Editorial: The Multi-Disciplinary Reclamation of Geopolitics: New Opportunities and Challenges

The story of geopolitics may be described by the words of the Grateful Dead: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” From being the driving force behind the establishment of geography as a modern university discipline through a false, but near fatal, association with Nazism, the common story is that it took Henry Kissinger, a refugee from Nazism, to resurrect the topic. Such a revival was partial. The geopolitics that Kissinger promoted was the practical and realist geopolitics of states versus states. It took a reaction against such practices, under the guise of critical geopolitics, to rehabilitate geopolitics as an academic enterprise. In tandem with the post-structural approach of critical geopolitics, structural approaches to geopolitics, such as world-systems theory, provided a means to bring the “global” back in to the conversation without resorting to faux-histories and national agendas. The energy provided by feminist geopolitics kept the revival going, and now geopolitics is an eclectic blend of theoretical perspectives and topical foci. This journal has enabled and reflected these changes. After establishing itself through a focus on the politics of boundaries it has become an outlet for research on the spatiality of all forms of geopolitics. We are very grateful for all previous editors, Richard Schofield (1995–1999)1, David Newman (1998–2014), John Agnew (1999–2008), and Simon Dalby (2009–2014), for providing such a strong foundation for us to build upon