More than words: Geopolitics and language

Medby, IA; Thornton, P

doi:10.1111/area.12817

More than words: Geopolitics and language

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ingrid A. Medby ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2023.

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Abstract

In this editorial introduction, we introduce the special section on Geopolitics and Language. We provide a brief overview of some of the ways in which geopolitical scholarship has engaged with themes of language to date, noting in particular the legacy of critical geopolitics – and indeed work that has emerged from its foundation. Further we discuss language itself, a concept we suggest is often implicit but rarely explicitly considered in geographical work. That is, despite rich bodies of work on, for example, the textual and discursive, there is still much to explore in the broader sense of the linguistic. This includes a growing body of work on speech and sound, translation, and decolonisation – all of which also point to the need to go further in geographical and geopolitical engagement with language. The aim of the paper, however, is finally to introduce the section's papers and their specific theoretical and empirical concerns. And this, we argue, is more than words of introduction but also an invitation – to further engagement and geopolitical curiosity.