The Return Of Geopolitics

A comparative study of the relationship between the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of geopolitics in Europe.

In the 2016 CBC Massey Lectures, former Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General and international relations specialist Jennifer Welsh delivers a timely, intelligent, and fascinating analysis of twenty-first-century geopolitics. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Cold War dissipated, the American political commentator Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous essay, entitled “The End of History,” which argued that the demise of confrontation between Communism and capitalism, and the expansion of Western liberal democracy, signalled the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural and political evolution, and the path toward a more peaceful world. But a quarter of a century after Fukuyama’s bold prediction, history has returned: arbitrary executions, attempts to annihilate ethnic and religious minorities, the starvation of besieged populations, invasion and annexation of territory, and the mass movement of refugees and displaced persons. It has also witnessed cracks and cleavages within Western liberal democracies as a result of deepening economic inequality. The Return of History argues that our own liberal democratic society was not inevitable, but that we must all, as individual citizens, take a more active role in its preservation and growth.

With globalization fading and geopolitics on the rise this volume analyzes globalization/geopolitical cycles accompanied by rising and falling economic/military hegemonies and the Chinese concept of Tianxia as an equivalent of the idea of hegemony along with a theory of pre-emptive hegemonic decline. Geopolitical movements are also discussed including state-seeking movements since the 16th century, Kurdish struggles in Turkey, African terrorist groups, and the Russian intellectual movement called Eurasianism. Finally, there is a discussion of the geopolitics of the Anthropocene and the rise of Astropolitical theory.

From Mongol invasions to modern US-Russia relations--how global geopolitics shift in unforeseeable ways It has been almost 30 years since Francis Fukuyama proposed that we were entering into an era of triumph for Western liberalism he called "the end of history." Today this notion seems absurd. Political and military "strong men" once again hold sway over large portions of the globe; emerging world superpowers revive "Great Game"-style geopolitics; and worldwide catastrophes destabilize what were once thought stable borders. The essays in this volume give the reader purchase on the seemingly quickening pace of history by considering specific areas of geopolitics today, as well as historical moments when the global situation seemed to shift decisively. Contributors include: Jeremy Black, Philip Bobbitt, Michael Broers, Roger Crowley, Gregory Feifer, Noah Feldman, Jonathan Fenby, David Frum, Gabriel Gorodetsky, Peter Heather, Josef Joffe, Anna-Lena Laurén, John H. Maurer, Sean McMeekin, Walter Russell Mead, Richard Miles, Fraser Nelson, Richard Overy, Lincoln Paine, Andrew Preston, Morris Rossabi, Charly Salonius-Pasternak, Norman Stone, Barry Strauss and Mikael Wigell.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system has been unipolar, centered on the United States. But the rise of China foreshadows a change in the distribution of power. Øystein Tunsjø shows that the international system is moving toward a U.S.-China standoff, bringing us back to bipolarity—a system in which no third power can challenge the top two. The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics surveys the new era of superpowers to argue that the combined effects of the narrowing power gap between China and the United States and the widening power gap between China and any third-ranking power portend a new bipolar system that will differ in crucial ways from that of the last century. Tunsjø expands Kenneth N. Waltz’s structural-realist theory to examine the new bipolarity within the context of geopolitics, which he calls “geostructural realism.” He considers how a new bipolar system will affect balancing and stability in U.S.-China relations, predicting that the new bipolarity will not be as prone to arms races as the previous era’s; that the risk of limited war between the two superpowers is likely to be higher in the coming bipolarity, especially since the two powers are primarily rivals at sea rather than on land; and that the superpowers are likely to be preoccupied with rivalry and conflict in East Asia instead of globally. Tunsjø presents a major challenge to how international relations understands superpowers in the twenty-first century.

Far-right movements, parties, and governments are changing the language and logic of international order. Zero-sum geopolitics - from Donald Trump to Brexit - and the rhetoric of putting the national interest "first" are back, and along with them come a deep fascination with the values of patriarchy, masculinity, and strength. Putting these dramatic shifts in contemporary American and European foreign policy into wider historical and intellectual context, Geopolitical Amnesia explores the liberal crisis beneath the resurgence of far-right ideas. Drawing on memory studies, it addresses the ways in which the new geopolitics intersects and interplays with an exhausted and amnesiatic liberalism. Scholars with expertise on national and regional ideological traditions look at contemporary memory wars - competing revisionist histories - from Washington to Warsaw, and from the Anglosphere to Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe. They address the changing conditions of memory and nostalgia and discuss how and why it matters that the new geopolitics takes place in an age of accelerated, fragmented, and digitalized global media. Timely and ambitious, this accessible collection reveals the far-right ideas behind the return of geopolitics and the crisis of liberalism that paved its way.

This book furthers academic scholarship in cutting-edge areas of geographical and geopolitical writing by drawing on a series of little-studied undersea living projects conducted by the US Navy during the Cold War (Project Genesis, Sealab I, II and III). Supported by an engaging and novel empirical setting, the central themes of the book revolve around the practice and construct of ‘territory’, ‘terrain’, the ‘elemental’ and the interrelationships between these material phenomenon and both human and non-human bodies. Furthermore, the book will point to future research trajectories in the form of ‘extreme geographies’ to better understand living practices in a world that is increasingly submerged and extreme.