The Commonplace Geopolitics of Conspiracy

Abstract

Conspiracy narratives and ways of knowing are a highly visible, accessible and increasingly commonplace part of contemporary global life, permeating across spheres of politics, science and popular culture. Catalyzed by rapid developments in networked media and a political climate of enhanced government secrecy following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, thinking conspiratorially about power forms part of a broader global public challenge to State control over access to information and knowledge. Rather than relegate the study of conspiracy to a marginalised and discredited form of dissent (‘conspiracy theory’), this article proposes how geographers can bring a critical attention to the multiple spatialities inherent in and produced through discourses of conspiracy; the ways of knowing and practising the world which conspiracy informs for differently placed subjects, both publics and politicians alike, across the political spectrum. This discursive understanding of conspiracy is developed in relation to the critical geopolitics scholarship and recent concerns within this literature towards producing more situated, embodied and emotional accounts of geopolitics stemming from engagements with non‐representational and feminist theory. Grounding the geopolitical analysis of conspiracy discourse in these concerns, the types of geographies that might emerge is explored through empirical research conducted on and with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here the convergence of heterogeneous political actors around their conviction in a US government conspiracy exposes some of the possibilities and problematics which attending to the commonplace geopolitics of conspiracy opens up for ongoing research.

Climates of suspicion: ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy narratives and the international politics of geoengineering

“…This article aims to enrich the academic discourse around ideas of climate control, through redressing the apparent invisibility of the chemtrail theory in current discussions of geoengineering. In so doing, the work presented here also contributes to a growing academic interest in the analysis of conspiratorial narratives (Birchall ; Dean ; Fenster ; Jones ; Marcus ), and responds to recent calls for geographers to use the critical interrogation of the discourses of conspiracy as a means to ‘de‐centre the geo‐political gaze away from elite and official versions of global space, in order to consider alternative ways of knowing’ (Jones , 46). Rather than framing belief in chemtrails as pathology or fantasy, and (hypothetical, future) geoengineering as reality, both terms are understood here as discursive phenomena, the ‘bounds of which are continually being negotiated’ (Cairns and Stirling ).…”

“…Situated within a broadly interpretive research framework, the analysis presented here builds on the Foucauldian approach to the analysis of marginal texts and informal or popular knowledges as outlined by Birchall (, 11). The chemtrail conspiracy narrative is here analysed as a knowledge‐producing discourse (Anderson ; Birchall ; Jones ). In this context, discourse is taken to be ‘a shared way of apprehending the world.…”

“…Given that conspiracies evidently can and do occur, the identification of persistent epistemological differences between conspiracy theories and other theories becomes in effect impossible, and distinguishing between a political analysis that is neither ‘paranoid’ nor ‘naive’ is recognised as challenging (Coady ). Awareness of the indeterminate epistemological characteristics of ‘conspiracy theory’, as well as the potential of the term to be used pejoratively as a means of ‘discrediting and stifling counter narratives’ (Bayat , 5), has prompted various authors to problematise the term (Bayat ; Bratich ; Jones ). According to Pelkmans and Machold (), the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has more to do with the relationship of the claim in question to fields of power, than the content of the claim itself.…”

Conspiracy and foreign policy

“…2 Conversely, claims about conspiracies made by high-level national security officials are often assumed to be accurate and legitimate, since they are thought to rely on special information unavailable to others. As Jones (2012: 52) explains, this ‘illustrates the importance of attending to conspiracy discourse as a range of positions within which different actors seek to make claims for legitimate “knowledge”. The fact that some conspiracy narratives are ‘called forth’ as ‘conspiracy theories’ points to the importance of power relations in the production of foreign policy knowledge ( Jones, 2012: 48).…”

Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity, Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque inSouth Park

“…61 However, the work of Laura Jones which examines the 9/11 Truth movement is relevant here, as she has called for more 'situated, embodied and emotional accounts of conspiracy theories'. 62 While the episode is decidedly unambiguous in its depiction of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the US executive is depicted in a ridiculous manner (Dick Cheney is dressed in hunting gear and armed with a toy crossbow, a fact that is never explained). While the episode plays on the geopolitical fear of the threat from within the US borders, the US government is also desperate to appear all powerful, yet it is eventually unable to orchestrate such an elaborate ruse.…”