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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.
Stuart Elden considers the 'Occupy' protests as such a development. Before him, Jeremy Crampton argues that WikiLeaks was the most significant geopolitical event of 2011.
The other parts of the Geopolitical Review have been written by Alex Chitty/Simon Dalby, Saul Cohen, Virginie Mamadouh and Andrea Teti:
Chitty / Dalby: 2011 Geopolitical Review - social media / Durban climate conference
Cohen: 2011 Geopolitical Review - global events and US foreign policy
Mamadouh: 2011 Geopolitical Review - financialization and resistance
Teti: 2011 Geopolitical Review - Egyptian uprising, regime change, Muslim Brotherhood
Whether Julian Assange is ever extradited to Sweden to face charges of sexual molestation and rape (today the UK Supreme Court allowed an appeal that will delay this until at least February of 2012), whether the banking blockade of WikiLeaks is ever lifted, whether, in fact, WikiLeaks ever releases any classified information again, it will still be one of the most notable developments of the last year.
In making this assessment it is important to separate WikiLeaks the actual organization from WikiLeaks the idea. In the former is the strange character of Assange, who from all reports is a publicity-seeking professional victim. It is the latter which matters—the challenge to create more open, transparent government and to overturn the 'information asymmetries' where government knows far more about us than we know about them and the actions they undertake in our name.
The important name here is not Assange but Bradley Manning, the man accused of leaking the cables. Only today after being detained in revolting conditions for 17 months, does his pre-trial hearing begin, and in military not civilian court. He has said his motives were governed by the principle that "without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
A full assessment of what WikiLeaks (and those it inspires) has achieved has not yet been written. Surely any fair reckoning would have to include the reason that Australia’s most prestigious journalism award was given to WikiLeaks: it provided "more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime."
Geopolitically, it may even have brought the US occupation of Iraq to an end. The WikiLeaks revelations in the cables and the 'collateral murder' video made it untenable for Iraq to agree to immunity for American troops (as the Obama administration demanded, even as it sought to delay the withdrawal).
The US is chronically secretive and in love with surveillance, including geosurveillance. WikiLeaks has provided a voice and means of action to resist the security state.
It’s been quite a year, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, the war in Libya and the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.
Closer to (my) home there has been the turmoil in Europe and the financial crisis, the bleak austerity programme of the British government, and the riots in London and other English cities.
The thing that has given me most hope has been the ‘Occupy’ protests. These have been sporadic, sometimes disorganised, and criticised for lacking a clear focus or coherent set of demands. But something is being attempted here than breaks from other modes of opposition, that tries to challenge and understand, that seeks a mode of operating that doesn’t quite fit.
On my brief visit to the London occupation in the area around St. Paul’s cathedral I was impressed by the careful and respectful way that politics was operating. It is a long way away from the kind of politics taking place in Westminster, or Brussels, and it is for that, perhaps, that we should give it the space to operate.
The occupation is of space, but this is a space which is both actual and figurative. One of the great ironies of the financial crisis is that the dominant response has been more, not less, neoliberal policies. It is being recoded as a crisis within neoliberalism, instead of being seen as the crisis of neoliberalism.
Occupy seems to be saying that we cannot simply seek changes within the system, but we may need to discover an alternative. It is for that reason that simple demands which could be met or refused are inappropriate. For another world to be possible we first need to conceive the world differently. We may need to reverse the eleventh thesis.
