Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance by Jeremy Black (review)

Despite its alternate fortunes during the past century, the term geopolitics has seen a considerable success in the last two decades. In this informative and updated book, structured in eleven chapters, Black explores many aspects of the “spatial dynamics of power,” expanding its historical horizon to find geopolitical precursors in ancient China and Rome, especially during the last 500 years, in Chapters 2 to 5. To such chronological and geographical extension corresponds a more general approach to the subject: Given that the ambiguities of the term and its use by politicians, diplomats, advisors, journalists, etc., are well known to political geographers, Black refuses to be constrained by disciplinary borders. Solidly grounded in many decades of historical and interdisciplinary readings, he considers the complex relations between power and space, and their perception, from a plurality of angles, ranging from the history of international relations and cartography to diplomatic and military history, to that of science and technology, etc. He even draws a few examples from the history of cinema, literature, and the arts. The book is thus a precious reference work that certainly enriches the historical and geographical horizon of political geographers, political scientists, historians, and scholars from other disciplines.

Historical geographers will appreciate the richness of Black’s historical contextualizations in Chapters 6 to 9 and will recognize the usefulness of extending the analysis backward, in order to balance the historical role of the British Empire and the usual criticism centered on U.S. hegemony. They will also appreciate the attention given not just to the geopolitics “of the land” but also to that of the seas and the air, as well as to the spatial implications of many technological innovations in transport and weaponry. Furthermore, in addition to his inevitable emphasis on British and German geopolitics, Black also gives attention to the American, French, and other national traditions, though in a more fragmented way. Indeed, Black would have found useful inspiration in the work of Harold and Margaret Sprout and in Jean Gottmannʼs The Significance of Territory (Charlottesville, 1973).¹

Nonetheless, when confronted with the bulk of historical and political geographies, the book systematically accounts for most of the various ideological positions, debates, and controversies, opening the way to a number of interesting theoretical questions that are sometimes underplayed in the mainstream literature: Why does the common geopolitical unit of analysis have to be limited to the state seen as a monolithic entity? Why limit geopolitics to the global scale and not consider also the subnational scale, if international and domestic events are so often interdependent? Why are cities often excluded from geopolitics, given the global significance of the trend of increasing urbanization?

The most difficult historical context is indeed the contemporary one, which Black elegantly and usefully addresses and synthesizes in Chapters 9 and 10, allotting considerable space also to the rise of China. Black discusses current theoretical developments and their limits at large, including comparative methods and time geography. Black rightly directs a pointed question at the now largely dominant current of critical geopolitics: Does giving so much attention to deconstructing the discourse of power serve to prevent scholars from constructing anything, “for fear of becoming akin to the ‘metanarratives’”? (204), especially with regard to long-term views? Certainly, the many voices concerned could provide vastly different answers, especially in light of the diversity of critical geographers like Smith, Harvey, Ò Tuathail, Agnew, and others.²

Finally, in this book, geopolitics provides a powerful key that draws history and geography close to one another, allowing many fruitful exchanges between the two disciplines, especially through comparison of what could have gone missing in each of them. One further question arises with reference to the title: Is the quest for dominance simply a matter of power, or is it also a matter of dominating the increasing complexity of the world (and the knowledge about it)? From this perspective, space will certainly continue to provide a powerful key to conferring order to...