I can now share the cover of Geopolitics in the Anthropocene, together with another very brief excerpt from its first chapter. As the book aims to reclaim the geo in geopolitics, this means, as geographers will know well, moving beyond accounts of geopolitics that have little to do with geography…
Consider, for instance, Tim Marshall’s (2016) best-selling book Prisoners of Geography, in which physical geography is treated as an immutable prison, a collection of static mountain ranges, rivers, and deserts that permanently dictate the strategic destinies of nation-states. Such a crude resurgence of environmental determinism ignores how borders are historically constructed, how landscapes are socially produced, and how global flows of capital, data, and resources render physical barriers highly porous. Similarly, Robert Kaplan’s (2012) The Revenge of Geography resurrects nineteenth-century imperial geostrategy, presenting the physical earth as an unchanging strategic board upon which states are destined to compete over resources. As the late Ron Johnston (2013: 3) wrote in a damning review, “The Revenge of Geography is a frustrating, often annoying, even anger-generating, read”, as Kaplan “does geography a serious disservice and misleads the many readers from outside […] because it is clear that he cannot break free (however hard he might occasionally try) from an environmental determinist straightjacket that sees geography as nothing more than a three-dimensional physical manifestation.” By flattening the geo into a set of fixed natural obstacles and strategic choke points, these popular accounts erase the dynamic, volatile human-environment relations and transnational infrastructural networks that define the Anthropocene. They implicitly suggest that geography is a passive stage upon which the drama of international relations unfolds, forgetting that the earth is actively co-constituted by, and constitutive of, political-economic power. To reclaim the geo in geopolitics requires moving past these simplistic, cartographic clichés to examine how power is physically hardwired into the planetary fabric through extractive corridors and material systems.
