Simon Dalby
Geopolitics is about the political organization of space, and about how this is conceived, represented, and used in political discussion. The term refers to power at the largest of scales and simultaneously to the geographical arrangements of that power. It is linked directly to European modes of conceiving the world as a whole and then discussing how it is divided and ruled by many political organizations (Agnew 2003).
Inevitably it has a military dimension because political power is never entirely divorced from matters of coercion and violence. Strategy and political power have unavoidable geographical dimensions, but ones that are not always well understood by either politicians or the publics who advocate the use of military force.
But first and foremost geopolitics is about the initial specification of the world in ways that subsequently facilitate policy in the world presented in that particular manner. Thus places with certain attributes can be presented as requiring certain policies. Modes of conduct are tied to these prior contextualisations in much policy discourse, a simple but obvious point that is so unremarkable as to frequently pass without comment.
In the aftermath of September 11th 2001 the world was remapped in the political discourses of the war on terror (Dalby 2003). Initially it was unclear what the appropriate geography was to specify what had happened; ‘9/11,’ a temporal designation rather than a geographical one, is still used to specify the new circumstances. But remapped the world was, into the categories of the Bush doctrine and its ‘global war on terror’.
The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is a label attached to discussions of the modernization of the U.S. military particularly in the last couple of decades, but has implications for other military forces too (Sloan 2002). The term is used loosely to refer both to technological innovations in weapon systems, and in particular the important changes wrought by computer technologies and communication systems. Most obvious in the “smart” weapons publicly revealed in the 1991 Gulf war, the technological innovations are supported by global positioning navigation systems and numerous communications technologies that enhance command systems and situational awareness on the part of commanders.
