Using an Anarchist Approach in Geopolitics

For a more peaceful world it's necessary to move from the current I.R. approach/discourse to a different one. Using an anarchist approach could be useful and the paper aims to indicate few theoretical points, with quotations of anarchist and no-anarchist thinkers. The paper gives suggestions about what could be useful for analyzing the geopolitical crisis along an anarchist approach and suggests few ideas for going out the current mental and iconographic geopolitical discourse managed by the states.

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Special Issue, 44 (5), 1579–1754., 2012

VIDEO ABSTRACT: http://antipodefoundation.org/2012/09/11/anarchist-geographies-special-issue-guest-editors-video-abstract/ This edited volume proceeds from the perspective that as contemporary global challenges push anarchist agendas back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline. We develop an exploratory volume, where explicitly and unashamedly anarchist approaches to human geography have been allowed to blossom in all their wonderful plurality. Accommodating a diversity of positionalities demands an unconstrained and eclectic embrace, and accordingly we understand the potentialities of anarchist theory and praxis as protean and manifold. Through this unfolding and variegated approach, we seek to expose readers to a variety of epistemological, ontological, and methodological interpretations of anarchism, unencumbered by the strict disciplining frameworks that characterize other political philosophies, and purposefully open to contradiction and critique. Included articles: 1. Foreword: Looking Forward / Acting Backward - Myrna Margulies Breitbart 2. Reanimating Anarchist Geographies: A New Burst of Colour - Simon Springer, Anthony Ince, Jenny Pickerill, Gavin Brown & Adam J. Barker 3. Anarchism! What Geography Still Ought to Be - Simon Springer 4. The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox Economic Spaces at a Time of Neoliberal Crisis: Towards a "Postneoliberal" Anarchist Future - Richard J. White & Colin C. Williams 5. In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist Geographies of Territorialisation - Anthony Ince 6. Emotion at the Center of Radical Politics: On the Affective Structures of Rebellion and Control - Nathan L. Clough 7. Anarchy, Geography and Drift - Jeff Ferrell 8. Radicalizing Relationships To and Through Shared Geographies: Why Anarchists Need to Understand Indigenous Connections to Land and Place - Adam J. Barker & Jenny Pickerill 9. Practice What You Teach: Placing Anarchism In and Out of the Classroom - Farhang Rouhani 10. Afterword: Anarchist Geographies and Revolutionary Strategies - Uri Gordon

Geography Compass, 2013

Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers’ engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the nineteenth-century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’s enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the twentieth-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice-based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the ‘freedom of geography’ and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions.

A renewed interest in the relationship between geography and anarchism has characterised international tendencies in geographical scholarship in the last 10 years or so. As this new wave is having a very quick and spectacular development, quite corresponding to the rising of a new generation of scholars, this chapter especially focuses on these new developments and discusses their ruptures and continuities with precedent 'bursts' of anarchism in geography such as the historical experiences of the networks associated with Elisée Reclus and Pyotr Kropotkin, and the rediscovery of these authors which occurred between the 1970s and the 1980s. Highlighting the strong historical inspiration of the present wave of studies, especially committed to establishing new links with the anarchist tradition, I discuss the contributions that new authors are giving to current geographical scholarship in terms of radical pedagogies, more-than-human and non-representational approaches, alternative geographical traditions, transnationalism and cosmopolitism, gender studies and 'total liberation'. All these lines of study resolutely link academic scholarship and grassroots activism. Glossary Other geographical traditions. This definition includes the notions of 'genealogy', 'anarchist roots of geography' and 'early critical geographies' and participates in a wider reassessment of plural and contested geographical traditions. While, in the last decades, the imperial past of geography has been one of the main targets of radical critics within the discipline, now works by early unorthodox and critical authors, including anarchist and anti-colonialist ones, increasingly attract scholarly attention.

Antipode, 2012

These are certainly fruitful times for anarchist intellectual publishing. Reading through the articles in this special issue of Antipode, I was impressed by the diversity and creativity of efforts to apply anti-authoritarian perspectives to the geographical discipline, whose notorious breadth of application ("everything is spatial") seems to offer unlimited possibilities for new avenues of research. I also began thinking about two related issues that seem to run across much of what appears in the preceding pages. The first concerns the anarchademic enterprise itself, and its possible contribution to the development of anarchist politics. The second concerns a more specific problematic, which accompanies the integration of poststructuralist insights into our understanding of anarchism, and the concomitant celebration of prefigurative politics in the present tense. What connects the two is the question of revolutionary strategies. Does the postanarchist shift of perspective require us to abandon strategy as a valid category for our struggles? If not, how are strategies supposed to emerge as a conscious artefact of such a decentralized and swarming movement? What is the role of anarchist intellectual labour in such an emergence? Finally, what considerations-however preliminary and open to debate-can be presented as its starting point, and what might a geographical perspective contribute to their elaboration?

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2012

This article is a manifesto for anarchist geographies, which are understood as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. In its rejection of such multivariate apparatuses of domination, this article is a proverbial call to nonviolent arms for those geographers and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly endless series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for the end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane version of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of the state. It is instead the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to the discipline’s earliest days: anarchism!

"The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Towards Spatial Emancipation" sets the stage for a radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. By embracing anarchist geographies as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for non-hierarchical connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging, we configure a political imagination that is capable of demanding the impossible. Experimentation in and through space is the story of humanity’s place on the planet, and the stasis and control that now supersedes ongoing organizing experiments is an affront to our very survival. Singular ontological modes that favor one particular way of doing things disavow geography by failing to understand the spatial as an ongoing mutable assemblage that is intimately bound to temporality. Even worse, such stagnant ideas often align to the parochial interests of an elite minority and thereby threaten to be our collective undoing. What is needed is the development of new relationships with our world, and crucially, with each other. By infusing our geographies with anarchism we unleash a spirit of rebellion that foregoes a politics of waiting for change to come at the behest of elected leaders, and instead engages new possibilities of mutual aid through direct action in the here and now. Anarchism is accordingly framed as a perpetually evolving process of geographical prefiguration that seeks to refashion entrenched modes of understanding and being in the world vis-à-vis the authoritarian institutions, proprietary relations, and pugnacious geopolitics that dominate contemporary political relations and their associated configurations of space. We can no longer accept the decaying, archaic geographies of hierarchy that chain us to statism, capitalism, gender domination, racial oppression, and imperialism. Instead, geography must become beautiful, wherein the entirety of its embrace is aligned to emancipation.

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2012

The late 19th century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus. Yet despite the vigorous intellectual debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not until the 1970s that anarchism was once again given serious consideration by academic geographers who, in laying the groundwork for what is today known as ‘radical geography’, attempted to reintroduce anarchism as a legitimate political philosophy. Unfortunately, quiet followed once more, and although numerous contemporary radical geographers employ a sense of theory and practice that shares many affinities with anarchism, direct engagement with anarchist ideas among academic geographers have been limited. As contemporary global challenges push anarchist theory and practice back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline.

Meditations on Geopolitics, 2019

This is a people's history of the capitalist world-system, focusing on the period from 1492 to 2008. It is written for the democracy of the billions and against the despotism of the billionaires.

This chapter addresses the problem of nationalities in the work of early anarchist geographers at the Age of Empire. Drawing on recent literature on anarchist geographies and histories of transnational anarchism, I address the work of three key exponents of the international network of the anarchist geographers, Mikhail Dragomanov or Drahomanov (1841-1895), Pëtr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and Elisée Reclus (1830-1905). My main argument is that the anarchist tradition and the idea of nation stand not in opposition, but in mutual relation, and that such relation was linked to early anti-colonialism in the Age of Empire. The standpoint of anarchist geographers is a privileged one to understand the anarchist idea of nation because these militants and scholars worked on territories, regions, and borders, thus the definition of what a nation is (or should be) was part of both their professional duties and their political interests.