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Geopolitics: Critical Geopolitics
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Critical Geopolitics is an ongoing project which came to prominence within the Geography literature in the 1990s thanks in part to a special "Critical Geopolitics" issue of the journal Political Geography in 1996 (vol. 15/6-7), and the publication in the same year of Gearóid Ó Tuathail's seminal Critical Geopolitics book.
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This matters a great deal when it comes to how geopolitics affects the region in this first, extra-regional prism. The Soviet Union was much nearer to the Middle East than the United States during the Cold War, which obliged the United States to develop air and naval power and to maintain friends and bases in the region, to prevent Soviet Russia from improving its relative position. Here, of course, the consequences of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan stand as an obvious example of how geography matters. The 1973 U.S. military airlift to Israel, which made use of a critical transshipment point in Portugal’s Azores islands, provides another example. The U.S. alliance with Turkey, too, was of particular significance and complexity because of geography; Turkey’s European role as a NATO member cohabited with its role as a U.S. ally bordering on Soviet proxy states in Syria and Iraq. This mattered enormously in the twin crisis of 1958 (Iraqi revolution and Lebanese crisis), as it did in the Berlin-Cuban crises of 1961–62.
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The "critical" in Critical Geopolitics therefore relates to two (linked) aims. Firstly, it seeks to 'open up' Geopolitics, as a discipline and a concept. It does this partly by considering the popular and formal aspects of geopolitics alongside practical geopolitics. Further, it focuses on the
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Critical Geopolitics