Critical Geopolitics

This chapter introduces some of the aspects that, over the last three decades, have characterised political geography critiques of geopolitical power mechanisms. The chapter reviews these critiques – commonly known as critical geopolitics – along two related approaches. The first focuses on how geopolitical meaning is constructed and legitimated and spatial narratives of global politics deconstructed, via representations, such as texts and images. The second focuses on geopolitics as experience that emerges, unfolds and is encountered in ordinary life; this approach considers practices – including embodiment, materiality, experience and performativity – as starting points for its critique. Either via analyses of representations or via grounded engagements with experience, critical geopolitics considers spatial representations of world politics as contextual and situated rather than objective and scientific, and as present to everyday life rather than detached from it. Both approaches – the discursive and the experiential – advocate imagining alternative, more just and sustainable futures.