The Three Critical Flaws of Critical Geopolitics: Towards a Neo-Classical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics is the dominant school of geopolitics in contemporary geography. Critical geopolitics is a body of radical scholarship that emerged in the 1980s that attempts to move beyond classic geopolitics. In order to resuscitate geopolitics, critical geopoliticians had to distance themselves from the imperialist, racist, and environmentally determinist geopolitics of the 1940s. In doing so, however, critical geopoliticians created a body of scholarship that omits important explanatory variables necessary to understand post–Cold War geopolitics. We argue that critical geopolitics unnecessarily limits the wider application of geopolitics because it is: 1) anti-geopolitics; 2) anti-cartographic; and 3) anti-environmental.