Guest Editorial The State of critical geopolitics As a body of scholarship that first emerged in the early 1990s, critical geopolitics bridged the disciplines of Geography and Inter- national Relations and was initially inspired in Geography by the pioneering work of ‘dissident’ scholars including Simon Dalby, John Agnew and Gearoid Ó Tuathail. The seminal works published by Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992), Ó Tuathail (1996a, 1996b) and Simon Dalby (1990, 1991) at the beginning of the 1990s subse- quently burgeoned into a rich and vast array of publications and the now established field of critical geopolitics. Drawing inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, critical geopolitics did not seek to develop a theory of how space and poli- tics intersect but was rather concerned with developing a mode of interrogating and exposing the grounds for knowledge production and of seeking to analyze the articulation, objectivization and subversion of hegemony. It was thus “merely the starting point for a different form of geopolitics” and as such offered “a seductive promise, a putative claim that one can get beyond a baleful geopol- itics and recover the real beyond the categorical, the ideological, the dogmatic, the imperialist and the hyperbolic” (Ó Tuathail, in Jones & Sage, 2009). Given the important influence of poststructural philosophies on critical geopolitics, it would be inappropriate to posit a foundational moment in which the origins of this approach could be secured. Nonetheless, it is striking how the emergence of critical geopolitics was coeval with the development of critical theories of international relations from the late 1980s onwards, especially in the work of Richard Ashley, James Der Derian, Michael Shapiro and Rob Walker (see the overview in Campbell, 2009). In particular, the separately developed but intellectually related arguments of Campbell’s Writing Security (Campbell, 1992) and Ó Tuathail’s landmark text Critical Geopolitics (Ó Tuathail, 1996a) demonstrated how common approaches emerged at this particular juncture. Campbell’s Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, first published in 1992 and then in 1998 in a revised edition, was an extension of his 1989 PhD thesis completed at the Australian National University entitled Security and Identity. Ó Tuathail’s Crit- ical Geopolitics (1996), the sixth volume in the University of Minne- sota Press Borderlines series edited by David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, was based on his 1989 Syracuse University PhD entitled Critical Geopolitics: The Social Construction of State and Place in the Practice of Statecraft. Through these intersections, critical geopolitics scholarship sought to radically reconceptualise ‘geopolitics’ as a complex and problematic set of discourses, representations and practices. Through the 1990s a number of geographers used the term critical geopolitics to encompass a diverse range of academic challenges to the conventional ways in which political space was written, read and practiced. Without wishing to homogenize a diverse and disparate body of work, we agree with Ó Tuathail’s assessment that critical geopolitics is: ..no more than a general gathering place for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that char- acterize modernity. One important initial vector of critique was the recovery of textuality within practices which are repre- sented as objective or practical, as ‘beyond the text.’ Geopolitics is inescapably cultural. A second was the displacement of state- centric readings of world politics and the recovery of the many messy practices that constitute the modern inter-state system. Geopolitics is inescapably plural. A third was the development of critical histories of geopolitical thinkers and discourses. Geopolitics is inescapably traversed by relations of power and gender (Ó Tuathail, in Jones & Sage, 2009). In the two decades since its emergence, critical geopolitics has become an extremely popular ‘gathering place’, its attractiveness “possibly the sole result of the sexy combination of space and power” (Mamadouh in Jones & Sage, 2009), as it now constitutes an ever-growing body of research aimed at deconstructing geopo- litical discourses and disclosing the hidden power relations behind them. The focus on the recovery of textuality was particularly popular in the early years, so much so that Nigel Thrift’s (2000) article ‘Its the little things’ directs our “mesmerised attention to texts and images” and calls for a more sensitive inquiry into the workings of geopower by attending to objects, the human body and matters of percept, affect and emotion, as well as the most ordi- nary (‘precognitive’) forms of sociality. In recent years this chal- lenge has been taken up in, for example, the work of Gearoid Ó Tuathail on affect and the invasion of Iraq (Ó Tuathail, 2003), Ben Anderson’s work on the geopolitical dimensions of affect and ‘anticipatory practices’ of security (Anderson, 2010a, 2010b), in the work of Carter and McCormack (2006) on film and the affective logic of intervention and in Sidaway’s (2009) work on geopolitics, affect and place. As Müller (2008) has argued however, in discus- sing the textualism that has dominated critical geopolitics thus far, the concept of discourse in critical geopolitics continues to be relatively under-theorized and its theoretical breadth and depth remain largely unexplored. In a similar vein to Thrift (2000), Müller (2008) thus advocates widening the analytical focus of crit- ical geopolitics to encompass a concept of discourse as language and social practice. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo 0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.003 Political Geography 29 (2010) 243–246