Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy
Section snippets
Introduction: understanding performativity
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the relationship between imaginative geographies and the foreign and security policies of states (Agnew, 2003, Power and Crampton, 2005). Such policies are said to be both enabled by and productive of specific geographical imaginations. Too often, though, these analyses are understood as advocating a form of social constructivism, whereby linguistic enunciations and textual statements are (the critics maintain) determinative of material
Non-state scribes
To understand the power of the imaginative geographies guiding current US strategy it is important to look back at the recitation, reiteration and resignification of previous strategic formulations. During the Clinton years, a number of figures who had been involved in various guises in previous Republican administrations wrote widely on the geopolitical opportunities and threats of a post-Cold War era. From specifications of the threat posed by international terrorism, ‘failed states’ and
National security strategies
The concept of integration, invoked in different ways and in different measures by both Kagan and Barnett, is similarly at the heart of the current administration's foreign and domestic policies. The former Director of Policy at the US State Department, Richard Haass, articulated the central tenets of the concept when he wondered:
Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is. It is the idea of integration. The goal of US foreign policy should be to persuade the other major powers
Imaginative geographies and popular geopolitics
As we have tried to argue, such elaborations of security rely upon the affirmation of certain understandings of the world within the context of which the strategies and understandings advanced by them are rendered believable. What is more, we have tried to highlight how such performances invoke earlier articulations, even as their reiteration changes them. More broadly, we stressed how such articulations provide the conditions of possibility for current – and future – action. Integration thus
Conclusions
In the aftermath of September the 11th it has become commonplace to argue that the world has fundamentally changed. President Bush claimed as much when he declared the attacks of that day meant “the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water” and the strategic vision of the US had to shift dramatically (Bush, 2003). As a result, integration – into a western and American set of values and modus operandi – has become the new strategic concept. Distinct from the superficial binaries of
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