Reference books on geopolitics: a lexicon, a reader and three dictionaries. A review

With this statement, the British political geographer Ron Johnston expresses his second thoughts in his review of the Dictionary of geopolitics, edited in 1994 by the American political geographer John O'Loughlin. But Ron Johnston seems not to have been aware of the fact that this was no less than the second dictionary of geopolitics published in a few months time! The other was edited by the French geographer Yves Lacoste. This book review deals with these two major reference books which correspond to two of the four main geopolitical schools I have distinguished in my overview of the field (see elsewhere in this issue): subversive geopolitics and non-geopolitics. In addition it examines three other reference books on geopolitics: another dictionary, and a lexicon and a reader which correspond to the other two geopolitical approaches. Critical comments on dictionaries deal with two issues: the selection of the entries and the content of the articles. Re-