(Dis)placing Geopolitics: Writing on the Maps of Global Politics

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Abstract
The meaning of geopolitics is a curiously underexamined issue in ‘critical geopolitics’. In this paper I seek to outline and pursue a poststructuralist displacement of the concept, a displacement marked by hyphenization: geo-politics. Using Derrida's critique of Saussure, in the first part of the paper I interweave the problem of meaning with the discourse of geography so as to write on the concepts of ‘the map’ and ‘geography’. In the second part of the paper I explore the implications of this writing on or displacing for the analysis of geographical discourse and/in global politics. I concentrate on three issues: (1) problemattzing the traditional conceptual maps of ‘geopolitics’, (2) speculating on the historical problematic of geography and governmentality, and (3) suggesting a typology for the study of geo-politics which pays particular attention to how places are sighted/sited/cited by governmental institutions (geo-political sites).

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