Human Geopolitics

Migration has become a top priority for politicians and policy makers around the world, but most writing on the topic covers only half the issue, wrongly assuming that migration policy equals immigration policy where, in reality, the majority of states care more deeply about emigration and the transnational involvements of emigrants and their descendants in the diaspora. Liberal democratic states have long considered emigration controls off-limits, for fear that they violate individual freedom of exit at the same time as interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. But these norms are changing fast: in the past 25 years, more than half of all United Nations member states have established some form of government department devoted to their people living0in other countries. What explains the rise of these 'diaspora institutions', and how does it relate to the political geographies of decolonisation, regional integration, and global governance since World War II? 0This book addresses these questions, based on quantitative data covering all UN members from 1936-2015, and fieldwork with high-level policy makers across 60 states. The book shows how, in many world regions, the unregulated spread of diaspora institutions is unleashing a wave of 'human geopolitics': a kind of geopolitics involving claims over people rather than territory. It argues for the development of principles to guide the future development of state-diaspora relations in an era of unprecedented global interdependence.

Human geopolitics, the competition for population rather than territory, is an essential but weakly understood dimension of world politics today. Such competition has preceded violent conflict throughout history, but has been muted since the Treaties of Westphalia laid the territorial foundations of the modern international system in the mid-seventeenth century. Today, however, human geopolitics is being resurrected in unanticipated ways, as governments are enabled and encouraged to engage their emigrant diasporas. How and why is this happening? Until now these questions have been difficult to answer. The majority of research attention has focused on questions of immigration policy in a handful of wealthy migrant destination countries, largely ignoring the emigration policies that preoccupy the worlds many migrant origin states. This book addresses that research imbalance, by focusing on the overlooked sending side of migration policy. Drawing on data covering all UN members across the post-WWII period, and fieldwork with high-level policy makers across 60 states and a dozen international organisations, the book charts the re-emergence of human geopolitics through the global spread of diaspora institutions government ministries and offices dedicated to emigrants and their descendants. It calls for the development of stronger guiding principles and evaluation frameworks to govern these new state-diaspora relations in an era of unprecedented global interdependence.

This major reference collection highlights the contested and diverse nature of geopolitics and charts the controversial intellectual history of the field. Coined by the Swedish author, Rudolf Kjellén, the term 'geopolitics' highlights the role that territory, resources and boundaries play in shaping global political relations. The collection brings together work from international relations, political science, history, geography and law into a definitive collection that covers three dimensions of the geopolitical: classic geopolitics, critical geopolitics, and popular geopolitics.

This thought-provoking and clearly argued text provides a critical geopolitical lens for understanding global environment politics. A subfield of political geography, environmental geopolitics examines how environmental themes are used to support geopolitical arguments and physical realities of power and place. Shannon O’Lear considers common, problematic traits of such familiar but widely misunderstood narratives about human-environment relationships. Mainstream themes about human-environment relationships include narratives about presumed connections between human population trends and resource scarcity; ways in which conflict and violence are linked to resource use or environmental degradation; climate security; and the application of science to solve environmental problems. O’Lear questions these narratives, arguing that the role or meaning of the environment is rarely specified, humans’ role in these situations tends to be considered selectively, and little attention is paid to spatial dimensions of human-environment relationships. She shows that how we tend to think about environmental concerns often obscure value judgments and constrain more dynamic approaches to human-environment relationships. Environmental geopolitics demonstrates how we can question familiar assumptions to generate more just and creative approaches to our many relationships with the environment.

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.

Rachel Hughes is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Melbourne. --

"Develops a geographic approach to the politics of spectacle and its unspectacular Others through examining recent spectacular capital city development projects in seven authoritarian, resource-rich states of Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Asia"--

Young people, and in particular children, have typically been marginalised in geopolitical research, positioned as too young to understand or relate to the adult-dominated world of international relations. Integrating current debates in critical geopolitics and political geography with research in children’s geographies, childhood studies and youth research, this book sets out an agenda for the field of children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. It considers diverse practices such as play, activism, media consumption and diplomacy to show how children’s and young people’s lives relate to wider regional and global geopolitical processes. Engaging with contemporary concepts in human geography including ludic geopolitics, affect, emotional geographies, intergenerationality, creative diplomacy, popular geopolitics and citizenship, the authors draw on geopolitical research with children and young people from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. The chapters highlight the ways in which young people can be enrolled, ignored, dismissed, empowered and represented by the state for geopolitical ends. Notwithstanding this state power, the research presented also shows how young people have agency and make decisions about their lives which are influenced by wider geopolitical processes. The focus on the lives of children and young people problematises and extends what it is we think of when considering ’the geopolitical’ which enriches as well as advances critical geopolitical enquiry and deserves to be taken seriously by political geographies more broadly.