Geopolitics has been a particularly successful neologism since the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén introduced it in his theory of the state as living organism at the turn of the previous century. Despite its turbulent trajectory in the early 20th century it has become a crucial but polysemic sign in political geography and cognate disciplines. The title of this presentation refers to an article published 25 years ago (Mamadouh 1998) in which I was discussing the surge of publications on geopolitics that marked the 1980s and 1990s. I was then proposing four “schools” to shape some order in the overwhelming diversity of approaches: neoclassical geopolitics, subversive geopolitics, non-geopolitics and critical geopolitics.
A quarter of century later these schools are highly productive, still mostly evolving each in their own silo. Moreover they have been complemented and challenged by new ones. Feminist geopolitics has become over the last two decades a well-established approach. More recently interesting directions have been taken by geographers inspired by the new material turn and by those interested in the multiple dimensions of digital geographies (including their infrastructural underpinnings).
In that same period, geopolitics has made a comeback in media and political discourses. Beyond academia geopolitics remain however constrained to its traditional domains: the impact of physical geography on the foreign policy of states and/or the relations between Great Powers. The new assertive roles of China or Russia on the global scene is seen as geopolitical and the calls for a more powerdriven European Union have been couched in pleas for a geopolitical Commission and a geopolitical EU. The gap between a rich and diverse academic geography and the public widened further and academic geographers keep struggling to find an audience for their more nuanced and variegated geopolitical analyses and contribute to the public debate on key geopolitical issues.
Mots clés : geopolitics|critical geopolitics|feminist geopolitics|material turn|digital geopolitics
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