Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics

Twenty years ago Gearóid Ó Tuathail called for an approach within Political Geography that made geopolitical culture and the formulation of foreign policy the object of analysis. He specified the task of what subsequently became critical geopolitics as the need to expose the complicity of geopolitics with domination and imperialism. After the cold war there was a decade when military matters declined in importance and globalisation confused the geographical designations of danger. In the aftermath of 9/11 the utility of force has been reasserted by a neo-Reaganite American foreign policy using military force in the global war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Now the geopolitical culture is a matter of debates about empire and the appropriate geopolitical designation of danger, whether in Thomas Barnett's non integrated gap on “the Pentagon's New Map” or in the complex geographies of Alain Joxe's “Empire of Disorder”. This re-militarisation of global politics clearly suggests the continued relevance of Ó Tuathail's specification of the need for critical geopolitics to grapple with the culture that produces imperial attempts at domination in distant places.