‘The study of the relationship between geographical features and international politics. It is a matter of debate whether these features are natural or constructed, what is meant by international politics and whether the former influences the latter or vice versa. Since the late nineteenth century, “geopolitics” has encompassed several traditions or schools of thought, including one closely associated with the Nazis. This reminds us that geopolitics is also a field of knowledge that developed in the service of state power. Recent scholarship takes a critical approach to geopolitics, seeking to unveil the manner in which politicians discursively construct geopolitical spaces, often by manipulating “geographical facts” for strategic purposes’ (Dahlman in C. Gallaher et al. 2009). See Essex AAAG 102 1, 191 for a thoughtful paper on the geopolitics of hunger.

Hyndman (2001) Canad. Geogr./Géogr. canad. 45 argues that immigration law produces a ‘geopolitics of mobility’.

Critical geopolitics holds that all truth claims are political: that they are made on behalf of vested political interests and often in the pursuit of political economic imperatives. In this way critical geopolitics manifests a classic concern of poststructuralism to highlight the contingent and political nature of knowledge production. Thus Dalby (1996) Pol. Geog. 15 investigates ‘the use of geographical reasoning in the service of state power’, exploring the way the production of geopolitical knowledge about the relationship between states both exercises political power and affirms identity. Beware: ‘after two decades of scholarship on “critical geopolitics”, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open’ (Hyndman (2010) Pol. Geog. 26, 247.