Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Changing World Political Map by Nurit Kliot & David Newman

Author:Nurit Kliot & David Newman [Kliot, Nurit & Newman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780714650555
Google: AtUkVuatr1wC
Goodreads: 2909849
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-01-15T09:28:45+00:00

Discourses of deterritorialisation are also a window into an understudied problematic in contemporary political geography, namely the long relationship between technological systems and the world political map. Driving most contemporary claims of deterritorialisation is a ‘skein of networks’ (Latour) comprising complex technical systems from micro-radio communications and satellite transmission systems to transcontinental optical cable lines.54 These in turn enable everything from ebusiness on the Internet to 24 hour television broadcasting and deep space navigation. These telecommunications networks, as Hillis notes, have a long history and are much more than ‘tools’ or ‘conduits’ for the transmission of information.55 Rather, they are socio-technical networks that envisage, enframe and in-site ‘worlds’. In Latour’s terms, they are ‘actor-networks’ that combine humans and machines in co-evolving arrangements of mutual constitution and dependence.56 Actor-networks have important techno-political geographies that are often invisible or neglected. Political geographers have been slow to theorise the implications of such deeply geopolitical actor-networks as radar, trans-continental bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and space travel programmes in the past. Today’s spy satellite systems and global television networks, overwhelmingly owned and dominated by a few Western states and transnational corporations, have also not received the attention they deserve. Neither has the Internet which, while a supposed ‘global network’ is dominated by US-centric traffic and dependent upon thirteen root-name servers, only three of which are located outside the United States.57 Such invisible actor-network geopolitics has multiple visible geopolitical implications and consequences, such as the ability to monitor foreign policy crises in near real time and the capacity to co-ordinate rapid military responses across many different locations.

Any consideration of ‘the changing world political map’ on the eve of the twenty first century must recognise that there are multiple world political maps, state-centric maps produced by the territorialities created by the inter-state system but also dynamic maps of flow produced by the telemetricality created by informational capitalist corporations and well funded state institutions. New types of atlases are required to visualise these techno-political geographies of the info-sphere and a critical geopolitics of cyberspace is needed to deconstruct the latest manifestations of techno-political discourse. Characterised not by a transcendence of territoriality but by centralised routing stations, interconnected nodes, dense concentrations of flows, and sharp digital divides, this geopolitics of cyberspace is layered upon, wired across and embedded within existing territorial relations of power. Documenting the multidimensional spatiality and complex regime of boundaries and territorialities produced by an informational capitalist world economy, a networked transnational civil society, and informationally rich and digitally disadvantaged states is one of the great challenges facing political geography in the twenty-first century.

NOTES

1.L. Bryan and D. Farell, Market Unbound: Unleashing Global Capitalism (New York: Wiley 1996) ; E. Dyson, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (New York: Broadway 1997) ; B. Gates, The Road Ahead, revised edition (New York: Penguin 1996); T.W. Luke, ‘Running flat out on the road ahead; Nationality, sovereignty and territoriality in the world of the informational superhighway’, in Rethinking Geopolitics, G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds.) (London: Routledge 1998) pp.

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