Rethinking Geopolitics

de Simon Dalby

Cold war geopolitics may be dead, but struggles over space and power are more important than ever in a world of globalizing economies and instantaneous information. Using insights from contemporary cultural theory, the contributors address questions of political identity and popular culture, state violence and genocide, speed machines and militarism, gender and resistance, cyberwar and mass media - connecting each question to a generalised re-thinking of the spaces of politics at the global scale. Rethinking Geopolitics argues that the concept of geopolitics needs to be conceptualised anew as the twenty first century approaches. Challenging conventional geopolitical assumptions, the diverse chapters include analyses of: theories of post-modern geopolitics, historical formulations of states and cold wars, the geopolitics of the Holocaust, the gendered dimension of Kurdish insurgency, the cold war world, political cartoons concerning Bosnia, Time magazine representations of the Persian Gulf, the Zapatistas and the Chiapas revolt, the new cyber politics, conflict simulations in the US military, and the emergence of a new geopolitics of global security. Exploring how popular cultural assumptions about geography and politics constitute the discourses of contemporary violence and political economy, Rethinking Geopolitics brings the ideas of a new generation of scholars to a wide audience for the first time.