Case Study - Geopolitics: Histories, Discourses, and Mediation:

We live immersed in a world of popular culture. It is composed of a bewildering array of narratives, images, and sounds that we often plug ourselves into for fun or just to relax. But it is also more than that: it is a space of geopolitical action. Whether it is Trevor Noah's satire of the Trump administration's diplomatic efforts on The Daily Show, Homeland's examination of drone warfare, or the villainous Russian oligarch in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, it is undeniable that while popular culture is often stigmatised for being a waste of time, it nevertheless feeds off of geopolitical events that are deemed to be important.

The geopolitics of popular culture often operates under our own radar, whether through music in the background (such as country singer Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue") or patriotic displays at sporting events (such as the singing of the national anthem or a military flyover). Both of these examples point to the ubiquity of popular culture, how it is always reminding us of who we are (or are supposed to be). Attention to popular culture usually takes the form of concern over violent video games or bias in the news media, but rarely do we think about the ways in which popular culture informs us about less controversial topics. For instance, the above examples of Toby Keith's song and the national anthem illustrate the way country music and American sporting events both utilise and generate nationalist sentiment. While those might seem obvious, popular culture is often seen to have more subtle encodings. For instance, 2012's The Avengers climaxed with an alien invasion of New York City; the heroic Avengers battled in the streets and skies of Manhattan to repel the Chitauri invaders.

The ensuing carnage was visually reminiscent of the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks in which the World Trade Center towers fell, leaving dust and debris everywhere.

The similarities between the geopolitical event and its filmic replay eleven years later were not lost on viewers; indeed, the overarching narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has gone on to explore the impact of "what happened in New York" on the heroes' relationship with the society in which they are enmeshed. Playing out over dozens of movies and several TV series, the MCU has explored the relationship between power, violence, and security in post-9/11 America.

To explore the relationship of film to 9/11, however, we have to go back in time yet furthereven before the attacks of 9/11. Many who witnessed the attacks in New York felt compelled to refer to it as "like a movie." Independence Day (1996) is just one of many movies in that past that provided a language for talking about the 9/11 attacks when they occurred later. Certainly, the U.S. government believes that popular culture and geopolitics are interlinkedthe Pentagon has allocated military equipment to movie shoots that it thinks are sufficiently pro-American in perspective, such as the Transformers franchise, and in 2005 the United States Special Operations Command was soliciting contractors to produce comic books aimed at Arab adolescents.

"In order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached. One effective means of influencing youth is through the use of comic books. A series of comic books provides the opportunity for youth to learn lessons, develop role models and improve their education" (U.S. Government 2005; in chapter 6 we will focus more on the military-entertainment complex). Thus, any full understanding of geopolitics requires that some attention be paid to popular culture and matters of identity. But what is geopolitics?

WHAT IS GEOPOLITICS?:

Even if you don't know what it is, you have likely heard the word "geopolitics." It features prominently in newspaper headlines and on twenty-four hour television channels, often in tightly knit, succinct phrases such as "the geopolitics of oil," "Russia's muscular geopolitics," and "Middle Eastern geopolitics."

The term "geopolitics" seems to be useful to journalists because it has a veneer of tremendous explanatory power: What has produced anxiety in the Baltics? Russia's muscular geopolitics. What is driving American foreign policy in the Middle East? The geopolitics of oil. It sounds so helpful, so powerfullike a key opening a lock. It seems like understanding geopolitics could lead to understanding the world.

But what exactly is geopolitics? Upon second glance, those journalistic answers ring a little hollow. Just saying the word "geopolitics" does not really explain anything at all. However, it does refer to somethinga tradition, a way of thinking that has been highly influential in the twentieth century and, seemingly, one that looks to be key to the current century as well. It is that tradition that provides the tacit explanation that journalists love to harness. In these news articles, "geopolitics" seems to refer to a hard-nosed assessment of the way the world really is, without any pie-inthe-sky illusions. The world geopolitics describes is a rough place, with limited resources and land and too many people wanting them. So where did this tradition come from?

The Origins of Geopolitics:

Organic theory of the state Populations draw strength from territory; expansion of the state is a sign of strength.

Geopolitics, as a notoriously slippery idea, can be traced back through time in innumerable ways. However, our narrative starts with Friedrich Ratzel, a German geographer at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was all the rage, and soon scholars began to try to apply Darwin's ideas to the study of societiesa move now seen as dubious as it reduces humans to making decisions based on what is "natural" rather than what might be moral or ethical.

The resulting movement was known as social Darwinism. Importantly for our purposes, Ratzel took Darwin's ideas of natural selection and applied them to countries (especially his own, Germany) in what became known as his organic theory of the state.

According to this theory, which was published in his book Politische Geographie (1897), countries (here known as states) need to grow in order to thrive. Powerful nations, Ratzel claimed, felt a powerful urge to expand the borders of their state in order to have a swath of territory that could reflect and sustain the vigor of their people.

The analogies to Darwin's "survival of the fittest" are apparent even here. They are even more obvious when one considers the consequences of Ratzel's ideas if implemented: his theory of the state legitimises continual war of all against all, as each country must seek the path of least resistance to territorial expansion and must simultaneously defend its territory at all costsor else begin a downward spiral in which less territory means less national vigor, which means further loss of territory, and so on.

Ratzel's ideas came to the United States through his student, Ellen Churchill Semple, who studied in Germany before returning to the United States, where she became a leading theorist of the environment in her own right and the first female president of the Association of American Geographers (now known as the American Association of Geographers).

Rudolf Kjelln was a Swedish political scientist who studied under Ratzel. It was he who coined the term "geopolitics" in 1899, and his further contribution was, among others, that the state and society should be viewed synergistically.

This notion, together with Ratzel's coining of the now infamous word "Lebensraum" and his legitimation of the violence inherent to it, prefigures the rise of the Nazi party and its foreign policy. The explicit link between the works of Ratzel and Kjelln and the rise of the Nazi party comes through another manKarl Haushofer.

Lebensraum "Living space" taken by a strong culture from weaker ones in Nazi geopolitics

A major general in the German army, Haushofer retired after World War I and began a new career as a political geographer, where he gained familiarity with the ideas of geopolitics, or "Geopolitik" as it is known in German. Haushofer became the founding editor of the Journal of Geopolitics in 1924, and as such he provided the intellectual basis of what would become Nazi foreign policy.

During the early 1920s his former aide-de-camp from the army, Rudolf Hess, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch (the first Nazi attempt to take power in Germany) and was thrown in jail. It was while visiting Hess in prison that Haushofer met Adolf Hitler. During World War II, Haushofer's propaganda value far exceeded his policy influence, as it was falsely rumored in the United States during the war that he headed an institute with more than a thousand geopolitical scientists plotting the perfectly scientific path to world domination. However, Haushofer was never a Nazi himself and never shared their view on the importance of race. In fact, his son was executed by the Nazis for plotting to assassinate Hitler.

Although geopolitics, in the history relayed above, appears to be purely a Central European invention, and a dubious one at that, it is not necessarily so (see Atkinson 2000 for the role of Italian geopolitics in this era). Parallel to the Central European intellectual lineage was another strand of geopolitical thought, this one Anglo-American.

In 1890, around the same time that Ratzel was conceptualising his ideas about political geography, an American admiral named Alfred Mahan published The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660-1783. In this book, Mahan, a scholar of naval history, argues strongly that control of the sea was pivotal to victory in battle, as ships could move troops and resources faster than land-based methods of travel. Mahan further argues that control of commerce is key to survival during wartime, and this means that the successful navy must be able to achieve decisive victory over the enemy's fleet, thus protecting their own commerce and exposing that of their enemy to attack.

This geostrategy dominated thinking for decades following the book's publication and in fact was the philosophy behind Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, proving that ideas soon escape the intentions of those who originate them.

Mahan's ideas found fertile soil with influential British geographer Halford Mackinder, who was variously a scholar at the University of Oxford, director of the London School of Economics, cofounder of the University of Reading, and member of Parliament. Mackinder argued that the expansion of railroad networks was fundamentally reworking the political geography of the world by giving land-based powers the ability to move troops and resources with the ease of sea-based powers.

Further, because Europe, Africa, and Asia together could be controlled by a strong land-based power, while Central Asia could never be successfully invaded by a sea-based power as it was too far from the sea, naval powers such as the United Kingdom (Mackinder was a major proponent of British Empire) and the Mahan-influenced United States could ensure that Russia (the occupier of this sea-power-immune tract of land in Central Asia) remained contained. This idea was originally published in 1904 and then updated in 1919 and 1942. Mackinder's strategy, like Mahan's, proved highly influential, providing, among other things, an intellectual basis for President Truman's Cold War doctrine of containing the Soviet Union.

Environmental Determinism and the Decline of Geopolitics

Thus, there were strands of what we can call geopolitical thinking occurring on both sides of the Atlantic prior to World War I. From these thinkers we can begin to decipher what geopolitics meant at this time. Common to all of these thinkers is an effort to systematise political life, providing order and creating general rules that are seemingly "natural."

At this point it is worth noting that the discipline of geography has traditionally incorporated both physical and human geography, and the scientific methods associated with the physical sciences were at this time dominant in human geography. Just as physics attempted to derive the rules by which matter and motion operated, human geography attempted to derive the rules associated with the social environment.

Thus, the efforts of these geopolitical thinkers to derive fundamental rules was not unusual for the time. Both the German and Anglo-American strands of geopolitics were heavily influenced by environmental determinismthe belief that human societies and their cultures are largely a product of the environment in which they develop.

This can be seen in both Mackinder's focus on land and sea powers as somehow naturally opposed to each other and also in Ratzel's focus on territory and resources as determinative of national power.

The problem with environmental determinism is that the rules derived in its name invariably turn out to be less than universal. For instance, environmentally deterministic scholarship has argued simultaneously that the intellectual developments in classical Greece were because the landscape of mountains inspired loftier thoughts and that America was similarly drawn to greatness because of its wide open plains, which led inhabitants to "think big." Of course these are simplistic formulations, and environmental determinism can be quite sophisticated, as in the work of Jared Diamond (1999).

Similarly, the work of Robert Kaplan (2012, 2017) and Tim Marshall (2016) has been very popular in recent years, as their work purports to explain global geopolitical patterns. Nevertheless, all forms of environmental determinism suffer from a lack of attention to what people think and do.

Indeed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that, while the environment obviously influences what people do, what people do is increasingly modifying the environment through climate change and other processes.

What is also true of these writers is that, although they sought to derive the objective truth about how the world of politics and states works, they all approached it from a subjective standpoint. Mahan's "universal" naval geostrategy was composed in the milieu of a newly industrialising country with two long coastlines. His proscription for a strong navy is further contextualised by Mahan's position as a naval officerhis claims can be viewed as a strategic maneuver within the long-running interservice rivalries of the U.S. armed forces. Mackinder's geopolitical vision similarly deals entirely with the anxiety of maritime nations being overwhelmed by land-based powers.

As an avowed imperialist, Mackinder was personally particularly keen to prevent Russia from severing the link between Great Britain and India (Russia and the United Kingdom engaged in a long rivalry for domination of Central Asia during the late 1800s, often referred to as the "Great Game".

Haushofer's Geopolitic was oriented toward justifying conflict with the purpose of regaining the territory that Germany lost in World War I, a war in which he fought and which he viewed as lost by geopolitically unsavvy national leaders. Thus, every one of these writers approached geopolitics from their own national, and sometimes personal, perspective. It is important to note that this is not a personal flawit is impossible for anyone to abstract themselves from their subjective identity in order to conduct objective research.

The problem here is that they did not acknowledge their own perspective and reduce the scope of their claims. Instead, their universal theories of how the world works were aimed directly at their national policy makers; political geographer Isaiah Bowman even went to Paris as an American negotiator for the treaties that concluded World War I. In the hands of these scholars, geopolitics was formulated as a kind of applied political geographyacademic knowledge bent to the purposes of the state.

In the aftermath of World War II, Geopolitik was seen as corrupted by its association with Haushofer and Hitler's ambitions. With it went the English version of the word; Isaiah Bowman even wrote an article claiming to differentiate between the supposedly neutral, objective science of American geography and the ideological perversion that was German geopolitics. Geopolitics became a dirty word, described by American geographer Richard Hartshorne as intellectual poison (Hartshorne himself had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, so he was hardly neutral himself).

The Return of Geopolitics:

From shortly after the end of the war until about 1970, geopolitics was not the subject of serious academic study, although the word did persist somewhat in the journalistic sense described at the beginning of this chapter, and political geographers such as Saul Cohen continued to study politics at the global scale. This, however, does not mean that geopolitical thinking came to an end. Indeed, the onset of the Cold War brought global, geopolitical thinking to the fore in a way that had never happened before. With two global superpowers seemingly locked in conflict, the entire world had to be rendered understandable for leaders and citizens of the major powers. This was a distinctly geographical projectboth in regard to constructing a geostrategy and making populations feel like their security hinged on events in distant parts of the world.

It is impossible to understand Truman's containment policy (which justified permanent military commitments like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO]) and the later domino theory (which justified the Vietnam War) as anything but applied political geography. Indeed, political geographers such as Saul Cohen were involved early on, but the term "geopolitics" never reared its head until Henry Kissinger became involved in U.S. presidential politics.

As national security advisor and secretary of state, Kissinger advocated just the sort of faux-objective calculation in American foreign policy that the journalistic usage of "geopolitics" today refers to, and it is perhaps to him that we owe this lingering meaning. While not directly referencing (or exonerating) the pre-World War II usage of the term, he nevertheless seemed to lift the veil by implying that the study of geopolitics could work for the United States.

A new generation of scholars began to look at geopolitics in the 1960s and 1970s, lending diversity to the geopolitics described by Saul Cohen. However, just as Ratzel, Mackinder, and Haushofer were rooted in their time, so were these scholars. The 1970s in geography were a time dominated by a type of analysis that became known as spatial science. The spread of computing technology facilitated understandings of geographic phenomena as geometric relations across space that could be objectively measured, with foreign policy made on this rational basis.

Generally speaking, this abstract form of geopolitics envisioned the world as a Cartesian plane, with geopolitical actors (states) located at specific coordinates and weighted according to their power, resources, and the like, allowing models to be built. Much like prior formulations of geopolitics (the work of American geographer Nicholas Spykman in particular foreshadowed this approach, with his notions of power degrading with distance from its epicenter), this "new" geopolitics assumed an anarchic, violent world in which the gain of territory and resources is the main motivating force in action. However, this reincarnation of "objective" geopolitics was quickly joined by a radical refiguring of geopolitics led by the French geographer Yves Lacoste.

Where the quantitative form of geopolitics was related to the technological innovation of the 1970s, Lacoste's more openly partisan geopolitics reflected the Marxism and radicalism of that same decade. His 1973 paper on the geography of U.S. bombing patterns near Vietnam's Red River exposed the United States' attempt to destroy the dike system that maintained the region's agricultural system.

This paper was followed by a pamphlet titled The Purpose of Geography Is, above All, the Making of War! which made clear the relationship between professional geographers and the maintenance of inequality around the world. Indeed, historically, geography has been in the first instance about mapping places to be colonised and later about teaching imperial subjects about the extent of their domain.

Further, as we have seen, the history of geopolitics in the twentieth century is one fraught with dubious forays into imperialism and warfare. While linguistic differences, among other things, have kept Lacoste from being more integrated with the Anglophone geopolitics community, his interventions marked a turning point in the way geopolitics was conceived in the Anglophone world.

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; alliance founded to fight against the Soviet Union during the Cold War

Domino theory Belief during the Cold War that if one country becomes communist, its neighbours will as well

Henry Kissinger National security advisor and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations (1969-1977)

Spatial science Form of geography associated with quantitative analysis of locations and distributions

Cartesian plane Two-dimensional surface with a location-finding grid associated with it

Marxism Political-economic theory and practice that argues that economic exploitation is at the root of society

CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS

Critical geopolitics Intellectual movement dedicated to questioning the geographic assumptions of global politics

Poststructuralism Body of thought that takes meaning as not pregiven

In the late 1980s, the Anglophone political geography community belatedly began to incorporate intellectual currents that were already existent elsewhere in the social sciences. These currents were collectively known as poststructuralism, and they downplayed (but did not disparage) the role of economic and political structures in social life.

Those involved in poststructuralism generally advocated the importance of language and culture, alongside the economic and political structures, in understanding social outcomes.

Those actively incorporating poststructuralism into geopolitics, such as Gearid Tuathail (1996), Joanne Sharp (1996), John Agnew (1994), and Simon Dalby (1991), sought to refashion the subdiscipline as something more contemporary and dynamic than the static geopolitics of the past. Hence, their projectdubbed "critical geopolitics"focused on discourse.

Discourse

"Discourse" is a term that refers to the way in which we talk about things. Discourses are key to any understanding of the world, geopolitical or otherwise. A short example of geopolitical discourse can be found in the oft-used phrase "Middle East" to describe the region around today's countries of Iraq, Israel, and Saudi Arabia (among others). This term, upon consideration, is meaningless without a centre point against which the Middle East is being measuredif something is the "East," it must be east of something in particular. That centre point is Britain, which dominated the region after World War I. Using this term, then, tacitly accepts the British claim to be the centre of the world (which is cartographically mirrored by their successful mapping of the prime meridian to go right through the outskirts of London).

This may seem innocent enough, but consider the Iraqi citizen who self-identifies as a Middle Easternerthey have accepted a term that reinforces their own geopolitical marginality. That someone could view themselves as anything other than the centre of their own world illustrates a fundamental tenet of the poststructuralist turnthat words, and discourse, have great power. It is worth remembering that "geography" can be translated from the Greek as "earth writing." This term comes from geography's early definition as the science of mapping and dividing the world up into natural regions. However, today it lends a new meaning as increasingly geography is about studying the ways in which we inscribe meanings into placesliterally dividing the world up into spaces with which we associate values.

So, where classical geopolitics sought to root it's analyses in "the way the world is," critical geopolitics interrogates how and why we have come to think of the world (or parts of it) in a certain way. This is a very useful intellectual move, as it calls into question all sorts of received wisdom, including that which we produce now. For instance, if we view classical geopolitics as a discourse rather than the truth about the world, we can identify several features of international politics that are neglected and several that are overemphasised. For instance, every classical geopolitical thinker from Ratzel on assumes the primacy of the state in global affairs. Indeed, for these thinkers it was their job to advance their own state among the others. The world is seemingly naturally composed of these states, which unproblematically reflect cultural and historical divisions among humanity. One term, still used today to great advantage by politicians because of its geopolitical heft, is "the national interest.

By terming something the national interest, a leader can rhetorically undercut any opposition, who by definition is then against what is best for the country (subtly identifying the opposition as traitors is a time-honoured tactic in democratic politics). However, that term elides a great many distinctions between the people of a nation. Is free trade in the national interest of the United States? Perhaps for the executives who run Hollister, but perhaps not for North Carolina textile workers. By adopting the state as the only frame through which geopolitical decisions can be legitimately made (a notion called state-centrism), less powerful groups and individuals are literally erased from consideration.

state-centrism The assumption that states are the natural unit of analysis in geopolitics:

Formal Geopolitics

Scholars of critical geopolitics have identified three different types of geopolitical discourse. These are very broad categories, and some discourse seems to bridge these categories rather confusingly. Nevertheless, the categories are quite useful in day-to-day usage (see table 1.1). The first category is "formal geopolitics." This is geopolitical discourse produced by academics, either in university settings or in more overtly political think tanks like the Heritage Foundation or the Brookings Institution. A think tank is an institution that is funded to conduct research to advance the policy goals of its supporters.

Thus, all the classical geopolitical thinking that was described at the beginning of this chapter can be described as formal geopolitics. Despite our focus here on critical geopolitics, we should not lose sight of the fact that much of the work done in political science and international affairs is done within the tradition of classical geopoliticsthe tradition of scholars informing policy makers about "how the world is" and telling them what to do to maximise the state's power. For instance, President George W. Bush's second secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was a professor of political science at Stanford University who initially gained the ear of the Reagan administration and subsequently the George H. W. Bush administration, serving as an expert on the Soviet Union. After being secretary of state, she went back to teaching political science. From this example we can see that formal geopolitical discourse is generally formulated to feed into government decision making.

Think tanks Organisations dedicated to policy analysis:

Practical Geopolitics

The move of Dr. Rice into government symbolises our segue into the second type of geopolitical discourse, "practical geopolitics." This is the discourse used by politicians and policy makers. While it often follows from formal geopolitical theorising, it frequently takes on a life of its own as politicians seek to frame debate to advantage themselves. A classic example of practical geopolitical rhetoric would be President George Washington's Farewell Address (1796). In it, Washington wrote that

the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. . . .

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rival-ship, interest, humour, or caprice?

As you might sense, much has changed since 1796 in terms of how presidents communicate. In this passage, Washington argued that the geographic location of the United Statesacross the Atlantic from the ongoing wars between the United Kingdom and Franceprovided the infant country with a buffer that ought to shape its foreign policy. Indeed, Washington's principle that the United States ought not enter into any permanent alliances was followed until after World War II, when the United States began building up a network of regional alliances around the world.

Practical geopolitics may seem to be the most important form of geopolitical discourse; it is certainly the "business end" of geopolitics, as the words of politicians can unleash death and destruction on the objects of their discourse. However, it is not necessarily the most common. That honour is held by the third type of geopolitical discourse, "popular geopolitics."

Popular Geopolitics

Popular geopolitics refers to the everyday geopolitical discourse that citizens are immersed in every day. In a democratic society (which is not a given, of course) popular consent is necessary to some degree for the conduct of foreign policy. In June 2018, President Trump wanted to initiate a trade war with America's allies in order to get them to agree to terms of trade that were more beneficial to the United States. That is, Trump wanted to raise tariffs (taxes) on goods imported from countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada, all of which had been America's closest allies over the last fifty years. However, American law only allows the president to deviate from agreed trade deals with these countries if the tariffs are necessary to protect American national security. Trump duly certified that this was a matter of national security, and the tariffs were put into place. This caused Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to call Trump on the phone, asking how America's closest ally could be a threat to national security. Trump replied that Canada had burned the White House down during the War of 1812 (it was actually the British).

This exchange played to the Canadians' benefit when it was leaked to the press, with comedians and late-night TV hosts mocking the president. Even the conservative Fox News joked, "Maybe we need a northern wall." While most Americans know little about Canada, they generally associate Canada with a stereotype of cheerful politeness, hockey, beer, maple syrup, and so on.

The stereotype is a distinctly unthreatening one. In fact, Canada's good neighborliness has been a staple of Hollywood comedy for decades, spoofed in films like The Canadian Conspiracy (1985), Canadian Bacon (1995), South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), and Super Troopers 2 (2018). It was not one of those films that accomplished this or a particular late-night comedian. Rather, it was all of these examples, and more, saturating everyday life with the idea of Canada as friendly and unthreatening to Americans. Therefore, Trump's attempt at enacting a practical geopolitical discourse around Canada crashed into a deeply set popular understanding of Canada and could not take root as a discursive "fact."

As this example demonstrates, popular geopolitics involves the study of the media in virtually all its forms. We use the word so often just referring to the news media that we often forget the root meaning of itmedia are avenues through which information is mediated to us. Any formal or practical geopolitical discourse needs to be broadly disseminated if it is to become a popular geopolitical discourse. In addition, it is important to remember that geopolitical discourses can be formulated "from below" by grassroots discussion. Those, too, would have to be mediated to a larger audience to become truly popular.

The focus of popular geopolitics on the media includes the news media (newspapers, TV journalism, etc.) and, most important for this book, popular culture, such as comic books, television shows, novels, movies, music, and the internet. We live in a mediated worldall that we know about the world beyond our immediate experience comes to us via various media, whether it is the printed word, the televisual, radio, or something else entirely. The media even colonise our personal experiences; it is almost impossible to go somewhere without preconceived notions of what to look at and how to feel about it. What would it be like to experience a place not having read about it or seen it on screen? Thus, the media play a major role in not only how we see the world but also how we make sense of it.

This mediation of the world is geopolitical because it occurs in ways that associate values and behaviours with various parts of the world, which in turn influences the ways people interact. For example, during the Reagan administration, there was a steady flow of anticommunist action films, including Red Dawn (1984), in which the Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans launch an unlikely invasion of Colorado, only to be turned back in part by a group of American teenagers who refuse to collaborate, and Rocky IV (1985), in which the "Italian Stallion" defeats a much bigger, steroid-enhanced Soviet boxer through sheer American hard work and willpower. In the latter movie, the final match takes place in Moscow, and the crowd is so convinced that Rocky deserves to win by what they see that they begin to chant his nameeven the Soviet leader (a Mikhail Gorbachev lookalike) is compelled to stand and applaud Rocky's superiority.

Although both movies are somewhat comical in retrospect now that the Cold War is long over, they served to reinforce what was common sense at the timethe Soviets wanted to defeat (and possibly kill) Americans if they could, and they would utilise underhanded trickery (the steroids) to do so; but the United States would always triumph because of innate traits that made us successful in geopolitics (and boxing, apparently). Later, completely different villains would take the place of the Soviets, with nevertheless similarly derogatory characterisations. For instance, when Red Dawn was remade in 2012, the villainous invaders were rewritten to be North Koreans, backed by ultranationalist Russians. There is plenty more that could be discussed about these movies, but we will have to limit our discussion here to providing an example of how popular culture serves to mediate popular geopolitical discourse about who "we" are and what "our" position in the world is vis--vis those who are different from us.

Popular Geopolitics beyond the Media

The focus thus far on geopolitical discourse has tended to emphasise the mediation of elite views, whether those are of geopolitical theorists, of presidents and prime ministers, or of Hollywood moguls. This is a problem in that popular geopolitics is necessarily the realm of everyday life, and even the biggest couch potato doesn't spend all their time in front of a screen. How can we think about popular geopolitics in a more lived, embodied way?

One way to think about this is in terms of a global sporting event like the World Cup, in which football (soccer) teams representing many countries around the world come together in a tournament every four years. Each region of the world has a tournament in "off years" to qualify for the tournament, so only the best teams from each region attend. Given the global popularity of football, the Men's World Cup is second perhaps only to the Summer Olympics as a global sporting phenomenon.

One way to think about the World Cup as a form of popular geopolitics is to think about the players. Their bodies, wearing jerseys decorated with national symbols, become invested as avatars of the nationtheir successes and failures mapped onto the nation itself. There is a great deal of pressure to represent the nation well, both in sportsmanship and in actual performance. As an extreme example, consider the Colombian football player who accidentally scored a goal against his own team in the 1994 Men's World Cup, causing his team to be eliminated. Five days later, he was assassinated in Colombia by (it is rumoured) a drug cartel. Usually the stakes are not that high. But the players' bodies become important in other ways as well.

For instance, during the 2018 Men's World Cup, the winning French team was notable for its diversityseventeen players (of the team's twenty-three total) were the sons of immigrants, largely from North Africa. Other successful teams like Belgium and England have similarly built winning teams from their immigrant populations. The Belgian success stems from the funding of youth football programs, not only to make a better national team but also as a means of integrating native-born Belgians and immigrant communities that otherwise might remain in ghettos. Playing football together is seen as a way of overcoming racial, religious, and linguistic divides and forging a unified country. When the team is advancing in a global media event like the World Cup, it also puts those multiracial bodies on screens all around the world, making a tacit claim about citizenship and belonging in those countries.

Speaking of screens, let's consider the people watching those screens all over the world. Unlike Hollywood films or TV shows, sporting events are unscripted and so the outcome is not known in advance. Your player or team may perform well, or they may not. Your opponent may perform well, or they may not. But notice what has already happenedthe viewer has been positioned as part of a nation, and among the many types of nationalism (see chapter 2), cheering for your national team is understood as among the most benign and socially acceptable forms. Many people watch World Cup games in public spaces, either in bars or in public squares where a Jumbotron has been set up. Watching national teams in groups allows for a kind of group synergy to form, with high-fives or mutual consolation bonding the group under the banner of the nation when a goal is scored. That group synergy, mixed with the tension of the unscripted game and the high stakes, can lead to outbursts of public emotion when either victory or loss is realised.

Sometimes this takes benign forms, like a street party. Sometimes it takes a darker turn, such as when English fans in 2018 trashed an Ikea after their team defeated Sweden. Through this example of the World Cup, we can see how popular geopolitics can be a more lived and embodied experience. While the televisual aspect of the World Cup absolutely matters (about 815 million people were estimated to be watching at any given time in 2018), as it connects the players with the viewers, it is what players (and viewers) do with their bodies that mattersthe running and kicking, the high-fiving and shouting. Popular geopolitics of this sort happens all the time, and not just at major events like the World Cup. What we do, and how we do it, is central too shaping geopolitics. Our bodies remain our most potent geopolitical tools. Necessarily, one person has relatively little geopolitical power.

However, one person can make a difference, especially when their action is picked up and mediated to the masses. Such was the case in December 2010 when a father of eight children named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. Bouazizi did so after his produce cart was confiscated by the Tunisian government, which had been led by a dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, since 1987.

This act of desperation resonated with the people of Sidi Bouzid, who erupted in riots. Within a month, Ben Ali was driven from the country, and Tunisia began the process of setting up a democracy. The Tunisian revolution spread, with social media fueling unrest throughout the Middle East, and came to be known as the Arab Spring. Few of the subsequent revolutions were as successful as the Tunisian one, and many turned into long-term bloodbaths (as in Syria). But this serves as an excellent example of the power inherent in a single body when amplified by various forms of media. Crucially, this gives all of us a role in shaping geopolitics.

Questions:

1. What are two things you understood well from this reading
2. What is one thing you did not understand and what specifically or why?
3. What is one thing that you really liked from this reading?