GEOPOLITICS
Primo semestre – 3° anno
6 domande risposta aperta (short) – Online
CHAPTER 1: CLIMATE CHANGE
Warning: pace and scale of climate action are insufficient to tackle climate change.
The adverse impact of the human-caused changes will intensify --> causing and
impacting:
Water scarcity and food production
Health and wellbeing
Cities, settlements and infrastructure
Ecosystems structure, species range shifts and changes in timing
Every increment of warming makes these effects and the extremes more widespread
and pronounced.
The problem is not the couple degree hotter weather, but the changes and dramatic
events that it involves and brings up, like flooding, earthquakes etc.
The hope is that mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action now will reduce
losses and damages for nature and people. Climate action provides co-benefits.
Multiple, feasible and effective options are available to reduce GHG emissions and
adapt to human-caused climate change.
CHALLENGE:
1. Cut emissions quickly, sharply to create a safer, sustainable world
2. Scale up practices and infrastructure to enhance resilience
3. Cut global GHG emissions by nearly half by 2030
4. Action required along numerous dimensions
One o9f the major challenge is that we are used to the use of non-renewable
energies / carbon fuel and it’s like we don’t protest anymore against the use of them
because it’s normal.
One of the best solutions is FAIRNESS: those who contributed the least to climate
change are often the most vulnerable to its impacts and the less guilty (biggest impact
in parts of Asia, Africa, central/south America & small islands).
People in highly vulnerable areas are up to 15x more likely to die in floods, droughts
and storms, compared to those who lives in in most resilient areas.
NEED TO INCREASE FINANCE:
3-6 times the current climate investment (there’s
enough global financing to rapidly reduce emissions)
Developing countries require external funding to meet
adaptation needs (options are available to scale up
financing)
Integrating measures to adapt to climate change, with actions to reduce emissions, in
ways that provide wider benefits like improving peoples’ health and livelihoods,
reducing poverty and hunger, use clean energy, water and air --> CLIMATE-
RESILIENT DEVELOPMENT
EFFECTIVE CLIMATE ACTION NEED:
1. Political commitment
2. Inclusive governance
3. International cooperation
4. Effective ecosystem
5. Sharing knowledge
6. Sharing benefits and burdens
7. Trust
8. Collaboration Human factors
9. Recognition
GEOPOLITICS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
The Anthropocene is the period when the humanity is in control.
Geopolitics is about:
The exercise of power: power is sociologically intended as the way for having a
person do what you want according to your objective and interests. It can be
political, institutional, economic, discursive or material.
Power can be divided into two types:
1. HARD POWER: like economic, military and material. War is an example
of using hard power over a weaker country.
2. SOFT POWERS: powers that are about solving and framing a problem,
like discursive.
The dimensions of powers are changing from the west to the superpower of
China and India. We are moving to some south Americans and African countries.
The 20th century was the century of the USA, but probably the 21 st will be
moving towards China. Is always a matter of power that is moving and
migrating.
!!Soft powers are even more important because it fertilized the ground
to use hard powers.
Where USA are working on themselves and working on their education system,
China is working on an educated class and on bringing educations and school
(infrastructure) in other countries, like Africa.
Geography: disposition of the countries and how they interact. Geopolitics is a
component of human geography. Geographers share a geographic or spatial
perspective: geography and society are mutually constructed.
For political geographers this means that politics makes geographies, and
geographies that are made are not politically neutral.
Geopolitics is also a form of political geography (mutual construction of
geography and politics). Traditionally:
GEOPOLITICS: is about soft powers. It explores the international
relations and interaction between countries. Interactions of geography
and politics that have an international or global dimension.
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY; is about hard powers. It’s about domestic
politics.
However, contemporary approaches have made the picture more complicated,
as geopolitics involves more actors than just states (social movements,
terrorist groups etc.)
Action on how we portray or represent them: geopolitics has very much to do
with narratives. It is reinforced through the use of maps (projection), that
make the countries looks closer and project the size in scale. The size of the
representation is part of the narrative (bigger country feel the power to
colonized and domine smaller and weaker countries).
How the powerful have created worlds: through the spread of powers used to
promote their interests and ambition of extension and dominance. Most of the
richness is detained from the 1% of the population, making them a
geopolitical actor themselves. The 1% of the population make more
emissions than the 66% of the poorest population, thanks to their unfair
lifestyle.
How the weaker have resisted such efforts and, in some contexts, constructed
their own worlds.
A multitude of connected actions and actors and the geographies they make,
change, destroy and maintain.
Why is geopolitics popular?
It’s because the ability to explain in simple terms a complex and precarious world.
For that reason, geopolitics can be reassuring, creating the illusion of being able to
know and, hence, to understand the world. It has often claimed an ability to tell us
how the world is going to be -> ability of making prevision based on the
analysis of the actual situation.
However, this is a simplification of a complex world is often an act of politics rather
than a way to understand the world.
Geopolitics that recognize the complexity of the world looks for ways to understand
why there are so many diverse geopolitical agents and why they either cooperate or
are in conflict.
GEOPOLITICAL APPROACHES
There are three approaches are alive and well and interacting with each other:
1. CLASSICAL GEOPOLITICS: very popular. The foundations are established in
the era of European exploration (15th – 16th century) and civilization of other
populations (barbarian). This era was characterized of desire and need to see
the world connected and give labels to its parts (barbaric or empty, to be
civilized and developed).
This was the foundation for the politics of empire and colonialism, hand in hand
with the mapping of the world.
Mapping is not that objective, and it’s made by geographers at the service of
the state. The prospective of the map depends on the country that made it.
There are a lot of features of classical geopolitics:
Masculine prospective
State-centric White, male elite
Simplification Territories have a given
Classification / labelling value and meaning
GEODETERMINISM: The way in which political actions are determined, as if
inevitably, by geographic location or the environment. Political actions are intended as
outcome of “natural laws” and not decision made by its ruler.
2. CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS: emerged in the 1990s as a reaction by geographers
to reclaim geopolitics of the State. It comprehends the post modernism; a broad
movement that developed in the 1980s-90s adopted in a variety of academic
and theoretical disciplines, marking a departure from modernism. Can be
defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it
describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with
modernism, focusing on the role of ideology in maintaining political or economic
power.
Critically engages the choice of words and the focus of policy statements,
maps, essays movies or any media to identify what is the underlying
discourse.
DISCOURSE: fusion of power and authority into the content of language.
Critical Geopolitics re-engaged through discourse analysis the work of past
classical geopoliticians exposing their biases and political agenda.
Es: the role of language in creating taken-for-granted assumptions about
terrorism, Islam, and Middle Est.
Es: US insistence on “liberation” or “freedom” during Cold war or in post 9/11
“Geography is about power. Although often assumed to be innocent, the
geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of
struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy,
and administer space”.
3. FEMINIST GEOPOLITICS: Built upon the increasing visibility and relevance of
feminist thought, starting from the 2000s.
It’s a way of thinking that aims to counter the simple classifications that are
underpinning classical geopolitics: rather than simple (and binary) categories,
complexity of people's positions and connectivity between people and places,
instead of claiming clear boundaries and differences between political spaces.
We cannot understand the word in the top-down manner of classical geopolitics
or simply critiquing this view as in critical geopolitics. We need an embodied
perspective, understanding what it means to be a particular individual in a
particular context to understand the way politics operates.
There are three different types of geopolitical discourse:
1. FORMAL GEOPOLITICS: produced by academics. Tradition of scholars
informing policy makers about “how the world is” and telling them what to do to
maximize the state’s power.
2. PRACTICAL GEOPOLITICS: discourse used by politicians and policy makers
3. POPULAR GEOPOLITICS: everyday geopolitical discourse that citizens are
immersed in. focus on popular media, based on the assumption that geopolitical
ideas are not only shaped by the state, intellectual elites and politicians.
LIBRO ANTHROPOCENE
DALBY
1, GEOPOLITICAL REVISITED
Climate change --> shaking up the economic and political order
Rapid changes in weather and temperature --> outpacing our capacity to assess risks
--> redefining economic success and shaking up GEOPOLITICAL STATUS QUO
VIOLENT RIVALRIES --> order of the day in global politics
Discussion on:
1. MIGRATION
2. BOUNDARIES WALLS Especially in Trump administration
3. MILITARY INTERVENTION
MEAD: concerned on antagonistic politics between some great powers --> suggest
return of geopolitics after a period of absence.
Opportunistic populist politicians --> respond to crisis with XENOPHOBIA and
THREATS of force rather than intelligent policies.
KAGAN: worried that the weight of geopolitics is reducing the role of democracy in
global governance as authoritarian states flex their political importance.
In response IKENBERRY was convinced the liberal order of recent decades remains
intact and nationalist rhetoric isn’t undermining globalization.
Fractiousness to international politics / nationalist logic /more border controls -->
REINFORCE TERRITORIAL MODE OF POWER
Geographical truths are being invoked by nationalist politicians suggesting that:
MOBILITY and MIGRATION are a threat to stable political entities
ALARMING, invece, is the failure of contemporary modes of governance to deal
with many interconnected changes.
The geographical arrangement of the world, shape and determine the
conduct of foreign policy and strategic history
KAPLAN: geographical context determines destiny
In EUROPE: classical geopolitics --> revival with political thinkers invoking
geographical formulation as the CONTEXT FOR POLICIES in the new centuries
Emphasizing: growing interconnectedness of global economy and the
dynamism of globalization --> change patterns of production and trade
REVIVAL OF CONCERNS (geopolitical matters) --> involves profound
engagement with:
Geographical representation --> that structure policy discussion
Changing geographies of global political economy
Rapid environment transformation --> directly related matter to global
politics
Geological language --> term ANTHROPOCENE
Conventional forms of environmental governance --> inefficient tackling global
changes
STRUCTURE POLICY --> emphasize separation / competition / conflict --> making more
difficult to address the dangerous global transformation of our times
1. THINKING GEOPOLITICALLY
DODDS: three things are the key
1. Influence and power over space and territory
2. Use geographical frames to make sense of worlds affairs (include “sphere of
influences” / “neighborhood” ecc.)
3. Geopolitics is FUTURE ORIENTED
Offers insight of behavior of states --> their interests are not changing
states need to: secure resources / protect territories / manage
populations
Geopolitics matters --> shaping politics at the planetary scale about:
1. struggles for power As the global economy and the technologies grew and
2. rivalries of big states and empires increase human possibilities
ATTEMPTS to divide the world POLITICALLY into various special configurations /
empires / blocks.