Politicians justify border walls by arguing that it would protect the nation from outside threats, such as immigration or terrorism. The literature on border walls has identified xenophobic nationalism's centrality in framing border walls as a security measure. Yet, alternative geographic visions of nationhood in Hungary, Georgia and Israel define the fenced perimeters in these countries as the lines that divide the nation and its territory. These cases illustrate the contradiction between the geography of security, marked by the border wall, and the geography of nationhood, which extends beyond the fenced boundary. These cases allow us to problematize the link between "security" and "nationalism" and their relationship with borders. Therefore, this dissertation is a study of the politics of reconciling distinct geopolitical visions of security and nationhood in the making of border walls. Justification of border walls requires the reframing of the national territory in line with the geography articulated by border security and away from the spatially expanded vision of nationhood. A successful reframing of the nation's geography is a matter of politicians' skills to craft a convincing geopolitical storyline in favor of the border wall that would combine security and nationalist arguments (Hungary). However, even the most skillful rhetoricians will find it hard to create such a discursive story if the hegemonic geography of nationhood has firmly fixed the meaning of the fenced line not as a border but as a dividing line across the nation's geo-body (Georgia). Where such hegemonic geography of nationhood is absent and the society disagrees over the meaning, shape and location of borders and territory, a security discourse in favor of the border wall would sway the public opinion towards that type of territorial conception of nationhood, which overlaps with the promise of protection (Israel). / Doctor of Philosophy / Politicians justify border walls by arguing that it would protect the nation from outside threats, such as immigration or terrorism. This study shows that the new border walls do not necessarily mean the rise of nationalism. Instead, the nationalism associated with border walls has sidelined and replaced other forms of nationalism that aim to keep the border open and expand the state's reach beyond the sovereign boundaries. In Hungary, Georgia and Israel, new border walls serve the purpose of security. Simultaneously, they separate the country from the areas beyond the fenced line but are considered part of the national territory. This study accounts for the political process that aims to reconcile these territorial contradictions between the quest for border security and the nationalist desire to maintain power beyond the border wall. The study has found that such a dual functioning of the borders has been possible in Hungary and Israel. In contrast, in Georgia, the fence remains a deeply negative symbol of the nation's territorial division.

Animals have been integral to human activities for millennia. It could be reasonably argued that humans have never existed independently of animals. Animals have been impacted by human activities (e.g., agriculture, transportation, military power, and ecotourism) and human societies in turn have been changed. Despite this enduring dialectical relationship between humans and animals, there has been a notable lack of attention given to the political significance of animals. Against this backdrop, this dissertation seeks to reevaluate fundamental operations of the state through the lens of animals by asking: how do animals make the state? Specifically, how do whales make the state? Here, I aim to demonstrate how engaging with whales can complicate and reconceptualize existing geographical theories of the state, particularly concerning territory, development, and resources. My analysis centers on exploring the multifaceted historical and geographical intersections of human-whale entanglements in East Asia, with an emphasis on South Korea’s (post)colonial whaling relations with Japan and on the city of Ulsan, which serves as South Korea’s former whaling center and current whale tourism hub. Combining theories and methods from various fields including environmental geopolitics, political ecology, resource geography, and animal geography, I employed a range of qualitative methods, including archival analysis, in-depth interviews, on-site observations, and textual analysis of secondary literature. My findings first indicate that imperial Japan’s whaling industry in colonial Korea (1910-1945) underpinned its maritime territorial expansion in East Asia. This expansion was facilitated by the adoption/transfer of advanced whaling knowledge, technologies, and infrastructure. However, Japan’s whaling endeavor to command marine space and life during colonial rule remained partial and fragmented due to the challenges posed by the agency and materiality of whales. These findings suggest that the production of territory is a recursive process rather than a fixed outcome. Second, I examined how the (industrial) capitalist development of Ulsan configures whale tourism in specific ways, focusing on urban (economic, political, and environmental) processes and practices. As South Korea’s ‘industrial capital’, Ulsan’s growth has been primarily driven by heavy industries such as automobile manufacturing, shipbuilding, and petrochemicals since the 1960s. Despite its industrial character, Ulsan has embraced whale-based city branding and tourism. Both urban industrialism and whale tourism are incorporated into the city’s developmental projects to fix flagging urban investment and declining whale populations. My findings suggest that ecotourism development is not confined to ecologically significant or highly urbanized environments post-industrialization; it can also thrive in active industrial zones. Lastly, I analyzed Ulsan whale tourism’s three interlinked political dimensions: the politics of Bangudae Petroglyphs, the politics of distancing from Japan, and the politics of gray whales. This examination revealed how whales were selectively integrated into shaping the resource and territorial projects of both the Korean state and Ulsan. This research shows that whale tourism serves as a geopolitical tool through which whales actively (re-)shape the state. Whales serve as material and symbolic resources that underpin national resource sovereignty and territorial claims. Ultimately, this project offers a critical platform for reconsidering the role of marine animals in understanding the operation of the state. / Geography

Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).

This dissertation seeks to make a unique contribution to the study of geopolitics and empire in Central Asia by focusing on both the indigenous developments of grand strategies and their legacies by examining several key points in the history of the region's geopolitics in order to determine the peculiar and specific nature of regional geopolitical evolution, and how its basic concepts can be understood using such a locally based framework. By putting the focus on several key concepts which hold steady through major societal and technological upheavals, as well as foreign incursion and both the inward and outward migrations, which together create the conditions which I have dubbed ‘The Formless Empire', it is possible to see the elements of a regional and homegrown tradition of grand strategy and geopolitical thinking which is endemic to the area of Inner Eurasia, even as this concept adapts from a totality of political policy to merely frontier and military policy over the course of time. This indigenous concept of grand strategy encompasses political, military, and diplomatic aspects utilizing the key concepts of strategic mobility, and flexible or indirect governance. These political power systems originated in their largest incarnations amongst the nomadic people of the steppe and other people commonly considered peripheral in history, but who in a Central Asian context were the original centerpieces of regional politics until technological changes led to their eclipse by the big sedentary powers such as Russia and China. However, even these well-established states took elements of ‘The Formless Empire' into their policies (if largely relegated to frontiers, the military, and a few informal relationships alone) and therefore the influence of the region's past still lingers on in different forms in the present.

This study seeks to examine the main theories and theorists of geopolitical imagining and argue for an intrinsic relation between traditional geopolitics and the development of international relations both in theory and practice. By doing so the study aims to pursue an assessment of the insights of critical geopolitics, as reflected in the works of John Agnew, Gerar&oacute / id &Oacute / Tuathail (Gerard Toal), Simon Dalby, Klaus Dodds and others, for the theory of IR, more specifically its dominant paradigm realism. The aim of this study, in other words, is to identify and describe the geopolitical assumptions that have led IR theory to turn out to be &bdquo / realist

No description available.

This thesis starts from the premise that Geopolitics is performative, an iterative discourse “of visualising global space…reproduced in the governing principles of geographic thought and through the practices of statecraft” (Agnew 1998:11). During the last decade, two dominant discourses have shaped the contemporary geopolitical imagination – the ‘war on terror’ and ‘climate change’. These have steered conceptualisations of security and insecurity - performative iterations of who, where, and what poses a threat. The resulting geopolitical picture of the world has enabled the legitimisation of human and geographical domination – an acceptance of geographical norms that enable the continuation of uneven geographies. The research is concerned with the performative spaces of alternative geopolitics; spaces that emerge where nonviolent social movement activism and geopolitics intersect and the sites through which these are practiced and mediated. The motivations are twofold. The first is a desire to intervene in a critical geopolitical discourse that remains biased toward engagement with violent geographies. The second is to take seriously ‘geopolitics from below’, alternative geographical imaginations. I address the first of these through research that is concerned primarily with the spacing of nonviolence – the performed and performative spaces of nonviolent geographies shaped through a politics of the act. The second is approached through substantial empirical engagement with social movement activists and sites of contention and creation in opposition to dominant environmental geopolitics. ‘Militant’ ethnographic research took place over six months in 2009. It traced the journeys of two groups as they organised for, and took part in, large counter-summit mobilisations. The first was a UK based social movement, the Camp for Climate Action (UK). The second was an intercontinental caravan, the Trade to Climate Caravan. Both groups shared a common aim – to converge on the 16th of December in a mass demonstration of nonviolent confrontation; the ‘People’s Assembly’, to contest dominant discourses being performed inside the intergovernmental United Nations Conference of the Parties 15. Social movement groups from around the world would present alternative narratives of insecurity and offer ‘alternative solutions’ garnered through non-hierarchical forms of decision-making. The research followed the route each group took to the People’s Assembly and the articulations (narrative and practices) of nonviolent action.

This essay explores the Swedish state’s geopolitical view and creation, of the spatial spaces in and of the Arctic. With a critical geopolitical framework, a discourse analysis is conducted on the Swedish strategy for the arctic region, with the ambition to unfold the underlining spatial spaces, actors and dramas that this discourse creates. The result of this analysis shows that Sweden creates three different Arctic spaces within its geopolitical discourse; a Swedish Arctic, a Nearby Arctic and a Regional Arctic. This has major political consequences, which will be illuminated in the essay. Perhaps the most noteworthy being the ulterior theoretical view of the Swedish state regarding the environment and the relationship between the global space and the Regional Arctic, in relation to the threat of global and regional environmental deterioration.

Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, this dissertation addresses how the sovereign's command over life intersects with contemporary global governmentality. Particular attention is given to the geographically sedimented normative dimensions entailed in this intersection. Two broad questions emerge from this focus: 1) How are the perceived and actual boundaries of U.S. responsibility for distant (non-national) life formed; and 2) How do emotional sentiments of care and concern within the U.S. populace for distant life impact the sovereign's geopolitical calculations.The case of Sudan, especially Darfur, is utilized to help illuminate these questions. With regard to sovereign power, I analyze the Darfur related discourse being produced by the U.S. executive. I argue that this discourse is part of a bio-normative geopolitics aimed at maintaining the U.S. claim on the valuation of global life, while at the same time challenging the privileged status of the concept of genocide within our contemporary global governmentality. With regard to the societal constitution of global governmentality, I investigate two partially overlapping cases, one on the globally focused Christian Right and the other on the faith based movement to "save Darfur".In the former case, I consider how norms, values, and feelings of care contribute to the facilitation and construction of geographical knowledge, which, in turn, helps to inform particular engagements with the space of Sudan. In the latter case, the question of caring for distant others is taken up from the perspective of the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, who ultimately posits the inherent need to circumvent sovereign power within any form of normative activism. Addressing this problem, I suggest the possibility of establishing alternative communities of care, which are not only grounded on a recognition of our global intersubjectivity, but also on our common predicament in the face of a universally prevalent sovereign power.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The geopolitical change and emergence of new threats, notably terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, forced a reappraisal of the political and security roles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Alliance's post- Cold War development, operations in the Balkans, and differences across the Atlantic also provided grounds for a revision of NATO's purely self-defense dimension. The Alliance, after having permanent out-of-area debates, has realized that it can no longer be circumscribed by artificial geographic boundaries to meet the future. At its Summit in Prague 2002, NATO initiated a new concept transforming itself into an effective organization with a global approach. By establishing the NATO Response Force, balancing the burden-shifting, and opening the security dialog among likeminded allies, NATO renewed the essence of common transatlantic values. By analyzing NATO's role and its prevailing tendencies, this thesis contends that NATO is no longer a regional security organization but a collective security instrument with its first front abroad, in the Greater Middle East and Northern Africa. However, if NATO is to contribute profoundly to international peace, it needs an institutional framework with global legitimacy. / Lieutenant Colonel, Czech Armed Forces