Radical geopolitics

Defining what is ‘radical’, ‘critical’ or ‘mainstream’ is a quite tricky endeavour in Geography. On the one hand, most scholars consider now outdated the classically assumed distinction between Radical Geography as first expressed in North America by the journal Antipode, mainly addressing socio-economic contradictions through relatively traditional approaches such as Marxism and Anarchism, and a more variegated Critical Geography. Indeed, intersectional approaches have blurred the limits between these definitions, so that ‘critical’ tendencies tend to include socialistic and ‘radical’ approaches alongside themes such as feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, decoloniality, postcolonialism and plural ‘post-structuralist’ approaches to name just some of the possible ‘axes.’ On the other, the very term ‘Radical’ has different meanings in Anglo-American political vocabularies, where it generally denotates a leftist political orientation, and in other languages, especially in Europe and Neo-Latin countries, where the political label ‘Radical’ is broadly associated with liberalism (and sometimes parliamentary transformism), being hardly applied to leftist social agendas. Resulting from these cultural and linguistic differences, some meanings ‘lost in translation’ in the assessment of different geographical traditions across continents have been recently discussed.