Critical Geopolitics and Its Critics

Critical geopolitics emerged from the late 1980s onward as an academic movement, associated above all with the political geographers Gearóid Ó Tuathail (also published as Gerard Toal) and Simon Dalby, that challenged the epistemological foundations of classical geopolitics represented by Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman. Ó Tuathail's influential book Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (1996) argued that classical geopolitical theories had never been objective, scientific descriptions of a fixed physical geography but were themselves political and rhetorical acts, produced by specific writers occupying specific institutional and imperial positions, and functioning to justify particular state policies rather than merely to describe an independent geographical reality.