This book traces the shifting meanings of security and geopolitics in Central European states that acceded into the EU or NATO in 2004. The author examines assumptions that shaped these debates and influenced policy-making, combining fresh theoretical approaches from international relations and political geography with rich empirical material from Central Europe. This book provides the first in-depth analysis of security discourse in the region.

"Change the system, not the climate" is a common slogan of climate change activists. Yet when this idea comes into the academic and policy realm, it is easy to see how climate change discourse frequently asks the wrong questions. Reframing Climate Change encourages social scientists, policy-makers, and graduate students to critically consider how climate change is framed in scientific, social, and political spheres. It proposes ecological geopolitics as a framework for understanding the extent to which climate change is a meaningful analytical focus, as well as the ways in which it can be detrimental, detracting attention from more productive lines of thought, research, and action. The volume draws from multiple perspectives and disciplines to cover a broad scope of climate change. Chapter topics range from climate science and security to climate justice and literacy. Although these familiar concepts are widely used by scholars and policy-makers, they are discussed here as frequently problematic when used as lenses through which to study climate change. Beyond merely reviewing current trends within these different approaches to climate change, the collection offers a thoughtful assessment of these approaches with an eye towards an overarching reconsideration of the current understanding of our relationship to climate change. Reframing Climate Change is an essential resource for students, policy-makers, and anyone interested in understanding more about this important topic. Who decides what the priorities are? Who benefits from these priorities, and what kinds of systems or actions are justified or hindered? The key contribution of the book is the outlining of ecological geopolitics as a different way of understanding human–environment relationships including and beyond climate change issues.

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect. It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

"A very good overview. Covers the key topics well and in an accessible and engaging style." - Dr Daniel Hammett, Department of Geography, Sheffield University This is a revised and updated edition of a core undergraduate resource for political geography. Focusing on the social and cultural while systematically overviewing the entire discipline, Joe Painter and Alex Jeffrey explain: Politics, geography, and ′political′ geography: power, resources, institutions, and the history of the field State formation: classical views alongside recent work on governance and governmentality Welfare to workfare state: the restructuring of present state strategies Democracy, citizenship and law: different models of democracy in European and global contexts Identity and social movements: the relation between identity and political action Nationalism and regionalism: ethnicity, national identity and "otherness" Imperialism and post-colonialism: from world systems theory to post-structuralist accounts Geopolitics: the political, economic, and strategic significance of geography. Comprehensive, accessible and illustrated with real world examples, Political Geography provides undergraduates with a thorough understanding of the relationship between geography and politics.

A comparative study of the relationship between the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of geopolitics in Europe.

This volume provides an up-to-date, authoritative synthesis of the discipline of human geography. Unparalleled in scope, the companion offers an indispensable overview to the field, representing both historical and contemporary perspectives. Edited and written by the world's leading authorities in the discipline Divided into three major sections: Foundations (the history of human geography from Ancient Greece to the late nineteenth century); The Classics (the roots of modern human geography); Contemporary Approaches (current issues and themes in human geography) Each contemporary issue is examined by two contributors offering distinctive perspectives on the same theme

Offering theoretical insights on region building, this book explores the attempts to formulate a political and institutional vision for the Black Sea region in the post-9/11 era and in the context of the enlargements of the EU and NATO. It investigates in depth these attempts, viewed as a failure by the key actors involved, in order to understand how regions emerge in international politics as well as how and why they may fail to come into being. To this end, the book explores a range of factors that impacted region building in the Black Sea, considering the role of region builders involved, their practices and the context of their actions, and the spatial representations and security discourses that were integral to the region building process. Hence, attention is paid to how these factors both enabled and constrained the discursive construction of the Black Sea region, thus identifying the elements that distinguish the Black Sea from other successful cases of region building. Based on critical approaches towards international relations and political geography, this book both expands and deepens the scope and understanding of regions and will thus appeal to academics and students in the fields of International Relations, Security Studies, Political Geography, and Regional Integration.