Vital Topics Forum: Geopolitical Lives

By Samar al-Bulushi (UC Irvine) and Kristin Peterson (UC Irvine)

In the days and weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, political analysts worldwide observed that a sizeable number of Global South states actively resisted Western calls to condemn Russia for its actions. Even if some of these states acknowledged the destabilizing impact of the invasion, they were quick to highlight US hypocrisy in demanding respect for a “rules-based order,” noting the track record of US aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The fact that so many states abstained in the vote to condemn Russia at the UN General Assembly signaled the potential decline of Western hegemony and shift to a more multipolar order.

Months (and billions of dollars in US arms shipments to Ukraine) later, at least two things are clear: Russia’s actions have triggered new debates about imperial formations beyond Europe and the food crisis precipitated by the shutdown of global supply chains has created challenging circumstances for many Global South states as they strive to maintain a neutral stance all while attempting to address the basic needs of their people. To date, however, anthropologists have not had much to say about these developments, despite their implications for the people and places in which we work.[1]

While this collection of essays was drafted prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the potential geopolitical shifts it represents speak precisely to the importance of an anthropology of geopolitics. What would it mean for anthropology to more explicitly engage with geopolitics—to foreground a phenomenon often relegated to the “context” of our work—by grappling with its grounded instantiations across the world? In the simplest terms, geopolitics is about the relationship between territory and power. While the study of geopolitics remains largely a positivist assemblage of analyses dominated by political scientists, international relations scholars, and security analysts, geographers have pushed us to think about geo-graphy—the literal writing of the earth—as a technology for the deployment of power (Massaro and Williams 2013; see also Dalby 1994; O’Tuathail 1996; Sparke 2000). In this sense, geopolitics might be understood as the material and conceptual division of the world into discrete states, each one ostensibly sovereign, equal, and characterized by a seemingly discrete “culture.” In many ways, geopolitics is about the implicit geographical understandings of world politics that are mobilized by institutions of power, from the military to mainstream news outlets to the university. It is equally about the imaginative geographies and taken-for-granted assumptions about scale and concomitant actors that continue to structure our understandings of the world. These predominantly masculinist and abstract renderings of space are informed by charts and lines on a map; some rely on racialized metaphors and templates such as the “developing world” or “failed states” in order to concretize and reinforce their assumptions about place and power.

In recent years, Black feminists and geographers have shed critical light on dominant modes of geographic thought, turning our attention to geographies of relationality and unrecognized forms of knowledge and action (see especially Hawthorne 2019; McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007). So too have they directed our attention to forms of life that operate in excess of hegemonic geopolitical scripts. In this Vital Topics Forum, we take inspiration from this work as we interrogate the ways in which Euro-American geographies, political leaders, and institutions continue to be centered as the terrain of the political, rendering the global majority and their geographies as either too destroyed or too subjugated to constitute the geopolitical (McKittrick 2011; McKittrick and Woods 2007; in anthropology, see especially Coronil 1996; Wilder 2015). While the vocabulary of “geopolitics” often signals to North American audiences the machinations of US imperialism abroad, emergent scholarship on Black geographies offers a powerful entry point to make connections between geographies of violence and dispossession (e.g., gentrification, policing, etc.) “at home” and abroad.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, anthropologists increasingly abandoned their microscopic lenses to explore the realms of transnationalism and globalization. Examining transnational imagined communities like the Non-Aligned Movement and the European Community, Akhil Gupta (1992) encouraged us to consider processes of place-making and community formation that transgress the seeming “naturalness” of the nation-state. Liisa Malkki (1992) scrutinized the pathologization of uprootedness, focusing especially on the discursive externalization of refugees from the “national” order of things. As we shifted away from romanticized and universalist notions of “global flows,” we grappled with the reality of a fragmented globality (Trouillot 2001)—of a world that continued to be structured by hierarchy, racism, and inequality. Theorizations of transnational governmentality productively challenged our conceptualizations of scale (Ferguson and Gupta 2002) but neglected the continued significance of race in structuring global power formations (Clarke and Thomas 2006; Pierre 2013). Feminists have probed the gender of theory itself, noting the masculinity that continues to shape analytical pronouncements about the global order (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Lutz 1995, 2006; Rofel 2002). The recent uptick in ethnographies of US empire (e.g., Collins and McGranahan 2018; Saleh 2021) has enriched and complicated our understanding of the shape-shifting nature of imperial power, pushing us to move away from reified conceptualizations of empire as a singular, totalizing force.

However, the political dynamics of our time continue to outpace our analytic vocabularies (Lee 2010). There is a risk that we overlook subnational and interregional dynamics as well as emergent (sub?)imperial formations (e.g., Caton 2020). Without simultaneous attention to the sub- and supranational engagements of the global majority, these populations and regions are often misunderstood as passive recipients of North Atlantic power. That is, we risk missing just how people and populations resist, cope with, (re)constitute, and run away from various geopolitical machinations (e.g., Elamin 2018).

An anthropology of geopolitics broadens our lens to reveal other sets of actors who are relevant to understandings of the global present. We know that worldmaking has never been the exclusive preserve of (white) political actors in the metropole (Getachew 2019; Lee 2010; Li 2020; Prashad 2007; Stephens 2005; Thiong’o 1993; Wilder 2015). From Afro-Asian solidarity gatherings in Bandung and Cairo to the rise of BRICS and the Gulf Cooperation Council, from Black Lives Matter to Standing Rock, Global South feminisms and Palestine, sub- and supranational modes of place-making are important sites of meaning-making and belonging. So too do they demand vocabularies and conceptualizations of scale that account for the plurality of world “centers” (Hanieh 2019; Thiong’o 1993).

An anthropology of geopolitics is not only possible but necessary at a time when emergent dynamics are effectively remapping the world in which we live. Drawing on the discipline’s existing conceptual tools for the study of the political, we can expand our lens with attention to the problematics of scale, opening up space for new questions and ideas that transcend conventional categories and templates (Peterson and Olson, under contract). Building on the work of feminist scholars, we could explore how marriage, family planning, and contests over militarized masculinity are domains through which geopolitics unfold, as well as how variously positioned bodies co-constitute the geopolitical (e.g., Smith 2020) while also tracking how science produces distancing and maps bodies in particular ways (Clarke, this forum). While on the one hand, studying transregional entanglements, intimacies, and relationalities (e.g., Clarke 2004; Ho 2006; Lowe 2015; Lu 2022; Hundle, this forum), we could equally scrutinize the ways in which certain relations are framed as disentangled, obscuring collaboration and complicity (see especially Appel 2019; Dua 2019; Saleh 2021; Stoler 2018). Here, the anthropology of geopolitics is essential to engagements with law, bureaucracy, and political economy by helping ask: Who is a geopolitical actor? And where is geopolitics? We also have an opportunity to enrich our analysis of temporality by examining the seeming linearity of what Jatin Dua (this forum) refers to as “geopolitical time.” There is room here for anthropology’s great strength of zooming in on the details of social and political life, capturing the complex realities of those who are both out of “place” and out of “time.”

While mainstream conceptualizations of geopolitics continue to be shaped by Eurocentric ideas about disembodied “experts” operating in the public realm, an ethnographic lens would capture the affective and embodied dimensions of geopolitics: the ceremonial performances of friendship (Ghosh, this forum) as well as the doubt, the unease, and the suspicion that haunt geopolitical calculations and forms of knowledge (Al-Bulushi, Razavi, this forum). It could explore the role of secrecy, of (non)performativity, and of the silences that maintain hegemonic power formations (Tahir, this forum). It could follow traces, such as the aftermath of a drone strike, the elusive document, the backroom conversation, the hidden handshake, and the redactions in the colonial archive. It could explore how power is understood, negotiated, incorporated, or resisted by those who bear the brunt of geopolitical militarization and policymaking. By foregrounding the politics of location, it would highlight the differential stakes in the questions that are raised or not, and by whom (Hundle, Szeman, and Pares Hoare 2019).

We could examine the work of geopolitics, from the negotiation of trade deals, peace agreements, and access to military bases to the imaginative labor designed to shape how the inhabitants of one neighborhood, country, or region imagine their relationship to another. Studying the everyday work that shapes relationships between states/regions, in particular, would offer new insights on the study of elites, bureaucracies, and the state, highlighting how difference (race, gender, geopolitical location) shapes relationships between elites. Think tanks and international organizations, for example, are riddled with internal hierarchies, such that nonwhite professionals do not enjoy the privileges or ideas generally associated with whiteness (e.g., expertise, intellectual capacity, bureaucratic efficiency, neutrality) (Benton 2016; Razavi 2021). When the study of elites involves nonwhites, writes Adia Benton, in what direction are we studying? How do these scenarios trouble the metaphors of direction and scale implied in a discussion of studying “up” (Nader 1969)? More broadly, an anthropology of geopolitics would center the question of alterity for our understanding of global power formations, exploring the multiple, overlapping processes of racialization that inform phenomena as diverse as the climate catastrophe to the war on terror.

Methodologically and politically, we approach “geopolitics” as the basis for collaborative, decolonial, and feminist anthropology. We are attuned to the politics of location and how it shapes not only our questions and analytical frameworks but equally a differentiated ability to actually conduct research (see especially Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Tahir 2020; Berry et al. 2017). In an age of border imperialism and rapidly expanding surveillance regimes, the discipline’s readiness to contend with the significance of the “geo” in geopolitics is integral to the project of decolonizing lingering conceptions of authoritative knowledge. Our readiness to move beyond individual research projects and embrace more collaborative approaches is equally integral to our ability to make connections across time and space.

In This Forum

References Cited

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Note

[1] Darryl Li’s (2022) engagement with Aziz Rana’s essay in Dissent is one exception.