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Geopower and Geopolitics in, of, and for the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

Natalie Koch
Natalie Koch*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y.; e-mail: nkoch@maxwell.syr.edu
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Extract

In 1976, Michel Foucault gave a unique interview with the editors of the French geography journal, Hérodote. The interviewers pushed him to explicitly reflect on the many spatial concepts that pervade his writing, such as region, province, field, archipelago, and territory. In one reply, Foucault explained:

People have often reproached me for these spatial obsessions, which have indeed been obsessions for me. But I think through them I did come to what I had basically been looking for: the relations that are possible between power and knowledge. Once knowledge can be analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region and territory.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 315 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 Foucault, Michel, “Questions on Geography,” in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Crampton, Jeremy W. and Elden, Stuart (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007)Google Scholar, 177.

2 Ibid., 182.

3 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Senellart, Michel (New York: Picador, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Tuathail, Gearóid Ó, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 10.

5 Ibid., 7.

6 Paasi, Anssi, “The Resurgence of the ‘Region’ and ‘Regional Identity’: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Observations on Regional Dynamics in Europe,” Review of International Studies 35 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 133.

7 Koch, Natalie, “Is a ‘Critical’ Area Studies Possible?,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2016): 807 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–14. See also Sidaway, James D., Ho, Elaine Le, Rigg, Jonathan D., and Woon, Chih Yuan, “Area Studies and Geography: Trajectories and Manifesto,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2016): 777 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–90.

8 Murphy, Alexander B. and O'Loughlin, John, “New Horizons for Regional Geography,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 50 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 245. See also Murphy, Alexander B, “Advancing Geographical Understanding: Why Engaging Grand Regional Narratives Matters,” Dialogues in Human Geography 3 (2013): 131 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–49.

9 Koch, “Is a ‘Critical’ Area Studies Possible?,” 809.

10 Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of Field Science, ed. Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 9.

11 See, for example, Koch, Natalie, “‘Building Glass Refrigerators in the Desert’: Discourses of Urban Sustainability and Nation Building in Qatar,” Urban Geography 35 (2014): 1118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–39; Koch, Natalie, “The Shifting Geopolitics of Higher Education: Inter/Nationalizing Elite Universities in Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Beyond,” Geoforum 56 (2014): 46–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koch, , “Gulf Nationalism and the Geopolitics of Constructing Falconry as a ‘Heritage Sport,’” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15 (2015): 522 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–39; Koch, , “Is Nationalism Just for Nationals? Civic Nationalism for Noncitizens and Celebrating National Day in Qatar and the UAE,” Political Geography 54 (2016): 43–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vora, Neha and Koch, Natalie, “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15 (2015): 540 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–52.

12 Paasi, “The Resurgence of the ‘Region’ and ‘Regional Identity,’” 133.