Dalby 2008

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Imperialism, Domination, Culture:

The Continued Relevance of Critical
Geopolitics
a
Simon Dalby
a
Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
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To cite this article: Simon Dalby (2008): Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance
of Critical Geopolitics, Geopolitics, 13:3, 413-436
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Geopolitics, 13:413–436, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650040802203679
SPECIAL SECTION: CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS

Geopolitics, Vol. 13, No. 3, Jul 2008: pp. 0–0
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Geopolitics
AFTER TWENTY YEARS
Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The

Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics
Downloaded by [Universite De Paris 1] at 16:16 10 November 2012
SIMON DALBY
Imperialism,
Simon Dalby Domination, Culture
Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Twenty years ago Gearóid Ó Tuathail called for an approach

within Political Geography that made geopolitical culture and
the formulation of foreign policy the object of analysis. He specified
the task of what subsequently became critical geopolitics as the
need to expose the complicity of geopolitics with domination and
imperialism. After the cold war there was a decade when military
matters declined in importance and globalisation confused the
geographical designations of danger. In the aftermath of 9/11 the
utility of force has been reasserted by a neo-Reaganite American
foreign policy using military force in the global war on terror
and the invasion of Iraq. Now the geopolitical culture is a matter
of debates about empire and the appropriate geopolitical desig-
nation of danger, whether in Thomas Barnett’s non integrated
gap on “the Pentagon’s New Map” or in the complex geographies
of Alain Joxe’s “Empire of Disorder”. This re-militarisation of
global politics clearly suggests the continued relevance of
Ó Tuathail’s specification of the need for critical geopolitics to
grapple with the culture that produces imperial attempts at
domination in distant places.
But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need to

set ourselves against the unbridled arrogance that assumes that “We”
have the monopoly of Truth and that the world is necessarily ordered
by – and around – Us.1
Address correspondence to Simon Dalby, Department of Geography, Carleton University,

Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: [email protected]
413
414 Simon Dalby
How did our oil get under their sands?2

La Géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre.3
THEN AND NOW
Gearóid Ó Tuathail started his 1986 paper on the “Language and Nature of
the New Geopolitics”, which can fairly be said to be the first explicit attempt
to posit the scholarly agenda which subsequently has become known as
critical geopolitics, commenting that there were two approaches then in the
discipline dealing with geopolitics. First was the traditional Mackinderian
approach which emphasised policy recommendation; practitioners who
“wish, in essence, to practice geopolitics.”4 Second was a more critical and
materialist framework drawing from political economy and world system

theory, but one that he argued had yet, at that time, to explicitly tackle the
“new geopolitics” of the 1980s and the American foreign policy of the
Reagan administration with its explicit attempts to shore up a declining
hegemony through the use of military force.
Where twenty years ago Ó Tuathail’s initial concern was with El Salvador,
now force and violence are more obviously involved in Iraq, Afghanistan
and elsewhere in South West Asia. Given the stimulus to geopolitical
thought that the re-militarisation of politics in the 1980s provided then,5 it is
noteworthy that the “war on terror” and the attack on Iraq in particular, has
triggered another extension of disciplinary concern twenty years later.6 But
the parallel with that period, of the Reagan administration, military buildups
and nefarious military doings in peripheral places, and the current period
twenty years later, is no accident. The neo-conservatives who have either
directed the war on terror, or provided advice and policy from their think
tanks in Washington, actively sought the reinvention of a neo-Reaganite
foreign policy when they were out of power in the 1990s, and set about
implementing it after 9/11.7 Insofar as critique of such policies and the
geographical thinking that legitimates them was a key part of getting critical
geopolitics started, then tragically, it is still all too relevant two decades
later.
Since Ó Tuathail first wrote, both the geopolitical and intellectual terrain
within which critical geopolitics operates has changed fundamentally. The
end of the Cold War has reshaped the imagination of danger, and
specifically the terrains whence threats originate, as well as the related
discussions of appropriate security responses. As the rest of this paper
suggests, the respecification of the appropriate strategic geography in the
aftermath of the Cold War suggested numerous possibilities. But the codifi-
cation of the appropriate geo-graph in the mappings of the war on terror
had to wait for the events of 9/11 when the geography of danger coalesced
into an explicitly imperial imaginary of a war against a ‘global’ threat. In the
Imperialism, Domination, Culture 415
interim geography’s engagement with feminism, cultural studies, post-

structuralism and post-colonial studies has generated numerous theoretical
resources and a wealth of empirical material to inform critical geopolitics.8
Given the richness of these intellectual possibilities in the new geopolitical
circumstances, the question posed by the editors of this journal in their
invitation to contribute to this special issue, concerning the continued utility
of the approach, might be read as a question concerning the specificity of
critical geopolitics in this changed context.
In the rest of this paper I will argue that there remains a necessity to
engage with the spatial framing of politics and the geographical tropes used
in security, defence and foreign policy thinking, a specific intellectual
terrain that still justifies the moniker “critical geopolitics”. Where Ó Tuathail
was concerned in the 1980s to tackle the culture that supported “interven-
tions” the vocabulary of geopolitics has now changed and the imperial
themes that he specified as being in need of criticism have proliferated in
the current decade, the link between geographical specifications of cultural
identity, and the invocation of specific geographies of danger linked to
matters of military strategy, remains an important venue of contestation.
Although that said, it is important to note Matthew Sparke’s much broader
invocation of the responsibility of geography as a discipline to challenge the
taken-for-granted specifications of the political world, in which geography
as a discipline then becomes critique in a post-foundational ethic.9 In this
sense at least Sparke suggests that critical geopolitics should effectively be
subsumed in the larger critical enterprise. While this author clearly supports
Sparke’s aspirations there is a military, and more specifically a strategic,
dimension to contemporary geopolitical thinking that is an important matter
worthy of continued attention; empire isn’t only about military force, neither
as Agnew reminds us, is contemporary hegemony primarily a matter of
military force or territorial conquest.10 But much blood and treasure is still
involved in military conflict, and many wars are justified in language struc-
tured in explicitly geographical terms. As such the initial focus in critical
geopolitics in the 1980s on directly tackling the reasoning practices of state-
craft remains compelling even though the geopolitical circumstances and
the intellectual resources available in geography have changed.
The use of imperial language in Ó Tuathail’s initial formulation turns
out to be especially appropriate now when discussions of warfare and the
imbroglios in Afghanistan and Iraq investigate matters in terms of counterin-
surgency warfare and hearken back to the history of imperial rule. They do
so in part because traditionally military forces of empire have had two
primary functions: first, patrolling the peripheries against external threats
and second, internal pacification, administration and policing. The latter has
come to prominence once again in the war on terror, and insofar as it has
shaped the geographical imaginary of commentators, it is useful to contrast
this to the previous Cold War period where the focus was much more on
416 Simon Dalby
the spatial struggles for power and influence between great power protago-
nists whose militaries were primarily designed to fight each other.11 The
cultural dimensions of all this have likewise been an important theme in the
discussions of popular geopolitics, in American culture, movies and
elsewhere where imperial themes are once again central to the discussion
of American masculinity and the role of its military in producing identity.12
Because of this contemporary context the rest of this paper argues for
the continued relevance of the initial problematic sketched out in the 1980s,
despite the changed intellectual and geopolitical circumstances two decades
later; indeed it suggests precisely that the much more explicit evocation of
imperial themes is related to the military dimensions of the war on terror
and needs to be understood as such. The links between neo-liberalism, neo-
conservatism and the Bush doctrine, and in particular the work of Thomas
Barnett have been dealt with by Matt Sparke in particular and elsewhere in
some detail by this author;13 the discussion below of Barnett, and the com-
parison with Joxe, is intended to focus on the mappings of empire rather
than an engagement with political economy. Neither can this paper ade-
quately deal with the huge literature now detailing the cultural practices of
empire. Likewise the remilitarisation of culture, and not least its gendered
consequences in the Reagan period, and once again subsequent to 9/11,
cannot be engaged in detail here. Nor is this an attempt to engage in an his-
torical summary of the debate so far.14 Instead this paper makes some
observations on military geographies, strategic representations of empire,
the cartographies implicit in the technothriller genre and the mappings of
American virtue in the face of geopolitical danger to reassert the continuing
importance of the key discussions of culture and discourse in the early
critical geopolitics literature. It concludes by linking themes of consumption
culture which empire supposedly secures, to matters of political economy
and suggests that there is considerable further potential for critical geopoli-
tics to engage the contemporary religious tropes in American culture in
particular.
CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
To take on his self-imposed task Ó Tuathail argued in 1986 that it was

necessary to directly tackle geopolitical language, and the practices of for-
eign policy making that invoked geographical terminology, but that such an
analysis must not abstract the language from the context of its production.
This needed to be complemented by a focus on the formulation of foreign
policy and the nature of the state system. In short, he suggested the neces-
sity of engaging directly with geopolitical culture, a theme that reflected
other debates in the 1980s about culture and ideology, and about how the
“discourse of dissent” to use Rob Walker’s contemporaneous term, could
effectively challenge the militarism of the times.15 These questions have not
gone away, although two decades later very different enemies are being
produced through geopolitical discourses that render Islamic extremists as
the enemy. Another generation of activists has emerged to struggle with the
consequences of military power, and as the epigraph to this paper
reproducing the slogan from the placards used at numerous protests against
the invasion of Iraq in 2003 suggests, geographical formulations are part of
this discourse too.
Ó Tuathail went on to argue that “the concept of a culture (in its broad-
est, all pervasive, not narrow sense) of geopolitics is a much sounder
ontological position for it reifies neither the ‘economic’ nor the ‘political’ but
postulates a dialectical (interconnected) relationship between the two
within the historical context of particular signifying practices.”16 Using this
concept of geopolitical culture makes possible a mode of analysis that

overcomes the wariness that geographers had about geopolitics after World
War Two. “Contemporary geographers should be just as wary of the
phenomenon, for it is premised on the reality as well as the assumption of
imperialism and domination. Mackinder (1904) understood this and
endorsed it. Contemporary social scientists should understand this and
expose it.”17
Although Ó Tuathail’s paper did not use the term “critical geopolitics”,
it did directly link foreign policy formulation, signifying practices, language,
geography and culture with an explicit rejection of imperialism and domina-
tion. What has followed since under the label of “critical geopolitics” shares
these concerns, and the explicit political stance that it is not the task of the
geographer to provide state policy makers with rationales for foreign
policies that promote imperial power or coercion. The analytical gaze is
turned precisely on these activities, and in the process becomes an explic-
itly critical practice. While the discipline had to wait a decade for Ó
Tuathail’s book called Critical Geopolitics in which he elaborated a series of
theoretical concerns which showed that matters of representation and text
required a more sophisticated understanding of power, knowledge and
identity, than that specified earlier in terms of a simple “exposure” of
domination, here in this initial formulation are the key themes that were
subsequently to mark the intellectual terrain of critical geopolitics.18
But refusing the temptations to practice geopolitics and instead engag-
ing its culture to understand how geopolitics works has not proven easy in
the decades since. Many writers have grappled with the matter of culture; Ó
Tuathail has returned to it recently to spell it out in more theoretical detail
and also to make it a key theme in teaching undergraduates critical geopolitics.19
The numerous discussions elsewhere in academia about post-coloniality, posi-
tionality, and post-modernism on the one hand, and the not entirely unre-
lated discussions of method on the other, have shaped the discussions in
critical geopolitics too. So while the achievements of a vibrant discussion of
418 Simon Dalby
geopolitics in a number of critical registers has been clear, the difficulties of

critique have persisted and the debate about method and purpose
continue.20 But there is little doubt that the themes that Ó Tuathail sketched
out in 1986 have been remarkably persistent; imperialism is at least as
relevant today as it was then, even if Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are now
more in the news than El Salvador.
While it is certainly an oversimplification, nonetheless it is not too far
from the mark to suggest that critical geopolitics is what happened when
post-structuralism, post-modernism, feminism and other variants of critical
social theory and the post-colonial debates in other disciplines, and espe-
cially in international relations, met a revived political geography in the late
1980s.21 Ó Tuathail’s focus on the culture of foreign policy making suggests
this very clearly; his work with John Agnew in this period, and in particular
their crucial paper on “Geopolitics and Discourse” which finally appeared in

Political Geography in 1992, years after its initial circulation as a conference
paper, emphasises the multiple forms of geopolitical reasoning and the
intertexts between more formal thinking, practical articulations in political
practice and popular culture.22 Edward Said’s Orientalism, perhaps the key
text in crystallising what subsequently became post-colonial studies, was
especially influential in formulations of discourse and the geographical
imagination.23
It was so because (a point not elaborated in Ó Tuathail ’s 1986 paper,
but prominent in 1992) of the importance in geopolitical culture of the
construction of threats to American national security, how these threats are
mapped, and how such mappings structure strategic thinking, specifying
important places and marginal places, and in turn the justifications for
certain kinds of military forces best suited for dealing with dangers in these
specific places. The Soviet Threat was the dominant danger through the
Cold War period, and its specification drew on the classical geopolitical
writing of Mackinder and Spykman in constructing its Manichean cartography
of hostile otherness.24 Much more recently Derek Gregory has once again
used Said as his point of departure in criticising The Colonial Present and
the architectures of enmity that structure imperial hubris.25
AFTER THE COLD WAR
Hugh Gusterson wrote in 1993 that “the end of the cold war has destroyed
our maps”.26 Precisely by removing the dominant Other in the American
geopolitical imaginary the end of the Cold War did destroy the cartography
of fear and the neat division of the world into geopolitical blocs. In the
early 1990s this produced a plethora of arguments and suggestions as to
how the world was to be specified in geopolitical terms. In particular
Francis Fukuyama suggested that the end of history had been reached and
the triumph of liberalism was at hand so blocs were effectively over;

Edward Luttwak thought that geo-economics was about to overtake geopol-
itics, so blocs would be reconstructed on different premises; Samuel
Huntington announced an imminent clash of civilisations with yet another
albeit highly contested geography.27 O’Loughlin and Heske noted the return
of Spykman’s writings as an important theme in geopolitical discussions, but
much of the grand strategy literature of the time passed with little comment
in the critical geopolitics genre.28 “Globalisation” soon emerged as both
business aspiration and the name of the age. Disarmament agreements and
reductions of nuclear weapons were more in vogue than the rivalries of
superpower realpolitik. There were other languages of international politics
available to discuss the future of global politics. Debt crises and trade imbal-
ances, economic blocs and free trade agreements also provided additional
vocabulary for diplomats. Various “liberal/internationalist” perspectives were

in circulation in books and in the pages of the Washington policy journals.29
In some spheres economic issues and global threats to the ecosphere
loomed larger than military considerations; the Earth Summit happened in
1992 but even there the dominant script was one of great powers, rivalry
and international prestige.30
Despite calls at the time to “disenthrall” American thinking about
politics from Cold War themes, or more fundamentally rethink American
security policies, the geopolitical mode of reasoning about security was far
from a spent force.31 The first Bush administration was quick to redefine
American identity as a military superpower in the Gulf crisis. Superpower
status was defined in realist terms and specifically in terms of the American
ability to intervene militarily in the Third World. Despite the rhetoric of
United Nations involvement military power once again defined the US as
the supreme actor in international affairs, “the world’s policeman”, the only
superpower at a “unipolar moment”.32 Despite the numerous new perspec-
tives on security in the latter years of the 1980s and in the 1990s,33 the
dominant discourse of post–Cold War political discussion in Washington
remained one of military strategy and the classical geopolitical themes of
great power rivalry. While the themes of the discourse may have been
stretched to refer to “geo-economic” rivalries,34 the important point that
Ó Tuathail emphasised was that the language and the policy planning
premised on it was still of states and power.35 Despite the processes that
were then becoming known as globalisation, in much of the geoeconomic
discourse economic developments were once again referred to in terms of
territorial strategies and the language of realpolitik.
In the early 1990s the geographical specification of likely future threats
was a matter of very considerable disagreement. Stephen Van Evera’s
cogently argued case for drastically reduced US military capabilities is espe-
cially interesting precisely because he argued that the Third World is effec-
tively irrelevant to US security because its industrial potential is too small to
420 Simon Dalby
present a military threat and the US is not dependent on its resources.36 One
potential danger that might threaten American prosperity is a major
European war and hence the logic for maintaining an American presence
there. Van Evera’s argument led to a response that completely contradicted
his specification of the appropriate geography of concern.37 In light of then
current economic growth both by Japan and the German-led European
Community, critics argued that the US should concentrate its military, trade
and foreign policy on areas of immediate concern for its own economic
interests. Recognising the perils of “overstretch” expounded on at length in
Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Great Powers a few years earlier,38 these
authors suggest prioritising American commitments in an explicitly
geographic formulation, an American “zone of cooperation” with a new
strategic focus on the Pacific and Latin America; US military power can be
reconstituted and its long-term strategic future assured in this completely

different geography.
Many of these themes spilled over into the genres of popular geopol-
itics. The shifting popular understandings of “discourses of danger” were
represented clearly in the plot lines of Tom Clancy’s “technothriller”
novels.39 Against the backdrop of the second Cold War in the early 1980s
and the subsequent emphasis of “third world” dangers and in the light of
Grenada, Libya, and Panama, not to mention Iraq, his themes incorpo-
rated US security concerns in a highly accessible manner. First (in The
Hunt for Red October), came the concern with technological innovation in
the strategic arms race and the potential for Soviet technical progress to
counteract US naval supremacy. Concern with internal troubles in the
Soviet Union triggering an attack on NATO in Western Europe was dealt
with in Red Storm Rising (1986), an interesting plot irony given that internal
troubles a few years later in the Soviet Bloc lead to glasnost, perestroika
and the Sinatra doctrine instead. Irish terrorism in Britain and the US
provided the somewhat unlikely plot line for Patriot Games (1987). The
dangers of the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and the potential for
“Star Wars” weapons systems to change the strategic balance showed up
in The Cardinal in the Kremlin (1988). The dangers of narcoterrorism and
political subversion in Latin America followed in Clear and Present
Danger (1989). Then came fears of Palestinian nuclear terrorism and
the potential for “physist proliferation” to provide various groups with the know-
how to construct nuclear weapons. This was the theme in the significantly
titled The Sum of All Fears (1991). In the novel one of those weapons,
ironically a lost Israeli nuclear weapon, goes off in the United States pre-
saging events of a decade later with hijacked airplanes instead of a
nuclear weapon. As Tom Clancy makes clear threats were dealt with by
upper middle-class white American males applying the reasoning prac-
tices that take for granted and reproduce the dominant understanding of
how politics is scripted. These were very much the “manly virtues” praised
in the narratives of the Gulf war early in 1991 as feminist critics in particular
pointed out.40
The crisis in the Gulf in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion was quickly
defined in military terms, and the resultant war perpetuated the policies of
military solutions to political difficulties. The “New World Order” proclaimed
in conjunction with the mobilisation and deployment to the Gulf provided a
unique opportunity for a show of force and international solidarity against a
quickly branded “pariah” state. Working in the Pentagon under Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and others drafted a blueprint for the
future of the American military, one that was leaked to the press in 1992,
suggesting that this victory gave America the opportunity to extend its lead
over all potential and putative military competitors. They argued that this
commanding presence on the world stage should be maintained into the
indefinite future so that never again could another state mount a threat to
the United States on the order of the Soviet challenge. Indeed they
suggested that an American dominance in military affairs would act to deter
other states from even trying, hence ensuring a pax Americana based on
military pre-eminence, into the distant future.41
Security was once again understood in terms of external threats issued
from someplace beyond the sphere of political action to which military or
political management strategies should be applied to impose solutions. The
geopolitical understandings of inside and outside are in play here, in the
process militarising security matters. The domestic political order was taken
as an unproblematic given; the danger of subversion or corruption comes
from an external source. The preeminent protector of this “security” is seen
by many in the Western world, and nearly all “security intellectuals” in
Washington, as the American military. The overarching trope for all this was
the simple sense, articulated by the widespread adoption of Fukuyama’s
phrasing of the end of history, that the United States had won the Cold War.
But it was not at all clear what kind of peace had resulted, or how it might
be mapped.
GLOBALISATION AND GRAND STRATEGY
Military actions in the Gulf did not ensure George H. W. Bush’s re-election;
the Clinton administration came to power, elected on a campaign theme
immortalised as “it’s the economy stupid”. While the military forces were
reduced somewhat and budget deficits brought under control major foreign
policy initiatives didn’t include military actions abroad initially. The adminis-
tration took criticism over its failure to intervene in Rwanda and the botched
intervention in Somalia. But it did intervene in Bosnia, and Kosovo, repeat-
edly bombed Iraq, and used cruise missiles on Sudan and Afghanistan in a
failed effort to kill Osama bin Laden. Peace attempts were made in the
422 Simon Dalby
Palestine-Israel conflict, and while military matters were not ignored, clearly
they were much less of a priority than in the Reagan years. The removal of
the Soviet threat also produced a serious doctrinal gap in the American
military; its role was suddenly much less clear. But institutional inertia main-
tained numerous Cold War programmes despite the new geopolitical
circumstances. The argument codified as “the Powell doctrine”, which
suggested that Vietnam-type imbroglios should be avoided by the applica-
tion of overwhelming force to achieve specific objectives supported by
political backing at home, and with a clear exit strategy at the end of the
combat period, was widely accepted by many commentators who argued it
was vindicated by the Gulf War.42
The doctrinal discussions about how to extend the technological
capabilities of American armed services however continued to focus on
large-scale military competition, the near peer competitor most frequently

considered was China, understood in this logic as the next potential enemy
for American forces. The revolution in military affairs linked guidance
systems and information systems in a whole new series of technological
capabilities that meant that the American forces could bomb Bosnia in 1995,
and subsequently Serbia in 1999 with near impunity. But the military effec-
tiveness of such operations remained in doubt to the critics, despite the
rhetoric of Shock and Awe in the military textbooks and Wesley Clark’s
subsequent manual on how to use air power.43 The need to transform the
ground forces for lighter faster movement to take advantage of the new
technology in combat ran up against the traditional organisation of the army
into large heavily equipped divisions.44
The 1990s also involved an explicit attempt to extend the remit of
democratic regimes as a strategy of enlargement, a direct reversal of the
prior spatial direction of American policy in terms of containment. The view
from Washington during the Clinton administration shifted focus a number
of times with attention paid to the dangers of collapsing states, genocides
and environmental threats. New emphasis on such matters contributed to a
focus on key pivotal states in the South, those whose political stability was
judged to be essential to regional stability, and hence a matter of priority for
security planners given the threats these regions might potentially pose to
global order.45 But themes of multilateralism and trade arrangements to
facilitate the booming American national economy, and issues such as
“managing” the Asian financial crisis of 1997 were paramount. Economic
matters took precedence, and to the alarm of the neo-conservatives, military
matters were seen to be of less importance. Globalisation was more impor-
tant than pax Americana; trade liberalisation and financial matters were the
order of the day. The political protests of the 1990s were about these
matters, the economic dislocations and inequities of neo-liberalism dis-
cussed in terms of an anti-globalisation movement, not a matter for either
peace or critiques of imperialism.
The confusion among policy makers about how to specify the dangers
America faced in these times lingered through the 1990s; in Ó Tuathail and
Luke’s terms deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation were the order of the
day, although they did point to an overarching concern with a mapping of
the world into “wild zones” of danger and tame zones in need of protection
from threats from the wild zones.46 This sense of drift in military terms, the
lack of a clear focus on dealing with the threats supposedly presented by
Iraq, galvanised the neo-conservatives into calling for rearmament, and explic-
itly for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy where military force could be used to
shape the future.47 Cooling their heels out of power the neo-conservatives
reinvented themselves as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),
and wrote their criticisms of the Clinton years in terms of both the lack of
priorities given to military spending in general reducing America’s ability to
project power, and more specifically in terms of a failure to engage more

violently with the Iraqi regime.48 But PNAC, in its catalogues of threats and
its demands for military expansion, downplayed the threats from terrorist
attacks or insurgent movements; states and their apparatuses remained the
geopolitical lens through which the world was viewed and through which
they thought military planning should be organised.49 An imperial formula-
tion of geopolitics if ever there was one. But not one understood quite as
such at the time. Candidate George W. Bush repeatedly suggested quite
clearly in the 2000 campaign, prior to his appointment to the presidency by
the supreme court, that America simply wasn’t in the nation-building
business.
IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS
In the aftermath of 9/11 and the crucial decision by the Administration to

define the response as a “war on terror”, much of the discussion of American
foreign policy, and in particular the invasions of Afghanistan and subse-
quently Iraq was suddenly discussed in imperial tropes. Niall Ferguson’s
Empire, Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, Chalmers Johnston’s Sorrows
of Empire all use the term in their titles; so do numerous other authors.50
From the left came concerns about oil in all this; so too from self-confessed
conservatives concerned that imperial adventures are eroding what remains
of the republican form of government that supposedly rules in Washington.51
While this doesn’t necessarily make America an empire, it certainly suggests
that at least as far as the military attempts to dominate many parts of the
globe are concerned, it is acting in an imperial manner.
In part the designation imperial is a matter of appearances; the global
war on terror and American power coercing Pakistan into cooperating in its
invasion of Afghanistan, certainly looked imperial. Likewise when the inva-
sion of Iraq was launched in 2003 in disregard for much of world opinion
424 Simon Dalby
these actions looked imperial too. The Bush doctrine documents, with their
explicit statements about pre-eminence, preventive war, the strategy of
forcible regime change, interventions to deal with rogue and failed states,
and subsequently the formulation of a long war against Islamic extremism
contributing to the ultimate foreign policy objective of eliminating tyranny
on the planet, made it clear that military coercion was back on the agenda
in a manner that suggested an explicitly imperial agenda.52 Ó Tuathail’s ini-
tial 1986 juxtaposition of domination and imperial power is tragically apt
once again. So too is the longstanding concern in critical geopolitics about
the construction of enemies, and the geographical language used to portray
the terrain of international conflict as requiring military “interventions”.53
But crucial to the emergence of the theme of empire is the simple point
that empires engage in wars against militarily weak peripheral political
organisations in distant lands. The Cold War was a struggle between big
states, with Europe as the potential battleground in the imaginary war.54 In
contrast, the new war is about pacification operations, expeditionary forces,
asymmetric conflicts and bringing local rulers into line with metropolitan
priorities, a matter that frequently involves subjugating local populations in
the messy geographies of the new wars. Ironically, but consistent with the
representations of geopolitical culture, just as the troops were becoming
involved in ever more conflicts with complicated geographies American
power was being represented in clear moral cartographies, and a single
overarching geopolitical division between what Thomas Barnett would
quickly dub the “integrated core” and the “non-integrated gap” in the global
economy.55 Finally the military preoccupations of the neo-conservatives
with state power were explicitly linked to dangers wrought by globalisation;
enemies could be anywhere and everywhere in a “global” war on terror,
although at least initially they were most likely to be found in the wild
zones of South West Asia. Once again Manichean division applies: “with us
or with the terrorists”.
US special forces in Afghanistan do have all sorts of parallels with
British military adventures there in the nineteenth century. The invasion of
Iraq likewise; the 2003 intervention by British forces after all was the fourth
time they had done this in ninety years and part of a long-term pattern of
growing Western influence after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.56
Reading the Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006 makes it clear that
Pentagon planners are building an infrastructure to quickly move troops
and air power to any corner of the globe that may require the use of
military force.57 The system of roads for which Rome is famous allowed for
the movement of the legions of heavy infantry from one part of the empire
to another relatively quickly. But much of the scouting and many of the
cavalry formations used in Roman wars were mercenaries or local levies
brought under imperial command to conduct specific tasks. Rome concen-
trated on the decisive element in pitched battles, the flexible heavy infantry
of the legions, and on engineering and siege warfare techniques. This

pattern of power is replicated by the current dominance of the American
navy in many parts of the world but airpower, space surveillance and com-
munication are now also part of American strategic power whose global
reach is clearly unrivalled by any other military.
The analogies with Rome and with nineteenth-century Britain also
suggest the limits of military manpower and the necessity of using local
auxiliary troops for imperial pacification and policing operations. Just as the
US is aiming to maintain strategic superiority in key areas of smart weap-
onry, stealth technologies and global mobility, the Roman empire empha-
sised the importance of strategic domination in heavy infantry and siege
weaponry.58 The British empire relied on local troops for many functions in
the empire but in the process maintaining dominance in the crucial technol-
ogy that ensured strategic superiority where it mattered most in the nineteenth
century, on the oceans.59 The Royal Navy in its victories over Napoleon, in
particular at Trafalgar, established the conditions for the success of British
imperialism much of which was of an indirect nature related to trade rather
than direct conquest.
Simply looking at where American troops are situated outside what is
now interestingly called the “Homeland” (“national security” is apparently
now no longer an adequate formulation) and how they have moved in the
last few decades is instructive. The scale of the American basing effort is
worth emphasising as is the persistence of American military presence in
various parts of the world since the 1940s.60 But it is also important to note
that the facilities used by the American forces change through time and are
arranged in numerous treaty and rental agreements through the different
military services as well as through commercial arrangements. Looking at
these impressive facilities which reproduce substantial parts of American
suburbia complete with movie theatres and restaurant chains, the parallels
with Roman garrison towns built on the Rhine, or on Hadrian’s wall in
England, where the remains are strikingly visible on the landscape, are
obvious. This is partly a matter of enclave geographies where outposts of
metropolitan power are imposed from afar into various hinterlands as part
of the globalising patterns of spatial change of our times.61 In Chalmers
Johnston’s terms these bases are for all practical purposes colonies.62 Less
visible is the sheer scale of the logistics to keep garrison troops in residence
in the far-flung reaches of empire.63 The imposition of order is related to
long-term military presence. That presence literally builds the cultural logic
of the garrison troops into the landscape, a permanent reminder of imperial
control.64 But the extent of these facilities should not be exaggerated; the
overall numbers of troops are still relatively small. The global reach of these
facilities is more impressive than the actual number of troops present.65
In addition the carrier task forces that the US Navy operates effectively
act as mobile bases able to sail the high seas with little opposition that is
426 Simon Dalby
likely to thwart their moves. But local auxiliaries will still have to be avail-
able to do the local policing and the ensure that the resources continue to
flow from the peripheral wild zones to the metropoles, ones that might be
much more frequently located in Asia in the coming decades. The coalitions
of the willing that American leaders have attempted to construct whether in
Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq clearly show the utility of auxiliaries. The diffi-
culties that American recruiters face, given the insurgencies in Iraq, in
ensuring the necessary numbers of soldiers are available in the volunteer
American army emphasise the point that while the American military has a
global reach it does not have the ability to keep substantial garrisons on the
ground for extended periods. Neither does it have the ability to do “nation
building” in most places; in these places it is practicing what Michael Ignatieff
called Empire Lite.66
Contemporary American strategy, and the Rumsfeld innovations of

emphasising mobility and firepower at a distance in particular, is clearly
related to the reorganisation of its military bases around the world. Both the
Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006, and the 2006 National Security
Strategy of the United States are explicit about the need to transform
the basing system from a garrison posture to facilitate the rapid surging of
the newly configured expeditionary forces.67 Understood as an empire then
the questions of terror in the periphery appear as arguments over the
administration of the extraction of resources from the remote provinces for
export to, literally in the case of the Middle East, fuel consumption in the
metropoles.68 All of which suggests the continued utility of critical geopoli-
tics in challenging these formulations, making explicit the geographies that
geopolitical discourse elides in its formulations of enemies and its rationales
for military action.
DISORDERLY EMPIRES AND DISCONNECTED GAPS
The specific geographies of power become clearer in contrasting two very

different commentators on contemporary American power. Alain Joxe, a
leading French strategic thinker, published a small volume in 2002 in
English called simply Empire of Disorder.69 In it he makes the argument that
American hegemony is imperial in a negative sense. In line with George
Bush’s phrase from the January 2003 State of the Union speech, that America
“exercises power without conquest”, Joxe suggests that American power is
uninterested in territorial control. Rather its mode of imperial rule defines
the terms and conditions of trade and disciplines local regimes that do not
follow policies broadly congruent with American financial and security inter-
ests. This is entirely consistent with the lack of large numbers of American
troops available for permanent garrison and administration duties. Invoking
Machiavelli as the epigram for the main text, and specifically the argument
that it is in the interests of a conqueror to enrich that which is conquered, in

provocative style Joxe suggests that
this power which refused to conquer the world, only seeks to fill its
own pockets. We are confronted with a global power that takes
infinitely varied local forms while refusing to think of local variety
except in terms of temporal uniformity; and it succeeds thanks to its
ability to establish norms, not to conquer. It is now trying to sustain this
unconquered empire by shirking the requirements that Machiavelli out-
lined: the obligation to enrich the conquered peoples as much as the
conquerors.70
Key to the argument about American influence here is the assumption

that America is the telos of history; all states that do not measure up to the
American way of doing things are understood to be underdeveloped, but
given appropriate policies and support from American power, all local idio-
syncrasies can be relegated to the past; development leads to one form of
modernity which the appropriate norms of neo-liberalism will eventually
ensure renders primitive others into clones of the modern US. Joxe goes on
to discuss numerous American policies and military interventions in places
from Bosnia to Columbia to make the argument that America is shirking its
imperial responsibilities to ensure their enrichment and in the process effec-
tively ensuring that disorder remains in many parts of the world. It does so
by using military power and security assistance to maintain friendly elites in
charge in many places, but does not usually involve itself in the detailed
administration or reconstruction of satellite powers. In this at least both
Afghanistan and Iraq are fairly unusual.
Ironically, with an important notable exception, such thinking neatly
parallels Thomas Barnett’s thinking in The Pentagon’s New Map, and in the
sequel called Blueprint for Action, which extends the case for reconstruct-
ing the American military to enforce the expansion of globalisation.71
Barnett’s logic is fairly simple. Globalisation is the future, liberal economies
connected into the circuits of capital and the circuits of cultural communica-
tion are peaceful states most of the time. They treat their peoples with rea-
sonable regard for human rights and personal freedom. Dangers come from
the remote parts of the world, not the globalised core of the economy, and
they do so because of a lack of connectivity, enforced either by lawless
remoteness or the deliberate design of local tyrants and dictators who deny
their peoples the benefits and opportunities of connectivity. This leads to a for-
mulation of the planet into a zone of danger in the form of the non-integrated
gap which is external to the integrated core of the world economy.
Note this is not empire, because connection into the larger globalised
world is in this understanding something that everyone desires and will
benefit from, and not a matter of direct administration. More specifically:
428 Simon Dalby
America does not shrink the Gap to conquer the Gap, but to invite two
billion people to join something better and safer in the Core. Empires
involve enforcing maximal rules sets, where the leader tells the led not
just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been
the American way of war and peace, and does not reflect our system of
governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the
most obviously destructive behavior. We push connectivity above all
else, letting people choose what to do with those ties, that communica-
tion, and all those possibilities.72
Thus Barnett is advocating the extension of globalisation, by force if neces-

sary on the clear geographical assumption that the wild zone’s violence
threatens the core and as such must be civilised, for its own good of
course.73
The difference between Joxe’s formulation and Barnett is precisely
around the theme of connectivity. Joxe argues that in many case America is
technically unconnected with the populations of parts of the world, but not
with many of the elites. In these terms the patterns of investment and the
connections with local rulers who ensure the export of key resources, and
who are willing recipients of military aid and security assistance to maintain
their rule, does connect them with the empire; its just all the rest that are
“disconnected”.74 Thus by narrowly defining empire in terms of conquest,
the more complex political economies of informal empire are denied. The
benefit of Joxe’s formulation is precisely the specificity of these interconnec-
tions and how he notes that there is a long history of such interconnections.
One of the most important patterns of connection with the elites has been
with those who oversee the production and export of raw materials, and
petroleum in particular. While this is a long-time theme in the literature of
geopolitics, it has recently been updated to emphasise the connections
between the international markets for commodities and the violence of
what are now called resource wars.75
This literature has made it clear that there are patterns of violence in
the periphery that relate fairly directly to struggles to control resource reve-
nues in poor economies. While the empirical generalisations have to be
carefully qualified with the specifics of particular cases, it is nonetheless
clear that the violence in the periphery is frequently related to the export of
key commodities.76 This being the case the assumption of disconnection
that is the premise of Barnett’s cartographic specification of global danger is
incomplete in a misleading way. Alain Joxe’s formulation seems especially
apt in the case of petroleum where the relationships between international
oil companies and local elites is indisputable, and also frequently related to
persistent patterns of violence and human rights violations.77
But Barnett explicitly rejects the strategy of running an empire of disor-
der, or operating in “empire lite” mode. Instead he argues that American
forces need to be expanded to add a large component of “system adminis-

trators” who can reconstruct societies in the wild zones of the gap and
connect them into the circuits of the global system. Not content with inter-
mittent policing actions, which Barnett thinks fail to weed out the dangers
in the non-integrated gap, he explicitly suggests (temporary) conquest to
remake societies as was done in Germany and Japan in the aftermath of the
Second World War. This isn’t imperialism he argues, just the bringing of
freedom to the world’s impoverished. Nowhere does he suggest that this
has been tried before by other European powers who did indeed claim the
burden of empire was taken up on behalf of the conquered, to civilise and
pacify them.
The other fascinating point in Barnett’s argument is that he includes
both China and India within the integrated core suggesting that they too
will benefit from shrinking the gap, reducing the spaces where terror, drugs
and political instability grow. Even more than this Barnett thinks that both
these states are far more interested in trading and growing their economies
than in behaving as rivals to American power. But if American strategy
doesn’t deal with the zones of instability then he fears that precisely that
instability may lead to violence, arms races, rivalries and once again global
warfare.
Formulating matters in terms of empire has the huge advantage of
putting the precise geography of the United States into question. It is no
longer so easy to follow the standard international relations device of speci-
fying the United States as just another great power if its status as such is
challenged by imperial formulations which greatly emphasises the primus
over the inter pares. It also focuses on the functions of empire, in imposing
peace but doing so in the context of an arrangement that enriches those in
the metropoles. In Joxe’s terms of course it’s the failure to impose an effec-
tive peace that is the most damning indictment of pax Americana. In
Thomas Barnett’s formulation this clearly requires that America make a
much larger effort to finally subjugate all to the rule of the global economy
of the integrated core; an imperial hubris entirely consistent with the long-
standing theme of American exceptionalism, of America as the best hope of
humanity, a people with a manifest destiny, and a mission for the future to
save humanity from itself.
EMPIRE, HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE
But looking closely at this discussion suggests two important things about
the formulations of empire and the gap. Specifically it suggests that the use
of military power is now related to the fringes of what Agnew calls the mar-
ketplace society; military force has not, as Agnew argues, built the global
order of the market.78 If one looks at the location of the violence, the places
430 Simon Dalby
where American power has been most directly exerted is in peripheral

regions, and especially those where valuable resources are to be found, or
in places where instabilities are a threat to larger political arrangements.
American involvement in “civil wars” recently also suggests a pattern of
intervention that might be called imperial, but it is also important to note
that American foreign policy is usually more frequently conducted by coop-
erative ventures, suggesting some kind of hegemony rather than
dominance.79 The pattern of violence related to resources suggests not that
American power is used to actively incorporate parts of the gap, but per-
haps it simply operates to ensure that the essential supplies continue to
flow to the manufacturing centres, without whose production activities the
whole edifice of consumption culture would collapse, and with it any
claims to hegemony.80 All of which suggests that some precision is needed
in the geography of all this; in some places the American military acts in an
imperial manner, even if strictly speaking America is not an empire in terri-
torial terms, nor is it the direct controller of many economic and political
matters outside its borders. But nonetheless the military gets used fre-
quently.
Thus to follow David Harvey’s rendition of the question Iraq is symp-
tomatic of a much larger imperial ambition, one that he poses as “whoever
controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls
the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near
future.”81 But more so than this it is important to note that the military oper-
ations in the Middle East are also tied into a particular part of the American
political economy, what Nitzan and Bichler call the weapon-dollar petro-
dollar complex: arms companies and logistics firms that provide both mili-
tary and oil field services and security.82 But, and here the argument once
again supports Agnew’s case that these recent attempts to assert military
control are against the long-term thrust of American practice, it is fairly easy
to say that this is fraction of capital that has had its day, new innovations in
high tech, biotech and renewable energy systems are nonetheless delayed
and thwarted by this backward looking policy of trying to maintain control
over petroleum in the Middle East. In Bichler and Nitzan’s terms, war in the
Middle East facilitates differential accumulation in this sector of the econ-
omy. Thus the struggles within the United States about climate change and
the adoption of new energy strategies, are also an important part of the
larger matter of resisting imperial domination in its more overt military
forms in South West Asia.
Focusing on the debate about empire suggests in part that the resis-
tance to the foreign exercise of American military power in America itself is
driven by a combination of political motives in addition to the struggle
between fractions of capital that Nitzan and Bichler discuss. First is the
revulsion at such practices at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, the application
of American power in ways that do not fit well with its supposed civilised
qualities, its claims to support human rights, etc. Supporting the house of
Saud and other dictatorial rulers in the Middle East simply is not the American
way. America is not supposed to be an empire after all! Second, many argu-
ments criticise the immense waste of resources on military adventures in the
Middle East, especially in the aftermath of the disaster that befell so many
people when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. With deficits mounting
there are compelling economic arguments against the application of the
Bush doctrine. Some of this is very reminiscent of the latter days of the
Reagan administration too, where budget deficits coincided with military
adventures and the discussion of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.83 Only
then it was great powers, not empires.
There are also technical arguments about the application of military
force in both Iraq and Afghanistan which are especially damning; but it is
noteworthy that until quite recently the finer points of these have rarely
been engaged beyond the technical journals. Except, that is, in the eloquent
statements and columns of the few experts who are familiar with the finer
points of military thinking and understand the arguments within geopolitical-
strategic discourse. Most of the discussion has been about more or less
troops, not about the practices of anti-insurgency violence versus counterin-
surgency political strategies, although this has begun to change.84 But as
Rob Walker argued back in the 1980s, such arguments, while very effective
on the finer technical points, don’t in and of themselves provide adequate
grounds to tackle the culture of militarism and its larger geopolitical pre-
suppositions of a hostile world in need of the application of American
military power.85 These arguments still need to be linked to larger under-
standings of culture and political economy if political strategies to reduce
violence and simultaneously produce more ecologically sensible modes of
living are to be effective. Critical geopolitics can surely have a useful role to
play here.86
But the critical geopolitics engagement in popular culture perhaps
need some further extension too to continue to challenge imperial subjec-
tivities. By way of a conclusion this paper offers but one suggestion for an
additional contribution. Now that the overarching evil in the Cold War, the
Soviet Union, has been replaced by a theological enemy, albeit one under-
stood as a perversion of a proud religion, American rhetoric of Christian
rectitude frequently sneaks into the official scripts. Orientalism, with its
construction of an omniscient we with the geopolitical truth, as Gregory
notes, once again pervades political discourse.87 While Tom Clancy increas-
ingly focused on the role of special forces in his novels in the 1990s, and
the necessity for undercover violence to police matters of political order
internationally, he has most recently extended this line of argument in The
Teeth of the Tiger (2003) to examine the logic for American assassination
squads operating entirely beyond any state oversight.88 Clancy’s vision of
the rightness of the cause justifying the extrajudicial murder of those whom
432 Simon Dalby
well-meaning Americans judge to be “terrorists”, links up with the parallel

arguments in the scripts of the relatively new genre of religious “thrillers”.
The popularity of books about the last days, the imminence of the rapture,
battles of Armageddon through the last quarter of a century have long
engaged with the military dimensions of geopolitics. American exceptional-
ism is given divine sanction where political violence in America and Israel’s
supposed interest meets prophesies predicting the end of the world.89 Now
this literature has met up with the technothriller genre to provide chilling
justifications for American “Christians” to kill with impunity because the
rules of diplomacy or morality do not apply to the saved. Joel Rosenberg’s
best-selling geopolitical technothriller of end times The Ezekiel Option is
exemplary.90 Here once again American exceptionalism, this time with the
authority implicit in divine blessing, grants a license to kill “Others”, and if
this happens to precipitate the extreme violence of end times, divine inter-
vention and the rapture of the faithful, so much the better.
Which leads back again to the geographical parallels with Rome and
the question the religious basis of the legitimating discourses of the Bush
administration.91 The parallels are beginning to be discussed by theologians
interested in Christianity, and Pauline versions thereof, in terms of resistance
to imperial Rome with its god-cult of Caesar and its practices of invoking
imperial justice as part of pax Romana. The links between Roman forms of
security and the appropriation by Constantine of many Christian themes,
into what much later became doctrines of state sovereignty and just war
theories, are part of this intellectual rethinking.92 The more radical interpre-
tations of Christianity as forms of opposition to the imposition of Roman
rule, or Jesus of Nazareth as a proponent of non-violent resistance to the
oppression and impoverishment of the poor in these imperial arrangements,
are once again being discussed as a counter to the contemporary invocation
of Christianity to justify military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. If
America is the new Rome, rather than the new Jerusalem, the potential for
very different interpretations of American foreign policy arises where
Washington is seen as the oppressor rather than the vehicle of salvation.93 It
all depends on the geographical analogy invoked.
All of which suggests the potential for considerable contestation of the
terms of contemporary hegemony precisely where secular social scientists
might be most reluctant to look. But drawing the explicit parallels between
the two empires opens up precisely this political possibility. These themes
are now part of political discussion, and for those who remember the his-
tory of religious wars in Europe, which are not unrelated to the founding of
the American states in the first place, this may be a very worrisome thought.
But challenges to hegemony are about contesting the taken for granted
assumptions about the context within which geopolitical language is
shaped; and if the assumption that America is a secular society within which
political debate can only be a matter of eighteenth-century liberal and
scientific categories mapped onto nineteenth-century imperial ambition, is

relaxed, then other terrains of discussion may yet become available in the
disputation of American geopolitical culture.
NOTES
1. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell 2004) p. 262.
2. Slogan on placards used by demonstrators in many places at protests against the imminent
American invasion of Iraq early in 2003.
3. Yves Lacoste, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Lacoste.>
4. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘The Language and Nature of the “New Geopolitics” – The Case of US-El
Salvador Relations’ Political Geography Quarterly 5/1 (1986) p. 73.
5. As in David Pepper and Alan Jenkins (eds.), The Geography of Peace and War (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell 1985); R. J. Johnston and P. J. Taylor (eds.), A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986, 1989); Nurit Kliot and Stanley Waterman (eds.), The Political Geography
of Conflict and Peace (London: Belhaven 1991).
6. Stanley D. Brunn (ed.), 11 September and its Aftermath: The Geopolitics of Terror (London:
Frank Cass 2004); Stephen Graham (ed.), Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards and Urban Geopolitics
(Oxford: Blackwell 2004); Colin Flint (ed.), The Geography of War and Peace: From Death Camps to
Diplomats (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005); Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds.), Violent Geographies:
Fear, Terror and Political Violence (New York: Routledge 2007).
7. See in detail James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York:
Viking 2004); Stefan Halper and Jonathon Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global
Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004); Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism
and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge 2004).
8. See for instance the breadth of contributions in Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.),
Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 1998); Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (eds.), Geopolitical
Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge 2000).
9. Matthew Sparke, ‘Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hope and the Responsibilities of Geography’,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97/2 (2007) pp. 338–349.
10. John Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press 2005).
11. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007).
12. See Simon Dalby, ‘Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom of
Heaven,’ Political Geography 27/4 (2008) pp. 439–455.
13. Matt Sparke, ‘Geopolitical Fears’ (note 9); Matthew Sparke, In the Space of Theory: Post-Foundational
Theories of the Nation State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2005); Simon Dalby, ‘Regions, Strate-
gies, and Empire in the Global War on Terror’, Geopolitics 12/4 (2007) pp. 586–606.
14. On the first decade see Klaus Dodds, ‘Political Geography III: Critical Geopolitics after Ten
Years’, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) pp. 469–484.
15. R. B. J. Walker, ‘Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent’, Alternatives 9/3
(Winter 1983–1984) pp. 303–322, reprinted in R. B. J. Walker (ed.), Culture, Ideology, and World Order
(Boulder: Westview 1984) pp. 302–322.
16. Ó Tuathail, ‘The Language and Nature of the “New Geopolitics”’ (note 4) p. 83
17. Ibid., p. 84, citing Halford J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, The Geographical
Journal 23 (1904).
18. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 1996).
19. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Geopolitical Structures and Cultures: Towards Conceptual Clarity in
the Critical Study of Geopolitics’, in Lasha Tchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems and
Regional Concerns (Winnipeg: Centre for Defence and Security Studies 2004) pp. 75–102; Gearóid Ó
Tuathail, ‘General Introduction: Thinking Critically about Geopolitics’, in Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon
Dalby, and Paul Routledge (eds.), The Geopolitics Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 2006) pp. 1–14;
See also Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitics and Global Security: Culture, Identity and the “Pogo Syndrome”’,
434 Simon Dalby
in Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge 1998)
pp. 295–313.
20. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (note 18); J. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest
and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000); J. Sharp, ‘Remasculinizing
Geo-Politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’, Political Geography 19/3 (2000)
pp. 361–364; M. Sparke, ‘Graphing the Geo in Geo-Political: Critical Geopolitics and the Revisioning of
Responsibility’, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 373–380; G. Ó Tuathail, ‘Dis/placing the Geo-Politics
Which One Cannot Not Want’, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 385–396; G. Ó Tuathail, ‘Condensing
Critical Geopolitics: Reflections on Joanne Sharp’s Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and
American Identity’, Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 159–165; J. Sharp, ‘Indigestible Geopolitics: The Many
Readings of the Digest’, Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 197–206.
21. James Der Derian and M. J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Post Modern
Readings of World Politics (Toronto: Lexington Books 1989); David Campbell, Writing Security: United
States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1992);
R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1993).
22. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical
Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography 11/2 (1992) pp. 190–204.
23. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage 1979).
24. Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other’, Alternatives: Social Trans-
formation and Humane Governance 13/4 (1988) pp. 415–442; Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold
War: The Discourse of Politics (London: Pinter, and New York: Guilford 1990).
25. Gregory, The Colonial Present (note 1).
26. Hugh Gusterson, ‘Realism and the International Order After the Cold War’, Social Research 60
(1993) pp. 279–300, at 279.
27. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest 16 (1989) pp. 3–18; Edward Luttwak,
‘From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce’, The National Interest 20
(1990) pp. 17–23; Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) pp. 22–49.
28. J. O’Loughlin and H. Heske, ‘From “Geopolitik” to “Geopolitique”: Converting a Discipline for
War to a Discipline for Peace’, in N. Kliot and S. Waterman (eds.), The Political Geography of War and
Peace (London: Pinter 1991) pp. 37–59.
29. J. S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic 1990);
N. X. Rizopoulos (ed.), Sea Changes: American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed (New York:
Council on Foreign Relations 1990).
30. Simon Dalby, ‘Reading Rio, Writing the World: The New York Times and the “Earth Summit”’,
Political Geography 15/6&7 (1996) pp. 593–614.
31. T. L. Deibel, ‘Strategies Before Containment: Patterns of the Future’, International Security 16/
4 (1992) pp. 79–108.
32. C. Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, in G. Allison and G. F. Treverton (eds.), Rethinking
America’s Security: Beyond the Cold War to a New World Order (New York: Norton 1992) pp. 295–306.
33. Ken Booth (ed.), New Thinking About Strategy and International Security (London: Harper
and Collins 1991); M. T. Klare and D. C. Thomas (eds.), World Security: Trends and Challenges at
Century’s End (New York: St. Martins 1991).
34. J. Agnew and S. Corbridge, ‘The New Geopolitics: The Dynamics of Geopolitical Disorder’, in
R. J. Johnston and P. J. Taylor (eds.), A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives (London: Basil Black-
well 1989).
35. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Japan as Threat: Geo-Economic Discourses on the U.S. Japan Relationship
in U.S. Civil Society, 1987–1991’, in C. Williams (ed.), The Political Geography of the New World Order
(London: Belhaven 1993) pp. 181–209.
36. Stephen van Evera, ‘Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesn’t: American Grand Strategy
after the Cold War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 13/2 (1990) pp. 1–51.
37. V. M. Hudson, R. E. Ford, D. Pack with E. R. Giordano, ‘Why the Third World Matters, Why
Europe Probably Won’t: The Geoeconomics of Circumscribed Engagement’, Journal of Strategic Studies
14/3 (1991) pp. 255–298.
38. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House 1987).
39. Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press 1984); Red Storm
Rising (New York: Putnam 1986); Patriot Games (New York: Putnam 1987); The Cardinal in the Kremlin
(New York: Putnam 1988); Clear and Present Danger (New York: Putnam 1989); The Sum of All Fears
(New York: Putnam, 1991).
40. Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press 1993).
41. Department of Defense, Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994–1999,
(Washington: Department of Defense 1992). The history of these themes and their subsequent
re-emergence in the Bush doctrine is recounted in Simon Dalby, ‘The Geopolitical and Strategic
Dimensions of U.S. Hegemony under George W. Bush’, in Charles Philippe David and David Grondin
(eds.), Hegemony or Empire?: The Redefinition of American Power under George W. Bush (Aldershot:
Ashgate 2006) pp. 33–49.
42. H. G. Summers, On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War (New York: Dell 1992).
43. H. K. Ullman and J. P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defence
University Press 1996); Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of Combat
(New York: Public Affairs 2001).
44. Douglas A. Macgregor, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century
(Westport, CT: Praeger 1997).
45. Robert Chase, Emily Hill, and Paul Kennedy, ‘Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy’, Foreign Affairs
75/1 (1996) pp. 33–35; Robert Chase, Emily Hill, and Paul Kennedy (eds.), The Pivotal States: A New
Framework for U.S. Policy in the Developing World (New York: Norton 1999); Daniel Esty et al., ‘State
Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings’, Woodrow Wilson Center Environmental Change and Secu-
rity Project Report 5 (1999) pp. 49–72.
46. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and T. W. Luke, ‘Present at the (Dis)integration: Deterritorialization and
Reterritorialization in the New Wor(l)d Order’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84/3
(1994) pp. 381–398.
47. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, ‘Toward a neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs
75/4 (1996) pp. 18–32.
48. Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century (Washington:
The Project for the New American Century 2000).
49. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (eds.), Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American
Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books 2000).
50. Niall Ferguson, Empire (New York: Basic 2003); Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Harvard
University Press 2002); Chalmers Johnston, Sorrows of Empire (New York: Holt 2004).
51. M. T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency
on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan Books 2004); Andrew Bacevich, The New American
Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005).
52. Dalby, ‘Regions, Strategies, and Empire’ (note 13).
53. G. Falah (ed.), ‘Forum on the War on Iraq’, Arab World Geographer 6/1 (2003) pp. 1–60.
54. Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding East-West Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell 1990).
55. Thomas P. M. Barnett, ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’, Esquire (March 2003) pp. 174–179, available
at <www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm>.
56. The theme of Robert Fisk’s book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle
East (London: Harper Perennial 2006).
57. Dalby, ‘Regions, Strategies, and Empire’ (note 13); Quadrennial Defense Review Report
(Washington: Department of Defense, Feb. 2006).
58. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire From the First Century AD to the
Third (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1976).
59. Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (New York:
Harper Collins 2004).
60. See Tim Kane, Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2003 (Washington: Heritage Foundation
Center for Data Analysis Report #04–11, 2004), available at <http://www.heritage.org/Research/
NationalSecurity/cda04–11.cfm>.
61. See Tim Bunnell, Hamzah Muzaini, and James Sidaway, ‘Global City Frontiers: Singapore’s
Hinterland and the Contested Socio-political Geographies of Bintan, Indonesia’, International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 30/1 (2006) pp. 3–22.
62. Chalmers Johnston, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan
2007)
63. See William Langewiesche, ‘Peace is Hell’, Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 2001) pp. 51–80.
436 Simon Dalby
64. Mark Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press 2007).
65. Chalmers Johnston, ‘America’s Empire of Bases’, TomDispatch.com (15 Jan. 2004). See also
‘U.S. Military Bases and Empire’, Monthly Review 53/10 (2002) pp. 1–14.
66. Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (New York:
Viking 2003).
67. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America 2006 (Washington: The White
House, Feb. 2006); Quadrennial Defense Review (note 57).
68. See Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitics after the Cold War: Rethinking the Theme of Empire’, in Lasha
Tchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems and Regional Concerns (Winnipeg: Centre for Defence
and Security Studies 2004) pp. 103–119.
69. Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder (New York: Semiotexte 2002).
70. Ibid., p. 81.
71. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map (note 55); Thomas P. M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A
Future Worth Creating (New York: Putnam’s 2005).
72. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map (note 55) p. 355.
73. For a detailed critique see Simon Dalby, ‘The Pentagon’s New Imperial Cartography: Tabloid
Realism and the War on Terror’, in Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear,
Terror and Political Violence (New York: Routledge 2007) pp. 295–308.
74. See Susan Roberts, Anna Secor, and Matthew Sparke, ‘Neoliberal Geopolitics’, Antipode 35.
(2003) pp. 886–897.
75. Philippe le Billon, ‘The Geopolitical Economy of Resource Wars’, Geopolitics 9/1 (2004) pp. 1–28.
76. Ian Bannon and Paul Collier (eds.), Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and
Actions (Washington: The World Bank 2003).
77. Michael Watts, ‘Antinomies of Community: Some Thoughts on Geography, Resources and
Empire’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 29 (2004) pp. 195–216.
78. Agnew, Hegemony (note 10).
79. John O’Loughlin, ‘The Political Geography of Conflict: Civil Wars in the Hegemonic Shadow’,
in Colin Flint (ed.), The Geography of War and Peace (Oxford: Blackwell 2005) pp. 85–110.
80. These connections which are especially clear to environmental critics of the commodity flows
that keep globalised consumption moving; see Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and
the Degradation of the Tropical World (Rowman and Littlefield 2007).
81. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003) p. 19.
82. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Dominant Capital and New Wars’, Journal of World
Systems Research 10/2 (2004) pp. 255–327.
83. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (note 38).
84. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006).
85. Walker, ‘Discourse of Dissent’ (note 15).
86. A case made in detail prior to 9/11 in Simon Dalby, Environmental Security (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 2002).
87. Gregory, The Colonial Present (note 1).
88. Tom Clancy, The Teeth of the Tiger (New York: Putnam 2003).
89. Tristan Sturm, ‘Prophetic Eyes: The Theatricality of Mark Hitchcock’s Premillennial Geopoli-
tics’, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 231–255. More generally on the importance of religion in scripting current
foreign policy see Nick Megoran, ‘God On Our Side? The Church of England and the Geopolitics of
Mourning 9/11’, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 561–579.
90. Joel C. Rosenberg, The Ezekiel Option (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale 2005).
91. Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm; Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire
(London: I.B. Tauris 2004).
92. Miguel deLarrinaga, Alterity, Social Order, and the Meaning(s) of Security, unpublished PhD
dissertation, University of Ottawa, Canada, 2002.
93. John Dart, ‘Up against Caesar: Jesus and Paul versus the Empire’, Christian Century (8 Feb.
2005) pp. 20–24.

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SPECIAL SECTION: CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The

Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Twenty years ago Gearóid Ó Tuathail called for an approach

But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need to

Address correspondence to Simon Dalby, Department of Geography, Carleton University,

How did our oil get under their sands?2

THEN AND NOW

materialist framework drawing from political economy and world system

interim geography’s engagement with feminism, cultural studies, post-

To take on his self-imposed task Ó Tuathail argued in 1986 that it was

concept of geopolitical culture makes possible a mode of analysis that

geopolitics in a number of critical registers has been clear, the difficulties of

their crucial paper on “Geopolitics and Discourse” which finally appeared in

AFTER THE COLD WAR

the triumph of liberalism was at hand so blocs were effectively over;

vocabulary for diplomats. Various “liberal/internationalist” perspectives were

reconstituted and its long-term strategic future assured in this completely

GLOBALISATION AND GRAND STRATEGY

large-scale military competition, the near peer competitor most frequently

project power, and more specifically in terms of a failure to engage more

In the aftermath of 9/11 and the crucial decision by the Administration to

of the legions, and on engineering and siege warfare techniques. This

Contemporary American strategy, and the Rumsfeld innovations of

DISORDERLY EMPIRES AND DISCONNECTED GAPS

The specific geographies of power become clearer in contrasting two very

that it is in the interests of a conqueror to enrich that which is conquered, in

Key to the argument about American influence here is the assumption

Thus Barnett is advocating the extension of globalisation, by force if neces-

forces need to be expanded to add a large component of “system adminis-

EMPIRE, HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE

where American power has been most directly exerted is in peripheral

well-meaning Americans judge to be “terrorists”, links up with the parallel

scientific categories mapped onto nineteenth-century imperial ambition, is

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