Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics is concerned with the nature of corporate power against the backdrop of the decline of the West and the struggle by non-western states to challenge and overcome domination of the rest of the world by the West. This book argues that although the US continues to preside over a quasi-imperial system of power based on global military preponderance and financial statecraft, and remains reluctant to recognize the realities global economic convergence, the age of imperial state hegemony is giving way to a new international order characterized by capitalist sovereignty and competition between regional and transnational concentrations of economic power. This title seeks to interrogate the structure of world order by examining leading approaches to globalization and political economy in international relations and international political economy. Breaking with the classical school, Woodley argues that geopolitics should be understood as a transnational strategic practice employed by powerful state actors, which mirrors predatory corporate rivalry for control over global resources and markets, reproducing the structural conditions for corporate power through the transnational state form of capital. In a period of increasing geopolitical insecurity and economic instability this title provides an authoritative yet accessible commentary on debates on capitalism and globalization in the wake of the financial crisis. It is valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to develop a deeper understanding of the historical determinants of the changing dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and their implications for world order.

Enlargement has been an almost constant part of European integration history - going from an improvised exercise to the EU's most developed foreign policy tool. However, neither the longevity nor the complexity of enlargement has been properly historicised. European Enlargement across Rounds and Beyond Borders offers three interdisciplinary, innovative, and indeed radical, new ways of understanding and analysing EC/EU enlargements: first, tracing Longue Duree developments; second, investigating enlargement Beyond the Road to Membership; and third, exploring the Entangled Exchanges and synergies between the EC/EU and its outside. This edited volume will provide fresh perspectives on enlargement as one of the defining processes in Europe in the second half of the 20th century: How are we to understand enlargement as a policy? How has it changed the EU? What is the historical role of the British press in shaping the UK's visions of Europe? How has enlargement played into Russia's relationship with today's EU? Giving answers to these questions, and many more, this volume wishes to spark a broad debate about the roots, range, and repercussions of enlargement, and how historians, and other scholars, should engage with it. This publication will be of key interest to scholars and students of modern European history and politics, the European integration process, EU studies, and more broadly multilateral international institutions, history, law and the social sciences.

The political and economic geography of Europe is changing - the European Community is expanding its boundaries towards EFTA and is resuming a closer association with Central and Eastern European regions engaged in radical restructuring. As EC integration accelerates there is the prospect of intensified inter-regional competition. This book, divided into five parts, examines in detail the changes and the challenge for policy makers. The introduction draws out the central themes of the book, addressing EC regional performance and future indicators, the enlargement and changing map of Europe and the implications for the EC of Eastern European changes. The second part deals with EC issues, particularly focusing on the economic and spatial impact of European integration. Part 3 addresses Eastern European issues, and Part 4 covers the Peripheral Regions. The final part is devoted to a policy debate, concluding with a policy agenda for the forthcoming decade.

Writing Global Trade Governance operationalises a key post-structuralist methodology in order to expand understanding on the institution at the heart of the global political economy. Despite the WTO's centrality and the growing popularity of methods utilizing discourse theory, no other text has yet demonstrated how these two fields of learning can be productively combined. The book seeks to move beyond existing literatures that assume the WTO to be a structure, institution or normative framework, in order to enquire into the discursive processes of identity formation that make the WTO both possible and contested. The book criticises conventional approaches that treat critical civil society as distinct to the WTO, arguing instead that it is only through including such social practices within the field of relations making the WTO that we can properly understand what makes the WTO work. The book presents an empirical analysis of the discursive character of the present-day WTO (including its formation and operation) and then moves on to evaluate how it is subject to change within a broader social context. The final stage of the book seeks to discuss the impact of the findings on future research, both on the WTO and other institutions. This work is a significant intervention in the literature on the World Trade Organization and the politics of global trade and social movements, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of global governance, discourse theory and international organizations

Drawing on scholarly and life experience on, and over, the historically posited borders between "West" and "East," the work identifies, interrogates, and challenges a particular, enduring, violent inheritance - what it means to cross over a border - from the classical origins of Western political thought. The study has two parts. The first is an effort to work within the Western tradition to demonstrate its foundational and enduring, violent conception of crossing over borders. The second is a creative effort to explore and encourage a fundamentally different outlook towards borders and what it means to be on, at, or over them. The underlying social theoretical disposition of the work is a form of post-Orientalist hermeneutics; the textual subject matter of the two parts of the study is linked using Walter Benjamin's concept of the storyteller. The underlying premise of the work is that the sense of violent possibility on the borders between "West" and "East" existed well before the more recent "age of imperialism" and even before there was a "West" or an "East" to speak of. That sense is constitutive of a political imagination about borders developed deep within the revered sources of Western culture. On the other hand, confronting the influence of such violent imaginaries requires truly novel modes of hermeneutical openness, hospitality and solidarity. Seeking to offer a new understanding and opening in the study of borders, this work will provide a significant contribution to several areas including international relations theory, border studies and political theory.

Latin America is a continent of diversity. The nation-states and peoples of South and Central America, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that together form the political geographical region of Latin America, encompass a wide range of societies, politics and economies.
A Political Geography of Latin America exposes these differences between places, regions and countries, individuals and societies, offering an invaluable insight into the themes of political and economic development, and an accessible guide to understanding power and space relations. From the Antarctic to the tropical jungles, the coastal communities to the highland villages, the mega-cities to isolated rural existence, the political geographies of lives, localities, cities and rurality are too sophisticated to be subjected to generalizations. Adopting a critical human geography perspective, Jonathan Barton enables a clearer understanding of similarities, difference and sophisticated human geographies. From its starting point of difference, this book explains how it is possible to overcome the stereotyping and generalizations about the content: of dictatorship and terrorism, 'banana republics', shanty town poverty and the Latin character.
Exploring Southern power-space relationships, the author also examines wider processes of globalization that are linking spaces and transgressing boundaries. Barton stresses the need for inclusionary political geography across hemispheres, nation-states, regions, races and ethnic groups, gender and sexuality, and for recognition that it is citizens who wield the power and shape the nation-states that shape them.

This book, originally published in 1986, shows the importance of geography in international power politics and shows how geopolitical thought influences policy-making and action. It considers the various elements within international power politics such as ideologies, territorial competition and spheres of influences, and shows how geographical considerations are crucial to each element. It considers the effects of distance on global power politics and explores how the geography of international communication and contact and the geography of economic and social patterns change over time and affect international power balances.

This book is an outcome of the 26th international geographical union congress in Perth, Western Australia. It focuses on border landscapes, with emphasis on the varying impact that political decision-making and ideological differences can have on the environment at border locations.

This book examines the reciprocal relationships between geography and the policies of states. The text begins with a theoretical analysis which sets the study in the context of geography and related fields, and an analysis of certain global strategies advocated by geographers and others. The remainer of the book deals with policies of defence, development and administration.

At the close of the First World War, propaganda mapping played a crucial role in the creation of a consensus about German national territory. Under the Map of Germany provides a detailed and vivid analysis of the history and techniques of nationalist mapping in inter-war Germany. Using extensive archival documentation - including many previously undiscovered maps - the author charts the development of new concepts of national territory and the establishment of an effective propaganda mapping network. His research demonstrates that a consensus about the extent of the Greater German nation was not created by skillful Nazi propagandists, but by the collaborate efforts of respected scholars and nationalist activists during the Weimar Republic. Challenging the belief that national self-determination is a just cause, Under the Map of Germany reveals that national territories are not tangible entities that can be clearly delimited, but are artificial constructs open to a wide range of interpretations.

First published in 2004, this book is the inaugural volume of the Indian Ocean Research Group (IORG). The volume emphasizes the complexity and historical and contemporary geopolitical significance of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). It also propagates the necessity for increased intra-regional cooperation.

Through a detailed account of the West German census controversies of the 1980s, this book offers a robust and geographical sense of what effective 'resistance' and 'empowerment' might mean in an age when the intensification of 'surveillance society' appears to render us ever more passive and incapable of controlling our own registration.

Critical Geopolitics presents a brilliant and radical analysis of the ideas which have driven nations to attempt to remap the globe in their own image. The essays - ranging across Britsh colonialism to Nazi geopolitics, from America's ambitions to the bloodshed of Bosnia and Ireland - unearth a new political history of the struggle for space and power in the West, and revise the geographies of global politics at the end of the twentieth century.

Frontiers are "wild." The frontier is a zone of interaction between distinct polities, peoples, languages, ecosystems and economies, but how do these frontier spaces develop? If the frontier is shaped by the policing of borders by the modern-nation state, then what kind of zones, regions or cultural areas are created around borders? This book provides 16 different case studies of frontiers in Asia and Latin America by interdisciplinary scholars, charting the first steps toward a transnational and transcontinental history of social development in the borderlands of two continents. Transnationalism provides a shared focus for the contributions, drawing upon diverse theoretical perspectives to examine the place-making projects of nation states. Through the lenses of different scales and time frames, the contributors examine the social processes of frontier life, and how the frontiers have been created through the exertions of nation-states to control marginal or borderland peoples. The most significant cases of industrialization, resource extraction and colonization projects in Asia and Latin America are examined in this book reveal the incompleteness of frontiers as modernist spatial projects, but also their creativity - as sources of new social patterns, new human adaptations, and new cultural outlooks and ways of confronting power and privilege. The incompleteness of frontiers does not detract from their power to move ideas, peoples and practices across borders both territorial and conceptual. In bringing together Asian and Latin American cases of frontier-making, this book points toward a comparativist and cosmopolitan approach in the study of statecraft and modernity. For scholars of Latin America and/or Asia, it brings together historical themes and geographic foci, providing studies accessible to researchers in anthropology, geography, history, politics, cultural studies and other fields of the human sciences.

Widespread public concern about environmental issues has attracted growing interest in the subject in both the popular media and academic literature. The work of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like Greenpeace and others in trying to change the environmental policies of governments and business organizations has received some attention, but what has been written is mostly Northern-based and about Northern NGOs.
This book makes an original contribution to the subject in three major ways. First, new evidence is reported resulting from field research in Asia and Africa by a team of social scientists from the Open University and their collaborators. Second, the focus is mainly on NGOs in Asia and Africa; since environmental policies usually emanate from, and are affected by, an international political context. There is attention also to the international linkages between Southern NGOs and their Northern colleagues. Third, the original research reported here relates to important theoretical issues in the academic literatures of comparative politics and the social sciences more generally.

Islands and their environs - aerial, terrestrial, aquatic - may be understood as intensifiers, their particular and distinctive geographies enabling concentrated study of many kinds of challenges and opportunities. This edited collection brings together several emerging and established academics with expertise in island studies, as well as interest in geopolitics, governance, adaptive capacity, justice, equity, self-determination, environmental care and protection, and land management. Individually and together, their perspectives provide theoretically useful, empirically grounded evidence of the contributions human geographers can make to knowledge and understanding of island places and the place of islands. Nine chapters engage with the themes, issues, and ideas that characterise the borderlands between island studies and human geography and allied fields, and are contributed by authors for whom matters of place, space, environment, and scale are key, and for whom islands hold an abiding fascination. The penultimate chapter is rather more experimental - a conversation among these authors and the editor - while the last chapter offers timely reflections upon island geographies' past and future, penned by the first named professor of island geography, Stephen Royle.

This classic work is a comprehensive treatment of the world's political frontiers and boundaries, and includes sections on boundaries in the air as well as chapters treating the subject in a regional manner, covering the continets in terms of the evolution of boundaries.

This book surveys the development of geo-political thought in the twentieth century and relates it to international political developments, as well as examining how sound geopolitical theories are. It considers the work of Mackinder, Hartshorne, and Haushofer and his disciples in Germany who influenced the Nazis; and of more recent developments including Marxist geographical writing.

The idea of civilization recurs frequently in reflections on international politics. However, International Relations academic writings on civilization have failed to acknowledge the major 20th-century analysis that examined the processes through which Europeans came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized - Norbert Elias's On the Process of Civilization. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the significance of Elias's reflections on civilization for International Relations. It explains the working principles of an Eliasian, or process-sociological, approach to civilization and the global order and demonstrates how the interdependencies between state-formation, colonialism and an emergent international society shaped the European 'civilizing process'.

The political and economic geography of Europe is changing - the European Community is expanding its boundaries towards EFTA and is resuming a closer association with Central and Eastern European regions engaged in radical restructuring. As EC integration accelerates there is the prospect of intensified inter-regional competition. This book, divided into five parts, examines in detail the changes and the challenge for policy makers. The introduction draws out the central themes of the book, addressing EC regional performance and future indicators, the enlargement and changing map of Europe and the implications for the EC of Eastern European changes.
The second part deals with EC issues, particularly focusing on the economic and spatial impact of European integration. Part 3 addresses Eastern European issues, and Part 4 covers the Peripheral Regions. The final part is devoted to a policy debate, concluding with a policy agenda for the forthcoming decade.

This book is a very timely account of the legal, economic and political consequences for border states caught in the current tug-of-war between the West and Russia.The Ukraine crisis of 2014 focused policy-makers' attention on a geographical area full of dangers that had gone relatively unnoticed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, namely the security dynamics of the border states of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a strong Russia returns alternatively threatening and cajoling, but at risk itself of suffering economic injury from western reprisals over its nostalgia for the map drawn at Yalta. That conflict, which hotted up over the Ukraine, was soon being played out over - and in the air space over - Syria and Turkey, while the border states themselves are likely to be drawn into the European refugee crisis and have the potential, after the 2015 Paris atrocities, to be breeding grounds for international terrorists. This groundbreaking book contains prescient warnings that must be heeded by leaders and diplomats on both sides of the East-West divide.

Over the past two decades or so, medieval geopolitics have come to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the collective imagination-and writings-of International Relations scholars. Although these accounts differ significantly in terms of their respective analytical assumptions, theoretical concerns and scholarly contributions, they share at least one common - arguably, defining - element: a belief that a careful study of medieval geopolitics can help resolve a number of important debates surrounding the nature and dynamics of "international" relations. There are however three generic weaknesses characterizing the extant literature: a general failure to examine the existing historiography of medieval geopolitics, an inadequate account of the material and ideational forces that create patterns of violent conflict in medieval Latin Christendom, and a failure to take seriously the role of "religion" in the geopolitical relations of medieval Latin Christendom. This book seeks to address these shortcomings by providing a theoretically guided and historically sensitive account of the geopolitical relations of medieval Latin Christendom. It does this by developing a theoretically informed picture of medieval geopolitics, theorizing the medieval-to-modern transition in a new and fruitful way, and suggesting ways in which a systematic analysis of medieval geopolitical relations can actually help to illuminate a range of contemporary geopolitical phenomena. Finally, it develops an historically sensitive conceptual framework for understanding geopolitical conflict and war more generally.

From a brilliant Brookings Institution expert, an "important" (The Wall Street Journal) and "penetrating historical and political study" (Nature) of the critical role that oceans play in the daily struggle for global power, in the bestselling tradition of Robert Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography. For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit. All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows. A brightly painted forty-foot steel shipping container loaded in Asia with twenty tons of goods may arrive literally anywhere else in the world; how that really happens and who actually profits from it show that the struggle for power on the seas is a critical issue today. Now, in vivid, closely observed prose, Bruce Jones conducts us on a fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases--from the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated security arrangements in the Port of New York. Along the way, the book illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America's standing going forward. As Jones reveals, the three great geopolitical struggles of our time--for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing climate--are playing out atop, within, and below the world's oceans. The essential question, he shows, is this: who will rule the waves and set the terms of the world to come?

While moving across borders has been made easier for some in Russia in recent years, for others, physical as well as socio-cultural borders are proving to be more and more difficult to cross. Tackling the differences between the ways in which official discourses construct borders and the ways people who live there experience them in their everyday lives, this book uses innovative theoretical approaches and empirical work with young North Caucasian migrants to explore issues of identity, citizenship, exclusion and belonging. The Chechen war, terrorist attacks and confrontations between Caucasian migrants and local residents have served as touchstones for intense public debates about who belongs in Russian society and who does not. Young people of North Caucasian origin are experiencing the effects of such debates as they learn to negotiate and maintain their identities in an environment in which they are defined as a threat to national security whilst simultaneously being pressured to align with core civic values of the state. This book reflects on the notion that the cultural borders, which define civic liberties and people's right to belong, are increasingly being defined within society, and not by the external borders of states.

'Sectarianism' is one of the most over-discussed yet under-analysed concepts in debates about the Middle East. Despite the deluge of commentary, there is no agreement on what 'sectarianism' is. Is it a social issue, one of dogmatic incompatibility, a historic one or one purely related to modern power politics? Is it something innately felt or politically imposed? Is it a product of modernity or its antithesis? Is it a function of the nation-state or its negation? This book seeks to move the study of modern sectarian dynamics beyond these analytically paralysing dichotomies by shifting the focus away from the meaningless '-ism' towards the root: sectarian identity. How are Sunni and Shi'a identities imagined, experienced and negotiated and how do they relate to and interact with other identities? Looking at the modern history of the Arab world, Haddad seeks to understand sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification but as a multi-layered concept that operates on several dimensions: religious, subnational, national and transnational. Far from a uniquely Middle Eastern, Arab, or Islamic phenomenon, a better understanding of sectarian identity reveals that the many facets of sectarian relations that are misleadingly labelled 'sectarianism' are echoed in inter- group relations worldwide.