Post-triumphalist Geopolitics
Liberal Selves, Authoritarian Others
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i4.1811Keywords:
Critical geopolitics, political geography, mental maps, authoritarism, liberalism, democratization, Orientalism, post-Soviet spaceAbstract
This article examines a dominant vision in contemporary geopolitics, in which the world is imagined as divided between liberal and illiberal political systems, clustering around the two conceptual nodes of “democracy” and “authoritarianism”. It considers how these conceptual nodes are imagined, mapped, and brought to life through writing, policies, and institutions related to democracy promotion. Instead of focusing on the definition of these concepts, this essay scrutinizes the ideological underpinnings of efforts to define “authoritarianism” and “democracy”, and shows how these definitional debates themselves produce geopolitical imaginaries that facilitate certain kinds of intervention in an era of “post-triumphalist geopolitics”.
References
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Dalmasso, Emilia, Adele del Sordi, Marlies Glasius, Nicole Hirt, Marcus Michaelsen, Abdulkader Mohammad, and Dana Moss. (2018). Intervention: Extraterritorial authoritarian power. Political Geography 64: 95-104.
Diamond, Larry. (2008). The spirit of democracy: The struggle to build free societies throughout the world. New York: Times Books.
Diamond, Larry, Marc Plattner, and Christopher Walker. (2016). Authoritarianism goes global: The challenge to democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Giddens, Anthony. (1987). The nation-state and violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Glasius, Marlies. (2018a). Extraterritorial authoritarian practices: A framework. Globalizations 15 (2): 179-197.
Glasius, Marlies. (2018b). What authoritarianism is … and is not: A practice perspective. International Affairs 94 (3): 515-533.
Grojec, Wojtek and Carlos Coelho. (2018). How autocracy is trending again (August 23). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved from: https://www.rferl.org/a/how-autocracy-is-trending-again/29449280.html
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Hadenius, Axel and Jan Teorell. (2007). Pathways from authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 18 (1): 143-157.
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Hale, Henry. (2016). 25 years after the USSR: What’s gone wrong? Journal of Democracy 27 (3): 24-35.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David. (2009). Cosmopolitanism and the geographies of freedom. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hoffman, Bert. (2018). More than “authoritarian solidarity”: Unbundling the international cooperation survival package of socialist Cuba. Taiwan Journal of Democracy 14 (1): 117-139.
Howe, Paul. (2017). Eroding norms and democratic deconsolidation. Journal of Democracy 28 (4): 15-29.
Jansson, David. (2018). Deadly exceptionalisms, or, would you rather be crushed by a moral superpower or a military superpower? Political Geography 64: 83-91.
Johnson, Corey and Reece Jones (2018) The biopolitics and geopolitics of border enforcement in Melilla. Territory, Politics, Governance, 6 (1): 61-80.
Kagan, Robert. (2015). The weight of geopolitics. Journal of Democracy 26 (1): 21-31.
Koch, Natalie. (2014). The shifting geopolitics of higher education: Inter/nationalizing elite universities in Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Beyond. Geoforum 56: 46-54.
Koch, Natalie. (2016). We entrepreneurial academics: Governing globalized higher education in ‘illiberal’ states. Territory, Politics, Governance 4 (4): 438-452.
Koch, Natalie. (2017). Orientalizing authoritarianism: Narrating US exceptionalism in popular reactions to the Trump election and presidency. Political Geography 58: 145-147.
Koch, Natalie. (2018a). The geopolitics of spectacle: Space, synecdoche, and the new capitals of Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Koch, Natalie (2018b). Trump, one year later: Three myths of liberalism exposed. In Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on, with P. Steinberg, S. Page, J. Dittmer, B. Gökariksel, S. Smith, and A. Ingram. Political Geography 62: 207-215.
Koch, Natalie and Neha Vora. (forthcoming). Laboratories of liberalism: American higher education in the Arabian Peninsula and the discursive production of authoritarianism. Minerva.
Krastev, Ivan and Stephen Holmes. (2018). Imitation and its discontents. Journal of Democracy 29 (3): 117-128.
Krugman, Paul. (2017). America becomes a Stan (January 2). The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/america-becomes-a-stan.html
Mann, Michael. (2004). Fascists. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mazzarella, William. (2015). Totalitarian tears: Does the crowd really mean it? Cultural Anthropology 30 (1): 91-112.
Mitchell, Timothy. (1988). Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mutua, Makau. (2001). Savages, victims, and saviors: The metaphor of human rights. Harvard International Law Journal 42 (1): 201-245.
Nathan, Andrew. (2015). China’s challenge. Journal of Democracy 26 (1): 156-170.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1996). On the genealogy of morals: A polemic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Noah, Tucker. (2015). Donald Trump - America’s African President (October 3). The Daily Show YouTube Channel. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPrJxTvgdQ
NPR. (2018). Madeleine Albright warns: Don’t let fascism go ‘unnoticed until it’s too late’ (April 3). National Public Radio. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=599120190
Ó Tuathail, Gearóid and John Agnew. (1992). Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy. Political Geography 11 (2): 190-204.
Rancière, Jacques. (2006). Hatred of democracy. New York: Verso.
Rabinow, Paul. (1989). French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rampton, David and Suthaharan Nadarajah. (2017). A long view of liberal peace and its crisis. European Journal of International Relations 23 (2): 441-465.
Rhoden, Thomas. (2015). The liberal in liberal democracy. Democratization 22 (3): 560-578.
Rupnik, Jacques. (2018). The crisis of liberalism. Journal of Democracy 29 (3): 24-38.
Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sharp, Joanne. (2000). Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Snyder, Timothy. (2017). On tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
Snyder, Timothy. (2018). The road to unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. (1978). A world split apart – Commencement address delivered at Harvard University. Cambridge: Harvard University. Retrieved from: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm
Todorova, Maria. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1975). Images and mental maps. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 65 (2): 205-213.
Tucker, Joshua, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret Roberts, and Pablo Barberá. (2017). From liberation to turmoil: Social media and democracy. Journal of Democracy 28 (4): 46-59.
Turits, Richard Lee. (2003). Foundations of despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo regime, and modernity in Dominican history. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Vora, Neha. (2018). Teach for Arabia: American universities, liberalism, and transnational Qatar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Way, Lucan. (2016). Weaknesses of autocracy promotion. Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 64-75.
Zakaria, Fareed. (2016). America would be Trump’s banana republic (July 21). The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-would-be-trumps-banana-republic/2016/07/21/f652820a-4f57-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html?utm_term=.769eecc74396
Agnew, John. (2003). Geopolitics: Re-visioning world politics. New York: Routledge.
Albright, Madeleine. (2018). Fascism: A warning. New York: Harper.
Barber, Benjamin. (1969). Conceptual foundations of totalitarianism. In, Carl Friedrich, Michael Curtis and Benjamin Barber (eds.), Totalitarianism in perspective: Three views. New York: Praeger, pp. 3-52.
Bauman, Zymunt. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Belcher, Oliver and Lauren Martin. (2013) Ethnographies of closed doors: Conceptualising openness and closure in US immigration and military institutions. Area 45 (4): 403-410.
Bing, Christopher and Joel Shecthman. (2019). Special report: Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of U.S. mercenaries (January 30). Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-spying-raven-specialreport/special-report-inside-the-uaes-secret-hacking-team-of-u-s-mercenaries-idUSKCN1PO19O
Carothers, Thomas. (2002). The end of the transition paradigm. Journal of Democracy 13 (1): 5-21.
Chambers, Peter. (2018). Border security: Shores of politics, horizons of justice. New York: Routledge.
Chernilo, Daniel. (2006). Social theory’s methodological nationalism: Myth and reality. European Journal of Social Theory 9 (1): 5-22.
Conroy-Krutz, Emily. (2015). Christian imperialism: Converting the world in the early American Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Cooley, Alexander. (2015). Countering democratic norms. Journal of Democracy 26 (3): 49-63.
Cooley, Alexander and J. Heathershaw. (2017). Dictators without borders: Power and money in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cresswell, Tim. (2005). Moral geographies. In, David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, Davide Sibley and Neil Washbourne (eds.), Cultural geography: A critical dictionary of key concepts. New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 128-134.
Dalby, Simon. (1990). Creating the second Cold War: The discourse of politics. London: Pinter.
Dalmasso, Emilia, Adele del Sordi, Marlies Glasius, Nicole Hirt, Marcus Michaelsen, Abdulkader Mohammad, and Dana Moss. (2018). Intervention: Extraterritorial authoritarian power. Political Geography 64: 95-104.
Diamond, Larry. (2008). The spirit of democracy: The struggle to build free societies throughout the world. New York: Times Books.
Diamond, Larry, Marc Plattner, and Christopher Walker. (2016). Authoritarianism goes global: The challenge to democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dittmer, Jason. (2005). Captain America’s empire: Reflections on identity, popular culture, and post-9/11 geopolitics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95 (3): 626-643.
Dittmer, Jason. (2010). Popular culture, geopolitics, and identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Folkenflik, David. (2018). NPR criticized for interview with white supremacist Jason Kessler (August 13) National Public Radio. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/13/638102276/npr-criticized-for-interview-with-white-supremacist-jason-kessler
Freedom House. (2018). Freedom in the world 2018: Democracy in crisis. Freedom House. Retrieved from: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018
Fukuyama, Francis. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.
Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Giddens, Anthony. (1987). The nation-state and violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Glasius, Marlies. (2018a). Extraterritorial authoritarian practices: A framework. Globalizations 15 (2): 179-197.
Glasius, Marlies. (2018b). What authoritarianism is … and is not: A practice perspective. International Affairs 94 (3): 515-533.
Grojec, Wojtek and Carlos Coelho. (2018). How autocracy is trending again (August 23). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved from: https://www.rferl.org/a/how-autocracy-is-trending-again/29449280.html
Gould, Peter. (1966). On mental maps. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Hadenius, Axel and Jan Teorell. (2007). Pathways from authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 18 (1): 143-157.
Hale, Henry. (2005). Regime cycles: Democracy, autocracy, and revolution in post-Soviet Eurasia. World Politics 58 (1): 133-165.
Hale, Henry. (2016). 25 years after the USSR: What’s gone wrong? Journal of Democracy 27 (3): 24-35.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David. (2009). Cosmopolitanism and the geographies of freedom. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hoffman, Bert. (2018). More than “authoritarian solidarity”: Unbundling the international cooperation survival package of socialist Cuba. Taiwan Journal of Democracy 14 (1): 117-139.
Howe, Paul. (2017). Eroding norms and democratic deconsolidation. Journal of Democracy 28 (4): 15-29.
Jansson, David. (2018). Deadly exceptionalisms, or, would you rather be crushed by a moral superpower or a military superpower? Political Geography 64: 83-91.
Johnson, Corey and Reece Jones (2018) The biopolitics and geopolitics of border enforcement in Melilla. Territory, Politics, Governance, 6 (1): 61-80.
Kagan, Robert. (2015). The weight of geopolitics. Journal of Democracy 26 (1): 21-31.
Koch, Natalie. (2014). The shifting geopolitics of higher education: Inter/nationalizing elite universities in Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Beyond. Geoforum 56: 46-54.
Koch, Natalie. (2016). We entrepreneurial academics: Governing globalized higher education in ‘illiberal’ states. Territory, Politics, Governance 4 (4): 438-452.
Koch, Natalie. (2017). Orientalizing authoritarianism: Narrating US exceptionalism in popular reactions to the Trump election and presidency. Political Geography 58: 145-147.
Koch, Natalie. (2018a). The geopolitics of spectacle: Space, synecdoche, and the new capitals of Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Koch, Natalie (2018b). Trump, one year later: Three myths of liberalism exposed. In Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on, with P. Steinberg, S. Page, J. Dittmer, B. Gökariksel, S. Smith, and A. Ingram. Political Geography 62: 207-215.
Koch, Natalie and Neha Vora. (forthcoming). Laboratories of liberalism: American higher education in the Arabian Peninsula and the discursive production of authoritarianism. Minerva.
Krastev, Ivan and Stephen Holmes. (2018). Imitation and its discontents. Journal of Democracy 29 (3): 117-128.
Krugman, Paul. (2017). America becomes a Stan (January 2). The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/america-becomes-a-stan.html
Mann, Michael. (2004). Fascists. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mazzarella, William. (2015). Totalitarian tears: Does the crowd really mean it? Cultural Anthropology 30 (1): 91-112.
Mitchell, Timothy. (1988). Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mutua, Makau. (2001). Savages, victims, and saviors: The metaphor of human rights. Harvard International Law Journal 42 (1): 201-245.
Nathan, Andrew. (2015). China’s challenge. Journal of Democracy 26 (1): 156-170.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1996). On the genealogy of morals: A polemic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Noah, Tucker. (2015). Donald Trump - America’s African President (October 3). The Daily Show YouTube Channel. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPrJxTvgdQ
NPR. (2018). Madeleine Albright warns: Don’t let fascism go ‘unnoticed until it’s too late’ (April 3). National Public Radio. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=599120190
Ó Tuathail, Gearóid and John Agnew. (1992). Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy. Political Geography 11 (2): 190-204.
Rancière, Jacques. (2006). Hatred of democracy. New York: Verso.
Rabinow, Paul. (1989). French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rampton, David and Suthaharan Nadarajah. (2017). A long view of liberal peace and its crisis. European Journal of International Relations 23 (2): 441-465.
Rhoden, Thomas. (2015). The liberal in liberal democracy. Democratization 22 (3): 560-578.
Rupnik, Jacques. (2018). The crisis of liberalism. Journal of Democracy 29 (3): 24-38.
Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sharp, Joanne. (2000). Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Snyder, Timothy. (2017). On tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
Snyder, Timothy. (2018). The road to unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. (1978). A world split apart – Commencement address delivered at Harvard University. Cambridge: Harvard University. Retrieved from: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm
Todorova, Maria. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1975). Images and mental maps. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 65 (2): 205-213.
Tucker, Joshua, Yannis Theocharis, Margaret Roberts, and Pablo Barberá. (2017). From liberation to turmoil: Social media and democracy. Journal of Democracy 28 (4): 46-59.
Turits, Richard Lee. (2003). Foundations of despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo regime, and modernity in Dominican history. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Vora, Neha. (2018). Teach for Arabia: American universities, liberalism, and transnational Qatar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Way, Lucan. (2016). Weaknesses of autocracy promotion. Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 64-75.
Zakaria, Fareed. (2016). America would be Trump’s banana republic (July 21). The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-would-be-trumps-banana-republic/2016/07/21/f652820a-4f57-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html?utm_term=.769eecc74396
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Published
2019-09-12
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Koch, N. (2019). Post-triumphalist Geopolitics: Liberal Selves, Authoritarian Others. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(4), 909–924. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i4.1811
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