Geography vs. Geopolitics

Abstract

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From “Primitive Migration” to “Climate Refugees”: The Curious Fate of the Natural Environment in Migration Studies

“…Both Semple and Huntington were especially criticized for considering climate as a main determinant for a racial sorting of mankind (Livingstone 1992). During the first half of the twentieth century, the neo-Lamarckian geopolitical determinism pioneered by Haushofer and his followers-a radicalization and political instrumentalization of the Ratzelian idea that states compete, fight, and evolve the way that organisms do in their natural environment-was also criticized as highly problematic pseudoscience (Bowman 1942). It was then largely cast out from the academy for having served as an intellectual resource for National Socialism (O'Tuathail 1996).…”

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“…The next step in the story is usually the consolidation of human geography under the sign of geopolitics in the early twentieth century, starting with Mackinder's heartland mapping of world geopolitical space in which only three named (European) political entities are actively featured -Great Britain, Germany, and Russia -and in which the rest of the world is present only in terms of a sweeping crescent-like biogeographical theater of conflict and geopolitical struggle open to those named countries. Then students learn that Ratzel and Mackinder wound up as constitutive ingredients of Hitler's Mein Kampf via German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, which then prompted Bowman's typification of geopolitics as "illusion, mummery, an apology for theft" -and of course his claim that the entirely different enterprise of geography was nonpolitical and soundly scientific (Bowman 1942). And indeed it is in the wake of Bowman's article -which in Smith's (2003, 289) memorable words "bricked a high wall between geopolitics and political geography" -that the first big epistemic rupture occurs in our story.…”

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