Guest EditorialNeoclassical geopolitics

In May 2009 Robert Kaplan wrote an article for Foreign Policy, entitled, ‘‘The revenge of geography’’ (Kaplan, 2009). He argued that in spite of ‘‘globalisation’’, geography still matters in world politics, and indeed will come to matter more so in the future as environmental pressures and resource scarcities destabilise weak majority-Muslim states in Asia. Although there was nothing original about this thesis, it is noteworthy that it appeared in a journal that is widely read within the Washington based academic/policy/ media community and beyond. More striking was his evocation of Halford Mackinder as prophet of geographical determinism. For Kaplan, Mackinder is the wise ‘‘Victorian’’ sage to whom we must at last return having recognised the enduring relevance of his insights as the heady promises of post-Cold War neoconservative politics and neoliberal economics are buried in the wreckage of the Iraq debacle and global financial collapse. For geographers, Kaplan’s article makes dismal reading. It removes Mackinder from his social context, fails to acknowledge his political project, and displays no cognizance of the flaws and contradictions of his corpus. Recent systematic analysis of Mackinder and the early twentieth-century classical geopolitical tradition appears to have passed Kaplan by. His article is a painful reminder to political geographers of the need to take neoclassical geopolitics seriously. In this editorial I suggest that, whilst focusing on ‘‘contemporary conservative geopolitics’’, we have generally omitted to provide a sustained critique of ‘‘neoclassical geopolitics’’. That is not to say that we have failed to confront the multiple traces of geopolitical thinking, especially as deployed in support of right-wing politics over the past two decades. Critical geopolitics itself was born in reaction to the framing of militarised Soviet– American competition in stark geographical terms. It subsequently jousted with what Ó Tuathail and Dalby memorably termed the ‘‘new blockbuster visions of global space’’ (1998: 1) – Huntington’s ‘‘clash of civilisations’’ (1993), Barnett’s ‘‘gap’’ (2004), and the like. What critical political geographers have done can be understood by distinguishing between three strands of geopolitical thinking. We have firstly disarmed the classical geopolitical thinkers (chiefly Mackinder, Haushofer, and Spykman) by demonstrating how bound their supposedly timeless truths were to their contexts (Ó Tuathail, 1992), and how their visions were contested by competing contemporary alternatives (Kearns, 2009). Secondly, we have debunked contemporary conservative geopolitical Cold War and post-Cold War ‘‘blockbuster visions of global space’’. However, in so doing, we have failed to pay sufficient heed to, thirdly, the twenty-first rise of neoclassical geopolitics.