Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography

Abstract

Geographers have a responsibility to examine persistently, collaboratively, and critically the geographical grounds of hope and fear. We can help debunk false hopes and groundless fears, and in so doing we can also advance more sensible hopes based on more embodied and accountable experiences of fear. The case of the Iraq war shows how the groundless geopolitical fears about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections were combined with equally groundless geoeconomic hopes about making the middle of the Middle East into a bastion of peace and freedom through free-market reforms. These geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses were imagined as part of a foreign policy of accumulation by dispossession. Other, more grounded accounts of the real fears created by dispossession can lead instead to more realistically hopeful geographies of repossession.

Key Words:

• geoecononomics
• geopolitics
• hope
• neoliberalism
• resistance

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to Vicky Lawson for the original invitation to participate in the AAG plenary panel and for her unstinting support for the work represented in this article. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their advice, and especially to Audrey Kobayashi for her generous as well as rigorous editorial work.