Kearns, Gerard
(2011)
Reading Gerry Kearns’ Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder.
Political Geography, 30.
pp. 49-58.
ISSN 0962-6298
Abstract
Halford Mackinder has had a posthumous existence that many
of us might envy. Long after his earthly demise, some of his ideas,
particularly that of the “geographical pivot of history,” keep coming
back to life. Currently, some well-known pundits in US foreignpolicy
circles, typically thought of as neo-conservative and keen
on a “muscular” US military presence around the world, have
re-discovered Mackinder’s geographical determinism as providing
a seemingly naturalistic account for the approaching rebirth of
the “yellow peril” (the rise of China) and offering as it did at the
turn of the last century a timeless rendering of the challenges
to the democratic maritime powers from the despotic land powers
of Eurasia. The widely cited American journalist Robert Kaplan
(2010: 22), for example, frames the emerging “geography” of
China’s power almost entirely in these terms. It is timely, therefore,
to have a new intellectual biography of Mackinder that not only
critically engages with the central themes of his geopolitics but
that does so by both situating them in the historical context of
the early twentieth century and showing why they remain attractive
in some quarters by dint of their effective depoliticization of
the very world politics that they underwrite. This book matters,
therefore, in a number of distinctive ways. That was why a session
devoted to it was so worth organizing at the Washington DC AAG
Annual Meeting in April 2010.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
Gerry Kearns; Geopolitics; and Empire; Legacy; Halford Mackinder; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography |
| Item ID: |
8638 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.09.007 |
| Depositing User: |
Gerry Kearns
|
| Date Deposited: |
22 Aug 2017 12:05 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Political Geography |
| Publisher: |
Elsevier |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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