Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Review Forum Reading John Agnew and Luca Muscarà’s Making Political Geography Making Political Geography, John Agnew, Luca Muscarà, 2nd ed. (2012) Lanham (paperback) 9781442212299 (hardcover) 9781442212312 (e-book), ISBN: 9781442212305 Virginie Mamadouh a, *, Elena dell’Agnese b, Takashi Yamazaki c, Colin Flint d, Natalie Koch e, Luca Muscarà f, John Agnew g a Universiteit van Amsterdam, AISSR-GoG, Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies (GPIO), Plantage Muidergracht 14, 1018 TV Amsterdam, The Netherlands b Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy c Osaka City University, Japan d Utah State University, USA e Syracuse University, USA f Università degli Studi del Molise, Italy g University of California, Los Angeles, USA Introduction Making Political Geography presents a concise history of the making of the field, specifically of how doing political geography has changed since its establishment as one of the key subdisciplines of modern geography. It is the second and revised edition of a book (Agnew, 2002) originally published as the first volume in a Human geography in the making series edited by Alexander Murphy. Other volumes were published a few years later: Making population geography (Bailey, 2005), Making political ecology (Neumann, 2005) and Making development geography (Lawson, 2007). These short texts were meant to introduce a broad scholarly readership to the developments in each sub-discipline in the past decades marked by globalization. This volume starts with the discipline’s establishment in the nineteenth century, its evolution and the contemporary challenges it faces. Unlike other introductory texts, Making Political Geography does not follow a thematic structure; it is centred on the history of discipline instead. It stresses the influence of the changing geopolitical context on the evolution of the discipline and reviews topical issues, research agendas and shifts in interpretations and reinterpretations in the context of major geopolitical changes. Starting from the observation that “political geography is about understanding the geographical distribution of power, how it concentrates in some hands and some places, the human and environmental consequences of such concentration, and how it shifts between places over time”(p. vii) the authors John Agnew and Luca Muscarà set to task to trace the development of scholarly and political ideas about the relationship between geography and politics (p. 2). They * Corresponding reviewer. E-mail address: v.d.mamadouh@uva.nl (V. Mamadouh). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.11.002 introduce an eclectic selection of “public issues” over the past ten years (that is since the publication of the first edition) to explain what it means to think of these problems geographically: they include local, national, macroregional and global events such as the political polarization between states in US domestic politics, the Arab revolutions, water claims in Punjab, the garbage crisis in Naples, the Eurocrisis, the execution of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and the mass murder by Breivik in Norway. In the second chapter Agnew and Muscarà present their take on how political geography is made, reviewing power and knowledge, the language of political geography, the meaning of the political and the enduring relevance of political geography in a globalizing world (through a set of vignettes). In the following chapters they present political geography as made in different periods: “the historic canon” (in the imperial context i.e. 1875e1945), “reinventing political geography” (in the cold war context i.e. 1945e1990) and “the horizon” (in the post cold war context i.e. since 1990). The conclusion recaps the main transformation of political geography, from an explanation of politics (narrowly defined as statehood and interstate conflicts) with geographical factors (narrowly defined as facts of nature) to “an understanding of the distribution and organization of power across geographical scales through the geographical imaginations, group and other affiliations, and the agency of people engaged in everyday struggles and conflicts” (p. 239). The book forum brings a diverse range of views together, based on the Authors-meet-critics session organized at the 2013 AAG Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, CA, in April 2013 and sponsored by the AAG Political Geography Specialty Group (PGSG) and by the Commission on Political Geography of the International Geographical Union (IGU-CPG). Dell’Agnese opens the forum by discussing the importance of textbooks and stresses the specific ambition of this one. The four other contributions included here raise some of the issues inevitably associated with any attempt to cover the Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 evolution of such a broad discipline over 150 years, before the two authors are given the opportunity to respond. Yamazaki questions the singularity of political geography, as represented in the book, from a Japanese position. Clint wonders which audience is actually targeted by the textbook and examines why and how context “makes” political geography. Koch questions the proposed periodization of political geography and the presentation of post cold war period from the perspective of young scholars who started working in the field since the publication of the first edition. Finally Mamadouh considers the importance of classics and canons in the light of the making and the unmaking of political geography. In their responses, Muscarà and Agnew lay emphasis on their approach to the history of thought and the evolution of the discipline, the specificity of their textbook, and their teaching philosophy. The collection will hopefully stimulate the reader to engage critically with textbooks and their role in the development of the discipline. (Political geography) textbooks matter! Elena dell’Agnese Textbooks are often dismissed as being of little significance for the scientific development of a discipline. Not only are they usually considered less relevant than other scientific publications, especially if produced in the early stages of a young scholar’s career, they are also the objects of a less careful analysis when published, and are awarded fewer reviews in academic journals. Indeed, in their more typical form, textbooks provide no more than a summary of the contents and the topics that their author e who takes a stance of presumed scientific objectivity on the matter e considers most appropriate and relevant for the discipline. So, at a glance, they do not seem to offer any original input, and, for this reason, they are generally considered of little interest to review forums like this. By contrast, it may be argued that they can offer a precious glimpse about the evolution of a discipline, both from the side of the intended audience, and from the side of the content. In terms of the audience, textbooks reach quite a large number of readers, usually much larger that those reached by journal articles and monographs. Moreover, their readers are usually students rather than established researchers, tending to accept them largely uncritically. So, even if they are not always capable of “moving generations” as the dedicated section in Progress in Human Geography is entitled, textbooks generally leave a mark, producing (especially for those who do not become scholars) a subsequently unrevised vision of the discipline and its content. From the side of the content, even if they are usually considered to offer the state-of-the art, they can be interesting for other reasons too, since they reflect the situation of the discipline at the time of their writing and publication; sometimes, they even mark a standpoint “from which the distance that [the discipline] has travelled should be measured” (O’Loughlin, 2009, p. 278). Generally speaking, this argument applies to any textbook. However, geography textbooks are, from both points of view, even more interesting; indeed, as it is by now widely recognized (dell’Agnese, 2008), geography is a form of knowledge, which is “creative of world, and not simply reflective of it” (Sharp, 2003, p. 59). Far from being “innocent”, geography is “an instrument of domination” (Dematteis, 1985, p. 26), since it represents as “normal”, naturalizing them and making them acceptable, power relations that are not natural nor normal. Political geography textbooks, supposedly aimed at introducing the connections between space, politics and power, are, from this standpoint, real “technologies of power” (Kuus, 2010), since they risk presenting a contingent historical circumstance (like the sovereignty-State-territory nexus, for instance) as an absolute truism, a “taken for granted” absolute to be accepted without any possible debate. Indeed, there is a long 47 tradition of political geography introductory textbooks where specific attention is devoted to the spatial attributes of what is defined as the “political” actor par excellence e the State e while very little consideration is devoted to the definition of “the political” itself (Taylor, 1982). They tend to devote long paragraphs to the description and the classification of the territorial attributes of the State, such as capitals or boundaries, which claims to scrutinizes the relations between politics, territory and people through the “cold lenses” of science. This does not mean that these textbooks are not “political”, of course (Johnston, 1980), because even avoiding the definition of the political is a political choice. While assuming a State-centric view, they indirectly delineate what must be accepted as politically relevant and what is not, offering a distinct perspective about who are the actors at play in the international arena, and also about what the meaning of the most relevant analytical categories for political action is. Thus, political geography textbooks must certainly be accepted as a component of what Yves Lacoste (1976) has described as “la géographie des professeurs”, (the geography of school teachers) but, they are not simply “rébarbatif et inutile” (off-putting and useless), as suggested by the same Lacoste (1976) so many years ago. They are not just a “smokescreen”(Hepple, 2000); quite the opposite, they are “constitutive elements of power relations” (Kuus, 2010), fundamental in outlining the ingredients of the taken-for-granted geopolitical discourse of their time. However, not every author who sets up to write a textbook is satisfied by the idea of offering just a summary or an overview of the discipline. On the contrary, a textbook may be a good instrument to rethink the discipline in its theoretical framework fundamentally. So, a part of the state-of-the-art introductory textbooks, there are also textbooks that, quite bluntly, develop a totally new approach to the discipline, and aim at revising the most common theoretical basis on ways in which is usually conceived. A big question about the “real nature” of political geography, for instance, was exposed by Claude Raffestin in a textbook entitled Pour une géographie du pouvoir (For a geography of power) (1980), in which he took on the challenge of rethinking political geography on the basis of Foucault’s notions about power and knowledge. On these premises, he claimed that geography was no longer to be accepted as “the science of places and spaces, as in Vidal de la Blache’s traditional definition” (my translation). On the contrary, it should be considered as the way of “making explicit the knowledge and praxis men [sic] use in their relation to space. Knowledge and praxis assume a system of relations where power is circulating, since power is consubstantial to any form of relation.” (p. 2) (my translation). From this perspective, Raffestin first developed a semiotic approach to the analysis of traditional political geography textbooks. Specifically, he analyzes them as a system of signs, a specific code built on the general assumption of political geography being “la géographie de l’État”, that is the geography of the modern state. For this reason, three different signs are mobilized to characterize the State e people, territory and sovereignty (p. 17) e each characterized by a particular syntactic code. . These signs, which together make a “discourse”, are simply the representation of state power. After this semiotic analysis, Raffestin goes further, suggesting a new kind of political geography, conceived as a “geography of power”. Unfortunately, this very innovative work, which was quickly translated into Italian and Portuguese, and became highly influential in the evolution of both Italian and Brazilian geography, was never translated into English. As a classic case of a “rendez-vous manqué” (Fall & Minca, 2012), Raffestin’s theories, at the time, did not reach international debate and Foucault’s ideas about the power/knowledge relation inherent to any form of geographical 48 Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 representation had to wait till the 1990s to enter into Anglophone political geography through another route (dell’Agnese, 2008). A better known example of “revolutionary textbook”, at least among Anglophone geographers, was offered, in 1985, by Peter Taylor’s Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State, Locality. In the first edition of this extraordinarily successful book, Taylor introduced world system theory to political geography, dividing the world scale of political action into the three scales of the global, the national, the local. More than thirty years later, it is difficult to understate the importance the text (in all six editions) has assumed in the history of political geography (the fourth edition, the first one co-authored with Colin Flint (Taylor & Flint, 2000) has been defined by Kolossov (2008) as “The best contemporary textbook on political geography”). Of course, both in the Anglophone world and elsewhere, there are other examples of textbooks “with ambition”: earlier, such as Jean Gottmann’s The Significance of territory (1973), or later, such as the Italian book by Angelo Turco, Configurazioni della territorialità (Configurations of territoriality) (2010). John Agnew and Luca Muscarà’s book belongs to this category. It does not propose a new way of thinking about the “political”, a “materialistic framework”, or a radical revision of political geography as the geography of power. It is something different again, and for this reason it deserves careful attention. Instead of telling what political geography should do, this book tries to understand how it evolved, why it has been as it was, and what it has being doing, in the context of its past and also of its present. Some political geography textbooks can be accused of being an “anachronism” (O’Loughlin, 2009, p. 275), for their “talent” in avoiding “the political turmoil” of their present (O’Loughlin, 2009, p. 275). Agnew and Muscarà’s book, on the contrary, is remarkable for the opposite reason; not only because it engages with History, relinking it with the history of the subdiscipline, but also, it is well aware of the Present, and of the challenges it offers to the development of the field. Beyond a singular political geography Takashi Yamazaki As a political geographer coming from outside of the Anglophone world, and from a country defeated in WWII, I would like to make two points regarding this excellent book: one is how the authors’ critiques of conventional state-centric political geography can be viewed from Japan; the other is how political geographers from different parts of the world can share ‘global’ frameworks such as the Cold-War geopolitical context and how we can account for the plurality of situated political geographical theories and practices. After WWII, geopolitics ceased to be taught in Japanese universities. Instead political science, and International Relations in particular, became the successor to geopolitics. Geographers became less and less interested in states and interstate relations and focused instead on issues at the local scale. Geopolitics was stigmatized, and political geography was regarded as its synonym. The situation of political geography in Japan, then, is somewhat different from what the authors describe for Europe and North America. Books on geopolitics almost disappeared after the war, but political geographical studies gradually increased until the 1960s due mainly to the activities of the Japanese Association of Political Geographers (Yamazaki, 1997). From the late 1970s to the early 1980s however political geographical studies again began to decrease in number. During the same period, political geography was revitalized in Anglophone countries, which was driven by geographers’ growing interests in social and political issues. Japanese universities were thrown into political commotions over academic authoritarianism and the JapaneU.S. security arrangements. Japanese geography, however, did not necessarily politicize itself in this politicized era. By disassociating themselves from international politics, Japanese geographers focused on the “problem solving” role of the discipline. Policy, rather than political, research has been more actively pursued and differentiated as ‘the geography of local administration and finance’ (chiho gyozaisei no chirigaku). Until today, the geography of politics has not been fully accepted by Japanese geographers, resulting in the absence of states as political agents in their research. Japanese geographers are not “moving away” from state territories and borders as Agnew and Muscarà observe; they have already excluded states from their analysis. Seemingly there are two reasons for the absence of states in Japanese geography: one is that states tend to be considered the most violent and unwieldy political agents and so should be excluded from a ‘peaceful’ science; the other is that such exclusion has been employed by the younger generations as a convention of geographical analysis rather than as a result of theoretical contemplation. The corollary is a predominantly local analysis that is less sensitive to the political. Therefore, I argue that putting back the state in geographical analysis is a necessary step towards the reinvention of political geography in Japan. Without configuring the reworking of states and interstate relations, Japanese geographers would not be able to understand geopolitical and geo-economic dynamism and its influence on localities in this globalizing world. Multi-scalar analysis thus needs to be firmly installed in Japanese geography. Nevertheless geographical studies on politics in Japan have been increasing in number since the end of the 1990s. This trend is in parallel with the time of growing interests in the political in human and social sciences as a whole. This was stimulated by the introduction of new academic trends such as postmodernism and postcolonialism and facilitated by an increased readership of the international flagship journal of the discipline Political Geography (Yamazaki & Kumagai, 2009). More broadly, the end of the Cold War and deepening globalization seem to have affected the geopolitical consciousness of the Japanese public. The post-war publication of books on geopolitics has had two major peaks in Japan: the first peak corresponds to the period of the Second Cold War; the second peak reflects the postCold War geopolitical context where Japan is situated in relation to China, North Korea, and the U.S (Yamazaki, Takagi, Kitagawa, & Kagawa, 2013). When the Japanese public becomes insecure about Asia, books on geopolitics seem to attract many readers. To cope with these trends, critical political geography needs to be reinvented in Japan as well. Turning our back to states would not help us understand the meanings and effects of state territoriality and territorialized identity. Instead multi-scalar analysis is again needed for a critical examination of states. The thesis of “territorial trap” (Agnew, 1994) is extremely important in this point, especially considering the current geopolitical context of Japan. Japanese territorial consciousness had been “ambiguous” until recently due mainly to its maritime boundaries and the stationing of U.S. military forces as a nuclear deterrent. Such ambiguous territorial consciousness, however, turns out not to provide immunity to the reactionary territorialization of national identity and the formation of nationalistic society. The growing public interest in classical geopolitics in recent years mentioned above, partially reflect the manifestation of such territorial consciousness. Political geographers should not be naïve to such effects of state territoriality. Critical studies on state boundaries and territories become increasingly important in illustrating how territorial traps actually work in our daily and political lives. Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 These Japanese specificities bring me to my second point: how can political geographers from different parts of the world share ‘global’ frameworks such as the Cold-War geopolitical context and how can we account for the plurality of situated political geographical theories and practices? Context matters in geography, and the geopolitical context of events such as imperialism and the Cold War has constituted one of the major frameworks for political geographic research. Using the term “context,” however, Agnew and Muscarà seem to bring an abstracted explanatory framework into their arguments, although they are critical of a structuralist or reductionist approach. Complexities of the context in which events occur and political geographical approaches develop cannot be reduced to a singular framework. We are sometimes preoccupied with the global/local dichotomy in which the global is always more abstract while the local the opposite. However, the local is not always subject to the global. Likewise, contexts do not always structuralize agents. Unlike other disciplines which focus on one scale of politics, political geography can describe and explore such complexities in regional settings from a multi-scalar perspective, offering much more nuanced understanding of geopolitical context. For example, post-Cold-War conflicts in Asia cannot simply be conceptualized using a global bracket such as “an Arc of Instability.” The demise of the Soviet Union has only revealed previously suppressed regional tensions. The struggle of the U.S.-led capitalist bloc against authoritarian regimes still continues. Military confrontations, territorial disputes, and ethnic conflicts in Asia look very different from those in Europe. Asia can be characterized by its internal historical and geographical diversity that has often hindered any over-arching conceptualization of the region (Murphy, 1995; Rumley, Chiba, Takagi, & Fukushima, 1996). In this sense, seeing things from a global perspective somehow reflects a very elitist view that is poorly informed with insight of what is happening on the ground. Capital, commodities, information, and immigrants are not abstract entities but have concrete origins and natures. Another example of contextual complexities is the disaster in Fukushima. It is a multi-dimensional/scalar incident including not only the general matter of nuclear security but also Japan’s specific post-war energy policies strongly conditioned by its militaryeeconomic alliance with the U.S. The U.S. relations to Japan over nuclear power ranged from atomic bombing to the export of nuclear technology, leading to the construction of many nuclear power plants on the geologically fragile islands (for critical reviews of this aspect, see Enomoto & Takeshita, 2011). The global context of the disaster cannot be divorced from this specific regional context of the JapaneU.S. alliance. This incident is so historically and geographically contingent that it cannot be fully absorbed into the generalized discourse of nuclear security. Concretization is then more powerful in explaining politics than abstraction and generalization. Knowing the world cannot be achieved through a unilateral process of abstraction. This is also the case with knowing political geographies in the world. Being critical of “grand theories” and “master narratives,” Agnew and Muscarà pay due attention to several trends in political geography outside the Anglo-American orbit and emphasize pluralism in theory and practice. But their efforts remain limited largely to European languages. Seen from outside of this Euro-American tradition, the book itself remains located within political geography rooted in that tradition, reproducing its dominant discourses, concepts and theories in the powerful language of international communication and academic exchanges, English. Apparently the authors well recognize this and thoughtfully propose to cross theoretical divides and share a common language. However, how can we overcome such multiple divides and establish intellectual cosmopolitanism? Agnew and 49 Muscarà’s answer is not entirely satisfactory for non-Anglophone readers, especially for those outside Europe. In my view, there might be two practical ways to narrow the divides: one is the active translation of non-English works into English; the other is more transnational research collaboration and publication as suggested by the co-authorship of this book. The journal Political Geography might become a medium to facilitate such exchange but needs to make itself more accessible to the non-Anglophone audience in terms of contents and circulation, while the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Political Geography and the International Political Science Association (IPSA) Research Committee 15 on Political and Cultural Geography, as mentioned in the book, could become forums to promote such endeavours. In any case, we need to go beyond a singular political geography. Why and how does context “make” political geography? Colin Flint The chapters and entries in the recent wave of handbooks and encyclopaedias focussing on political geography usually suggest ways in which a sub-topic fits into the broader narrative of the sub-discipline. In contrast, Making Political Geography creates the broader narrative and enables scholars to see where their particular foci fit in. The book does this very well and makes a valuable contribution, but, in the spirit of a forum that encourages critique, I will offer some concerns about the purpose and organizing framework of the book. In sum, the identity of Making Political Geography is not fully defined or resolved. Hence, the components of the book do not fit together well. I embellish this critique in two stages. First, I engage the lack of a clear audience. Secondly, and related, the loose definition of context is poorly discussed. The root of my concerns is the lack of a clearly defined audience. In some places it seems as if the audience is senior undergraduate students; i.e. the six vignettes on pp. 33e56. Topics covered in the vignettes are drug trafficking, the Israel-Palestine conflict, Ruthenian ethno-nationalism, state sovereignty through the issuance of postage stamps, piracy, and Los Angeles street gangs: In other words, a range of issues in the news that cover a variety of geographic scales and politicalespatial processes. The vignettes have the feel of a textbook about them and are designed to give some examples for readers to interpret the subsequent material. However, the vignettes are not explicitly brought back into the conceptual discussions. More to the point, the material preceding the vignettes refers to complex theories. The text is dense and assumes some prior knowledge of theoreticians such as Foucault and Rawls. These preceding discussions seem aimed at graduate students and faculty who would not require the empirical support of the vignettes. Furthermore, the last two chapters come across as a “call to arms” and are therefore apparently targeted towards graduate students and faculty. The attempt to address a number of audiences, without offering an explicit framework as to how this will be achieved, leads to problems regarding the content of the book. The presence of the potential undergraduate audience means that the conceptual discussions cannot be developed through intense engagement with existing literature, as would be seen in something like a Progress in Human Geography article. As a result, none of the multiple audiences are satisfactorily engaged: The undergraduates are likely to require more background on the concepts, and graduate students and faculty are likely to want a fuller and deeper discussion. The lack of a clear audience is at the root of my concern with the discussion of the key concept for the book, context: It is described 50 Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 rather than defined. This may well work well as an organizing theme for undergraduates to situate broad shifts in the subdiscipline, but leaves wanting the idea of context as an explanatory concept for how and why political geography changes. For the authors, the “geopolitical context of the time has been crucial to the making of academic political geography. This is the basic premise and leitmotif of this book” (p. ix). Yet context is not defined. Different temporal contexts are described but never developed as an analytical concept. Description may suffice as a heuristic device, but not if the concept is seemingly given a degree of causal power, as suggested by the word “crucial.” I identify three implications of the lack of conceptual clarity. How Do We Know That The Geopolitical Context Has Changed? e Without a definition context is identified in a very standard, one could even say politicized, interpretation of historical periods: age of imperialism; Cold War, etc. At one level these phases are recognizable and serve to organize the narrative of the changing content of political geography. But the authors are asking more of the concept of context than this e it is meant to explain change. So, it is not just a matter of how what is visible or tangible has changed, but how these are manifestations of more general or abstract features and mechanisms that constitute context. Change could happen in two ways: the elements of what constitutes context may change, by which I mean context may composed of different general features across the three time periods. Or the arrangement and manifestation of consistent elements of context may change. Without a definition we don’t know and so must take it in good faith that the contextual setting has changed. How Can We Identify The Mechanisms That Link Context With The Intellectual Activity That “Makes” Political Geography? e The authors provide a loose idea of how context influences intellectual activity by suggesting the notions of “ethos” and “zeitgeist”. These notions are inadequate, especially with reference to Chapter Two, “How Political Geography is Made.” A notable absence in this chapter is a discussion of the sociology of science, and the ideas of “normal science” and paradigm shifts (Kuhn, 1996). Some engagement with paradigm shifts would provide a greater sense of the academic settings in which political geography is made. Other publications, such as Livingstone’s The Geographical Tradition (1993), focus on intellectual setting and debate, and so there is no need for Making Political Geography to fully replicate them. However, there is a missed opportunity to connect individual academics, and their situation in specific academic settings and intellectual traditions, to the broader cultural, political, and economic concerns of historical periods. Political geography is made by individual intellectual activity, but within multiple settings e including the ebb and flow of paradigmatic debates. There is lost potential to explore the tensions between political geography and geopolitics e or formal and practical geopolitics e by connecting normal science with “normal politics,” by which I mean the establishment of dominant questions and agendas in the policy arena. Political geography is made through the back and forth between global dynamics translated within local settings (Agnew, 1987) and how these provoke and are translated through programmes of intellectual activity. In places, the authors do touch on these connections, such as the useful discussion of the wellknown case of Owen Lattimore and his battle with McCarthyism. However, the reader has to tease these connections out for themselves rather than the mechanisms linking “zeitgeist” with intellectual output explicitly. We Do Not Know The Strength Of Context’s Impact And How Prevalent It Is, Or How It May Be Resisted e The reader gets a clear sense that the authors do not take a deterministic view of context, but without knowing what context is we are unsure of the freedom of agency of the men (and they are all men in the book e even in the Horizons chapter) who made political geography, apparently, or how the agency of academics negotiates contexts to be able to build new political geographies. Put another way, knowing what context is would illustrate the constraints it provides; and that would go a ways towards explaining, and including in the narrative of Making Political Geography, the historical role of gender, race, and class politics in deciding who gets to make the sub-discipline and by ignoring what types of questions (Gilmartin & Kofman, 2004). Without knowing the opportunities and constraints of context we could be led towards some drastic conclusions. On the one hand, we could conclude that academics are dupes of their context, merely following imperatives of the times. On the other hand, especially in the authors’ discussion of post-modernism, there is a sense in the text that context is actually the product of the writing of academics: the narratives of academics produce new ways of thinking about the world, hence the world has changed, and hence there is a new geopolitical context. The argument becomes circular and we do not know whether “geopolitical context,” the key concept of the book, is cause or effect. I do not believe that the authors think context is either deterministic or the product of discourses. My point is that a reader cannot see its effect or role if context is not clearly defined. The problems of organizing the book around a concept e context e that is not clearly defined have been elucidated and emanate from the book’s attempt to reach multiple audiences. I started the essay by situating Making Political Geography within a plethora of companions, handbooks, etc. addressing political geography. The presence of these other books provides an opportunity for any new edition to concentrate on telling the story of how political geography is made. A clearer and more detailed connection between geopolitical context and intellectual activity could be made. In other words, make chapter two into a book, but without the vignettes, perhaps? Making Political Geography: placing the new generation of political geographers Natalie Koch When the first edition of Making Political Geography was released in 2002, it was the first textbook in the subfield to consider the post-9/11 geopolitical environment. Now in the book’s revised second edition, these discussions of geopolitical context are still highly relevant, carefully and thoughtfully presented, and an important dimension of any up-to-date text surveying the discipline of political geography. However, given the authors’ own emphasis on the central role that this context plays in the evolution of the subfield, I want to suggest that as a result of the major transformations in global politics since 2001, we are beginning to see a new era of political geography and a new generation of political geographers who have come of age during the era of the ‘Global War on Terror.’ Having completed my undergraduate, masters, and doctoral work in geography in 2006, 2009, and 2012 respectively, I write from my positionality as a young scholar, and part of this next generation. While there is very little to critique in this excellent survey of the subfield, I will argue that it raises two important points that political geographers must consider in the coming years, as we seek to move beyond the consistent framing of our contemporary era as ‘post-9/11’ and, even sometimes still, ‘postCold War.’ The first issue is that of periodizing political geography’s history in the light of generational disjunctures and the ‘horizon’ of political geography, and the second is the text’s division of the subfield into three dominant theoretical waves. John Agnew (2003, p. 86) once wrote: “Periods threaten understanding only when we forget that they are imposed on a more Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 complex flow of history. Otherwise, they are extremely useful.” Indeed, the three periods employed in the text are quite useful. Encapsulating the history of political geography, they are presented as three separate chapters in the middle of the book. The first of these is entitled “The historic canon” (Chapter 3) and treats the work of Ratzel, Mackinder, Bowman, Haushofer, and a handful of others. The second period is presented in a chapter called “Reinventing political geography” (Chapter 4) and considers the work that arose with what the author’s term a ‘revival’ of geography as a whole in the 1960s, and in particular the subsequent work in political geography on geopolitics, the spatiality of states, mobility, places and identities, and nationalism. The third period is entitled “The horizon” (Chapter 5), and basically covers the work that has arisen since the end of the Cold War until the present, with an emphasis on geopolitics and the environment, conflict, security and terrorism, global finance, and democracy. While the ‘accuracy’ of this periodization is not in question, I would question the accuracy of their titles. By this I mean that my generation’s understanding of these works in relation to the historic trajectory of political geography is quite different from that of the authors. For the most part, we have not come to the discipline seeing the works of Ratzel, Mackinder and others as the ‘historic canon.’ It is rare that students today actually read these works, but do perhaps read about them as historical ‘artifacts’ e or perhaps as a sort of distanced genealogical curio. The ‘historic canon’ as outlined in Making Political Geography, for this generation, is more history than a canon. Likewise, the works surveyed in the chapter ‘reinventing political geography’ are what many political geography students today have come to learn as the ‘canon’ (as problematic as that category may be; see Mamadouh’s comments). For example, by the time I began my studies in geography, the key figures named here (e.g. John Agnew, Simon Dalby, John O’Loughlin, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Peter Taylor, Kevin Cox) had already ‘reinvented’ political geography. I learned and read their work not as a ‘reinvention,’ but as the foundation of contemporary political geography. Continuing on this same line of reasoning, the literature discussed in the chapter on political geography’s ‘horizon’ neatly summarizes the debates that have been ongoing during my entire education in geography (albeit a modest 10 years in comparison to the authors). Surely many of these themes will persist into the future, but one does not gain a clear sense from the second edition of Making Political Geography about what this horizon might be in political geography e that is, what the future holds for the sub-discipline. Of course, this is perhaps a question best left for the ‘new generation’ to answer, and as I shall suggest below, this will arguably be far more interdisciplinary and theoretically inclusive than the authors imply in their chapter on the ‘horizon.’ The second trend, which I argue differentiates the experience of the new generation of political geographers from that of the authors, is that geography students today have ‘arrived’ at the discipline in an era marked by widespread efforts to breakdown disciplinary boundaries. Similarly, many of us have received extensive training in ‘mixed methods’ and have been taught to embrace, rather than shun, theoretical diversity. While Agnew and Muscarà are certainly aware of this trend, it only comes out faintly in the text. This is evident in the framing of Chapter 4, in which they introduce three ‘theoretical waves’ or perspectives that defined the ‘reinvention’ of political geography. In brief, the authors first point to the ‘spatial turn’ staring in the 1960s, second to the Marxist and neo-Marxist wave of scholarship beginning in the 1970s, and third to the postmodernist wave from the 1980s on. The entire chapter is then organized around outlining several case studies that exemplify these theoretical approaches on a number of key themes in political geography. Despite recognizing that “[t]here are signs of theoretical rapprochement [.] in some recent research and 51 writing on geopolitics and the rise of deterritorialized forms of power” (Agnew & Muscarà, 2012, p. 158; emphasis added), the overarching goal or impetus of this chapter’s structure is to ‘disentangle’ these theoretical approaches and to pinpoint those studies that adhere most clearly to one framework over another. But what our authors suggest are merely ‘signs’ of theoretical rapprochement are arguably much more pervasive e so much so that they are perhaps the prevailing trend within contemporary political geography. While I certainly hope that my experience is not unique, but widespread, I do not want to argue that that the old theoretical rifts and the ‘quantitative’/‘qualitative’ posturing are of the past e for they certainly are not. Rather, my sense is that the critical political geography of today is more open to theoretical diversity and the use of mixed methods than it was perhaps 10 or 20 years ago. I want to suggest that the heuristic divides in Making Political Geography are much less useful and relevant today than they once were. Further, in telling the story of contemporary political geography, we are perhaps better advised to highlight the ways in which scholars frequently and productively unite mixed theoretical and methodological approaches. The issue of presentation is not a trivial matter. By focussing on the ‘quintessential’ studies of one particular approach, there is a danger in inducing students into assuming their incompatibility in an era where they are most commonly united. If we are to truly start transgressing these theoretical and methodological divides, and embrace a more creative and open political geography for the ‘horizon,’ it is important to emphasize to students the cases where political geographers have productively united all these various frameworks and methods. This, I would argue, would be a more contemporary treatment of the issue, rather than holding onto this triad e which threatens to produce the increasingly outdated reality it seeks to describe. The divisions of yesterday are not those of today and we should be moving beyond this conventional account. In making these arguments, it is important to note that Agnew and Muscarà are admittedly working with a ‘moving target.’ As with any effort to account for a discipline’s historic trajectory, the difficulty lies is giving the most up-to-date account possible. The agenda of Making Political Geography is thus impressively ambitious, and the authors are to be commended for their creative approach to the task. And yet, as I have argued here, political geography is beginning to see a new generational disjuncture. Thanks to the very successful ‘reinvention’ of the subfield, young political geographers, such as myself, have come to the field in an era of interdisciplinarity and healthy diversification, which bears some parallels to (roots in?) the fleeting breakdown of binary worldviews that characterized Cold War-era geopolitics. And while my generation has come age during an equally bifurcated geopolitical era defined by the ‘Global War on Terror,’ with care and appreciation of this diversity, there is great potential to retain and even deepen the ‘theoretical rapprochement’ set in motion by those who revived political geography from the ‘moribund backwater’ (Johnston, 2001). Such a project has a privileged role in disciplinary texts like Making Political Geography, and their significance for shaping the analytical lenses of young scholars should not be underestimated. Canons and classics and the (un)making of political geography Virginie Mamadouh Writing a history of a sub-discipline is a perilous exercise and highly significant to its “making” through the institutionalization of a common body of knowledge that peers share. In this 52 Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 commentary I examine why political geographers e while they so reluctantly engage with their classics e need such a history/story, possibly in lieu of a canon, and how Making Political Geography fulfils this task. It has often been noted that (political) geographers demonstrate overt disinterest in classic texts and the founders of their discipline (Keighren, Abrahamsson, & della Dora, 2012a, 2012b). This lack of interest for canons among geographers has even been celebrated (Agnew, 2012) as it frees the discipline from the obligation to keep true to foundational theoretical approaches and methodologies, right or wrong, and makes it more inclusive and more open to new development than others, although it makes it more liable to hypes and fashions. Three characteristics possibly explain such a collective attitude. The first is the fragmentation of the field (there is simply no canonical work that have significantly mark the evolution of the whole discipline). The second is the orientation towards fieldwork rather than books as most valued source of insights and knowledge. The third is that geography has arguably reinvented itself much more radically than other social sciences in the past fifty years, and that it is particularly true for political geography. As a result the interest in old publications is limited: why bother about outdated empirics? and why study approaches that have been in the meantime discredited, for example for their association with environmental determinism or with criminal regimes? Discussions about classics and canons, like the recent set of interventions published in Dialogues in Human Geography 2(3), focus on internal identity issues: Keighren et al. (2012a, 2012b) call for a more serious engagement with the legacy of past geographers, to the benefit of the disciplinary historiography, disciplinary consciousness and the future of the discipline itself (see also Powell, 2012).The collection of commentaries in that issues highlight many of the problems linked to the issue of having, nurturing and transmitting classics to new generations of students. Moreover the lack of a canon and the neglect of classics is also consequential for the external identity of political geography, i.e. for the perception of political geography among scholars in related disciplines such as International Relations and political science, among policy makers, journalists, and the general public. Our visibility is notoriously limited. Even more troubling is the way geographical classics can be revisited. The “Mackinder revival” promoted by publicist Robert Kaplan in The revenge of geography bothered many political geographers over the past years (Antonsich, 2010; Dittmer, 2013; Johnston, 2013; Mamadouh, 2013; Morrissey, Dalby, Kearns, & Toal, 2009; Murphy & O’Loughlin, 2009; Powell, 2012). We might not care so much about Mackinder’s legacy nor about Kaplan’s engagement with it, but we need to be concerned about the collateral damage it brings to our discipline when the public wonders what this geography is that has to take its revenge, and when we have to explain over and over again that what Kaplan does has not much in common with what contemporary academic geographers are doing. Obviously traditional approaches still appeal to a wide audience especially outside academic geography and they are seen and used as a geographical canon to define geography from the outside. We might just as well make sure that our version of what counts as political geography and of the history of our discipline is heard. Since the late 1980s it has been more common for political geographers to engage with their predecessors, reassessing the work of famous geographers and geopoliticians, and rediscovering the work of others that has been silenced for several decades (most notably anarchist geographers). It has been one of the main goals of at the core of the project of critical geopolitics, but it remains a specialist subfield, a reserve for connoisseurs, while it should be part and parcel of students’ introduction to political geography. Does Making Political Geography offer a step in the right direction for such an engagement to the political geographical heritage? Most valued in my eyes is the fact that it is not teleological. The history of the discipline, whatever that is, is not written as to “explain” the present state of the art as the outcome of a linear and necessary evolutionary process. Instead it foregrounds the diversity of political geographical approaches and experiences. It is especially welcome that the periodization of the long century under scrutiny is not based on some internal meta-logics of the field, reifying the successive “triumph” of certain schools over others (this echoes the notion of hybrid geographies advocated by Kwan, 2004). Instead it is based on major changes in the geopolitical context in which geographers made political geography. It is however problematic that it endorses a periodization of the evolution of the geopolitical context at the global scale, that inevitably gives more precedence to the views of the geographers associated with the mightiest actors on the scene and neglects the margins (see Yamazaki’s comments). In the first period, the authors present the work of some key geographers, all male and all based in the great powers of the time. It would have been insightful to add the example of a political geographical school that emerges in smaller nations, not because any Hungarian, Danish or Japanese political geographer of the time has been particularly influential, but because it would have shown the dynamics of making political geography at the margins. Arguably the focus on the core is even more marked for the second period. In addition the authors use a typology crafted earlier by Agnew (1997) to deal with the prolific and expanding AngloAmerican academic networks. It is based on three perspectives and five subject areas. Simplification is key to make sense of such a huge and variegated body of work and comes at a price (see Koch’s contribution above) but let me take issue here with the neglect of feminist approaches, implicitly subsumed to the third stream, the postmodern perspective. This disregards the significance, the specificities and the vitality of the feminist turn in (political) geography that has been widely documented (i.e. Staeheli, Kofman, & Peake, 2004) that definitively warrant recognition as a specific perspective in such a typology (as in the matrix used in Agnew & Mamadouh, 2008). In the last post-cold war period, the core seems to be lost and political geography is presented as still trying to find its way. There are different reasons for that fog. First, making political geography is becoming a bricolage with often clumsy combinations of existing approaches, rather than new approaches, trying to get the best of different worlds (see Koch’s contribution above). Second, due to intensified communication and interconnection between geographers around the world, the diversity of political geography affected by the variegated contingencies of the different (local, national and macroregional) geopolitical contexts in which they operate, is more difficult to neglect (see Yamazaki’s and Flint’s interventions). Third we may be witnessing the unmaking of political geography. The pervasiveness of issues of power is widely recognized, and political geography is “done” by plenty of geographers that do not usually define themselves as political geographers but go under the flags of critical geographies, radical geographies, feminist geographies, urban geographies, cultural geographies, financial geographies, queer theories, geographically sensitive approaches to political economy, political ecology, etc. Again, this dilution and ensuing lack of visibility to the external world is consequential for getting political geography research and teaching noticed, funded and sufficiently institutionalized. To counter this trend and maintain the visibility of our specific sensibility to the spatialities of the political we need a flag. The flag needs not to be holy but it needs to be known. We need books like Making Political Geography for disciplinary survival: not to fix Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 the canon for the sake of having one, not to guard the territory of political geography and police its borders to exclude ‘improper’ kinds of political geographies, not to fossilize the discipline, but to get enough leverage to empower ourselves and more importantly our students to continue studying and making political geography e as we see most fit in the societal contexts we happen to function, and for the struggles we see as most urgent. Reading and re-reading Making Political Geography Luca Muscarà I am grateful to all contributors to the AAG Meeting session and this forum for their comments, and in the first place to John Agnew for the invaluable opportunity to collaborate to the making of a second edition of Making Political Geography. My reply will focus on the role of a history of political geography in relation to changing geopolitical contexts which, in a textbook on the last 140 years of political geography, has strong implications for disciplinary identity, given its relation to teaching, especially in view of the coming to maturity of a post-9/11 generation of political geographers. From a “history of geographical thought” perspective, any history of political geography is a cautionary tale on the risk of neodeterminisms of various types for geography (and the social sciences in general). Geography seeks generalizations, however, history shows that borrowing ‘laws’ from the natural sciences, physical geography, economics, etc. to improve its perceived scientific status and visibility, (sometimes as an answer to academic competition in securing resources) may damage it, rather than contributing to its quest for generalizations (considering its postWWII vulnerability to administrative decisions, especially at times of financial crunch). So while the risks of normative neodeterminisms keep looming over the horizon, an excessive fragmentation, promoted also by the publishing of multiple and intellectually competing texts, could lead to a Tower of Babel syndrome, in a field, which, under the political geography label, gathers together a variety of theoretical perspectives, substantive foci and geographic scales on a number of themes. A history of political geography provides a ‘map’ to navigate between the extremes of borrowed explanations and celebrating disintegration. The authors of this book wanted to avoid another fully-fledged textbook in the tradition of Flint and Taylor (2011) and Glassner and Fahrer (2004). It was instead conceived as a useful directional/supplementary text, at a time when many teachers have turned against committing to a single massive textbook to guide their students. In providing a history and overview of the subfield, it leaves scope for instructors to develop themes from the book in the directions they desire, with the sources they prefer. Rather than trying to impose a single ‘fashionable’ theory, such versatility in the use of the book is possible thanks to the underlying (not overarching) role of history as a general frame of reference. As far as we know, no other book takes this approach and fulfils this purpose, but certainly its usefulness depends on the style of learning, teaching, and examining. The textbook aims also to reach a broader audience than British and North-American students. One way to do so is to promote translation into other languages and thus reach non-Anglophone audiences. The first edition was translated into Italian. The second one will be too. Adding to the second edition a non-AngloAmerican co-author, was a second conscious step challenging Anglo-American hegemony in political geography. Still, some of the objections raised in this forum, from the point of view of a co-author who, before using it for over a decade, both with Italian and American students, has also overseen its Italian translations, and with a background in literary analysis, leave the impression 53 that books such as this one are read quite selectively (which also reflects the proliferation of literature in the competitive context of the contemporary imperative of publishing or perishing). In fact, the basic theoretical foundations of the book are actually spelt out in Chapter 2, beginning with the apparently overlooked reference to Nagel (1986). His notion of the ‘incompleteness of knowledge’ explains why it’s useful to rely on contexts to introduce political geographers and their ideas: “There can never be a view from nowhere that is not also, and profoundly, a view from somewhere” (quoted on p. 15, italics added). Placing authors and theories in their historical-geopolitical contexts doesn’t imply everyone is a “dupe of context” or that necessarily “contexts structuralize agents” (see Flint’s comments) as the Lattimore and Gottmann academic histories show, but is exactly an attempt at better specifying that “somewhere”, by alerting the reader “to the contextual biases built into any and all knowledge claims” (p. 14). Thus, inter-imperial rivalries and ‘naturalized knowledge’ do help to contextualize Ratzel and Mackinder, as much as the onset of the Cold War contributes to explaining the historical shift in political geography’s focus from the human-environment nexus to the power-knowledge one. While the meaning of “political” is certainly not avoided (pp. 26e29), the power-knowledge postulate (pp. 14e19) inevitably requires a focus on the sub-disciplinary “core” (see Mamadouh’s comments). Still, it could hardly be said we avoid the “margins”: French geography, including Vidal de la Blache, has not been at the “core” of previous histories from an Anglo-American perspective, our Historic Canon includes Reclus, Kropotkin, Siegfried, Italian and Japanese political geographies in the 1930s or Soviet geography during WWII. In Chapter 4, in the context of the Cold War and as political geography was somewhat eclipsed as a field, Lattimore, Gottmann and the Sprouts are presented as exceptions in the 1950s. A centre-periphery perspective requires moving beyond nationalities after World War II: national schools have not disappeared, but raising participation to transnational networks around shared perspectives and themes has made political geography more cosmopolitan since the 1960s. This is why, in view of the wider variety of scholars involved in the Cold War era’s reinvention of political geography (and related proliferation of literature), the narrative is not centred on national schools as it is for the pre-World War II period. To include post-WWII Japan’s political geography, we would need to create similar follow-ups also for French, German and Italian political geographies. Maybe a political geography historical atlas, written by a transnational network of political geography historians, could in the future provide a widely shared framework for the sub-discipline. To write such a thing we would need to agree on terminology and periodization, before trying to define “mechanisms” (see Flint’s comments), or rather, interactions through which geopolitical or intellectual contexts could influence any given author. Such links are multiple and can be traced back retrospectively for each case, but how to do so prospectively without the risk of inducing deterministic views of history in the students? I find it less interesting to try to extract rules in order to know prospectively how relations between geopolitics and political geography might be defined in the future: these are already qualitatively different for the three periods considered. Retrospectively, we defined some interactions between geopolitics and political geography, by comparing the role of geographers during and after each World War (pp. 103e105). While in the Historic Canon political geographers were ‘problem solvers’ serving their States from a position close to it (pp. 79, 100), since the Cold War their position has been increasingly that of critics from outside (p. 243). The plurality of that outsider perspective has been specified through a matrix, which still holds its value as historical artefact of that second period, while the feminist 54 Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 approach, its geographies and geographers, have been duly dealt with, as part of the post-modern perspective. This focus on historical difference is doubly important for defining how geopolitical “change” happens (see Flint’s comments). “Change” in the geopolitical context is a matter of historical discontinuities in the prevailing order, but attempts at establishing typologies will continuously be superseded by events. Could the politicaleeconomicemilitary and technological nexus that brought about the Cold War ever be repeated ad seriam? Personally, I’m more attracted by other questions: is the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War’s bipolar order sufficient to assume the existence of a post-Cold War period? Or do we need a scientific/technological discontinuity, of a magnitude comparable to the role played by nuclear weapons in the onset of the Cold War? And are the continuities since the late 1940s stronger than the discontinuities, as suggested in Isaac and Bell (2012)? We chose to keep three separate periods, though some continuities between Cold War and post-Cold War political geography are maintained. Our post-Cold War geopolitical context section (pp. 162e181) was entirely rewritten for the second edition, as a unitary period, exactly to avoid “reproducing the dominant discourse” of the War on Terror as the necessary singular future context for the development of political geography as a field (see Yamazaki’s comments). Given that the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was our cut-off date, the rewriting of the book in 2011 was characterized by ongoing geopolitical challenges, whose relevance to political geography (and to the media) competed for our attention, and required effort to gather local information and to interpret it (the Fukushima multiple crises, the demand for democracy in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, the financial-economic crisis, the UKeFrance governments bombing Libya from Italian bases, etc.). This felt more urgent than engaging in a forecasting venture on the mobile horizon on the future of political geography. This perspective on how political geography has evolved alongside geopolitical events reflects a specific approach to the history of thought. As the book claims: “The field has not evolved simply as the result of an internal dynamic, as one ‘paradigm’ simply replaced another because of intellectual fancy or academic competition” (p. ix). Could Kuhn’s theory of “normal science” (see Flint’s comments) and paradigmatic shift still contribute to understanding of the book’s approach to periodization? His phases 1e4 can be found in Chapter 3 on the Historic Canon, while phase 5 (and Lakatos’ coexistence of perspectives) has been taking place since 1945 and especially in the recent period defined in terms of the ‘horizon’ (Chapter 5). Instead, this may even require to historicize Kuhn: would his attempt at discovering the structures of scientific revolutions have been possible before WWII? This maybe another reason why it’s difficult to see a ‘normal’ political geography after WWII. In terms of paradigms (pp. ix, 40, 44): if the state-centred sovereignty paradigm was the normal science before WWII, does its more recent challenging constitute a new paradigm? If the State was once seen as ‘natural’, then political geography has never been ‘normal’ again. We could assume the power-knowledge nexus as the new ‘normality’, but wouldn’t we need to include also a new perspective on nature, compared to that of the pre-1945 political geography? The invention of nuclear weapons and nuclear power made a difference in this respect and we linked it to the rise in environmental awareness on political geography’s horizon (p. 197). This is also why we expanded the environmental section in Chapter 5, with Michael Hulme’s radical perspectives (p. 184). Writing a new textbook is easier than rewriting an existing one, but an historical perspective gives meaning to re-writing Making Political Geography exactly because political geography is in the making. Like most books, Making Political Geography could undoubtedly be improved: by considering many precious comments within this debate, and perhaps also by following up the discussion on the growth of the environment as an active subject of inquiry in political geography, or by developing the very interesting connection between economic and religious fundamentalisms, proposed in the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). If setting limits is a necessary part of writing any book, I believe this second edition keeps doing two things very well. It succeeds in avoiding the mono-causal explanations (predominantly environmental and economic determinisms) that have long bedevilled the field (pp. 184, 238). Beyond the attempt at historicallygeopolitically contextualizing authors, perspectives and themes, this in fact is the central tenet of the book. And a history of political geography seems the best guarantee to avoid it. The etymology of the word “context”, from the Latin ‘weaving together’, and the Sanskrit taksati ‘he/she fashions, constructs’, suggests that a critically informed history of political geography can also help us avoid drastically deconstructing our field due to either preference for a recycled neo-determinism (we have been there before), excessive self-defence of perceived disciplinary identity, or ignorance of how much the field has already engaged with concerns and perspectives that neophytes or outsiders think they are developing from scratch. Decade after decade, generation after generation, political geography, now in its second century, keeps recording scholars, papers, books, libraries, knowledge, etc. A contextualized history of political geography is a recipe to deal with this increasing complexity and reduce entropy in the subfield. As power shifts in the geopolitical context, so does within political geography too, though not necessarily mechanically. Within “theoretical diversity” and “inter-disciplinarity”, a history of geographical thought perspective on political geography is as indispensable as the use of “mixed methods” Koch calls for here above. Bio-bibliographic approaches to authors may even reveal their (evolving) methods’ internal order, just as reflecting on the pertinent contexts does help us seeing our own biases. Response to critics: fashion, determinism and context in the making of a textbook John Agnew Thanks to all the participants in the session at the Los Angeles AAG Meeting for reading the second edition of Making Political Geography and contributing to a lively discussion about this book in particular and the role of textbooks in relation to the field of political geography in general. My co-author has pointed out that the second edition is the fruit of a collaboration between us based not so much in providing an alternative to the basic framework of the first edition as in building on it for a new post-Cold War geopolitical era and expanding the geographical basis to its approach and empirical examples beyond the Anglo-American world of academic political geography privileged first time round. I would like to reiterate a few points about the book in both editions that have been lost in most of the commentaries that as a result of the nature of the encounter in an “authors-meet-critics session” tend to pick up on particular issues and not always note their insignificance or lack of relevance to the overall project that the book reflects. Most importantly, rather than build a textbook around a currently favoured theory or methodology or a provide a manual based on some arbitrary conventions about what goes for political geography, this book is committed to the idea explicit in the title that political geography as a field of academic study has been and is made by its exponents. The discussion about intellectual freedom in Chapter 5 is not simply incidental to the book. For potential students, then, the book issues an invitation to participate in the field’s Review Forum / Political Geography 38 (2014) 46e56 historically informed reworking rather than provide a recipe of currently fashionable themes and theories for their passive consumption. Necessarily the book separates out a field from the broader disciplinary and university settings in which it has developed since the late nineteenth century. Political geography has had a canon (from Ratzel and Mackinder to Gottmann and so on), even as the wider field of “geography” arguably has host aged itself increasingly to theoretical and methodological fashion (Agnew, 2012). Even though at various times environmental determinist and economistic theories have tended to prevail within the field, the field has historically always emphasized a focus on the political in the sense of the centrality of struggles for power and influence to geographical outcomes of all sorts (wars, pooling of wealth, distributional and patronage politics, etc.). The conceit of relating the book in the Preface to the political argument implicit in Lorenzetti’s famous Sienese fresco of “Effects of Good and Bad Government in City and Country” should alert the reader to this framing. The core of the book in Chapters 4 and 5 surveys how the political has been addressed in the field using a heuristic division of theoretical perspectives, once environmental determinism and its various associated doctrines were largely eclipsed, of the spatial analytic, politicaleeconomic and postmodernist. This is a simplification of a much wider continuum of theoretical perspectives but one defensible, we believe, in terms of how most self-described political geographers have tended to see the development of the field since the 1950s at least. That the “triad” is now breaking down is part of the burden of the argument of Chapter 5. That said, the making of political geography has been profoundly affected by the material and ideological circumstances of the times in which people have been engaged in making it. The idea of “geopolitical context” is how we choose to frame this. Obviously, the logic of the historical periods we use and the geopolitical themes (including the main geopolitical protagonists) we identify as crucial to those periods are subject to dispute. Contexts, as Peter Burke (2002, p. 172) reminds us: “are not found but selected or even constructed, sometimes, consciously, by a process of abstracting from situations and isolating certain phenomena in order to understand them better. What counts as context depends on what one wishes to explain.” The dilemma is that in trying to avoid both “the assumption of eternal wisdom to be found in American political science and Great Books programs” (Burke, 2002, p. 170) and an internalist account of political geography as a succession of paradigms or Great Men (the typical alternatives) we can “imprison” all ideas in their contexts not just those that had the closest “fit” with the times. To try to avoid doing so is why we expend so much energy identifying ideas that either remained largely marginalized in their time (e.g. from Kropotkin to the Sprouts) or that arise in times of geopolitical transition out of the merging of previously distinctive perspectives. The focus on historicalegeopolitical contexts, then, and the reason why we spend so many pages discussing them before moving into the particulars of political geography during those periods, is vital in providing us with summaries of the very materials that political geography has always tried to understand. Of course, a positivist or lawseeking conception of the field would fit uneasily with this historicist approach. All I would say is that if that’s your thing then this isn’t your book. Those obsessed with the present in terms of either what they’ve been reading recently or in regarding the historical development of political geography as “bunk” to be jettisoned will also probably best give this book a miss. There is a necessary tension in a book that tries to depart from the nostrums of the typical textbook and yet still appeal to a student audience. It’s hard to tell a student with this book what exactly will be on a test. The material does not lend itself to multiple-choice questions. The vignettes in Chapters 1 and 2 are included partly to 55 inductively introduce novice students to what political geography is possibly all about before diving into the history of the field. But this only works if the teacher/lecturer sympathizes with the idea that a textbook can be about trying to induct a student into what political geography has been and how they can contribute to what it might be. It would be hard to use this book in a MOOC that regards students simply as consumers of information rather than as fellow potential researchers/scholars. Personally, I find that praiseworthy. I think that it is the open-ended nature of this book that makes it difficult to classify as a typical textbook. 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