The symbolic-conventional words (iconographic, a la Gottmann, 1952) of Geopolitics recurring in the mass media, in the official speeches, and also in much debate among experts in international relations, are above all: stability, sovereignty, territorial integrity; with the corollary of: (internal) security, fighting terrorism. To justify any action (internal or trans-border), carried out by a government, to prevent the “instability" or to restore stability.
The system of states is the “territorial trap” (Agnew, 1998), the conceptual cage within which the states "that have a role" (the hegemonics, their allies, their proxies) move.
Thus the current borders of states can only be changed through juridical-institutional procedures so articulated and "hostile" to change that the (limited) actions of force and the fait accompli have increasingly become the practice followed to trigger processes of (geo)political change.
Conceptually, the time of the present boundaries seems to be conceived as eternal. But human dynamics and life forms in general are necessarily always in a process of bio-physical, social and cultural change.
The task of geography, at least of the critical one (Toal, 1996), is to elaborate the articulation of approaches and different points of view starting from the dynamism of space (physical and human), power relations (Raffestin, 1981) and the variability of “time”, which is subjective, not univocal, culturally determined and therefore "unstable". For those geographers who want to do it (Reclus, 1905-08; Springer, 2012).
The great confrontation (and the mediatic Narrative) between the three superpowers USA, Russia and China finds testing grounds in the Ukraine-Crimea-Donbass issue, the South China Sea and Taiwan. The latter cases make the conceptual cage of "eternal" boundaries even more evident because it is applied to water, which "has no form".
The presentation seeks to apply the described conceptual premises to these areas of geopolitical confrontation.
Mots clés : borders|stability|territorial integrity|iconography|socio-cultural drift
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