This thesis examines how the Amazigh diaspora, networked in France's Amazigh cultural associations, village committees and political movements, constructs an imaginative geography of North Africa, which they call Tamazgha, and the implications this has for this emergent and diverse group. It sets out to theorise and understand the political geographies of this diasporic social movement in the contemporary moment. It does so by approaching the Amazigh diaspora as its primary object of research within a relational, multiscalar analysis of its geopolitics. This thesis contributes to the subdiscipline of political geography as well as Amazigh studies. Drawing on ethnographic and documentary methods, including an experimental methodology for the digital sphere, it outlines the major themes of the diasporic Amazigh movement's relationship to space and place; making the diaspora, articulating indigeneity, negotiating citizenship and accommodating nativism. It analyses facets of Amazigh diaspora politics at times as a nation, at others as a social movement, finding a productive interaction between these two concepts. It is both an imagined community of people who claim to share a common language and culture and a political movement entraining activists, members and political parties in the pursuit of political change. As an Indigenous people, it is both a transnational social movement calling on the states where they live to uphold the rights of their Amazigh populations, and also a nation with a flag, asserting its claim to sovereignty, however limited. The diaspora associations frame themselves as a social movement championing diverse citizenship and integration in French society, whilst homeland-oriented citizenship is mostly expressed in nationalistic terms. This thesis charts how the politics of this diasporic Amazigh movement contest and produce spatial imaginations in the contemporary context of Mediterranean integration, new nationalisms and populisms, and the fear of Islamist terrorism in French society. With its focus on the political and imaginative geographies of the diasporic Amazigh movement, the thesis is organised topically, elaborating on different facets of political subjectivities in four substantive chapters that focus on the core themes of diaspora, indigeneity, citizenship and nativism. Chapter 2 provides an historical and sociological context for the study, and Chapter 3 details its methodology. Chapter 4 examines diaspora as a geopolitical concept, understood on the one hand as like a social movement and on the other as like a nation. It presents an understanding of diaspora 'as process' or 'assemblage' that constantly reworks the boundaries of nation, state, community and identity, within an imaginative geography of 'home'. Chapter 5 picks up from here to focus on how indigeneity is articulated as a political positioning in the diasporic Amazigh movement. Drawing on Stuart Hall's terminology to theorise the politics of indigeneity in relation to place, it outlines several Indigenous articulations made in the discourse and practices of the leaders and members of diasporic Amazigh associations. Chapter 6 focuses on the discourses and practices of citizenship, which in the diaspora intersect, overlap and produce transnational spaces. Drawing out an empirical distinction between 'diaspora-oriented' and 'homeland-oriented' citizenships, the chapter details how citizenship practices in relation to French state and society can be understood as 'ordinary' whilst those in relation to North African state(s) and society are characterised more as performative 'Acts'. Finally, chapter 7 homes in on Amazigh politics in the current context of increasingly influential nativist-populism in France and across Europe.

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This study is concerned with the role of contemporary Czech geographic and travel writing and its involvement with the creation and reproduction of spatialised identities and imaginative geographies as they relate to the 'developing world'. It employs the method of discourse analysis (mostly research tools taken from Critical Discourse Analysis) to examine the contents of articles from all issues of the magazines Koktejl and Lidé a Země for the year 2012. This is done in order to analyse the portrayals of such spaces within the context of imaginative geography and the post-development critique and bring attention to the kind of popular geopolitics that is being created. The main topics covered includes the construction of identity between the authors, readers and the objects of writing, the linear understanding of the flow of history and progress and the relationship between the writers and their objects (both places and people). The main findings of the research consist in the identification of the continued prevalence of the perception of linearity of history which constitutes the developing places as subjected to a universal historical process whith the European civilisation as the current endpoint of history. These places are therefore considered a legitimate domain of knowledge, appreciation...

[pt] As histórias em quadrinhos quando aplicada no ensino de geografia possui e usa a imaginação com intuito de realizar algum plano através da organização dos fatos e seus significados imaginativos e criativos; manifestando uma preocupação séria pelas personalidades e eventos do passado [...] e um desejo de entender a ordem social à luz de seus antecedentes. (TUAN, 1990, p.439). De forma a pensar uma alternativa de conhecimento iremos destacar o Giro Decolonial que é aqui entendido como uma crítica epistemológica e ontológica que traz uma reflexão sobre nossa memória, nosso imaginário, nossa subjetividade, nossas formas de existir cotidianas. (CRUZ, 2017, p.25). Ancorados nestes princípios, através da uma atividade realizada para com os estudantes do Cap-UERJ de produção de histórias em quadrinhos, propomos a construção de um conhecimento através de um sistema coerente e identificável de sinais comunicativos que expressam a experiência única que cada um de nós tem da vida. (BRUNETTI, 2013, p.18). Para assim, proporcionar aos envolvidos na atividade a construção de um conhecimento escolar de Geografia que permite enxergar e entender as relações de poder presentes na sociedade, conferindo capacidade para os envolvidos se posicionar como sujeitos e agentes transformadores do real. / [en] Comic books when applied to geography teaching have and use imagination in order to carry out some plan through the organization of facts and their imaginative and creative meanings; manifesting a serious concern for the personalities and events of the past ... and a desire to understand the social order in the light of their background. (TUAN, 1990, p.439). In order to think about an alternative of knowledge, we will highlight the Decolonial Giro, which is understood here as an epistemological and ontological criticism that brings a reflection on our memory, our imaginary, our subjectivity, our daily ways of existing. (CRUZ, 2017, p.25). Anchored in these principles, through an activity carried out with Cap-UERJ students in the production of comic books, we propose the construction of knowledge through a coherent and identifiable system of communicative signs that express the unique experience that each of we have of life. (BRUNETTI, 2013, p.18). To do so, provide those involved in the activity with the construction of a school knowledge of Geography that allows them to see and understand the power relationships present in society, providing the ability for those involved to position themselves as subjects and agents that transform the real.

This thesis deals with Japanese foreign and security policy through the optics of critical geopolitics, specifically the "geopolitics as culture" notion developed by Gearóid Ó Tuathail. Using this notion as an analytical framework, the development of Japan's foreign and security policy from the establishment of a modern Japanese state till present days is analyzed, with three main concepts being addressed: (1) foreign policy traditions; (2) geopolitical and geostrategic discourses; (3) and strategic and geopolitical culture. For reasons of narrowing the topic down and applying the concept more consistently, one specific element of Japanese foreign and security policy is at the centre of attention: Japan's "maritime identity". The goal of the thesis is to identify and characterize Japan's geopolitical imagination and attempt to determine if and how has this imagination been expressed in the country's security policy with regard to the maritime identity. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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).