Content area
Full text
Gearóid ó Tuathail / Simon Dalby / Paul Routledge (eds.), The Geopolitics Reader. 2nd edition. London / New York: Routledge, 2006. 320 pages, £ 1 15.50 (hb), £ 32,99 (pb). ISBN 978-0-415-34147-9 (hb), ISBN 978-0-415-34148-6 (pb)
In his general introduction to The Geopolitics Reader, Gearóid 0 Tuathail traces the history of the term geopolitics to Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen in 1899. The term was picked up by Karl Haushofer, a German former general who founded the Zeitschrift för Geopolitik (Journal of Geopolitics) in 1924. Haushofer' s wartime aide Rudolf Hess introduced him to Adolf Hitler. After the horrors of World War II, the term geopolitics was taboo. It was revived by Henry Kissinger, a Jewish émigré to the US in the 1970s, as synonym for his idea of global "balance-of-power" politics. - And recent years of international political confrontation and GWOT (global war on terror) have increased the relevance of the book whose editors are highly critical of geopolitics.
Gearóid 0 Tuathail reminds readers that geopolitics is discourse about world politics, thus we must study discourse, i.e. representational practices to understand the impact of the concept, to decipher how global space is labeled, metaphors are deployed,...