Lecture notes on power and space in political geography - the operations of power in geopolitical spheres and spaces of war and control. Covers early Nazi ideas of the geopolitik and moves to authors such as Foucault.
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Political Geography
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Power & Space
Notes on Lecture by Dr Noam Leshem, Durham University.
Power & The “Modern Age”
• The question of power underpins human existence — it is not a modern
phenomenon, however something happens to power in the modern age that forces
scholars to contend with changes and understand how they affect the answers
we’re looking for. For example, change in the understanding of sovereignty
• Modern age is accompanied by changes in thought; politics; structures,
orientations and procedures of power. This is best seen in its dislocation from the
sovereign.
• Hobbes’ Leviathan:
• Front cover: church and state — both are held by the ruler at the
top. The body of the ruler is made up of small people, populating
the body of the sovereign. All is encompassed/ contained by the
sovereign. Branches of power both earthly and divine. Sources of
authority are held in both his hands. Politics itself is made up of
the populace (remember polis from intro lecture).
• The landscape underneath the sovereign is hugged by the
sovereign. There is nothing that exceeds HIS (gendered!) domain.
Until the modern age this is the conceptualisation of power.
• Prior to the modern age power was conceptualised as inherent in
the sovereign.
• Foucault: sovereign power was a deductive power, a right to decide life and death;
a right to take life or let live. Deductive because the sovereign holds both the
power and the tools to do so. It is also deductive as it allows the sovereign to take
away money and possessions.
• Subtraction mechanism: right to tax/ appropriate portion of wealth; tax products,
goods and services.
• Levies on subjects in exchange for security. Sovereignty establishes itself thrill the
circulation of power - a social contract of loyalty (through sacrificing income,
children in army) and for the assumed promise of safety. Foucault calls this
sovereign power - talks about the sovereign as a shepherd (biblical), gives flock
protection, food, nourishment.
, • Monopolises right to violence in the sovereign
• Fredrich Ratzel: Bio Geography
• 19th Century Age of Rationalism: astronomy, history, geography
• Study of ecology emerges and there is a curiosity around the emergence of
species e.g. Charles Darwin ‘fathered’ this
• Prism of ecological thinking becomes a dominant way of understanding the natural
world/ non-human world, but also the operation of political systems
• Ratzel drew on this foundation of a biological interpretation of the political world.
For Ratzel, the state was a living organism. Anthropomorphised conception of the
state, shifted from an abstract/ theological notion to something that functions like
an organism.
• How does space work in this? We rely on space for nourishment, our movement,
used as a place for meeting others.
“Earthy” Geopolopitik: Ellen Churchill Semple an Karl Haushofer
• “Man is a product of the earth's surface. This means not merely that he is a child
of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set
him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have
strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of
navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution.
She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the
mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the
coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous
development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she
attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull
round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his
farm” — Semple (1911) Influences of Geographic Environment
• Very gendered relationship between nature and humans (also nonsense)
• Haushofer: “Not by accident is the word “Politik” preceded by that little prefix
“geo.” This prefix means much and demands much. It relates politics to the soil. It
rids politics of arid theories and senseless phrases which might trap our political
leaders into hopeless Utopias. It puts them back on solid ground. Geopolitik
demonstrates the dependence of all political developments on the permanent
reality of the soil. The foreign policy of the folkish state must safeguard the
existence on this planet of the race embodied in the state, by creating a healthy,
viable natural relation between the nation’s population and growth on the one
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