, forthcoming). All of
the essays challenge, transgress and transcend
the antinomies and oppositions that charac-
terize classic modernist thought: the inside/
outside of states, the private/public of gendered
political life, the local/national/global of modern
scalar relations, and nature/culture, the last
being one of the most foundational oppositions
of modernism. Events like the 11 September
attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade
Center reveal the importance of moving
beyond these dichotomies in order to under-
stand our world and the challenges it faces
(Luke, 2002).THE CHAPTERSThe first chapter, ‘Boundaries in a Globalizing
World’ by Anssi Paasi, reviews the traditional
political geography concern with borders and
boundaries and demonstrates how these
notions have been reconceptualized in the
wake of the ‘cultural turn’ across the social
sciences. Boundaries, Paasi argues, are dynamic
cultural processes that require consideration
and investigation of the cultural politics of
state formation, national identity construction
and everyday processes of spatial socialization.
Banal state sponsored practices like waving a
flag or studying borders in a classroom serve
to support cultural systems of meaning which
spatialize the world into a familiar ‘here’ and a
potentially dangerous ‘there’. Today, however,
the spatial socialization promoted by the state
has competition from more diffuse and transna-
tional forms of spatial socialization like MTV,
online chat rooms and the latest Hollywood
movie. Supposed examples of globalization like
wireless telecommunication, global television
and the development of the internet – media
that touch the lives of only a small minority of
the world’s population – have inspired consi-
derable hyperbole about the ‘deterritorializa-
tion’ and the ‘disappearance of boundaries’,glib rhetoric that Paasi dismisses while
acknowledging that the meaning of boundaries
is constantly under negotiation and revision.
Huge divisions of wealth and affluence still
characterize our world, yet these divides are
now connected by pervasive concern with
international terrorism as the affluent United
States confronts war-ravaged and famine-torn
states like Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
The chapter ‘Gender in a Political and Patri-
archal World’ by Joanne Sharp explores how
the cultural turn has affected the study of geo-
politics by giving rise to a critical geopolitics.
This approach deconstructs the normalizing
and naturalizing practices of geopolitical dis-
courses, the ways in which the world is textually
and rhetorically divided and labeled, treating
these practices as active geo-graphings of
world politics rather than objective descrip-
tions of the realm of necessity in world affairs.
Geopolitics is the geographical politics of the
pursuit of identity and security by state elites,
a geopolitics delimited and circumscribed by
everyday gendered distinctions between
inside and outside, ‘us’ and ‘them’, the private
and the public. Sharp’s own work highlights
the importance of the mundane operation of
a ‘popular geopolitics’ that is embedded in
popular culture and mass media, in the pages
of Reader’s Digestand the films of John Wayne.
She also discusses the gendered supports of
many central conceptions in political life from
images of the nation to the motivations of
nationalism, conceptions of responsibility and
visions of the military, security and violence.
For Sharp, the personal is not only political but
geopolitical.
The third chapter, ‘The Cultural Geography
of Scale’, explores the ways in which scale
is negotiated and reproduced in the political
and cultural arena. The particular focus of
the chapter is on ‘scale-jumping’, conceptual-
ized from a Marxist- inspired perspective
as the temporary transcendence of tensions
and contradictions thrown up by dominant
spatial and scalar order. The relationships
of the local to the regional, national, inter-
national and global, according to Newstead,
Reid and Sparke, are generally fixed within
a relatively permanent order of scalar rela-
tions determined by geographies of political
governance and capital accumulation. Breaking
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