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Beyond Mahan and Mackinder: Situating Geography and Critical Geopolitics in Middle East Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

Kyle T. Evered
Kyle T. Evered*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, Michigan State University, Lansing, Mich.; e-mail: ktevered@msu.edu
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Extract

Considering geography's potential to inform research and teaching in Middle East studies, it is necessary to acknowledge that the discipline's full potential in the United States—despite many accomplishments in recent decades—is yet to be realized. In American higher education, this lack of engagement always seemed to me a consequence of at least four factors in both fields’ institutional and disciplinary histories. As a matter of self-examination, we should first acknowledge that regional orientations in geography (e.g., the Berkeley/Sauer school's emphasis on Latin America and its indigenous and agrarian landscapes) often overlooked the area, leaving engagement with the Middle East more to the efforts of individual scholars and students. Second, despite recent surges in geography's importance and institutional presence on many American campuses, for a variety of reasons (not all of which are agreed upon) there were several periods in the 20th century when geography departments were eliminated from many of those universities regarded as leaders in Middle East studies. Third, forces of inertia—institutional, fiscal, pedagogical (e.g., offerings of language classes, particularly at advanced levels), and mental—set in place by the first two factors are impossible to overstate and difficult to overcome. Fourth and finally, American notions of how to define geography are often tenuous; this is true not only within the general population but also among scholars of other disciplines, compelling recurrent rediscoveries of the discipline. As a consequence—and apart from the contributions of individual scholars—only in the past two decades has geography witnessed significant exchanges with Middle East studies beyond select areas of inquiry in the discipline (e.g., urban studies), and a regional specialty group for Middle East geography within the American Association of Geographers (known until recently as the Association of American Geographers) did not emerge until the late 1990s. In the following paragraphs, therefore, I introduce geography as a discipline for scholars of the Middle East. This introduction provides a useful starting point as I proceed to engage with one (sub)subfield of the discipline that features routinely in both academic and policy-making engagements with the Middle East and its study: geopolitics.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 335 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

Notes

1 Murphy, Alexander B., “Geography's Place in Higher Education in the United States,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31 (2007): 121–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 Tuan, Yi-Fu, “A View of Geography,” Geographical Review 81 (1991): 99–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Beyond his epistemology of geography, history, and other disciplines, Kant sought to facilitate geography's instruction. Indeed, he viewed knowledge of geography (as well as anthropology and history) as requisite for informed and responsible citizenship. Society is still in need of these lessons—particularly with regard to America's ongoing engagements with the Middle East. See Elden, Stuart and Mendieta, Eduardo, eds., Reading Kant's Geography (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

6 Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978)Google Scholar.

7 Key works in this effort to establish a critical geopolitics include Hepple, Leslie W., “The Revival of Geopolitics,” Political Geography Quarterly Suppl. 5 (1986): S21–S36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toal, Gerard, “The Language and Nature of the ‘New Geopolitics’: The Case of US–El Salvador Relations,” Political Geography Quarterly 5 (1986): 73–85 Google Scholar; Toal, “Critical Geopolitics: The Social Construction of Space and Place in the Practice of Statecraft” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1989); Toal, , Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Dalby, Simon, “Critical Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference, and Dissent,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9 (1991): 261–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dodds, Klaus-John and Sidaway, James Derrick, “Locating Critical Geopolitics,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 (1994): 515–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Sources on these themes of regional perceptions/constructions of the Middle East include Davison, Roderic H., “Where is the Middle East?,” Foreign Affairs 38 (1960): 665–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koppes, Clayton R., “Captain Mahan, General Gordon, and the Origins of the Term ‘Middle East,’” Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1976): 95–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Culcasi, Karen, “Constructing and Naturalizing the Middle East,” Geographical Review 100 (2010): 583–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mills, Amy, “Critical Place Studies and Middle East Histories: Power, Politics, and Social Change,” History Compass 10 (2012): 778–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 On this latter field, see Dittmer, Jason, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2010)Google Scholar.

10 Indeed, even in my own individual and collaborative geopolitical research, these fields of inquiry are complementary and often inseparable. See, for example, Evered, Emine Ö and Evered, Kyle T, “A Geopolitics of Drinking: Debating the Place of Alcohol in Early Republican Turkey,” Political Geography 50 (2016): 48–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Evered and Evered, , “From Rakı to Ayran: Regulating the Place and Practice of Drinking in Turkey,” Space and Polity 20 (2016): 39–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Evered, Kyle T. and Evered, Emine Ö., “‘Not Just Eliminating the Mosquito but Draining the Swamp’: A Critical Geopolitics of Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Turkey's Approach to Illicit Drugs,” International Journal of Drug Policy 33 (2016): 6–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Kearns, Gerry, “Progressive Geopolitics,” Geography Compass 2 (2008): 1599–1620 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kearns, Gerry and Reid-Henry, Simon, “Vital Geographies: Life, Luck, and the Human Condition,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (2009): 554–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Evered, Kyle T., “‘Poppies Are Democracy!’: A Critical Geopolitics of Opium Eradication and Reintroduction in Turkey,” Geographical Review 101 (2011): 299–315 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.