(DIS)PLACING GEOPOLITICS - WRITING ON THE MAPS OF GLOBAL POLITICS

The meaning of geopolitics is a curiously underexamined issue in 'critical geopolitics'. In this paper I seek to outline and pursue a poststructuralist displacement of the concept, a displacement marked by hyphenization: geo-politics. Using Derrida's critique of Saussure, in the first part of the paper I interweave the problem of meaning with the discourse of geography so as to write on the concepts of 'the map' and 'geography'. In the second part of the paper I explore the implications of this writing on or displacing for the analysis of geographical discourse and/in global politics. I concentrate on three issues: (1) problematizing the traditional conceptual maps of 'geopolitics', (2) speculating on the historical problematic of geography and governmentality, and (3) suggesting a typology for the study of geo-politics which pays particular attention to how places are sighted/sited/cited by governmental institutions (geo-political sites).