Making the Strange Familiar: Geographical Analogy in Global Geopolitics*

Agnew, John

doi:10.1111/j.1931-0846.2009.tb00440.x

Cited by 27 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(12 reference statements)

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“…The use of geographic quantities in state‐led efforts to structure and shape international interactions have demonstrable geopolitical consequences. Their use is designed to contribute to ‘a state's supposed taken for granted status … a doubtful particularism … turned into universal truths to justify this or that action’ (Agnew , pp. 431–432) but unquestionably provoke alternative, often challenging reactions to their usage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Geopolitical Positionings of Iceland Towards ‘Europe’ and the Nordic States

Jones

Clark

2016

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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In the context of the spatialities of Europeanisation, we demonstrate the manoeuvrability of states through the selection and deployment of geopolitical positioning strategies. Specifically, we highlight how geographic quantities (territory, location, resources, natural conditions) are bundled together to substantiate a mutable national interest as well as underpin the advocacy by states of particular geopolitical positionings. We argue that the diplomatic use of geographic quantities in state-led efforts to structure and shape international interactions has demonstrable geopolitical consequences. Using the case study of Iceland, one of the first casualties of the international financial crisis, we examine this state's geopolitical repositioning towards 'EUrope' through use of geographical uniqueness and concomitant reaffirmation of Nordic closeness. We expose the diplomatic challenges to the use of geographical categories such as uniqueness in geopolitical (re)positioning towards the emerging 'EUropean' order.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Geopolitical Positionings of Iceland Towards ‘Europe’ and the Nordic States

Jones

Clark

2016

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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“…Political thinking, in addition, is comparative in its effects and thereby can help form traditions, historical periods, and doctrines. The comparative effects of political thought also can express visions of political modernity, complicate teleology, 45 affirm or challenge geopolitical formations, 46 or essentialize global unevenness. 47 One way of defining the elsewhere, therefore, is as an "ulterior" referent, 48 which specifies some spatial relation and in doing so establishes a comparative relation of social, cultural, or political difference.…”

Section: Comparative Relations and Comparative Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorizing Elsewhere: Comparison and Topological Reasoning in Political Theory

Bonura

2013

Polity

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This essay addresses the often neglected role of comparison in political thinking (both formal and everyday). It calls attention to the spatial reasoning of comparisons. In doing so, this article first discusses topological reasoning in debates over the scope and boundaries of the discipline of political theory, and reviews a variety of spatial imaginings found in substantive theoretical arguments, most notably in the field of comparative political thought. This article then looks closely at three recent examples of thinking elsewhere by Anglo-American theorists: John Rawls's The Law of Peoples, Andrew March's Islam and Liberal Citizenship, and John Bowen's Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia. In these three texts, Islam is taken to be the proximate elsewhere of political liberalism. This article demonstrates the importance of comparison and topological reasoning in contemporary political theory in general, and in liberal political thought in particular. Polity (2013) 45, 34-55.The crisis that brings culture to the attention of Anglo-American political theory has less to do with the geographical and moral elsewheres that anthropologists have conventionally studied, and more with the civic and moral centers that give point and sustaining substance to the forms of life of liberal democracy.-David Scott, "Culture in Political Theory"In the epigraph above, David Scott describes a form of discipline-based insularity. He criticizes political theory for its propensity to avoid "geographical and moral elsewheres" in favor of liberal ideological concerns and the "North Atlantic canon." 1 This essay examines the status of such "elsewheres" in political theory and attends to the way political thinkers, when delving arguments, turn to other societies, antiquities, states, utopias, or distant locales. These various forms of 1. David Scott, "Culture in Political Theory," Political Theory 31 (2003): 92-115, at 95.

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“…Both the Chinese media and young Chinese protestors appealed to nationalist sentiments in their discussions of the events, revealing their frustrations with foreign media outlets, which, because of their own geopolitical prejudices, precluded a positive reception of the Olympic Games (Manzenreiter ). Within China, the tropes of patriotic education helped connect the relay events to a wider discourse, allowing the angry youth to “familiarize unfamiliar situations in vocabulary drawn from some seemingly salient prior geopolitical experience” (Agnew , 431).…”

Section: Geopolitics and The International Torch Relaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mega‐Events and Nationalism: The 2008 Olympic Torch Relay

Grant

2014

Geographical Review

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This paper focuses on the relationship between the 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch Relay mega-event and contemporary imaginings of China's geopolitical position and the Chinese national geo-body. The performance of China's territorial presence at the international and domestic scales drew both support and resistance. Chinese media coverage of the spectacle reiterated tropes of geopolitical struggle and national unity. While these tropes resonated with some Chinese audiences who have been primed to recognize the Chinese geo-body through banal nationalism, Chinese citizens' satirical online comments reveal that some rejected the stilted ideological representations of the relay. Further, protesting groups' high-profile disruptions of the relay mega-event outside of the national territory of the host country worked to undermine the relay's international reception. Drawing from analyses of Chinese and international media sources and Chinese Internet satire, this article suggests that the scripted nature and geographical extent of mega-events compromises the geopolitical and nation-building aspects of such events in both neoliberal and postsocialist contexts.

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Making the Strange Familiar: Geographical Analogy in Global Geopolitics*

Cited by 27 publications

References 32 publications

Contemporary Geopolitical Positionings of Iceland Towards ‘Europe’ and the Nordic States

Contemporary Geopolitical Positionings of Iceland Towards ‘Europe’ and the Nordic States

Theorizing Elsewhere: Comparison and Topological Reasoning in Political Theory

Mega‐Events and Nationalism: The 2008 Olympic Torch Relay

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