Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Volume 6)

Geography is about power, an ever-changing map of the human struggle over borders, space, and authority. In Critical Geopolitics, Gearóid Ó Tuathail writes about the politics of this geographical struggle, and about the geography of global politics. Thoroughly engrossing and theoretically ambitious, the book is the first geographical study to tackle geopolitical writing from a poststructuralist position. Focusing particularly on Bosnia and Ireland, the author uses radical concepts of mapping and seeing to subvert traditional assumptions about global politics.

The book begins by outlining a general theory of geo-power, or the governmentalization of geographical knowledge by the state. Ó Tuathail then considers the twentieth-century constellation of geo-power that we know as “geopolitics.” He shows how geopolitics is not a fixed and stable phenomenon but varies historically with governmentalized geographical discourse.

Ó Tuathail delivers a deconstructive critique of various twentieth-century attempts to impose grand geopolitical visions on the spinning surface of global affairs. In doing so, he outlines a new “critical geopolitics” approach to geographical representations in political discourse.