Introduction: Domesticating Geopolitics

The papers that make up this special section on ‘domesticating geopolitics’ initially arose from a double session around this theme from the RGS-IBG Annual Conference held at the University of Exeter, UK, in September 2015. Those sessions, in turn, arose as a means of exploring a key theme that was emerging within our Ludic Geopolitics research project; how to think through the largely domestic geographies of children’s play in relation to wider geopolitical events. As we outline in more detail in our paper in this issue, our research was concerned with a specific toy range (the Her Majesty Armed Forces action figure range) that emerged in a specific place (the UK), and at a specific time (whilst UK military action was ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan). However, the question of how to theorise and conceptualise the entangled relationship between the domestic and the international is of course, a much wider problematic. The impetus behind the conference sessions was to begin a dialogue with others who, whilst working in different empirical settings, were nevertheless grappling with some of these same issues.

The sessions also arose from a sense that some of the promise and claims of a more critical geopolitics, specifically in relation to the problematisation of various scalar and spatial binaries, had perhaps not been fully realized. Whilst both traditional geopolitical thought, and realist approaches to International Relations, have tended to rely upon a series of binaries in order to make sense of the conduct of global politics, critical geopolitics has, more or less from the outset, sought to de-stabilise and re-think such binaries. One of the most enduring of these binaries has been that made between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘domestic’ (see Campbell 1992; Enloe 2007). It is in this context that the idea of the domestic has featured most prominently within traditional/realist geopolitical scholarship; as distinct from the ‘foreign’, which is often taken to be the proper object of geopolitical analysis or framing. More specifically then, if the domestic has been considered at all in classical or realist thought, it has been conceived as outside of the realm of international affairs, as a retreat from the violent, anarchical world of the international system.

Critical geopolitics and critical IR, as already indicated, has long been concerned with the geographical and political implications of such modes of binary thinking (not just foreign/domestic, but also ‘inside/outside’, ‘here/there’), and the subsequent scripting of particular spaces as either anarchic or safe, foreign or domestic. As critical IR scholar Richard Ashley (1987, 51, in Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998) puts it, ’the construction of the ”foreign” is made possible by practices that also constitute the “domestic”’. Critical geopolitics, then, has had a long-running interest in both the analysis and the unsettling of these sorts of spacings and the intellectual traditions (principally Classical geopolitics) that have given them form – but one could argue that this remains an unfinished project. Despite the claims made by more critical scholarship, these same patterns of thinking have often been reproduced in such work – not least because of its heavy reliance on textual analysis and elite-level policy and strategy, and thus it has often been critiqued for relegating lived experiences and methods attuned to them (Megoran 2006). Reviews of critical geopolitics’ epistemological tenets have, moreover, pointed to the need for an understanding of the texts and practices, that make up, and are shaped by, the geopolitical (e.g. Müller 2013).

Amongst the most prominent challenges made towards critical geopolitics in recent years, those posed by feminist geographers and IR scholars on questions of the domestic and intimate are most prescient here (e.g. Enloe 2007; Pain and Smith 2008; Pain and Staeheli 2014). These scholars have at root been concerned to critique both the separation of the domestic and the international, as well as the conceptualisation of the domestic only at the scale of the nation. Such contributions have, therefore, re-articulated the necessity of including the ‘everyday’ and the ‘ordinary’ into our accounts of the geopolitical, in part to work towards the dissolution of clear-cut distinctions between public and private, and towards the increasing realisation that different scales are not separate but intertwined. Brickell (2012), for example, has highlighted the range of ways that geopolitics and the ‘home’ are intertwined, and moreover, argues that we need to consider not just ‘the influence of geopolitics on the home’, but also ‘how geopolitics is influenced by, and emerges from the home’. Similarly, in her work on ‘Intimate War’, Rachel Pain (2015) argues for a ’specific articulation of the relation between the intimate and wider political structures. This articulation does not position the intimate as affected, or dripped down upon, by larger (geopolitical) processes’. This is a vision committed to revealing what Pain and Staeheli (2014) describe as ‘the intimate outwards’ as well as ‘the geopolitical inwards’ (see also Pain and Smith 2008).

In this special section, we take ‘domesticating geopolitics’ to capture a broad range of agents, practices, objects, performativities and discourses that contribute to how geopolitics is rendered familiar, sanitised, embodied and enacted, and the ways in which ‘the home’ and the ‘traditional’ terrain of the geopolitical are in-fact folded into each other in multiple ways. Building particularly on these feminist interventions in critical geopolitics, this collection seeks to offer three principal contributions to debates around intimacy, everyday and domestic(ated) geopolitics, in the following ways.

First, the collection explores an ever-broader set of actors, practices objects and spaces and their connection to and constitution of the geopolitical. Bodies, personal decisions, religious beliefs, families, feelings, mundane objects and everyday speech acts thus become, here, sites for the reproduction and contestation of geopolitical imaginaries and possibilities. They ‘are territory but also make territory’ as intimacy becomes a ‘site of geopolitical practices’ (Smith 2012, 2009). Whilst not tied to any particular conceptual tradition, authors in this special section negotiate everyday and intimate geopolitics as, for example, discursive, performative, material and more-than-human. The papers all draw upon empirical sites in the UK, although the issues addressed (and methods used) by the papers are varied, ranging from minority youth (in)securities in Scotland (Botterill et al.), rural domestic violence in the south-west of England (Little), recruitment at military airshows (Rech), war play amongst primary age children in the South of England (Woodyer & Carter), and the representational politics of wounded soldiers in the UK (Dawney).

Second, the papers collected together here, to varying degrees, attest and contribute to a newly-emerging set of conversations between the concerns of social and political geographers. Social geographies are engaged with by Botterill et al., for example, through their consideration of the psycho-social dynamics of family life amongst minorities in Scotland, where the family is understood not as ‘acted upon’ by geopolitics, but as a site of geopolitics itself. Specifically, this is explored through research that offers an insight into young Muslim people’s understandings of their place amid the recent independence referendum in Scotland. Little’s paper similarly connects the social and the geopolitical, drawing upon the notion of a ‘single complex of violence’ to better understand rural domestic violence, with a focus on the embodied and the local in order to overcome the global and disembodied primacy that characterizes much geopolitical analysis. And Dawney’s paper on ‘Figurations of Wounding’ draws connections between the representational politics of visualizing wounded war bodies and the domestic support for wars happening elsewhere, with a recognition of the importance of various civic and social spaces and institutions.

Third, the work represented here marks a continued evolution of thinking in popular geopolitics, in a number of different ways; through expanding upon who ‘audiences’ might be, how we might engage with them, and where we might find them, and also through expanding the pallet of objects and interactions we might associate with popular culture. Rech, for example, in his discussion of military recruitment at UK airshows, focuses his analysis on the objects that feature in these practices, and how these ephemeral objects subsequently circulate through domestic spaces, such that the home itself becomes a targeted space of recruitment. Dawney also analyses the relationship between forms of culture and processes of militarization, understood through the concepts of affect and authority. And Woodyer & Carter examine how geopolitical cultures are (re)configured in and through the space of the home through attention to children’s play with military action figures, using this to reflect on the possibilities of re-thinking how we conceive of popular geopolitics through the lens of the domestic.

Ultimately, this collection seeks to raise questions about the ways in which geopolitics is domesticated, and about what domesticating geopolitics means and entails. We are very grateful then, for the thoughtful and provocative reflections of Jo Sharp, which bring the special section to a close. In this short piece, she reflects on some of her influential earlier work in the field of popular geopolitics, and also presents some challenges for the utility of rethinking the geopolitical through the domestic. Our hope is that the papers gathered together provide a useful contribution to further debate and discussion on this topic.

Acknowledgments

The research that provided the impetus for organizing this special section was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), under grant number ES/L001926/1. In addition to thanking those that have contributed articles to this special section, we would also like to thank all those that participated in the RGS-IBG sessions in Exeter that gave rise to it. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the editorial team at Geopolitics, especially Colin Flint, for support and patience.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L001926/1].