Timing geopolitics: a conceptual matrix

Klinke, I. (2013) ‘Chronopolitics: a conceptual matrix’ Progress in Human Geography [forthcoming] Chronopolitics: a conceptual matrix Ian Klinke (University College London)1 Abstract: This article engages the platform of critical geopolitics through conceptual clarification of the debates around chronopolitics (the politics of time). It argues that the current literature has either reduced it to the dynamic of ‘speed’ or the ‘modern’ time consciousness in geopolitics. After reemphasising a narrative understanding of temporality and a non‐dichotomous conception of space and time, the article highlights the hetero‐temporality of geopolitical discourse. It suggests that chronopolitics should be understood not as an alternative to geopolitics but as one of its crucial elements ‐ and one that can be found in the project of a critical geopolitics, too. Keywords: critical geopolitics; temporality, narrative, modernity, chronopolitics I Timing (critical) geopolitics Despite legitimating some of the darker episodes of 19th and 20th century history, the tradition of geopolitics continues to haunt world politics. It is in geopolitics that practitioners, academics and journalists declare to have found a sober and apolitical view that allows them to perceive a deeper layer of reality – to see the world as it really is. The continued existence of geopolitical writing has attracted academic interest and the last two decades have therefore given birth to critical geopolitics, a diverse and challenging body of scholarship, that has set out to investigate and critique the continued undead presence of geopolitics. Challenging it both as an expert‐level form of power/knowledge and as a wider cultural discourse, critical geopolitics tries to strip geopolitics of its self‐evidence. In its analysis of geopolitics as a spatial ritual, the critical study of geopolitics has concentrated especially on three discursive practices. Firstly, it has addressed the delimitation of a familiar ‘self’ space from an unfamiliar and often threatening ‘other’ space (Campbell, 1992; Dalby, 1990: 39; Gregory, 2004: 17). Secondly, it has revealed geopolitics to be a detached, privileged and panoramic (God‐like) vision that entices the observer through positioning it in a pretend position above geographic space (Agnew, 1998: 11; Ó Tuathail, 1996: 23; Dodds, 2005: 2). Thirdly, it has critiqued the way geopolitics simplifies complex social processes with the help of binary oppositions and catchy spatial labels (Agnew & Ó Tuathail, 1992: 195; Ó Tuathail, 2006: 2), the latter visualised in maps, cartoons and films (Dodds, 1996; Dittmer, 2010). Engaging both theoretical and empirical debates, critical geopolitics – more of a platform that a grand theory – has brought a unique focus on space, boundaries and vision to the study of global politics. 1 This is an updated version of a paper I originally presented at the 2010 PSA‐BISA conference in Edinburgh. For further information about the original paper, please contact i.klinke@ucl.ac.uk. Perhaps because of its relative success, some key proponents of a critical geopolitics have recently displayed a slight reluctance towards reform. Turning away from developing critical geopolitics as a theoretical apparatus, the emphasis has been on fulfilling its promise as a tool for thick description research (Ó Tuathail, 2008; 2010). It has been argued for the conservation of critical geopolitics, urging scholars to keep a ‘narrower focus on the geostrategic knowledges used to legitimise warfare, and more generally security’ (Dalby, 2010: 286). Others in the field have been less content with the current state of critical geopolitics. Critics have come from a number of theoretical positions, some of which more sympathetic to the cause than others. It has included those on the more classical geopolitical end of the spectrum who have argued against the explicit ethics that (some) critical scholars of geopolitics have adopted (Black, 2009) or have sought a compromise between critical and classical geopolitics (Kelly, 2006). This group of (partially) external critics has also included those who have proposed a more ‘radical’ or Marxist geopolitics (Geopolitics, 2011; Mercille, 2008) as well as those who have urged critical geopolitics to take its feminism more seriously (Dowler & Sharp, 2001; Hörschelmann, 2008; Hyndman, 2004). Finally, it has encompassed a number of critics, some of which poststructuralists, who have argued for an intellectual engagement with material practices of the every‐day with the help of ethnographic fieldwork (Dittmer & Gray, 2010; Megoran, 2006; Müller, 2009; Thrift, 2000) and have urged critical geopolitics to address its ethical (Megoran, 2008) and epistemological tensions (Müller & Reuber, 2008). Finally, there are also those who have examined the relationship between geopolitics and biopolitics (Gregory, 2009), or the replacement of the former by the latter (Amoore, 2006; Campbell, 2005: 947). This article wishes to add to the debates surrounding critical geopolitics by taking as its starting point two existing attempts to incorporate the concept of chronopolitics into the platform. The first of these, originally inspired by Paul Virilio’s ‘hypermodern’ writings on speed and war, is found to sit uncomfortably within critical geopolitics because of its treatment of time as something accelerating outside of narrative construction. It has also somewhat rigidly separated time from space. Instead, it is proposed here that critical geopolitics should tune its conception of chronopolitics to its discursive understanding of geopolitics and see space and time as closely intertwined. This article also takes issue with a second more postcolonial literature on chronopolitics that has highlighted the modern progressive othering at the core of Western geopolitics. Although this critique of a modern conception of time does capture the temporality of much geopolitical writing, it leaves unexplored the complexity of modern temporal experience as well as the non‐modern temporalities that (continue to) operate in geopolitical texts of all sorts. Notions of familiarity, recurrence, repetition and regularity are crucial alongside modern linear progressive and declining constructions of time. They permeate bestsellers on world politics, broadsheet commentary, think tank papers, politicians’ speeches and Hollywood blockbusters. Although some of its analytical efforts have arguably gone into an exploration of the temporal logics that underpin geopolitical discourse (Sharp, 2000: 43; 91), critical geopolitics has tended to conceptually reduce global politics to a ‘spatial spectacle’ (Ó Tuathail, 1996: 60). In line with scholarship in International Relations that has investigated modern politics as ‘spatial politics’ (Ruggie, 1993; Walker, 1995: 306; for a recent exception see Hom, 2010), geopolitics is rendered the ideological process of constructing spatial, political and cultural boundaries to demarcate the domestic space as separate from the threatening other’ (Dalby, 1990: 137 emphasis added, see also Agnew & Corbridge, 1995: 4‐5; Mamadouh, 1999: 124). This preoccupation with space has been rooted in the platform’s self‐understanding as a resistance against the subordination of space in Western intellectual thought (Ó Tuathail, 1996: 24, Soja, 1989: 11), the inspiration for which can be found in the work of Michel Foucault who claimed that ‘the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space’ (Foucault, 1986: 22, see also Dalby, 1990: 21). This emphasis on spatiality has not gone 2 unnoticed and one observer complained already more than a decade ago that ‘the centrality of the spatial in the modern imagination’ needed ‘a more considered justification’ in critical geopolitics (Heffernan, 2000: 349). If, as one observer remarks, time is always ‘deeply involved in geopolitics’ (Aalto & Berg, 2002, 267), then critical geopolitics needs to assemble more conceptual tools to unpack it. An important step towards a more sophisticated conception of chronopolitics is to recognise that critical geopolitics is already engaged in analyses of political time, even if it does not always admit to it. Questions of prediction, historical analogy and even periodisation have played a key role in the analysis of geopolitical discourse, but the many references to geopolitics as the politics of space alone inhibit a full appreciation of how these are chronopolitical. Perhaps critical geopolitics has taken a little too seriously Foucault’s injunction to write a history of spaces (Foucault, 1980: 149). It is important to note that any critique of critical geopolitics is made difficult by the way the platform’s eclecticism is valorised and a unified definition of critical geopolitics is rejected (Campbell & Power, 2010, Ó Tuathail, 2009; Ó Tuathail & Dalby, 1998: 7). Although some authors discussed in this article may not align themselves with the label of critical geopolitics, it is possible to associate them with the platform because of similar analytical foci and normative positions. This articles closes in on the version of critical geopolitics that is still the most prevalent. It is the body of literature that has rejected the state‐centric nature of thinking about global politics, emphasised the discursivity of geopolitics and problematised the binary spatial identities that are constructed through geopolitics. The aim of this article is to promote an understanding of chronopolitics not as an alternative to geopolitics (something that rivals it) but as something already at work within it. Temporal language contaminates geopolitical writing and collective identities are produced as much through temporal as they are through spatial boundaries. Furthermore, what often escapes the critical geopolitical eye is that geopolitics does not only employ a spatial ‘God‐trick’ that scans and classifies the globe, but also a detached perspective on history that carves it up into neat periods and places the geopolitician in the superior position of he who knows time. This article sets out both to provide a conceptual clarification of chronopolitics and to offer a theoretical toolbox for the analysis of political time in geopolitical discourse. Notions such as chronotope, narrative, hetero‐temporality and periodisation open up the possibility of distinguishing better between different types of geopolitics. The utility of this conceptual toolbox will be demonstrated with the help of examples taken from a number of geopolitical bestsellers, from Kissinger to Chomsky. After a discussion in section II of the limitations of existing conceptions of chronopolitics, the article moves on to reignite a narrative understanding of temporality and non‐dichotomous concepts of space and time in section III. Whilst a return to narrative theory improves our comprehension of the relationship between language and time, the notion of the chronotope helps us to understand the way in which such geopolitical narratives are structured around key spatiotemporal symbols. Section IV suggests the concept of heterotemporality in order to account for the temporally polymorphous rather than monolithic nature of geopolitics. The final section discusses how different temporalities manifest themselves in periodisation, the simple practice of carving up time. II Existing readings of chronopolitics: hypermodern and postcolonial The first path writers associated with critical geopolitics have chosen into the politics of time is via Paul Virilio’s writings on war, speed and vision (Ó Tuathail, 1996: 251; 1998: 34). A crusader against naïve understandings of technology, Virilio has tried to divert social theory’s attention away from the economy and the logic of capital accumulation, and to the field of war and weaponry. However, Virilio is of interest to critical geopolitics not primarily because of his preoccupation with speed, acceleration and war, but due to his controversial belief in the disappearance of geopolitics, in fact of space itself in a period he prefers to call 3 postmodern rather than hypermodern. In a provocative response to Francis Fukuyama, Virilio claims that instead of an ‘end of history’, we are witnesses to an ‘end of geography’ (Virilio, 1998: 9). His well‐rehearsed argument unfolds as follows: based on his belief that war and not the economy is at the root of all social phenomena and that history is determined by weapons technology (Virilio, 1977: 90), he distinguishes between three types of warfare/historical eras: tactics, strategy and logistics. Since the late 19th century he sees strategy, essentially the organisation of space through fortification, as having become displaced by logistics, the organisation of the population in a totalising and all‐encompassing war machine that centres on the logic of speed. For Virilio the industrial (‘dromocratic’) revolution marks the major turning point in recent human history for it has replaced an age in which the attacker’s advance was slowed down through spatial organisation (fortification) with an era in which speed determines the victor (Hitler’s blitzkrieg is one of Virilio’s favourite examples here). Therefore, in modernity logistics means the channelling of speed and the management of time.2 Whereas in Virilio’s conceptual universe geopolitics is associated with the era of strategy, chronopolitics is the dominant practice in the era of logistics. Hence, we are currently witnessing the replacement of geopolitics (the politics of space) with chronopolitics (the politics of time). In an age of chronopolitics, one of his followers argues, chronology is elevated over geography and pace over space (Der Derian, 1992: 297). As acceleration is one of the central characteristics of modern warfare, ‘chrono‐political’ struggles over the disposition of time have become central in developed countries (Luke & Ó Tuathail, 1998: 83). Endorsing Virilio, Ó Tuathail and Dalby claim that in the wake of an intensified globalisation and a rise of chronopolitics, ‘the disappearance of a coherent geopolitics is increasingly manifest’ (Ó Tuathail and Dalby: 1994: 513). Although critical of Virilio’s geopolitical gaze, Luke and Ó Tuathail (2000: 371; 378) also emphasise its ‘seductive appeal’, holding that ‘geopolitical space begins to warp under the gun of speed’. Intriguing and dazzling as this argument may sound, there are two problems with the incorporation of Virilio’s concept of chronopolitics, both rooted in an understanding of time that sits uncomfortably in critical geopolitics. Firstly, Virilio assumes that time exists somehow outside of narrative. Dispensing with the poststructuralist emphasis on the text, he insists that time has been transformed into an abstracted universal ‘world time’ which is delinked from the historical narratives of nations (Virilio, 1998: 109). Instead, and in line with critical geopolitics, this paper argues that like space, time does not exist meaningfully outside of narrative. ‘Of course other things exist in time, but only humans possess the capacity to perceive the connectedness of life and to seek its coherence’ (Vanhoozer, 1991: 43). To revert to a quasi‐Newtonian ‐ if accelerating ‐ conception of time runs counter to the post‐positivist epistemology and constructivist ontology that dominates much of critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics is built on these meta‐theoretical assumptions for a good reason – namely to challenge the positivism and materialism found in much of classical geopolitics. Secondly, Virilio’s ‘end of Geography’ thesis is based on a problematic distinction between time and space ‐ of chronopolitics and geopolitics ‐ as essentially separate phenomena. With the help of this foundational distinction Virilio falls into the trap of an ‘aspatial’ understanding of globalisation, ‘one that obliterates the spatial into the temporal and in that very move also impoverishes the temporal (there is only one story to tell)’ (Massey, 2005: 89) – that of an accelerating chronopolitics. Geopolitical discourse has always been about space and time. As scholarship in Human Geography has forcefully argued for decades, the two dimensions were never 2 Although Virilio has argued that the move from feudalism to capitalism was due to an advance in weapons technology rather than changes in the mode of production, his arguments about globalisation share common ground with the Marxist notion of ‘time‐space compression’ (Harvey, 1989), for a critique of which see Thrift (2002). 4 separable in the first place and ‘Geography is no more the science of space than history is that of time’ (Baker, 1981: 439). We should also recall here what Edward Said, a key intellectual inspiration for critical geopolitics, added on the relationship between space, time and critical scholarship in a 1995 afterword to his seminal Orientalism: ‘Since the struggle for control over territory is part of history, so too is the struggle over historical and social meaning. The task for the critical scholar is not to separate one struggle from another, but to connect them’ (Said, 1978: 331‐2). The second notable way in which authors that share some of the concerns of a critical geopolitics have approached time is via a postcolonial conception of modernity. Under the influence of Johannes Fabian, John Agnew has brought critical geopolitics’ attention to the process of converting time into space as part of the modern geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 1998: 32). What is interesting here is that unlike others in critical geopolitics, he sees the relevance of modernity to global politics not exclusively in its reorganisation of political space, but of political time. Agnew has claimed that not only is the slicing up of the globe into various blocks of space part of the writing geopolitics, but so is the organisation of these blocks with the help of often binary temporal attributes into ‘modern’, ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ spaces. Rooted in the specifically western historical experiences of renaissance, reformation, enlightenment, industrialisation and colonialism, the geopolitician universalises a belief in economic and political ‘progress’ and then matches non‐Western others, confined to a (number of) seemingly homogenous blocks, with the temporal attributes of previous Western historical experience. ‘They are what we used to be like’ (Agnew, 1996: 31 original emphasis; see also Sparke, 2003: 379). Agnew’s argument relies on Johannes Fabian’s concept of ‘allochronism’, understood as a discourse that places the Other in a time other than the present of the writing subject (Fabian, 1983: 31). Fabian’s contribution, which targets the entanglement of the academic discipline of Anthropology with the persistent practise of colonialism (in a similar vein as critical geopolitics interrogates the relationship between Political Geography and modern statehood), is crucial here as it reveals the identity dimension at work behind temporal language in the distanciation of the Other (it lives in another time) and the simultaneous privileging of the self (xi). This postcolonial approach to time not only illustrates how geopolitical discourse and the forms of colonialism it has helped to legitimate continue to be aided by a notion of universal human progress, but also draws attention to the times of others that are being erased under the continuing expansion of Western modernity. Slater has added to this modern mindset the conviction that the non‐Western world can only achieve progress with the help of the West and that successful transformations were not inevitable but ‘required a series of appropriate interventions – economic, financial, social, cultural, political and psychological’ (Slater, 2004: 57). Although capable of pointing out a dominant spatio‐temporalisation of the world, the insights of Agnew, Fabian and Slater also present a somewhat incomplete picture. Whereas they emphasise the possibility of other ‐ non‐modern and non‐Western ‐ experiences of time, they seem only interested in one particular type of western modern temporality, the persistent colonial idea of a ‘one‐way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition)’ (Fabian, 1983: 144). We may legitimately wonder whether it really is an ‘obvious continuity’ in the modern geopolitical imagination that spatial difference is expressed in terms of one specific progressive temporal metaphor (modern/backward) (Agnew, 1998: 86). Is this not to deny the heterogeneity of western modernity as a time consciousness? Are modern discourses quite so monolithic? Furthermore, can we not detect in geopolitical discourse the coexistence 5 of both modern and what we might for lack of a better term call non‐modern understandings of time? Perhaps postcolonial theory remains a little too preoccupied with the very binary temporal logics that ensure its own existence – postcolonial/colonial (McClintock, 1992: 85). It is these issues that we will now turn to in order to flesh out an understanding of geopolitics as chronogeopolitics, to use a slightly awkward term. In an attempt to find a definition of time that is congruent with critical geopolitics’ conception of space, the following sections will outline narrative, timespace (chronotope), hetero‐temporality and periodisation as key elements of a conceptual matrix for the study of time in critical geopolitics. III Beyond Virilio: geopolitics, narrative and timespace As we have seen, time has been rendered in the conceptual universe of Virilio and his critical geopolitical followers a dimension both independent of space and of language. We will start by unpacking the relationship between time and language. After all, one might object that the very fact that there exist in modern society a number of competing (narrative) accounts of time points to the impossibility of such an objective perspective on time outside of textual meaning. Albeit a very marginal narrative account shared only by a narrow group of followers, Virilio’s own conception of time too competes with others for discursive hegemony over the debate on the nature of time. Moreover, it too is a political narrative that urges us to free ourselves from the shackles of modern technology. Surely, this example shows that time cannot be homogenous and objective but must be understood as necessarily heterogeneous, intersubjective and political. Crucially, time is intimately involved with the acts of ‘writing’ and narration, which are the processes by which ‘events’ and ‘facts’ become meaningful in the first place. The material facts classical geopolitics draws upon in order to unearth what it considers to be the laws of global politics are only presentable to the audience in the form of stories that are temporally structured through chronology, sequentiality and causality. In this section we turn to narrative theory in an attempt to ignite anew the interest critical approaches to geopolitics have already shown in narrative analysis (Campbell, 1998; O’Loughlin et al., 2004; Ó Tuathail, 1996; 2002). However, unlike these studies, we turn to narrative in order to unpick the relationship between storytelling and temporality – and to merge chronos (= time) and topos (= space) through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. We will draw in this section mainly though not exclusively on the work of Paul Ricoeur who made a name for himself as a theorist of narrative, temporality and hermeneutics in the 1970s and 1980s. His insistence that time becomes relevant through narrative and vice versa is particularly helpful for the argument forwarded here. However, Ricoeur’s work is also potentially problematic within the body of critical geopolitics because it is somewhat oblivious to the role of power relations (Crang, 1994: 30) and when he does deal with it, he arguably implies an ahistorical understanding of power (Ricoeur, 2010: 26). Here we should not forget that there does exist a link between narrative, ‘from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realised “history”’ and the realm of law, legality and authority that is for which global space was originally written and in many ways continues to be written (White, 1987: 13). However, if we are aware of these weaknesses, Ricoeur’s work can serve as a useful way to make the link between geopolitical narratives and time and reject a conception of chronopolitics as something outside of texts. According to Ricoeur narratives are accounts that have the characteristics of stories and therefore include protagonists and a tripartite plot, made up of beginning, middle and end. They describe ‘a sequence of actions and experiences of a certain number of characters, whether real or imaginary. These characters are represented in situations 6 which change or to the changes of which they react. These changes, in turn, reveal hidden aspects of the situation and the characters, giving rise to a new predicament which calls for thought or action or both. The response to this predicament brings the story to its conclusion’ (Ricoeur, 1981: 277). Protagonists in geopolitical texts may amongst a wide variety of possibilities include a heroic nation like the United States (Kissinger, 2002), an abstract spatial entity like ‘the West’ (Huntington, 1996), a villainous nation like Russia (Lucas, 2008) or a concept like ‘world order’ (Kaplan, 1997). A geopolitical narrative will follow these protagonists and present the unfolding events these characters produce or get caught up in as having a causal, sequential, linear and intentional form. The directional nature of narrative also has a practical side: it assembles the events so that their meaning is ‘geared towards action’ – the next (geopolitical) step follows logically from the previous (Ciută, 2007: 192). It is especially the end of a story that produces the point from which the events can be understood in their totality, so that lessons may be drawn and action prepared. This act of narrating is always already temporal. In the words of Paul Ricoeur ‘time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (Ricoeur, 1983: 52). Narrative and time are reliant on one another and it is only through chronology and causality, through duration, frequency, continuity and discontinuity that narrative produces (temporal) meaning (Simms, 2003: 80). (Geopolitical) narratives always work through both retrospection and anticipation, uniting the three elements of the time continuum. In other words: whilst our vision of the future (utopian and dystopian as it may be) is filtered by past experience, our understanding of the past is constituted through that very future vision. Furthermore, narrative enables us to mark the present, that point in time that has always already passed or not yet come, through delimitating it from both past and an anticipated future. Three bonds between narrative and time require more attention: language, identity and closure. Firstly, narrative form is the link between the dimension of time and the realm of language, an ontological dimension so crucial to critical geopolitics.3 Ricoeur has taken ‘temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent’ (Ricoeur, 1980: 169). Through processes of re‐narration, narratives try to freeze a particular interpretation of past, present and future (Sabelis et al., 2005: 261). A second link between time, narrative and geopolitics is identity, a concept we have already identified as crucial to the project of a critical geopolitics. A narrative approach recognises ‘the narrativising of reality’ as ‘integral to the performative constitution of identity’ and should therefore occupy a crucial position in the analysis of geopolitics (Campbell, 1998: 34). By integrating past, present and future, narratives fix the identity coordinates of social groups and the individuals that function within them. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, temporality is glued to narrative through the way in which narratives tend to be directed towards narrative closure. Ricoeur claims that ‘the story’s conclusion is the pole of attraction of the entire development. But a narrative conclusion can be neither deduced nor predicted. There is no story if our attention is not moved along by a thousand contingencies’ (Ricoeur, 1980: 174). Geopolitical narratives often work with utopian or dystopian scenarios and leave some room for practitioners to ensure that a particular ending does or does not occur. 3 It needs to be noted that temporality is also something humans experience through architecture, urban planning or the rhythms of the human body – some of which may not be narrated. However, at the risk of replacing an unhelpful binary (time and space) by another (body and mind), we shall focus here on the textuality of temporality and less on what some have called ‘time in its corporeal form’ (Thrift, 1977: 95). 7 We have argued so far that when critical geopolitics has addressed chronopolitics via the work of Virilio, it was on the basis of an understanding of time as existing outside of narrative and as essentially separated from its other foundational category: space. Instinctively, a critical geopolitics that is open to insights from gender studies and that has repeatedly argued against binary oppositions (although the one between traditional and critical theory remains at the heart of the project), could have also deconstructed that between space and time. As Massey (1992: 71) has argued in a piece on the space/time dichotomy: ‘the mode of thinking that relies on irreconcilable dichotomies of this sort has in general recently come in for widespread criticism. All the strings of these kinds of opposition with which we are so accustomed to work (mind–body; nature–culture; reason–emotion; and so forth) have been argued to be at heart problematical and a hindrance to either understanding or changing the world.’ Although there are a number of different formulations of the argument that time and space are inseparably interwoven, one of the most sophisticated, and sensitive to the particularities of geopolitics is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope or timespace. Although primarily designed for the analysis of novelistic discourse, it offers insight into the relationship between time, space and politics. Like the argument presented in this article, Bakhtin was also interested in narratives, though he investigated formally fictional rather than non‐fictional ones. Loosely inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bakhtin sought to address the ‘intrinsic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’. According to him, it is through the chonotope that time ‘thickens’ and becomes visible; ‘likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 84). Chronotopes are the places ‘where the knots of narrative are tied and untied’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 250). They may congeal into a number of physical symbols such as ‘the road’ or ‘the threshold’ (both of which are variations on the spatiotemporal theme of ‘movement’: time spent means distance covered). Although texts are made up of a number of chronotopes, they tend to be dominated by a single such chronotope, forming the centre around which the plot unfolds. This central chronotope concretises a given text’s abstract components and functions to limit the realm of narrative possibility. Often forming the point at which the text and its author find a materiality with which the reader can engage, the chronotope controls which interpretations are possible and which ones are not (Allan, 1994). Through positioning themselves in time and space, texts construct their ideological position; they transmit political choices, forge discursive alliances, imply different forms of social organisation. Crucially, without such spatiotemporal signs neither abstract thought nor the dialogical dynamics of self and other are possible (Folch‐Serra, 1990: 264; Holloway & Kneale, 2000: 83). Whereas Bakhtin was concerned with chronotopes specific to novels, his remarks are germane to the study of geopolitical texts. At this point it must be reiterated that geopolitical texts have never been devoid of the dimension of time. From the grand narratives of nationalism and modernisation down to the organisation of territorial borders, we can witness the politics of an interlaced timespace. States are governed by spatial (territory) and temporal discourses (history). If however subjected to scrutiny, the distinction between temporal and spatial seems problematic here, too. True, borders are the places where two territorial spaces are separated from one another. Yet, they also organise the personal time of those who travel or who are kept from travelling from one space into the next as well as those who guard the borders. Finally, borders delimit two spaces in which people have a 8 different sense of shared temporal belonging: two versions of history keep them apart. Maps too have temporal dimensions written into them and history often tells the story of spatial entities. Hence, the strict distinction between space and time, often accompanied by a static conception of space and a dynamic understanding of time, is unhelpful (May and Thrift, 2001).4 A number of chronotopes can be found in and around geopolitical bestsellers. A key liberal geopolitical chronotope for instance, is the frontier that marks a spatial distance that is to be overcome over time through a civilising mission (Barnett, 2004: 122). Realist chronotopes display a different logic. Zbiginiew Brzezinski’s Mackinderian chessboard chronotope contains both a spatial statement (Eurasia is the chessboard) and a temporal one (it has been so for 500 years) (Brzezinski, 1997: 3). Furthermore, it offers a materiality with which most readers can engage that also functions as a grave simplification: global politics is reduced to a game, the rules of which are fixed, as is the rationality needed to win it. In one of Henry Kissinger’s more recent bestsellers we have ‘the power vacuum’ as an only seemingly non‐material timespace, its underlying logic being the inevitable movement of military hardware into such a vacuous space over a certain period of time (Kissinger, 2002: 208). IV Modernity and beyond: heterotemporality This section argues for the temporal polymorphism of geopolitical narratives. The aim of this move is to open up the possibility of telling more than just a single linear story, be it that of an accelerating chronopolitics or that of a continued colonial othering. Although this is partially an exercise of listing in to the subaltern temporalities that the modern geopolitical imagination helps to silence, it is also one of appreciating the heterogeneity of the temporalities that structure modern geopolitics. Critical geopolitics has tended to operate a definition of modernity that has excluded from it the (equally modern) resistance to progressive modernity in the form of grand temporalities of decline, fall and apocalypse. Furthermore, we can detect in geopolitical discourse different temporalities, not all of which are indeed strictly ‘modern’ ‐ such as stories of repetition and rebirth.5 In order to make the case for the presence of different temporalities in geopolitics, it is obligatory to engage in more depth with the literature on modernity. Yet, it is also necessary to recognise the impurity and messiness of the temporalities in geopolitical writing. Modernity, as Therborn understands it, is ‘a culture, an epoch, a society, a social sphere having a particular time orientation’ (Therborn, 2003: 294). Moreover, he suggests that it functions as a temporality that is ‘looking forward to this worldly future, open, novel, reachable or constructible, a conception seeing the present as a possible preparation of the future, and the past either as something to leave behind or as a heap of ruins, pieces of which might be used for building a new future.’ This helps us to see discourses of modernity as driven by a time consciousness that rests on the belief in historical change and puts forward an agenda of permanent transformation, buttressed by science and a technical rationality that are thought to aid humans and their enlightened societies. Modernity, too, is a totalisation of history that 4 Given that Human Geographers tend to agree that time and space should be thought together, as one recent critic of this position asserts (Merriman, 2011: 1), then it is interesting to note that those working on geopolitics have been less inclined to do so. 5 For a different taxonomy that proposes providence as a fourth grand temporalisation in the analysis of nationalism, see Johnson (2001). 9 creates not just itself as an epoch (and all the others along with it), but history itself as a field of knowledge. It is therefore a time consciousness that invests time with history (Bauman, 2000: 110). The most important temporal form modernity has taken, and this is the form that Agnew discusses, is the belief in the progressive perfectibility of the human condition, the confidence that humans have historically progressed to higher and therefore better levels of civilisation. This temporal language continues to play a key role in geopolitical texts (Fukuyama, 1989) and often ‘understanding them requires us – in most instances – simply to look into our past and remember ourselves’ (Barnett, 2004: 123). So far we have identified modernity as the ‘delegitimisation of tradition’ in a self‐negating process in which the present is always superior to the past and the future to the present (Devetak, 1995: 28). According to this logic the past is equated with tradition and then rejected. What is crucial to this temporal dynamic is the agency that humans are able to claim for themselves. To quote Marshall Berman, one of the key theorists of modernity, modernity constitutes an ‘amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own’ (Berman, 1982: 16). Emphasising this multiplicity, the Marxist theorist Perry Anderson has made the point that we must not underestimate the role of decline within the modern conception of time – and overstate the possibility of human creativity that modernity unleashes. Interrogating Berman’s reading of Karl Marx, he claims that ‘what we find is something very different from any process of planar development. Rather, the trajectory of the bourgeois order is curvilinear. It traces, not a straight line ploughing endlessly forward, or a circle expanding infinitely outwards, but a marked parabola. Bourgeois society knows an ascent, a stabilization and a descent’ (Anderson, 1982: 101). A nuanced understanding of modernity cannot be limited to the function of valorising the new over the old, as we have previously seen in Agnew’s definition, but must be extended to the construction and sometimes the relegitimisation of tradition. The rejection of tradition reinforces the category. It is this somewhat paradoxical nature of modern discourses we must understand if we want to grasp the temporal dynamics at work in contemporary geopolitics. Modernity’s abstract form, as one commentator notes, ‘remains open to a variety of competing articulations. In particular, by producing the old as remorselessly as it produces the new, and in equal measure, it provokes forms of traditionalism the temporal logic of which is quite different from that of tradition as conventionally received. Both traditionalism and reaction are distinctively modern forms’ (Osborne, 1995: XII). We are now in a position to comprehend discourses of modernity as having included from an early stage onwards not only their counter‐image (backwardness) but also the possibility that social transformation (itself of course not a notion that emerged with the ascent of modernity) could result in apocalypse. ‘Decline surfaces again and again as the aporia of progress or as the reproduction of decline through progress itself’ (Koselleck, 2002: 231). Despite its promise of both personal and societal transformation, modernity’s reliance 10 on science, technology and reason risks to threaten ‘everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’ (Berman, 1982: 15). To modern sceptics it is in progress and economic growth that lie the seeds of decadence and ultimately of a civilisation’s decline. It is precisely such tropes of modernity that are popular in contemporary geopolitical discourse. Evoking Thomas Robert Malthus, Kaplan tells the story of a world that faces doomsday in the wake of racial clashes, environmental scarcity, state decline, new weapons technologies and an unprecedented demographic explosion (Kaplan, 1997: 9). ‘Emancipation, diversity, global communication – all the things that promise an age of riches and creativity’, Robert Cooper writes, ‘could also bring a nightmare in which states lose control of the means of violence and people lose control of their futures’ (Cooper, 2004: ix). Writing about a Western modernity‐induced apocalypse is not limited to the political right. Although the Marxist geopolitician and linguist Noam Chomsky pays tribute to a progressive teleology in which ‘[o]ver the course of modern history, there have been significant gains in human rights and democratic control’ through ‘popular struggle’, his future, too, is an ugly place. He constructs the United States as a threat to its own survival and the further existence of human life on the planet. In short, US foreign policy is a ‘prescription for disaster, perhaps in the not very distant future’ (Chomsky, 2004: 235‐6). These contemporary geopolitical texts already reveal a variety of temporalities. However, to widen our understanding of modern temporal experience from one limited to a linear progressive grand narrative to one that is receptive to stories of decline is not enough. If we go back for a moment to Berman’s idea of modernity as something that also gives humans the ability to transform the world around them, then we already start wondering whether classical geopolitics really conforms to this temporality. Would such an understanding of modernity not fail to incorporate Mackinder’s insistence (1905: 422) that it is nature that in a large part controls history? Does this not directly contradict the modern belief in the potential perfectibility of the human condition? Sometimes this tension is apparent in the same text, such as in Carl Schmitt’s (1954) Land und Meer [Land and Sea] where he claims that world history is the history of the struggle of Land power versus Sea power and vice versa (16), only to argue a few pages later for the existence of spatial revolutions that touch the very meaning of the ‘concept of space’ (57).6 There seems to be in Schmitt’s text a contradiction between a static understanding of global politics on the one hand and one that gives agency to humans on the other (revolutions, changing meaning). Whereas the latter may be identified as modern, the former’s invoking of a timeless, natural order is both modern in the sense of claiming scientificity as well as premodern through its reference to a Christian cyclicality. In geopolitical writing ‘the modern’ seems to coexist with what is within modern discourse itself coined ‘the premodern’7 or Christian conception of history. There is now a growing literature in critical geopolitics on religion that recognises not just the role of geopolitical representation in religious texts, but also crucially the role of eschatology, the study of the end of days, in structuring these narratives (Geopolitics, 2006; Dittmer & Sturm, 2010). Although these very interesting contributions do not explicitly theorise the nature of time within critical geopolitics, they do point to the fact that narratives of apocalyptic decline are not limited to modern (secular) geopolitical discourse. What this literature has paid less attention to is the role of the timeless, the cyclical and the ahistorical that is so typical for premodern Christian narratives. Cyclical grand temporalities try to ‘arrest time’ through myth and ritual. 6 Translation by the author. Given the nature of modern temporality, the term ‘premodern’ is of course itself a modern fabrication. What we mean by it here are temporalities that connect to mainly Christian beliefs that drove society before the advent of enlightenment. This is of course a simplification as Christian temporality has often fused with modern understandings of time. 7 11 ‘In their performance the original deed or decree is enacted in the present and the meaning recreated and preserved in its original form. Through its performance the enfolded past is activated and revealed, ab origine, that is, true to the beginning. Another way of making time stand still relates to the externalization of knowledge through representation, which holds in unchanging form what is moving, changing and interconnected’ (Adam, 2006: 120). Here it is possible to make a link to the visuality of geopolitics. True, not all geopolitical maps are stills that want to capture and detain a certain moment and make it permanent. After all, arrows can symbolise movement and a succession of maps may communicate temporal change. Nevertheless, there is a tendency of the geopolitical map to produce static and ritualised meanings that are not dissimilar to the iconic images that can be found in Christian churches. Even in an age where Catholicism has had to compromise its position with new advances in communication technology, there has remained intact a ‘timeless kernel of truth over which the Church exercises guardianship’ (Agnew, 2010: 47). Indeed geopolitical texts do not just tell stories of progress and decline, but also of familiarity, recurrence, repetition and regularity – categories that should not be separated too rigidly from one another ‐ and for these types of stories the most apt symbol is the cycle. Of course, critics might respond that the timeless truths that classical geopolitics sees as driving the cycle of history are rooted in a narrow positivism and thereby of modern origin. Nevertheless, these sceptics should note that contemporary geopolitics is at times quite uncomfortable with the idea that global politics operates according to natural laws (Gray, 2005: 333). Moreover, if we inspect another of classical geopolitics’ roots, namely political realism, we find that it has long been structured around a religious and premodern ‘imperfectability thesis’ (Pin‐Fat, 2005: 222), the idea that humans cannot accomplish a morally better society ‐ a claim that is at odds with the notion of enlightenment progress and the perfectibility of society as well as with the idea of decline. In the work of Niccolo Machiavelli, for instance, the modern and the premodern coexist even if the heavy emphasis on cycles of rise and fall seem to point to the predominance of the premodern (Parel, 1991). After Machiavelli it has been crucial for the modern realist tradition to cast global politics as an arena of repetition and recurrence in order to suppress if not its own emergence then at least its consolidation along with its identity politics in the aftermath of the 30 years war. World politics was supposed to be devoid of an (explicit) identity dimension and was meant to be timeless (Williams, 1998). Hence, given the proximity of classical geopolitics to its realist cousin, the conclusion that in geopolitics ‐ like in realism ‐ the modern and the premodern exist together seems far from radical. Examples for the presence of premodern temporalities can easily be detected on the level of formal geopolitics (Huntington, 1996: 40, 129), but they can also be found in the cyclical narratives (and conservative politics) that come with serialised geopolitical comics like Captian America (Dittmer, 2007; 2012). Whilst in the Virilio‐inspired research on geopolitics we have encountered the belief in the existence of one unified logic behind global politics itself (speed), the postcolonial literature sees the discourse of modern geopolitics as driven by one unified temporal logic (progress). Instead, what we are facing in geopolitics are different narratives with different grand temporalities, the latter serving as the deep assumptions about the nature of time and historical change. These grand temporalities need to be recognised as impure if critical geopolitics is not to fall into the trap of an overly schematic understanding of temporality. The temporalities (cycle, progress, decline) discussed above are only ideal‐types and they tend to occur in combinations. Furthermore, we often find them hidden behind a number of seemingly different temporalities, such as return, rebirth, new era, zenith or death. 12 Nevertheless, these alternative temporalities can also be related back to the three grand temporalities of progress, decline and cycle as they often simply pick out one segment of a grand temporality (return can be one section of a cyclical temporality) or by changing the pace from gradual to abrupt (death is a sudden form of decline). What all of this points to then is indeed the ‘heterotemporality’ of geopolitics, a term this article takes from Kimberly Hutchings (2008). But whereas her postcolonial approach urges us to listen in to the time of subaltern Others, this article wishes to alert us to the temporal plurality within the modern geopolitical imagination itself. Geopolitical discourse is marked by ‘a mutual contamination of “nows” that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from one meta‐narrative about how they all fit together’ (Hutchings, 2008: 166). V Conclusion: the chronopolitics in (critical) geopolitics This article has attempted to open up critical geopolitics to temporality by refocusing the platform’s existing definition of chronopolitics. In doing so, it has emphasised how geopolitical writing does not merely construct the spaces of world politics, but how it maps understandings of time, too. Geopolitics entices its audience not simply through spatial simplification but through the many temporal generalisations that haunt geopolitical discourse. The point for critical scholars is not simply to contextualise geopolitics historically or to incorporate a historical analysis of time, but to recognise the myriad of ways in which political time operates in geopolitical discourse whilst simultaneously becoming more aware of the chronopolitical assumptions that might be creeping into their own writing. In the cause of this discussion we assessed the ‘hypermodern’ understanding of temporality that was borrowed from Paul Virilio and his emphasis on speed, logistics and a radical restructuring of warfare and society itself: the move from geo‐ to chronopolitics. Contra Virlio the argument formulated here was that time and space are to be approached not as separate phenomena, but as intimately interwoven categories. This has lead us to conclude that there can be no move from geopolitics to chronopolitics or vice versa and that it is therefore best to think of chronopolitics as a discursive structure that operates in rather than outside of geopolitical narratives. The temporality of geopolitics has also been approached by Political Geographers via the works of the postcolonial scholar Johannes Fabian. Here the temporal dimension of geopolitics was equated with Western modernity and scholarly attempts were made to reveal how geopoliticians operate with a progressive understanding of history that organises other (non‐Western) parts of the globe according to previous periods of Western historical experience. Though this has indeed been a helpful way to approach geopolitical texts as many of them do display exactly this temporal logic, it is, as has been argued here, not the only way in which geopolitical discourse constructs time. The case has been made that within modernity at least two grand temporal tropes can be identified: the progressive and the declining. Furthermore, there is a timeless understanding of history that continues to haunt much geopolitical writing. It has been concluded that chronopolitics ‐ like geopolitics ‐ is not a monolith, but a discursive structure that takes different forms and that is in a continuous state of evolution or at times revolution. Though perhaps not quite the ‘ideological foundation of geopolitics’ (Fabian, 1983: 143), chronopolitics does denote the ways in which time is used to conserve or challenge (geopolitical) order. Particular grand understandings of time tend to be geared to particular logics of security. Whereas cyclical temporalities often invoke balance of power logics, progressive constructions of time favour interdependence arguments and declining temporalities may lead to endgame understandings of security ‐ all of which carry with them dissimilar normative imperatives (author reference). This helps us understand that chronopolitics does not simply embody one logic (modernity, neoliberal capitalism, imperialism or biopolitics), according to which the world functions, but an arena in which different temporalities interact and clash. 13 In order to further elaborate the point that chronopolitics can already be found in geopolitical texts, we need to return to our definition of geopolitics. In the introduction we stated that geopolitics, according to critical geopolitics, is a genre of text that functions through spatial identity formation, relies on a detached spatial gaze and controls by means of spatial simplification. Our argument here is that time is always already involved in all three of these elements. Firstly, unlike what some authors have implied (Diez, 2004; Rogers, 2009), othering is always simultaneously geopolitical and chronopolitical (Prozorov, 2010), a fact that is recognised in the postcolonial literature on geopolitics reviewed above. Secondly, instead of just elevating itself above space with the God‐trick, geopolitical writing also produces a detached temporal gaze in which the geopolitician is in the position of knowing time. Like the traditional historian, the geo‐strategist is a ‘timetraveller and prophet, the spectator that knows where world‐political time is headed’ (Hutchings, 2008: 175), often without showing any interest for local understandings of time. Geography is only one tool of geopolitics, the other is history. Thirdly, geopolitics has proven so appealing because of both spatial and temporal simplification. It collapses complex historical developments into neat temporal categories and analogies, slicing up history in the same way it carves up the globe. It has not only neglected the geographical specificities of places, but also discontinuity and contingency. It is this modern chronopolitical practice of periodisation that needs our attention for it can also be found in critical geopolitics. In geopolitical texts the construction of different temporalities tends to engage in some form of periodisation.8 As already hinted above, this act of periodising is of a modern origin and works alongside the geopolitical practice of slicing up the globe into supposedly homogenous spaces. The effect is clear: ‘[p]utting an age into a grander sequence of historical change invests the identification with a greater authority. Each époque becomes but a stage in a larger picture’ (Corfield, 2007: 158). Periodisation rests on the belief that each period is endowed with a unique character, which is then evoked to explain things within that period, an argument always at risk of being circular (202). Somewhat problematically, even critically minded research on geopolitics engages in modern forms of temporal categorisation when it speaks of ‘three ages of geopolitics’ (Agnew, 1998: 86; Agnew and Corbridge, 1995) or when it tells the history of geopolitics as one of different epochs (Ó Tuathail et al., 2006). In its analysis of classical geopolitics, critical geopolitics should try and resist thinking of history as separate bits of discrete time and look at the context in which these distinctions are made by geopolitical texts and the political implications thereof. If critical geopolitics does not wish to fall itself into the trap of geo‐ and chronopolitical zombification (author reference), it must seek both non‐geopolitical and non‐chronopolitical ways of structuring its analyses. Chronological approaches that work with unproblematised epochs and events are to be avoided as much as designs that treat a particular scale as politically innocent. To choose a particular temporalisation is always already a political move, a fact that is recognised in Agnew’s (1998: 4) writings on historical analogy. However, the chronopolitics of such analogies must be acknowledged independently of whether or not they are more or less pertinent (Agnew, 2009: 430). In the same way as there is a politics to dangerously lazy analogies such as those between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Third Reich, widespread critical geopolitical arguments about a neo‐colonial Israel (Gregory, 2004; Weizman, 2007) and a US empire (Sparke, 2003; Agnew, 2004: 883) are equally chronopolitical. Of course, critics will respond that in some form periodisation and analogy are unavoidable as part of narration, which critical geopolitics is of course not immune to. Yet, what can only be 8 Mackinder’s distinctions between a pre‐Columbian, Columbian and post‐Columbian age come to mind (Ó Tuathail, 1996: 30), as does Cooper’s premodern, modern and postmodern world (Cooper, 2004) and Henry Kissinger’s comparison of different continents/regions with periods of European history (Kissinger, 2002: 145, 214). 14 encouraged is an approach that is self‐critical of its chronopolitical framings and more explicit about the politics that comes with those choices. 15 Bibliography Aalto P & Berg E (2002) Spatial practices and time in Estonia: From Post‐Soviet Geopolitics to European Governance. Space & Polity 6(3): 253‐270. Adam B (2006) Time. Theory, Culture & Society 23: 119‐126. Agnew J (1996) Time into space: The myth of “backward” Italy in modern Europe. Time & Society 5(1): 27‐45. Agnew J (1998) Geopolitics: Re‐visioning World Politics. London: Routledge. Agnew J (2004) American hegemony into American empire? Lessons from the invasion of Iraq. Antipode 35(5): 872‐885. Agnew J (2009) Making the strange familiar: Geographical analogy in global geopolitics. The Geographical Review 99(3): 426‐443. Agnew J (2010) Deus vult: the geopolitics of the Catholic church. Geopolitics 15: 39‐61. Agnew J & Corbridge S (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Allan S (1994) ‘When discourse is torn from reality’: Bakhtin and the principle of chronotopicity. Time & Society 3(2): 193‐218. Amoore L (2006) Biometric borders: governing mobilities in the war on terror. Political Geography 25: 336‐351. Anderson P (1984) Modernity and revolution. New Left Review I/144: 96‐113. Baker A (1981) A historico‐geographical perspective on time and space and on period and place. Progress in Human Geography 5(3): 439. Bakhtin M (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barnett PM (2003) The Pentagon’s new map: war and peace in the Twenty‐First Century. New York: Berkley Books. Bauman Z (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Berman M (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: the Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin. Black J (2009) Geopolitics. London: Social Affairs Unit. Brzezinski Z (1997) The Grand Chessboard: American Imperatives and its Geostrategic imperatives. New York: Basic Books. Campbell D (1992) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 16 Campbell D (1998) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Campbell D (2005) The biopolitics of security: oil, empire and the Sports Utility Vehicle. American Quarterly 57(3): 943‐972. Campbell D & Power M (2010) Guest editorial: the state of critical geopolitics. Political Geography 29: 243‐246. Chomsky N (2004) Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. London: Penguin. Ciută F (2007) Narratives of Security: Strategy and Identity in the European Context. In Mole R (ed) Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 190‐ 207. Cooper R (2004) The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty‐First Century. London: Atlantic Books. Corfield PJ (2007) Time and the Shape of History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Crang M (1994) Spacing times, telling times and narrating the past. Time & Society 3: 29‐45. Dalby S (1990) Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics. London: Pinter. Dalby S (2010) Recontextualising violence, power and nature: the next twenty years of critical geopolitics. Political Geography 29: 280‐288. Der Derian J (1990) The (s)pace of international relations: simulation, surveillance, and speed. International Studies Quarterly 32(3): 295‐310. Devetak R (1995) The project of modernity and International Relations theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 24(1): 27‐51. Diez T (2004) Europe’s Others and the Return of Geopolitics. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17(2): 319‐35. Dittmer J (2007) The tyranny of the serial: popular geopolitics, the nation, and comic book discourse. Antipode 39(2): 247‐268. Dittmer J (2010) Popular culture, geopolitics and identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Dittmer J (2012) Captain America and the nationalist superhero. Philadelphia: Temple University Press Dittmer J & Gray N (2010) Popular geopolitics 2.0: towards new methodologies of the everyday. Geography Compass 4(11): 1664‐1677. 17 Dittmer J & Sturm T (2010) Mapping the end times: American Evangelical geopolitics and apocalyptic visions. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dodds K (1996) The 1982 Falklands War and a critical geopolitical eye: Steve Bell and the If… cartoons. Political Geography 15(6/7): 571‐592. Dodds K (2005) Global Geopolitics: A Critical Introduction. Harlow: Pearson Education. Dowler L & Sharp J (2001) A Feminist geopolitics? Space & Polity 5(3): 165‐176. Fabian J (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Colombia University Press. Folch‐Serra M. (1990) Place, voice, space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical landscape. Enviornment and Planning D: Society and Space 8(3): 255‐274 Foucault M (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972‐1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault M (1986) On other spaces. Diacritics 16(1): 22‐27. Fukuyama F (1989) The End of History. The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3‐18. Geopolitics (2006) Special issue: religion and geopolitics. 11(2): 183‐347. Geopolitics (2011) Geopolitical forum: The value of territory: towards a Marxist geopolitics. 16: 211‐235. Gray CS (2005) Another bloody century: future warfare. London: Orion. Gregory D (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. London: Routledge. Gregory D (2009) Seeing red: Baghdad and the event‐ful city. Political Geography 29: 266‐279. Harvey D (1989) The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell. Heffernan M (2000) Balancing visions: comments on Gearoid Ó Tuathail’s critical geopolitics. Political Geography 19: 347‐352. Holloway J & Kneale J (2000) ‘Mikhail Bakhtin: dialogics of space’ In M Crang (ed) Thinking space. London: Routledge, 71‐88. Hom, A. (2010) ‘Hegemonic metronome: the ascendancy of Western standard time’ Review of International Studies 36(4): 1145‐1170 Hörschelmann K (2008) Populating the landscapes of critical geopolitics: young people’s response to the war in Iraq. Political Geography 27: 587‐609. Huntington S (1996) The clash of civilisations and the remaking of world order. London: Simon & Schuster. 18 Hutchings K (2008) Time and World Politics: Thinking the present. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hyndman J (2004) Mind the gap: bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics. Political Geography 23(3): 307–322. Johnson NC (2001) From time immemorial: narratives of nationhood and the making of national space. In May J and Thrift N (eds.) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. Routledge, London, 89‐105. Kaplan RD (1997) The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Vintage Books. Kelly P (2003) A critique of critical geopolitics. Geopolitics 11: 24‐53. Kissinger H (2002) Does America Need a Foreign‐Policy? Towards a Diplomacy for the Twenty‐ First Century. London: Schuster and Simon. Koselleck R (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stansford: Standford University Press. Lucas E (2008) The New Cold War: How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West, London: Bloomsbury. Luke T & Ó Tuathail G (1998) Global flowmations, local fundamentalisms, and fast geopolitics: “America” in an accelerating world order. In Herod A et al (eds) An unruly world? Globalisation, governance and geography. London: Routledge, 72‐94. Luke T & Ó Tuathail G (2000) Thinking geopolitical space: The spatiality of war, speed and vision in the work of Paul Virilio. In M Crang (ed) Thinking space. London: Routledge, 360‐379. Mackinder H (1904) The geographical pivot of history. The Geographical Journal 23(4): 421‐ 437. Mamadouh V (1999) Reclaiming geopolitics: geographers strike back. Geopolitics 4(1): 118‐ 138. Massey D (1992) Politics and Space/Time. New Left Review 196(Nov/Dec): 65‐84. Massey D (2005) For space. London: Sage. May J & Thrift N (2001) Introduction. In May J & Thrift N (eds) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. London & New York: Routledge, 1‐46. McClintock, A. (1992) The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term ‘post‐colonialism’. Social Text 31/32: 84‐98 Megoran N (2006) For ethnography in political geography: experiencing and re‐imagining Ferghana valley boundary closures. Political Geography 25(6): 622‐640. 19 Megoran N (2008) Militarism, realism, just war, or non‐violence? Critical geopolitics and the problem of normativity. Geopolitics 13(3): 473‐487. Mercille J (2008) The radical geopolitics of US foreign policy: geopolitical and geoeconomic logics of power. Political Geography 27(5): 570‐586. Merriman P (2011) Human Geography without time‐space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers DOI: 10.1111/j.1475‐5661.2011.00455.x. Müller M (2009) Making great power identities in Russia: an ethnographic discourse analysis of education at a Russian elite university. Zurich: LIT. Müller M & Reuber P (2008) Empirical verve, conceptual doubts: looking from the outside in at critical geopolitics. Geopolitics 13(3): 458‐472. O’Loughlin J et al. (2004) Russian geopolitical storylines and public opinion in the wake of 9‐ 11: a critical geopolitical analysis and national survey. Communist and Post‐Communist Studies 37: 281‐318. Ó Tuathail G (1996) Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ó Tuathail G (1998) Postmodern geopolitics? The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond? in Ó Tuathail G & Dalby S (eds.) Rethinking geopolitics London: Routledge, 16‐ 38. ‘Ó Tuathail G (2002) Theorizing practical geopolitical reasoning: the case of the United States’ response to the war in Bosnia. Political Geography 21(5): 601‐628. Ó Tuathail G (2006) General Introduction: Thinking Critically about Geopolitics. In Ó Tuathail G et al (eds) The Geopolitics Reader. London: Routledge, 1‐14. Ó Tuathail G (2008) Russia’s Kosovo: a critical geopolitics of the August 2008 war over South Ossetia. Eurasian Geography and Economics 49(6): 670‐705. Ó Tuathail G (2009) Opening remarks. In Jones L & Sage S (eds) New directions in critical geopolitics: an introduction. GeoJournal, available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/75470501143010p6/. Ó Tuathail G (2010) Localizing geopolitics: disaggregating violence and return in conflict regions. Political Geography 29(5): 256‐265. Ó Tuathail G & Agnew J (1992) Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy. Political Geography 11(2): 190‐204. Ó Tuathail G & Dalby S (1994) Editorial: Critical geopolitics: unfolding spaces for thought in geography and global politics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12: 513‐ 514. Osborne P (1995) The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant‐garde. London: Verso. 20 Parel AJ (1991) The question of Machiavelli’s Modernity. The Review of Politics 53(2): 320‐ 339. Pin‐Fat V (2005) The metaphysics of the nation‐state: reading Hans J. Morgenthau. Review of International Studies 31(2): 217‐236. Prozorov S (2010) The other as past and present: beyond the logic of temporal othering in IR theory. Review of International Studies 37(3): 1273‐1293. Ricoeur P (1980) Narrative time. Critical Inquiry 7(1): 169‐190. Ricoeur P (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur P (1983) Time and Narrative Vol. I. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur P (2010) Power and violence. Theory, culture and society 27(5): 18‐36 Rogers J (2009) From “civilian power” to “global power”: explicating the European Union’s “grand strategy” through discourse theory. Journal of Common Market Studies 47(4): 831‐862. Ruggie JG (1993) Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations. International Organization 47(1): 139‐174. Sabelis et al (2005) Introduction to time and discourse: time, text and tuning. Time & Society 14(2/3): 261‐263. Said E (1978[1995]) Orientalism. London: Penguin. Schmitt C (1954) Land und Meer. Stuttgart: Klett‐Cotta. Sharp, J. (2000) Condensing the Cold War: reader’s digest and American identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Simms K (2003) Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge. Slater D (2004) Geopolitics and the Post‐colonial: rethinking North‐South relations. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja EW (1989) Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso. Sparke M (2003) American empire & Globalization: postcolonial speculations on neo‐colonial enframing. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(3): 373‐389. Therborn G (2003) Entangled modernities. European Journal of Social Theory 6(3): 293‐305. Thrift N (1977) Time and theory in Human Geography: Part I. Progress in Human Geography 1(1): 54‐101. 21 Thrift N (2000) It’s the little things. In Dodds K & Atkinson D (eds) Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought. London: Routledge, 380‐387. Thrift N (2002) A hyperactive world. In Johnston R J, Taylor P J & Watts M J (eds) Geographies of global change: remapping the world. Oxford: Blackwell, 29‐42. Vanhoozer K (1991) Philosophical antecedents to Rioeur’s Time and Narrative. In Wood D (ed) On Paul Ricoeur: narrative and interpretation. London: Routledge, 34‐54. Virilio P (1977) Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. Virilio P (1998) The Information Bomb. London: Verso. Walker RBJ (1995) International Relations and the Concept of the Political. In Booth K & Smith S (eds) International Relations Theory Today. Oxford: Blackwell, 306‐327. Weizman E (2007) Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. London: Verso. White H (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press. Williams MC (1998) Identity and the politics of security. European Journal of International Relations 4(2): 204‐225. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ira Bliatka, Christopher Browning, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Alan Ingram, Richard Mole, Susan Morrissey, Yannis Tsantoulis and audiences in London and Edinburgh for their comments on previous versions of these arguments. This paper originally came out of my doctoral thesis, which was cleverly supervised by Felix Ciută at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies and for which in 2007 I received the SSEES Foundation Fellowship. 22