ipl-logo

John Agnew Geopolitics Analysis

2512 Words11 Pages

In a world where there is much to know, there are also many ways of knowing Claims to one particular way of knowing have frequently been exposed as either misrepresenting or excluding a variety of histories, places and contemporary experiences. Feminist commentators have been highly influential in exposing the faction that there is a particular place from which one could get a God’s eye view of the world’ . Thus, the claim of the modern geopolitical writer to survey the world independently of ideology or prejudice would be considered intellectually dubious as well as arrogant. This does not mean, however, that we are unable to make any kind of meaningful statement about the world around us. Rather, it implies that we need to consider …show more content…

The invention of the ‘geopolitics’ coincided with a certain modernist belief that it was possible to view the world in its totality. The earliest texts of geopolitics reflected the belief that the European observer possessed the necessary intellectual and conceptual framework for viewing the world as an external and independent ‘object’. The earliest innovators of geopolitics in Europe and America such as Halford Mackinder and Nickolas Spykman tended to view geopolitics reasoning, which stressed the capacity of states to act within a changing global arena. Geopolitics was, therefore, a decidedly state-centric enterprise in the sense that the nation-state was paramount and geopolitical writers were eager to offer policy advice. Moreover, the physical environment was frequently conceptualized as a fixed stage on which political events occurred rather than a dynamic and shifting problem which influenced the natural of world …show more content…

In contrast to earlier writings, geopolitics is now not considered to be a neutral technique or device for viewing the world; instead it is seen as a discourse which can be employed to represent the world in particular ways. Thus, the first and most noteworthy source of critical geopolitics was derived from an investigation of the discourses of geopolitics and international relations. Such a position implies that perceptions of the world are derived from a series of assumptions, rules and convention that are brought to bear by those seeking to explain events and

Open Document