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More About This Textbook
Overview
Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resource distribution. This book takes advantage of a diversity of geographic perspectives as it analyzes the political processes of war and their spatial expression.
Contributors to the volume examine particular manifestations of war in light of nationalism, religion, gender identities, state ideology, border formation, genocide, spatial rhetoric, terrorism, and a variety of resource conflicts. The final section on the geography of peace covers peace movements, diplomacy, the expansion of NATO, and the geography of post-war reconstruction. Case studies of numerous conflicts include Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina, West Africa, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Editorial Reviews
Foreign Affairs
Geopolitics — the view that geography creates its own enduring strategic logic that states ignore at their peril — seems antiquated in these postcolonial days. The military importance of distance has been challenged by advances in the means of transport and communication and by the range of modern weapons. Nor does geopolitics fit well with modern academic fashion. Flint describes the "one single purpose" of this book as to debunk geopolitical theorist Nicholas Spykman's view that "geography is the most important factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent" — a purpose easily achieved. The many and varied essays that demonstrate how to approach the concept of "space" cover such topics as nationalism, religion, gender, peace movements, natural resources, water, and drug trafficking. The best pieces, which tend to be more focused and historical, provide real insight. The more general tend to be less satisfactory, especially after one has gotten used to the idea that "war/peace and geography are mutually constituted and socially constructed." Although from different points on the ideological spectrum, there is much here that is reminiscent of the old geopolitician's habit of allowing political prejudice to masquerade as scholarly analysis.Product Details
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Meet the Author
Colin Flint, Associate Professor of Geography at Pennsylvania State University, is a political geographer whose research interests include terrorism, geopolitics, war and peace, and the Arab world. He is editor of Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Hate and Intolerance in the United States of America (2003) and co-author, with Peter J. Taylor, of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State, and Locality (4th edition, 2000).
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