GeoJournal 50: 37–43, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 37 Conflict studies and critical geopolitics – theoretical concepts and recent research in political geography Paul Reuber Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, Berliner Strasse 48, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany Received 25 May 2000; accepted 19 June 2000 Key words: political geography, critical geopolitics, conflict studies Abstract The political and economic upheavals during the past two decades have led to a new social and political organization of space on all levels of scale. To deal with the obvious changes, political geography had to rethink and to extend its traditional concepts. Transcending its long taken-for-granted radical approaches, the Anglo-American geography developed two conceptional paths, both of which are still relevant for political geography today: – a new awareness of regional differences in political action and culture – a new, constructionist awareness of the instrumental- ization of geographical discourses for geopolitical pur- poses. With these theoretical concepts, political geography is examining a number of both traditional and new fields of research. Their heterogeneity is once again evidence of postmodern diversity and difference. They are characterized by both a new awareness of differentiation and a widening of the traditional viewpoint in three closely related respects transcending the traditional topics of political activity, the traditional political actors and the established levels of scale of politics. Based on the current literature it is possible to outline some major themes and perspectives of current political geography that are closely linked together, like knots in thematic networks: 1. ecological politics and resource conflicts 2. territorial conflicts and boundaries 3. geopolitics and the politics of identity 4. globalization and new international relations 5. the symbolic representation of political power 6. regional conflicts and new social movements. The ‘New World Order’ and Political Geography For a brief period, the end of the Cold War seemed to awaken the old hope of a new, democratic world society, that would be freer of violence than previous ages. Instead, however, the ‘new world order’ led to a further rise in armed conflicts. The wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya unleashed a degree of violence that had been thought overcome after World War II. Many of these new conflicts definitely have a geopolitical or place-specific component. At the same time, postmodern societies are undergo- ing far-reaching socioeconomic and political changes at the regional and local level. The social and ecological conse- quences of modernity have led to the development of a “risk society” (Beck, 1986) 1 , causing a “return of uncertainty into society” (Bonß 1993, p. 20). Even prosperous nations have had to face such developments as the institutional and finan- cial crisis of the state, environmental problems, economic liberalization, increasing social inequality, or the split-up of the population into a lifestyle-society celebrating their minor distinctions of taste (Bourdieu, 1991). These developments did not leave the spatial organiza- tion of society unaffected; they sometimes led to severe changes in the traditional balance of ‘geopolitical’ power on all levels. To deal appropriately with this “new social and political organization of space” (Scott et al., 1999, p. 2), political geography had to rethink and to extend its tradi- tional concepts. At the international scale, it had become impossible to explain “what (was) happening in the world... simply with the confrontation between the two great ide- ologies” (Lacoste, 1990, p. 17). The traditional primacy of the nation-state was challenged by globalized networks and institutions 2 as well as by regional particularisms (Ossen- brügge and Sandner, 1994, p. 12). Theories developed under the quasi-stable geopolitical conditions of the ‘old world order’ were no longer appropriate for understanding these changes. Anglo-American “Radical Geography” (Harvey, 1975), which was long considered to be “a leading, and,