- RSS feed 
- Twitter 
After clicking with left mouse button on book cover, an Amazon page (or publisher's) with book info appears in a new browser window.
Simon Dalby, "Security and Environmental Change", Polity Press, 2009
Jeremy Crampton, "Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS", Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Stuart Elden, "Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty", University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Virginie Mamadouh, "Politics - Critical Essays in Human Geography", John Agnew and Virginie Mamadouh (editors), Ashgate, 2008
Saul Cohen, "Geopolitics: the Geography of International Relations", Roman and Littlefield, 2008
For the third consecutive year, the editor has invited the contributors of ExploringGeopolitics to define the most significant geopolitical development of the year.
In her essay, Virginie Mamadouh argues that the financialisation of geopolitics and the grassroots mobilizations against it were key developments in 2011.
She puts these developments in a broad perspective by linking them to new media, the World Social Forum 2001 in Porto Alegre and the legitimacy of governments. Moreover, she raises the question whether financial markets can be considered a geopolitical agent.
The other parts of the Geopolitical Review have been written by Alex Chitty/Simon Dalby, Jeremy Crampton/Stuart Elden, Saul Cohen and Andrea Teti:
Chitty / Dalby: 2011 Geopolitical Review - social media / Durban climate conference
Cohen: 2011 Geopolitical Review - global events and US foreign policy
Crampton / Elden: 2011 Geopolitical Review - WikiLeaks / 'Occupy' protests
Teti: 2011 Geopolitical Review - Egyptian uprising, regime change, Muslim Brotherhood
2011 has been an exceptionally eventful year in geopolitical terms and it seems too early to decide which event will be most decisive in the long-run. My suggestions for now are the financialization of geopolitics and the grassroots resistance to it.
Several major geopolitical transformations in 2011 (or at least potential ones) were enacted by non-conventional geopolitical agents, such as 'financial markets'. In the past decades, many states were confronted with austerity measures imposed by international financial organisations like the IMF and the World Bank. New is that the scope to which European states are now 'disciplined by' naturalised 'financial markets', to some extent, embodied the three largest (American) rating agencies.
The ongoing struggle between states and 'financial markets'- between the political logics and the financial logics - shapes new relationships in global politics. So did the translation of this struggle between the real economy and the virtual economy of financial institutions into an affair between states. Financial institutions were successful in forcing politicians to bail them out when the consequences of the US mortgage and banking crisis hit them. The height of the resulting sovereign debt is now used to force upon them austerity programs and to offside politics and democracy. Decisions taken by politicians to appease and please financial markets will have an enormous and lasting effect on the balance between economic and political logics, reconfiguring the scope of democracy.
The European Union has been a particularly attractive target of the agents of the financial markets, as it was eager to be taken seriously and to save the euro. (The almost daily euro-soap opera has overshadowed other important geopolitical decisions in global finances, such as the deal between China and Russia, respectively Japan, to use their own currency for their bilateral trade, which weakens the position of the dollar as global currency).
Solidarity between EU member states is invoked to raise credit for the member states in danger of bankruptcy. In turn, the member states delivering financial aid reinforce the demands of the financial markets upon others through additional requirements, and effectively reduce the space for any alternative policies. The interdependence between financial institutions (not only banks and states, but also insurance companies and pension funds for example) in different places and at different scales makes it ever more difficult to provide an adequate analysis of the crisis and to sketch possible ways out. This also holds true for the possibility of unsettling the easy scapegoating of certain member states and the related practices of shaming and blaming.
The ensuing reconfiguration of the relations between member states, both between those with good ratings and those with poor ratings, between large and small ones, between the 17 euro-countries and the other 10, also affects the relations between the Council and the Commission, and between the (large) member states and the EU collective institutions. Together with the growing hegemony of Germany and the self-chosen isolation of the UK, they will likely be remembered -with hindsight- as a decisive step in the (dis)integration of the EU. We just can not tell yet which ways the coin will fall.
It is however clear that the financialization of geopolitics directly and indirectly reduces democracy and the space for politics. Governments have been replaced by technocratic governments without elections in several member states. In other countries, political parties all endorse the inevitability of austerity measures and the compliance with the wishes of the 'financial markets', even in the form of constitutional changes as in Spain. At the EU level, measures to enforce budgetary discipline might be steps towards more political integration but they also fuel the discontent among EU citizenry about its functioning and directly undermine its legitimacy.
Grassroots mobilisations against the outcomes of the financial crisis have been widespread. They also question the representations of 'national crises' . Telling examples are the Indignados and the Occupy movement. Ironically grassroots mobilisations in EU countries were also inspired by developments in the Arab World. There, such movements managed to unsettle autocratic regimes and even bring an end to the regimes of firmly established autocrats, who used to be supported by the West. Although not directed against the West, these mobilisations exposed the double standards of Western countries. These at times sacrificed demands for others’ human rights for reigional 'stability' and their own security. However, the direct causes of the protests were often corruption, unemployment and economic difficulties, exacerbated by the financialization of the world economy (including agricultural products). So far, the grassroots in European cities have not been able to achieve similar political changes.
The room for policy alternatives is however much reduced. Therefore the very presence of mobilisations such as demonstrations in the Arab streets, tent camps in Western cities and protests in Israel, Russia (against electoral fraud) and China (against corruption) is important. They - at least - evoke the possibility of other policies and other politics. These developments revive the fundamental debate about globalization that Margaret Thatcher (as UK Prime Minister) started in the 1980s, with her infamous slogan 'there is no alternative' to neoliberal globalization (also known as TINA). She has since been contradicted by opponents especially by the global social justice movement that since the very first World Social Forum in 2001 in Porto Alegre argues that 'another world is possible'.
The role of new media regarding its contribution to these grassroots mobilisations has often been celebrated, especially during the so-called Arab Spring. Indeed Web 2.0 (the development of interactive Internet applications) has opened new avenues for translocal grassroots communication and new forms of activism: Wikileaks for example has seriously shaken the traditional secrecy of diplomatic communication, which is key to geopolitics. At the same time, internet has been a powerful instrument of coercion, and not only in autocratic regimes (think of the invasive character of applications like Facebook into individual privacy). Sousveillance (or inverse surveillance that is the use of new information and communication technologies for community recording from the subject perspective) is not only an instrument to control the state and its agents, but can also be deployed to control felolw citizens (peer-to-peer surveillance as it were). In this respect, it should be remembered that internet has been the backbone of global financialization.
No doubt the financialization of geopolitics and the grassroots resistance to it offer plenty of new food for thought for political geographers and IR scholars studying geopolitics in the next few years.
