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GEOPOLITICS, GRAND STRATEGY AND CRITIQUE: TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING …

Simon Dalby Carleton University [email protected]

Paper for presentation to the "Critical Geopolitics 2008" conference Durham University, September 2008.

ABSTRACT Twenty years ago the intellectual projects that have become known as critical geopolitics emerged at the end of the cold war as a series of critiques of geopolitical reasoning. Drawing heavily on Edward Said's formulations of Orientalism the critical analyses probed the dense cultural productions of danger, the rationalizations for intervention and the logics of "Western" foreign policies. Social theory allowed both the analysis of geopolitics as practice and problematized the role of the researcher simultaneously. The geographical specifications of the world in the political discourses used to justify numerous imperial actions, and the rationales for the provision of security came under sustained scrutiny. Now two decades later despite the supposed end of history and endless invocations of globalization, the themes of empire and Orientalism remain at the heart of the Western geopolitical imaginary, explicitly structuring how the security intellectuals of our time plan for war and justify the construction of their military machines. Given the continuing dangers of warfare in a biosphere that is being radically destabilized by the modes of economy and violence these geopolitical texts legitimize, the necessity for critique remains compelling.

2 GEOPOLITICS, GRAND STRATEGY AND CRITIQUE: TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING …

War also mobilizes the highly charged and dangerous dialectic of place attachment: the perceived antithesis of 'our' places and homeland and 'theirs'. Sustained in latent if not overt forms in peacetime, this polarization has produced unbridled sentimentalizing of one's own while dehumanizing the enemy's people and land. That seems an essential step in cultivating readiness to destroy the latter and bear with progressive devastation at home. Ken Hewitt (1983:253) Critical geopolitics is distinguished by its problematization of the logocentric infrastructures that make “geopolitics” or any spatialization of the global political scene possible. It problematizes the “is” of “geography” and “geopolitics,” their status as self evident, natural, foundational, and eminently knowable realities. … In contrast to the strategic ambition of imperial geopolitics (which is about the establishment of place or proper locus), critical geopolitics is a tactical form of knowledge. It works within the conceptual infrastructures that make the geopolitical tradition possible and borrows from it the resources necessary for its deconstruction. Gearóid Ó Tuathail (1996:68) THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS In the two decades since critical geopolitics first emerged, as the moniker for the writings of a loose assemblage of political geographers concerned to challenge the taken for granted geographical specifications of politics, much has been written on the theme. The numbers of contributors to the discussion has mushroomed as has the variety of intellectual tasks undertaken and the theoretical resources in the discipline have expanded dramatically with the turn to social theory. The geopolitical circumstances have changed too, in the aftermath of the cold war first and more recently in the aftermath of the events still simply called 9/11; the political world isn't divided into geopolitical blocs in the sense understood from the late 1940s until the late 1980s. But as Derek Gregory (2004) has so eloquently shown, the Orientalist (Said 1978) concerns with imperial visions and the imaginative geographies at the heart of contemporary architectures of enmity have reappeared again in contemporary Western narratives about the Middle East in particular. The core concerns with war and geography and the apparent need to challenge the violent practices of our times remain despite the changes in the discipline and in those larger geopolitical circumstances (Dalby 2008a). While the scholarship has thrived there remains no clear consensus on the meaning of the term critical geopolitics nor its precise purpose; of late John Agnew’s (2003, 2007) work might be understood to be critical geopolitics but he doesn’t situate his work as such. The recent appearance once again of geographical publications relating to war and militarism (Cowen and Gilbert 2008; Flint 2005; Graham 2004; Gregory and Pred 2007, Woodward 2004) does raise awkward questions about the specificity of critical geopolitics in this larger scholarship. The debate about in what sense it is all critical loosely parallels debates

3 within the wider geography discipline (Blomley 2007) as well as in larger intellectual discussions concerning the place of the academy in a globalised neo-liberal world. All of which suggests the persistence of some of the tensions that shaped the early discussions and which are perhaps worth taking stock of now, not least because from very different perspectives Nick Megoran (2008) and Phil Kelly (2006) have posed pointed questions about critical geopolitics’ ethico-political purpose in general and more specifically the questions of non-violence and possibilities of emancipation. In our initial editorial formulations of three co-edited publications Gerard Toal and I worked on in the 1990s (Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1994; Dalby and Ó Tuathail 1996; Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998) we deliberately tried to encourage political and methodological pluralism to open up new ways of thinking about the geo in politics and the politics of geography. From the beginning there were concerns about disrupting the hegemonic practices of statecraft, challenging the taken for granted specifications of the world in various mappings by elites and by academics. The political purpose of all this was initially a challenge to American power and the military use of it in the cold war. In that sense the moral landscape of threats to use nuclear annihilation as a strategy of coercion made critiquing geopolitics something obviously necessary in the 1980s; it has all got a little more complicated since. Through the early days of these discussions a tension between scholarly practices and political commitments was obvious, and to a very substantial extent persists today. This in part shapes the discussion of critical geopolitics in recent publications. If cultural theory is to be taken seriously then discourses are very complicated and cultural production takes place in many places. But challenging the mappings of danger used to legitimate political power is a scholarly task still worth doing; if critical geopolitics is about anything it is surely still about trying to render Yves Lacoste's much cited statement "La Géographie, ça sert, d'abord, à faire la guerre" no longer the case. CRITIQUE IN CONTEXT After the end of the cold war critical geopolitics flourished in the 1990s when the geopolitical divides were fluid and the binary logics of nuclear strategy and fears of a “central war” were no longer so obviously relevant to many situations. The debates about global security shifted the focus of danger from the Soviet Union to matters of development and insecurity in the fringes of the global political economy. New insecurities were posited as dangerous and new discourses of wild zones and failed states intruded on the discussions of security in many policy making bureaucracies. Mapping dangerous places once again got the attention of cartographers, but now these places were known in the satellite surveillance systems and coded with GIS coordinates which all too easily turn into target sets just as soon as these social relations are rendered a matter of war. The whole planet is potentially a battlefield and hence a target set as Derek Gregory (2006a, 2006b) and Stephen Graham (2008) in particular have repeatedly reminded us of late. Simultaneously critical geopolitics proliferated too into discussions of Iraq and Bosnia (O'Tuathail 2003, 2005), cultures and the identities constructed in the discourses of geopolitics (Sharp 2000; Dittmer 2005; Hannah 2006), into movie criticism (Power and Crampton 2007), and crucially into how gender matters in all these things too (Hyndman 2001; 2004). After twenty years the geographical literature is nearly all now in some senses critical, and simply talking to each other, in the sub discipline of a sub-discipline, is not necessarily, so some of us seem to think some of the time, a politically useful practice. But scholarly work is what we do! The key seems to be to make sure that this is not all we do. If the insights of critical geopolitics

4 are worthy of serious attention as both a scholarly and a political project then they are worthy of wider dissemination into other scholarly fields and political debates more generally. But they will be more likely to gain attention outside the discipline if they are clever, well thought through and cogent criticisms which can be refined within geography first. In so far as critical geopolitics does these things it contributes to the larger political conversation about the human condition and the possible futures we collectively make. But in doing this it is an intellectual practice that is more than research understood in narrow quasipositivist sense of specialized knowledge applied to social "problems" in need of a technical solution. Neither is it just a matter of historical scholarship alone but a contribution to the larger intellectual discussion of humanity's condition in general and its violent cartographies in particular (Shapiro 2007). But none of these questions can be divorced from either the larger historical legacies of the cultures that produce contemporary geographers nor the ontological structures that shape the categorizations which subsequently become the objects for epistemological reflection. Critique is part of the intellectual activity in which we are all involved and being clear about this is essential to discussions of geography as well as politics (Dalby 2007). If geography's raison d'etre is to investigate the earth as the home of humanity then the really big questions of the future and the possibilities of both nuclear warfare and/or climate change induced disruptions to the conditions for urban civilization are clearly within the remit of critical geopolitics and will remain so. Linking these two themes has long been one of my intellectual preoccupations but it puts the most basic questions of politics at the heart of geographical considerations. Are we to understand ourselves as on earth, squabbling over control of discrete territories and threatening massive violence to our putative rivals in other sovereign spaces, or are we to understand our fate as increasingly a matter of reorganizing a dynamic biosphere in which we all dwell? Posing matters this bluntly is now key to focusing on matters of security and insecurity and the matters of biopolitics at the largest of scales. Doing so also goes back to Neil Smith's (1990) formulation of matters of uneven development in the 1980s and his insistence that the dynamism of capitalism has to be understood as simultaneously producing nature and space. Critical geopolitics is all about understanding the production of knowledge of spaces facilitating certain kinds of violent practice, the drawing of lines, the specification of dangers and the legitimization of violent actions to deal with these “threats”. Recently Nick Megoran (2008) has raised the explicit issue of the relationships of all this to the morality of warfare. In the process he has issued what amounts to an invitation to discuss much more explicitly the crucial question of violence and how those of us who write critical geopolitics situate ourselves in this regard. Focusing on Gerard Toal's discussion of Iraq (Ó Tuathail 2003) and Bosnia (Ó Tuathail 2005) he effectively poses the question of whether Toal is, to use the phrasing from his first paper in (Ó Tuathail 1986), "practicing geopolitics" rather than "exposing" its violence. The suggestion Megoran makes is that Toal effectively operates within the categories of just war theory and as such falls prey to the logics of state violence implicit in the theory. But if one is to venture into practical politics and take stands on particular instances of state violence these issues these pitfalls await all practitioners. In so far as the world is divided into spatial entities competing for power and willing to use violence or the threat thereof to gain their ends such logics play out. Of course as Megoran (2008) makes clear, spatial entities don't compete, bureaucracies, functionaries and politicians do and the reification of their actions in spatial tropes remains a powerful geographical sleight of hand that requires continuous critical commentary from us all. Or as I put it in one of my initial formulations “the function of a

5 critical geopolitics is not to provide ‘advice to the prince’ in terms of using geopolitical reasoning to advise state policy-makers, but rather to investigate how geopolitical reasoning is used as an ideological device to maintain social relations of domination within contemporary global politics” (Dalby 1990:14-15). What Megoran (2008) doesn't do in his pointed raising of the possibilities of nonviolence is push his analysis of realism to the conclusion that operating within an ontology of rival spatial units arbitrated ultimately by violence is doomed to the tragedy of the eternal return of war. The logic of clashing rival autonomous entities arbitrated by violence runs through the neo-realist approach to international relations just as much as it runs through the cultural logic of the national rifle association in the United States. These two share more than the acronym NRA, they share an ontological presupposition of competitive and potentially antagonistic autonomy. In the world of nuclear superpowers it was quite clear two decades ago that this wasn't "realistic" as a long term mode of security for anyone on the planet. The discussions of nuclear winter and the immediate climate change that a central nuclear war would create got attention in many places; coupled to the Chernobyl disaster it was part of the shakeup of the Soviet system in the 1980s. The Gorbachev innovations in new thinking concerning security recognized that the nuclear standoff was far too dangerous a game to play and set out to defuse the confrontation and manage international rivalries in a manner designed to remove the danger of crisis escalation (MccGwire 1991). The tragedy is that American foreign policy makers, wedded to the ontology of clashing entities, interpreted the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union as a victory and a confirmation of their superiority and rectitude. In the process the wisdom showed by the Soviet leaders in recognising the necessity of defusing an impossible standoff, and thinking anew about security in a fragile biosphere, was swept aside and numerous possibilities of a politics of international cooperation were precluded in the West as the financial shocks of neo-liberalism humbled and humiliated former Russian rivals (Klein 2007). The neo-realist school precludes the possibility of change when it reasserts the identities of the protagonists in the structural tragedies of anarchy. In this at least it reproduced some of the worst attributes of the earlier social Darwinist streams of geopolitik. But as globalization and the debate about climate change make clear, such artificial boundaries are dangerous ethical practices, not the given categories of our political being. Understanding this provides a powerful mode of critique but not the practical policy stances that activists facing immediate tactical decisions frequently insist of scholars when they demand that they take a stand. In so far as politics is about who decides before it is about what it is that needs deciding, the invocation of authority and threats of violence are unavoidable. Pressing necessities are deferred in the endless arguments about legitimate authority; pointing out the pernicious consequences of prioritizing rivalries over commonalities is a matter of critique too. The possibility of other political games, other modes of living together is what the nonviolence argument is about and its tied directly into challenging the assumption of clashing autonomies as the ontological condition of our times. More specifically it is precisely about disputing the assumptions of war as necessarily the ultimate arbiter of these rivalries with all the violence that goes with that assumption; this is the cartographic specification of a pervasive architecture of enmity that underlies international relations thinking. Geographical sensitivities are an especially good way into these discussions and critical geopolitics has to be about these arguments if it is to tackle the legitimations of violence that explicitly concern Megoran (2008) and at least implicitly concern the rest of us.

6 My own attempt to do all these things has been to address the key that links violence, wars, strategy and identity in the discussions of security and, over the decades, write a series of critical essays pointing out the political choices implicit in how danger is articulated to various identities. In doing so it seems to me essential to take the geographical formulations in these arguments seriously and use these as the starting points for analyzing how these discursive formations work. It also seems important to understand how these discussions play out in popular culture (Dalby 2008b), the practical geopolitical reasoning of policy makers and the writings of the journalists who legitimize these practices. Geopolitics works in all these places and hence is worth tackling in many genres; this is precisely what the proliferation of critical geopolitical analyses have been doing in this decade, and in that sense at least, this critical work has become the normal way of doing geographical scholarship. But all this is premised on the assumption that war as either a tool of policy or a permanent social relation is unethical, that in the long run in a small biosphere that humanity is rapidly destabilizing, nuclear weapons and strategies to use them are untenable. In Burke’s (2007) terms we all need to start from formulations of an ethical peace rather than from assumptions that war is just. Doing so requires tackling the big hard questions about violence, questions which have been made more pressing of late by the insistence by the most powerful state on the planet that it is at war, in an aggressive “long war” as part of its struggle to end tyranny on the planet. Its this prior condition of war that is the most important point that needs critique, but after twenty years the contributions to this discussion are now widespread and at times somewhat inchoate, not least because war and domination sometimes get forgotten. The sub discipline looks very different now in comparison to what existed in the 1980s when this all got started (Dalby 2008a). The current discussion of audience reception, fandom and how popular readers and viewers extends the analysis of critical geopolitics further in another useful direction, and offers considerable possibilities for critical engagement with the framing of larger political debates (Dodds 2006; Dittmer and Dodds 2008). But it seems that if we are to take Sparke's (2007) arguments about a post-foundational ethic seriously as geographers we do need to tie his concerns not only to matters of identities and spaces, but to the other major traditional theme of geography too, matters of nature, environment and the biosphere as the home of humanity. While much of the discussion of social nature, of hybrids and cyborgs, commodity chains and animal geographies has updated these themes, at the largest scale, that of the geopolitical, matters that concern us here, much more work remains to be done on these themes (Dalby 2007). Not least in linking war, identity, geography and ecology together much more closely in contemporary thinking while simultaneously looking to the alternatives for a more peaceful world. ECOLOGY, IDENTITY, CULTURE The first casualty of earth system science (Steffan et.al 2004) is the assumption, which so frequently underlies environmentalist thinking, that some notion of untouched, because unpolluted, nature is the basis for an "environmental" ethics. The assumptions that structure "deep ecology", those of pristine nature as intrinsically valuable and the source of ethical conduct, are radically challenged by the ontologies of interconnection that contemporary ecology has now made unavoidable. Marxists (Smith 1990) have long understood these points in general, but the new holistic literature on earth systems adds compelling arguments to understanding nature as produced. The premises of eco-feminism, of women as the givers of life with consequent intrinsic connections to nature, are frequently belied these days by the modes of

7 consumption that structure the automobile based modes of suburban homemaking, or the justifications for purchasing large gas guzzling SUVs in terms of security and safety. The problem here is, in part, with the frequent aestheticization of environmental sensibility and its incorporation into discourses of hygiene, modes of practice that are so frequently very violent operations of cleansing, the use of biocides and radical moves of separation in tropes of quarantine. Likewise with the appropriation of virtue to suburban domesticity, while forgetting the consequences of the modes of consumption that make such "lifestyles" possible. The lengthy commodity chains, at the heart of the trading patterns of contemporary empire, that make these modes of being possible are essential to urban existence (Talbot 2002). And its that urban life that produces academic texts about international relations and global rivalries based on liberal assumptions of autonomy and rights. These urban modes of life also produce romantic reactions to the violence and ugliness of industrialization which shape "environmental" sensitivities in numerous aesthetic forms. The romantic reaction to urban and industrialized modes of destruction, so magnificently reprised in Peter Jackson's cinemagraphic rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, is revealed here as a powerful cultural construction at the heart of the environmental problematique. The point is that much of the environmentalist literature is an urban literature. Its view of "nature" is that of urban residents, not those of rural residents who live within its direct ambit and who wrest a living directly from soil, forest or sea (Fitzsimmons 1989; Dalby 2003a). Invoking Tolkien allows us to see the politics of the representations of environment, and challenge the subjectivity of the urbanites who compose both environmentalist and geopolitical tracts and write both tactical manuals and environmental impact statements. The themes of contemporary geopolitics resonate remarkably with Tolkien's formulations, in particular with the Two Towers volume. Not least Tolkien is immediately relevant because we are in Durham at this conference where the local Anglican bishop N.T. Wright (2006, 2007) who has made repeated theological arguments against the war on terror, and the limits of just war thinking, has been criticized in the neo-conservative press precisely for failing to confront the task at hand in terms drawn from Tolkien. Joseph Laconte (2007) recalls Gandalf and Frodo’s conversation where Frodo wishes that the task of being the ring bearer had not fallen to him and says he wishes the rise of Sauron the dark lord had not happened in his time. Gandalf’s reply is that we don’t have that choice, all we can do is decide what to do with the time we are given. Laconte draws the analogy between Al Qaeda and Sauron. But a few moment’s reflection on Gandalf, Frodo and the more remote parts of Tolkien’s world will suggest a very different geographical analogy is in many ways more appropriate. Even if some of the contemporary analogies are somewhat stretched, nonetheless they provide a metaphorical repertoire for drastically rethinking many things. This requires a simple recognition that neo-conservative commentators and the suburbanites who cheer on Frodo, Bilbo, Pippin, Merry, Gandalf and Aragorn in the movie theatres, are in fact residents of Mordor and Isengard, not of the Shire. Viewed thus the world dominated by the two towers resonates all too eerily with September 11th when two towers were attacked and destroyed by agents from the periphery of the global economy. The leader of these forces, a man with a long beard, a penchant for cloaks and, despite his need to walk with the aid of a stick, a miraculous habit of disappearing into the remote mountains where the surveillance systems of the towers have great difficulty finding him, remains elusive and inspirational to his followers who face extraordinary odds in resisting the encroachment of Mordor’s military machines. Massive attacks on remote mountain hideouts seem to be ineffective in flushing him out and destroying him; no matter how powerful

8 the ideological spells induced on the local populations by forces inhabiting the towers, the leader of the opposition remains at large. One can cheekily extend this reading to analogize Tony Blair as Sarumon, the man who chose the dark side at the crucial moment, and if not globalization itself, then perhaps the Project for a New American Century or the Bush doctrine as the disembodied dark Lord Sauron. This inversion of the assumed loyalties of contemporary movie goers suggests the importance of understanding the urban culture, as one that depends on controlling resources and the peoples in the periphery to ensure the supplies of materials continue to flow to the metropoles. The mountain regions of Afghanistan may not be a very good analogy with Helm's Deep, but nonetheless the overall parallel is disturbingly suggestive. The violence set loose on the planet by the expansion of the power of Mordor loosely analogizes the destruction of numerous peoples and modes of livelihood that are the consequence of the rapid expansion of imperialism in the nineteenth, and urbanization in the twentieth centuries (Baviscar 2008). Resistance in the peripheries and the violence entailed in the extraction of resources there is now sometimes discussed as a matter of "shadow globalization" (Jung 2003), but globalization nonetheless. But what about Treebeard and the Ents? Earth system science (Steffen et.al. 2004) suggests the possibility of unanticipated surprises as a result of the changing ecological systems; the Ents' destruction of Isengard, an eventuality beyond Sarumon's capability to anticipate, suggests that nature may yet have its "revenge" on human imperial hubris. While Tony Blair may have been well aware of the possibilities of oceanic disruption of the contemporary climate system, little in the policies of many parts of the industrialized world suggest that the climatological "Ents" are getting the attention that contemporary ecological discussions of the Anthropocene suggest they deserve. This may be beginning to change, but ironically its doing so precisely as it these matters have finally been rendered in terms of economics and marketization. Its taken capitalism a long time to figure out how to commodify hot air, but carbon trading has finally done it (Lohmann 2006)! Its beginning to suggest the necessity of thinking about having a functional biosphere as a necessary precondition to the contemporary political order, and as such this universal stance too adds to the ethical impetus of a critical geography. This is not yet anywhere close to an ethic of care directed to life, something akin to an ethic of flourishing in Cuomo's terms (1998), but it does suggest a partial shift in categories helped along by such cultural phenomena as Al Gore's documentary movie on “an inconvenient truth”. Most important for my argument here is the cultural dimensions of these insights. Sauron's fantasy of complete domination and perpetual power, the hubris of imperial aspiration is the industrial fantasy of modernity, of the whole world as malleable to a single will. But if the understanding of interconnection is to be fostered, the cultural tools necessary are at least in part being forged in the post-industrial technologies of representation and communication. While so much of the ephemeral consumption online is just that, nonetheless the importance of the ephemeral connection is crucial both to the possibilities of rethinking politics, and the possibilities of ethics that understand that the distant unseen stranger and the distant unknown field or factory, is irremediably tied into who we who "log on" actually are. The dominance of the Texan (Alaskan?!) view of the world as in need of conquest and pacification tied into oil wealth literally fuels an especially destructive mode of accumulation as predatory globalization (Dalby, 2003b). But its here in the representations of the future and desirable subjectivities that the struggle for biospheric sensibilities is being fought out in the arguments over ethical driving, the denunciations of SUVs and the need for responsible behaviour on a small planet (Paterson and Dalby forthcoming). This is, in the sense that the

9 "Lord of the Rings" is invoked above, a cultural struggle in the broadest sense of the term political. Its about who we understand ourselves to be, how the world around us is arranged, and consequently and how we think we ought to act in the world. Its all about geography in short! The point of such excurses into the realms of "culture" is to reiterate the importance of understanding the assumptions that structure the identities in play in contemporary geopolitical discourse. It emphasizes the urban liberal consumer as the writer of environmentalist tracts and of social science. Understanding this "positionality" of social scientists as residents of Mordor, is key to reimagining the possibilities of acting ethically in a biosphere where security is usually understood in spatial tropes and where the assumption of nature as external to humanity structures political discussions. The point about earth systems sciences and the Anthropocene is that these assumptions are no longer valid premises for discussion if contemporary knowledge is at all relevant to discussions about the human condition (Dalby forthcoming a). GRAND STRATEGY AND GEOPOLITICS But while the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about environment, about redemption, resistance to the depredations of modernity, and a thoroughly romantic tale in which the heroes triumph in the end, true love is fulfilled and evil vanquished, it is also very much about warfare, about violence, and the practicalities of combat. Peter Jackson's construction of the battle of Helm's Deep is an extraordinary technical feat of computer generated images but also very much about reinterpreting medieval siege warfare. The larger storyline is a war story; its one of preparations, alliance making, battles, and in another apt reflection of contemporary times, in the plot line of Frodo, Bilbo and the ring itself, a very contemporary matter of what is now known as asymmetric warfare (Thornton 2007). Frodo's destruction of the ring exploiting a vulnerability at the heart of Sauron's power isn't exactly analogous to the events of 9/11, but the parallel of unanticipated vulnerabilities obsessing imperial power is nonetheless very suggestive. Heroism is now being rearticulated in terms of combat, violence and various codes of the warrior (Dalby 2008b). But, and this is a key point, in the discussion of human security and resistance to contemporary imperial violence, it is also being rearticulated in terms of civil society activists, peacemakers and protestors of various political affiliations (Kaldor 2007a). Many of these co-exist uneasily with development workers, neo-liberal projects of economic incorporation into the circuits of capital, the extension of the rule of particular forms of modernity United Nations relief efforts, the proliferation of medical initiatives and much else, but the geography is very much more complicated than the simplistic formulations of the great divide between community in sovereign spaces and potentially violent relations between states that has structured so much international relations thinking and the discourses of security for so long. As Kaldor (2007a, 2007b) suggests, in part what has been happening over the last couple of decades is that the geography of warfare has been changing. The discussions of just war theory are complicated by the fact that the rules were devised mostly for inter-state warfare of the European post-Westphalian variety, a geopolitical context that has in many ways been superseded by a more complex series of geographical connections within and across the boundaries of states and the identities of nation that are supposedly contained by state borders. Where this complicate geography is reduced to a matter of warfare understood in terms of the high-technology kinetic action that has shaped American military doctrine in particular in the last few decades, the kind of violence that Derek Gregory (2006a, 2006b) has repeatedly condemned in recent essays is the result. This is clearly a reinvention of many aspects of imperial warfare but

10 its crucial to note that this is being conducted by forces designed to combat other conventionally organised professional military organizations (Dalby forthcoming b). Ironically, as Marshall Beier (2006) notes, its precisely the supposed accuracy of the new generations of "smart" weapons, with their ability to precisely target individuals, that has made "surgical" strikes a tool of statecraft for America. The earlier area bombing and widespread collateral damage that would result from using nuclear or large scale carpet bombing, second world war style (Hewitt 1983) or Vietnam style, clearly suggested a disproportionality to the violence which made a repeat of the destruction of Hanoi or Cambodia, unlikely as a political strategy. But the supposed benefit of the new smart bombs is that they could be used as a precision counter force weapons, or even more directly as a political decapitation strategy, as the failed attempt to kill Saddam Hussein in the prelude to the invasion in March 2003 suggested. In terms of imperial pacification the removal of opposition, whether heads of states in Belgrade or Baghdad, or al Qaeda operatives in villages in Somalia, Yemen or Afghanistan, or on a highway in the fictional version in the movie Syriana, by the use of airborne munitions, offers a series of technical practices that change the notion of warfare implicit in the logics of just war theory. They do so in part because the technology of global surveillance and capabilities of smart weapons requires a geography that isn't a matter of state boundaries, sovereignty and violence between organized armies on both sides. War and policing have merged in a violent mode of security that no longer makes distinctions between inside and outside, policing inside and war outside states (Hardt and Negri 2004). Much of the difficulty of specifying the war on terror, and subsequently the long war has arisen precisely from the inadequate geographical vocabulary available to describe contemporary asymmetric warfare. Combined with the obviously inappropriate military structure and doctrines that long before abandoned teaching counter insurgency warfare, the war on terror once again emphasises the problems of fighting the last war. The reasons why the war on terror was so specified as war, are a complex cultural and political phenomenon, but once it was so specified the knowledge practices brought to bear were ones of targets, battle spaces and regime change, rather than international diplomacy, criminal investigations, arrests, trials and the exercise of justice. Revenge narratives fed neatly into scripts of fear, and the imprecise geographies of danger have subsequently led to all the pernicious social pathologies of wiretaps, prison camps, extraordinary rendition and the remilitarization of international politics. The reduction of the complexity of situation to a few verities is part of the story (Kaplan 2008), but so too is the appropriation of quasi religious themes to attempt to remake the Middle East (Gray 2008). All these matters need much more attention from critical geopolitics; they will be all the more efficacious in so far as these investigations explicitly link geopolitics to grand strategy. This is in many ways closer to Phil Kelly's (2006) rearticulation of what he calls the classical understanding of geopolitics in terms of the viewpoints of foreign policy makers concerning other states than some of the critical literature acknowledges. In Colin Dueck’s (2004:512) terms ‘“grand strategy’ involves a self-conscious identification and prioritization of foreign policy goals; an identification of existing and potential resources; and a selection of a plan which uses these resources to meet those goals.” All of this is done in terms of the context for particular states and its here that geopolitics provides the discursive context for grand strategy. In so far as the geographic designations of the context for policy remain at the heart of the intellectual exercise of geopolitics, it remains necessary to link this to the strategic arguments if the critique of contemporary foreign policies is to be effective. But it will, it seems, do so in the context of a changing cartography of danger that cannot rely on blocs, fronts and regions to specify dangers.

11 As Fraser McDonald (2007) shows clearly it will have to think about the macro context of military affairs and the militarization of orbital space just as much as it thinks about the local topographies of Southern slums and urban battlefields (Graham 2008). But none of this will be effective if it doesn't directly tackle the assumptions of war as "the permanent social relation” of our times to use Hardt and Negri’s (2004:12) phrasing. THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS? Predictions are not very useful in terms of scholarly trends nor for that matter in politics itself; but some speculative comments can be made drawing on the themes in this paper. One possibility for the future is that Matt Sparke's (2007) suggestions of geographical categories as the key to a post-foundational critique will become the disciplinary norm. If geography per se becomes a mode of critique the specificity of critical geopolitics might then be rendered redundant, absorbed in a larger disciplinary enterprise. Always assuming that geography itself remains a clearly defined discipline in the academies of the twenty first century of course. Of course a very uncritical geography may undergo a revival if American political managers in particular finally decide that local specific knowledge is useful as at least a supplement to the reductionism and claims to universality that have shaped military strategy as an explicitly technical practice since the revolution in military affairs and the professionalization of the military took over a generation ago (Dalby forthcoming b). But at least so far the cultural turn in American military thinking seems to be drawing on anthropologists for its “human terrain teams” rather than geographers (Featherstone 2008)!! The wider geographical literature on violence, warfare, militarization, military landscapes and related matters in the last few years (Gregory and Pred 2007; Graham 2004; Woodward 2004; Cowen and Gilbert 2008) also suggests that concerns with warfare are once again much more widespread in the discipline and as such the links between these matters and geopolitics are only one theme in this much larger disciplinary discussion. Hence too when viewed from this angle the specificity of geopolitics in this larger discussion raises the question as to whether critical geopolitics becomes simply part of the disciplinary concern. But insofar as there is a specific part of this larger enterprise that deals with the strategic representations of the globe in terms of battlefields, dangers, and insecurities tied into a cartographic specification of the necessities for violence and supposedly inevitable rivalries that require military responses, it seems that the designation critical geopolitics may still have utility in coming years. Instead of our history of providing the tools of colonization, the surveys, grids, and mappings of enclosure and expropriation (Blomley 2003), we might collectively challenge the taken for grantedness of these practices in a critique that grapples with the violence and transformations we have unloosed in the biosphere. This is especially important in the circumstances of our increasingly artificial existence in the urbanized world of the Anthropocene where we are collectively remaking our fate in ways that render traditional notions of a separate nature or an external environment untenable premises for discussing the earth as humanity's home (Dalby forthcoming a). Here it seems to me the wisdom of Neil Smith's (1990) formulation of capitalism as the simultaneous production of nature and space is evident if not recognized as widely as it might be as theoretical point of departure for geographical efforts. Incorporating this explicitly into critical geopolitics is a longstanding concern in my own scholarly writing (Dalby 2002). The pressing concerns with biospheric disruptions that are becoming all too obvious to those who monitor earth systems are now part of the geographical context that a global civilization, and its geographers, can no longer ignore. But much remains to be done on how we

12 incorporate these themes into the discipline and the political part of it in particular, although the recent discussions of these themes in Political Geography are an encouraging development. If the American political establishment comes to its senses sometime soon and calls off its long war to end tyranny and decides that forcing regime change in Tehran and elsewhere is not a sensible way to proceed, then the potential for international cooperation to deal with numerous difficulties opens up. But if the war in the Middle East is escalated, whether by a major airstrike on Iran or some other means, and China and Russia draw the logical conclusion that military strength is the only thing that American policy makers respect, the possibility for further great power rivalries nineteenth century style but this time with nuclear weapons, opens up instead, and with it numerous new attempts to divide, map and rule. This too would alas, generate whole new topics for another generation of critical geopolitics scholars to tackle. If this is superimposed on increasingly severe weather disruptions as a result of soaring carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and tackled as a traditional matter of national security then the potential for further wars and violence looms in a very nasty future for us all. Unless of course the pessimism of such realist thinking is confronted directly by the insistence on thinking about peace as a practice that is deserving of much more serious attention and the assumptions of violent rivalry challenged by a more comprehensive understanding of human insecurity (Kearns 2008). Despite the pervasiveness of the tropes and practices of war in the aftermath of 9/11 and the invocation of emergency measures and all the paraphernalia of renditions, alerts, Guantanamo and the rest of the architecture of American military power, through the last couple of decades the overall tendency in international affairs was towards a reduction of armed conflict. While Central Africa in particular remains a major problem of warfare and the Caucasus region as well as Central Asia are not exactly peaceful, the 2005 Human Security Report (Human Security Centre 2005) made clear that the trend line for violence in the decade before its publication was toward a diminishment of warfare. How geographers might usefully contribute to peacemaking efforts and use their scholarly analyses to think about social innovations which facilitate more peaceful modes of existence and undercut the dangerous dialectics of place attachment and the assumptions of international anarchy, is a major task for the next twenty years of critical thinking in geography in general and geopolitics in particular. RETHINKING SECURITY … YET AGAIN! One of the keys to this is the ongoing discussions in critical security studies on how to refashion security policy and the intellectual analyses of the theme of security to focus on people and planet not on the militarization of policy (Booth 2005; Rogers 2008). The alternatives to a focus on “just war” are obviously all about rethinking security, challenging the technical practices of targeting and administering spaces violently, and crucially the specification of contemporary times in terms of relations of war. In doing such things critical scholars are also investigating the efficacy of non-violent political action and the possibilities of resistance that avoids the dangerous dynamics of escalation where power uses violence to repress opposition. Some recent work by security scholars seems to confirm what many activists have long believed, that nonviolence in political struggles is a better option than opposing state power with its own tools (Stephan and Choweneth 2008). Here the links between geographical work on social movements links with the larger recognition of the difficulties of violence as a political strategy to accomplish progressive ends, and the investigations of international movements as alternative foci for geographical research and activism (Cumbers, Routledge and Native 2008).

13 In a small planet whose biosphere humanity is now radically destabilizing the need to decouple war as a policy response to instabilities is especially important so long as the destructive technologies of nuclear weapons remain part of the arsenal of many states. The logic of nuclear non-proliferation remains compelling in that humanity has little obligation but to develop institutions that deal with crisis and danger without the polarizing dynamics of interstate violence as the response. The current transition from a European and American dominated geopolitical view to an Asia dominated world in need of new governance mechanisms makes the issue of nuclear non-proliferation especially pressing in the coming years (Muller 2008). The promise of a nuclear free world and the immense dangers of ecological disruption should a major nuclear war happen were part of what triggered the innovations of new security thinking in the 1980s and these lessons have frequently been forgotten in the discussions since. Once again the geopolitical arguments confront ecopolitical ones in how the context of danger is specified (Dalby 2002); the implications for policy and the future are profound depending on which set of metageographies provides the contextualization that shapes the policy agendas. Above all environmental security now has to be about understanding the affluent parts of the planet as the source of disruptions to natural systems (Dalby forthcoming a). As the Hurricane season of 2008 in the Atlantic has reminded anyone who has forgotten, insecurity is artificial both in terms of both immediate impacts to urban residents and the larger hydrometeorological disruptions of climate change. Its about the themes that Jennifer Hyndman (2001; 2004) and many others articulate in terms of a feminist geopolitics of violence and insecurity in multiple ways and places. More specifically its about understanding the interconnections between things in ways that overcome modern practices of drawing lines between these things, practices notably persistent in Europe of late (Kuus 2007). The discipline has come a long way in the last two decades, but understanding security as something specifically human has to ensure that much more than a neo-liberal version of the consuming modern subject is the subject of its policies (Duffield 2007). Here where sovereign power and biopower meet directly, security is intensely contested (de Larrinaga and Doucet 2008). This too leads back again to the question of contesting the identities of those who inhabit these landscapes and indeed to how constrained the empathetic tendencies of humanity frequently are precisely by the cultural tropes used to reintroduce hierarchy precisely when crisis ruptures those categorical systems. Its about aid and solidarity in the face of disaster, about thinking ahead about rescues, infrastructure provision and specifications of danger that do not invoke threatening others as requiring military preparation. Its about a major political challenge to conservative modes of thinking which to borrow from George Lakoff's (2008) recent articulation of these matters, presuppose the great chain of being, hierarchy as natural and obedience to historically constituted authority as morality. Neither the war on terror, climate change nor the major social and economic transformations of our times are usefully amenable to such modes of violence if a common sustainable future is the goal. But these modes remain efficacious to those who understand ruling as coercion, division and the threat of force to maintain the privileges of the rich and powerful. Challenging this vision, and specifically the geographical legitimizations of its practices, remain the task of a critical geopolitics now, quite as much as they did when Gearóid Ó Tuathail (1986) first called on geographers to expose the violence of geopolitics rather than practice it. The particular forms of violence that plague our planet are legitimated by numerous narratives, but the geographical specifications of insecurity remain key to understanding how others are rendered threatening and, in Ken Hewitt's (1983) terms, how the dangerous dialectic of

14 place attachment is used to facilitate sacrifice at home and destruction abroad. Its here that the links between the current discussions of popular geopolitics and the larger discussions of politics and discourse come into play. Its also here that geographers are called to tell other stories, the possibilities of re-crafting narratives of identity to facilitate cooperation rather than perpetuating the neo-colonial architectures of enmity (Gregory 2004). Its about much more than texts; securitization is also very much about tele-visual images and the larger cultural productions of danger (Williams 2003). The converse of this, which needs much more intelligent analysis, concerns the possibilities of challenging images of danger in terms of empathetic gestures of cooperation. Its about post disaster reconstruction, the return of displaced people in Bosnia, and thinking carefully about infrastructure provision so that future Katrinas, and Ikes are much less damaging. Our engagements with popular culture and the narratives of opportunity are relatively neglected and here in particular the discipline in general and critical geopolitics in particular has much more to do in imagining future ecological possibilities, challenging the contemporary imagination to think in terms of dwelling sensibly in small biosphere rather than appropriating an external earth to perpetuate international rivalries (Klare 2008; Carmody and Owusu 2007). Thus the geo in geopolitics becomes a changing biosphere, not a series of cartographic designations of competing rival states. This requires a strategy that is very different from classical geopolitics and the assumptions that eternal enmity is the fate of humanity. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke have dominated the geographical imagination for far too long; Sarah Palin's lust for drilling in Alaska's ecological reserves to perpetuate the myth of the resource frontier as the American identity, is only the most obvious recent symbol of all that threatens a sustainable future. Imagining cooperative futures, working with cultural agencies to engage with the best about progressive movements, remains a task to which much more effort can usefully be devoted in the next two decades. Above all if we are to make useful contributions to ending the condition of war as the permanent social relation of our times we need to remain focused on the critique of the cultural production of places with attributes which supposedly necessitate violent practices. Challenging our own identities as residents of Mordor may also help in maintaining critical distance from the taken for granted geopolitical assumptions of the rich and powerful. By remapping the connections between places and peoples in the Anthropocene the interconnectedness of our fates is made much clearer and so too the necessity to think about insecurities as about things other than the rivalries of elites. The politics of such a peace is but one part of the task for critics, geographical and otherwise of contemporary politics, but an undoubtedly important one that will keep us all busy for the next twenty years! REFERENCES Agnew, John 2003 Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics London: Routledge. Agnew John 2007 “No Borders, No Nations: The Making of Greece in Macedonia” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(2). 398-422. Baviscar, Amita ed. 2008 Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power Delhi: Oxford University Press. Blomley, Nicholas 2003. "Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey and the Grid" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(1): 121141.

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18 Thornton, Rod 2007 Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the Twenty First Century Cambridge: Polity. Williams, M.C. 2003 "Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics" International Studies Quarterly 47: 511-531. Woodward, Rachael 2004. Military Geographies Oxford: Blackwell. Woodward, Rachael 2008. "Not for Queen or Country of Any of that Shit" in War, Citizenship, Territory Deborah Cowen and Emily Gilbert (eds) pp. 363-384, New York, Routledge. Wright, N.T. 2006 “Where is God in “The War on Terror” Public lecture Durham Cathedral 9 November . http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_War_On_Terror.htm Wright, N.T. 2007 “World Needs a Strong United Nations” January 15th at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/nicholas_t_wright/2007/01/post_2.html