Chih Yuan Woon

Precarious geopolitics and the possibilities of nonviolence

This paper examines the deployment of nonviolence within critical geopolitics. It contends that geographers’ engagements with nonviolence lack grounding, often sliding towards ethical appeals for people’s responsive commitments. Building on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘precarious lives’, I underscore the emotional impetuses through which nonviolence can be harnessed as a concrete pathway for social change. ‘Precarious geopolitics’ as I call it, represents a geopolitics that is sensitive and sympathetic to the claims of nonviolence and a subdiscipline that can seize the opportune juncture truly to reposition itself as one of the arts of peace.

Transecting Security and Space in Phnom Penh

Our paper examines everyday interactions of money, power, and security in Cambodias capital city of Phnom Penh, informed by a series of transects and interviews. When Phnom Penh hosted the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in April 2012, Prime Minister Hun Sen declared that “Cambodia is not for sale” in an angry exchange with journalists who had quizzed him about Chinas influence. However, the sale and enclosure of Cambodian land and property have yielded both profit and tensions. These are connected with the meanings and operation of security. The most powerful ‘security’ agency in Phnom Penh is neither wholly ‘public’ nor fully ‘private’, but hybrid; where public police and military personnnel and their equipment are purchased. We argue that this is symptomatic of circulation/operation of state/capital in Cambodia.

Chinese Narratives on “One Belt, One Road” (一带一路) in Geopolitical and Imperial Contexts

This article reviews Chinese-language writings on the ideas of a Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road that have proliferated in the last few years, now under the aegis of and visualized as One Belt, One Road (一带一路). We examine how these narratives articulate with geopolitical and strategic ones in China before exploring the history of the idea of Silk Road(s). An excavation of their origins in nineteenth-century German imperial geography leads us to reflect on the past and present relations between states, empires, and geopolitics and to begin to chart the range of responses to One Belt, One Road.

Area studies and geography: Trajectories and manifesto

We introduce the following set of essays on reformatting the relationship between area studies and geography and reflect on our individual and collective negotiation of this relationship. This leads us to revisit some key area studies’ controversies and agendas, notably strategies for comparison. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and other comparatively minded scholars, we advocate staging comparisons in terms of difference/similarity, expectancy/surprise, present/past and familiarity/strangeness.

“Protest is Just a Click Away!” Responses to the 2003 Iraq War on a Bulletin Board System in China

The Internet as an important cultural medium in the (re)production of geopolitical affairs has increasingly elicited close scrutiny by scholars working in popular geopolitics. However, recent exhortations have appealed for more expansive geographical imaginations to extend such research outside Anglo-American contexts. This paper focuses on one influential Mandarin bulletin board system (BBS) in China, the Qiangguo Luntan (QGLT), by critically analyzing the posted responses to a specific geopolitical event—the 2003 US-initiated war in Iraq. I argue that the lively discussions pertaining to post-9/11 global anxieties, (dis)order, and counterterror initiatives on QGLT demonstrate how interconnected Chinese communities are able to weave alternative viewpoints and shape antiwar consensus through the broad bandwidth of networked technology beyond the purview of territorially based governments. Furthermore, with China having a tightly controlled media industry whereby peoples voices are seldom heard (or seen), these online debates also offer poignant reflections on the intermeshing issues of democracy, civic participation, and citizenship. Finally, it is with hope that this paper provides a crucial intervention into considering how the surplus capacity of information networks (such as the BBS) can be mobilized for nonviolent agendas to detract from the excessive terrors and endless violence that continue to mire contemporary geopolitics.

Popular Geopolitics, Audiences and Identities: Reading the ‘War on Terror’ in the Philippines

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, the Philippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond.

Children, Critical Geopolitics, and Peace: Mapping and Mobilizing Children's Hopes for Peace in the Philippines

This article focuses on the role and agency of children in shaping the trajectories and outcomes of peace in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Through the analysis of childrens narratives that are articulated around their vision maps of peace, I argue that such cartographic representations and dialogues of the everyday open up opportunities for them to critically reflect on their understandings of and hopes for peace. This essentially contributes to childrens formation as active geopolitical actors, allowing them to negotiate broader structures, relations, and identifications of violence to situate their aspirations for peace. Rather than viewing such embodied spatial practices as having no wider political implications, I showcase efforts that seek to mobilize childrens hopeful imag(in)ings for the harnessing of coalitional formations toward transformative possibilities. This enables the development of ethical relationships between local communities and other relevant stakeholders, leading to the formulation of appropriate strategies to stamp out the reproduction of violence across generations. In so doing, this article aligns to yet extends emerging literatures that cast attention on the different actors and their grounded enactments of peace. Specifically, it calls for the explicit acknowledgment of childrens involvement in the rethinking and remaking of issues pertaining to geopolitics (and peace) that should be seen as closely intertwined with the everyday lives of children throughout the world.

(En)Countering Asia In Africa?: Opportunities, Challenges and the Geopolitics of Engagement

On October 12 2011, the magazine Businessweek published an article that embodies the attempt to debunk what the authors term as “myths” associated with China and India’s increasing forays into the African continent. One of the myths that was prominently signposted had to do with many Western leaders’ repeated pronouncements of China and India taking up the status of ‘neo-colonialists’ in their dealings with African nations. According to the article, such accusations are exaggerated (and somewhat hypocritical) given that the two big Asian nations, as compared to the previous European colonial powers, are actually contributing more in terms of creating positive human and institutional capacities in African countries (rather than simply preoccupied with resource extraction). In conclusion, the authors appeal to go beyond such parochial imag(in)ings so as to construct more situated and accurate representations of Asian-African relations. Padraig Carmody’s The New Scramble for Africa (2011), Ian Taylor’s The International Relations of Sub-Saharan Africa (2010) and the edited volume, The Rise of China and India in Africa by Fantu Cheru and Cyril Obi

China’s Contingencies: Critical Geopolitics, Chinese Exceptionalism and the Uses of History

ABSTRACT This paper examines the intimate relationship between narratives emanating from China and their uses of Chinese history, and how such perspectives inform China’s geopolitical positioning and practices in lieu of its purported ‘rise’. Taking inspiration from the deconstructive impetus of critical geopolitics, this article contends that these historical claims to China’s rise constitute deterministic accounts, hinging on the notion of Chinese exceptionalism to provide discursive backing for a Sinocentric geopolitical order in the coming decades. This in turn downplays ‘alternative’ historiographies that can shed light on how the nature of China’s emergence may be more dependent on and shaped by the external environment than previously acknowledged. Building on the historical-geographical expositions related to the idea of contingency, this article demonstrates how China (whether it be in the past or present) cannot be seen as operating in a vacuum but has to constantly negotiate and adjust its strategy of engagements/interactions based on the specific demands imposed by world politics. Specifically, by elucidating these dimensions through cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan, it is argued that understanding China’s contingencies can raise important questions for us to critically appreciate the contextual actors, processes and relationships that differentially impact on China’s engagements in the world.