Geopolitics

Benwell, MC; Núñez, A

doi:10.4324/9781003430926

Geopolitics

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Matt Benwell ORCiD

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Abstract

Geopolitics has a somewhat chequered history in the region of Latin America, given its close historical associations with geopolitical thinking utilised by dictatorial military regimes. This chapter will briefly summarise this historical context highlighting its connections with the regional geopolitical influence of the United States. Popular understandings of geopolitics (in Latin America and beyond) continue to be associated with the ‘macro-scale’ – reflective of the asymmetrical international order where the ‘development’ of Europe and the US is set in an advantageous position with respect to Latin American ‘underdevelopment’ – via the territorial struggles of states and the discourse of elites who ‘represent’ them. However, geopolitical scholarship has been reinvigorated within academic debate in recent years through its engagements with the work of feminist political geographers, and this will form the central focus of the chapter. The chapter contends that a grounded and everyday geopolitics ‘from below’ can foreground the perspectives of other actors who have not been substantially considered in geopolitical scholarship, serving to unsettle masculinist, militaristic and elite renderings of geopolitics, security and the nation. In order to illustrate this point, the chapter will clearly conceptualise feminist and everyday geopolitics and how they have been applied in the Latin American region.