Geopolitical Imaginations and Global Histories of International Thought: Adventures in Time and Space

Abstract Much is said today of geopolitics, but little is understood about its global intellectual history. Introducing this special issue, we map out an agenda for addressing this impasse, building on recent work by historians of geopolitical thought. We suggest that new histories of geopolitical thought have been obstructed by five persistent interpretative problems. These five problems have foreclosed new histories by framing geopolitics through powerful assumptions of an implicit Atlanticism, realist reductionism, pro-imperialism, intellectual extinction and detachment from geography. While such assumptions have been useful in reading some geopolitical thinkers critically, we argue that they have also constricted our attention to the protean diversity of geopolitical thought and unduly discounted marginalized thinkers from scrutiny. There is a global history of geopolitical thought to be written, where Atlanticism is provincialized, critics of imperialism abound, and planetary geographies are not read in abstract or determinist ways. In that history to come, thinkers once marginalized by their gender, ethnicity or politics stand as powerful guides, expanding the horizons by which our stories travel. We conclude by outlining how each of the contributions in this special issue invite readers to reconsider the boundaries of geopolitical thought.