Of tanks and tankies: What's ‘left’ for geography after the invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

This commentary explores the degree to which the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has posed a challenge for political geographers. I reason that while the war has exposed conceptual weaknesses and political blind spots, it has also validated many of the foci with which geographers have approached post‐Cold War European security. By drawing attention to the epistemological and moral problems of current NATO scepticism, I argue that tactics of counter‐mapping and whataboutery need to be carried out with the necessary care for the historical and political context.

What's ‘left’ for a ‘geopolitical Europe’?

“…As Klinke (2023) writes 'the problems that arise from viewing the world through the eyes of classical geopolitics are well-understood by geographers' (p. 3). In the current moment, it is our role to draw attention to the perils of the rhetoric of 'no alternative' in pushing for a more muscular and militarised EU, a rhetoric that draws directly on the tropes and terms of classical geopolitics that we hoped were long abandoned.…”

Russia's spatial anxiety and the construction of geographical knowledge

“…In the commentary to which this article responds, Klinke emphasises the ambiguity of objectives and long-term geopolitical trends that precipitated the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, cautioning against connecting the dots in a linear and simplistic manner (Klinke, 2023). Geography offers a practical contribution to this understanding, whether by analysing the preoccupation of Russian foreign policy with grand territorial logic (Lizotte et al, 2022) or the ordinary struggle at an intimate level where territorial battles play out in more complex ways (Wolfe et al, 2023).…”

“…The ever-changing and adapting geopolitical narratives of the Russian state are well documented, despite the statement of the head of the Russian Geographical Society and the Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, affirming that 'geography is not history and there can be no different views on it' (RGO, 2019). Such debates prove the 'continued popularity of primordialist theories of nationalism, and the continuing need to debunk them' (Maxwell, 2022, p. 153), in both Russia and the West (Klinke, 2023).…”

Geoeconomics geohistoricised

“…Today, this need to geohistoricise geoeconomics has been prompted again by great power rivalries, ultra-nationalist reterritorialisations and Global South resistance that all have their own complex ties to global uneven development and associated discontents with the inequalities and insecurities intensified by neoliberal globalisation. There has been a rapid return to geopolitical questions in the West driven as much by hegemonic decline and the domestic rise of reactionary anti-globalism as by the war-mongering of Vladimir Putin's Russia and the military investments of Xi Jinping's China (compare Antonsich, 2016;Sparke, 2022;with Klinke, 2023;Lizotte, 2022). Meanwhile, much of China's own geostrategic discourse surrounding the Belt and Road Initiative has been reworking geoeconomic visions of peaceful global integration-albeit with the Middle Kingdom in the Beijing-dominated middle-that previously provided cover for the hegemony-building geopolitics of Pax Americana (compare Flint & Zhu, 2019;Lee et al, 2017;Lin et al, 2021;Richardson, 2021;Zhang & Wen, 2022;with Essex, 2013;Morrissey, 2017;Sparke, 2005).…”