This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage’s elements. This has implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change. The article concludes by highlighting the methodological and ethical challenges that such a project would face.
This paper argues for the renewal of popular geopolitics through the adoption of a research agenda that emphasizes everyday life. Popular geopolitics as commonly practiced has adopted a focus on textual deconstruction that neglects the practices and performances that mark much of the everyday experience of the geopolitical. This paper reviews the literature on feminist geopolitics, non‐representational theory, and audience studies to find points of intersection between them. Following this a renewed popular geopolitics based on the common themes of embodiment, emotions/affect, performativity, and post‐human networks is sketched out. It is hoped that this ‘popular geopolitics 2.0’ might allow scholars to truly engage with the everyday without trying to impose a new theoretical orthodoxy.
This article introduces comic books as a medium through which national identity and geopolitical scripts are narrated. This extension of the popular geopolitics literature uses the example of post‐11 September 2001 (“9/11”) Captain America comic books to integrate various strands of theory from political geography and the study of nationalism to break new ground in the study of popular culture, identity, and geopolitics. The article begins with an introduction to the character of Captain America and a discussion of the role he plays in the rescaling of American identity and the institutionalization of the nation's symbolic space. The article continues by showing how visual representations of American landscapes in Captain America were critical to constructing geopolitical “realities.” A reading of post‐9/11 issues of the Captain America comic book reveals a nuanced and ultimately ambiguous geopolitical script that interrogates America's post‐9/11 territorialization.
a b s t r a c tDiplomacy and recognition play central roles in the conventional conferral of state legitimacy and functioning of the inter-state system. In broadening the diplomatic frame by stepping outside the conventional state-system, this paper brings a poststructuralist and performative toolkit to mimetic diplomatic practices. Adapting Bhabha's notion of mimicry to diplomatic discourse, it demonstrates how non-state diplomacies draw on, mimic and intervene in the realm of formal political action in ways which both promote 'official' state diplomacy as an ideal and dilute its distinction from other, 'unofficial' diplomacies. In thereby examining the enactment of international diplomacy in unexpected spaces, this paper brings together three empirical studies: a Government-in-Exile, a religious community and micropatrias (self-declared parodic nations). In each of these cases, attention focuses on: discourses of recognition; sovereignty and legitimacy; the diplomatic relationships fostered and institutions of diplomacy constructed; and the strategic position of such diplomacy vis-à-vis the conventional state-system. Unpacking the relationship between legitimacy, recognition and diplomacy and exploring the tension between state-centric and non-state diplomatic practices, this paper foregrounds the points of connection between the official and the unofficial. As a result, this paper expands the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies while incorporating lessons from the margins into our understandings of legitimacy, recognition, statecraft and sovereignty.
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