EC A Critical Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific

This short course examines the hemispheric shift in post-Cold War international relations from the North Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific through the lens of critical geopolitical theory. As the walls of East-West confrontation fell, this school of thought emerged in the mid-1990s as a corrective to the geographical determinism of classical geostrategy, centred not on territory per se, but on the construction of ideas of space and place and their instrumentalization in international politics. Our attention will focus on the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical construct, a new-old zone of confluence between East and West routed (sic) in imperial cartographies which owes its revival to the repurposing of imaginative geographies in a multipolar world. We shall analyse the resurgence of the Indo-Pacific as a global space, its representations in the forums of public debate, and its uses in the discursive strategies of British and Commonwealth foreign policy-makers.

(*lecture recommandée)

Agnew, John. “The Origins Critical Geopolitics” in Kuus, M. (2013). The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics (K. Dodds, Ed.) (1st ed.), 19-32. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315612874

Dittmer, Jason. Popular Culture, Geopolitics & Identity. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2010.

Li, Hansong. “The ‘Indo-Pacific’: Intellectual Origins and International Visions in Global Contexts.” Modern Intellectual History 19.3 (2022): 807–833.

A full reading list will be provided at the beginning of term.