As a body of scholarship that first emerged in the early 1990s ‘critical geopolitics’ sought to bridge the disciplines of Geography and International Relations and was initially inspired by the pioneering work of ‘dissident’ scholars including Simon Dalby, John Agnew and Gearoid Ó Tuathail. Grounded in a corpus of work emerging from the discipline of International Relations in the 1980s and bolstered by post-structuralism and political economy, these contributions sought to radically reconceptualise ‘geopolitics’ as a complex and problematic set of discourses, representations and practices. Through the 1990s a number of geographers used the term critical geopolitics to encompass a diverse range of academic challenges to the conventional ways in which political space was written, read and practiced. Since then the research agendas of ‘critical geopolitics’ have flourished and developed considerably.

This international conference seeks to assess the current state of ‘critical geopolitics’ and in so doing will explore areas for reconsideration and future research.  Just over a decade on from the publication of a special ‘Critical geopolitics’ issue of the journal Political Geography and the publication of Ó Tuathail’s landmark text Critical Geopolitics in the same year (1996), this conference recognises that, politically as well as intellectually, the time is right to appraise and reflect upon the contribution that this corpus of critical scholarship has made both within and beyond the discipline. Rather than assuming critical geopolitics to be a single analytical or methodological endeavour, this conference recognises that this corpus of scholarship encompasses various ways of unpacking the tropes and epistemologies of dominant geographs and scriptings of political space.
    
The conference will be organised by the Politics-State-Space research cluster at  University of Durham University with sponsorship from the Political Geography Research Group (PGRG) of the RGS-IBG and the journal Political Geography. The PSS cluster at Durham includes Ben Anderson, Ash Amin, Louise Amoore, David Campbell, Stuart Elden, Steve Graham, Ray Hudson, Kathrin Horschellman, Cheryl McEwan, Colin McFarlane, Gordon Macleod, Joe Painter and Marcus Power (amongst others). The Department is also home to the International Boundaries Unit (IBRU).

Further information about IBRU and the Politics-State-Space Research cluster is available at:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/research/researchclusters/

The conference will open with a series of short (pre-circulated) ‘position papers’ given by the key speakers around the theme of critical geopolitics before opening out to explore the variety of ways in which critical geopolitical inquiry has been practiced. In particular we want to invite key speakers to discuss how critical geopolitics shapes their current and ongoing research. Postgraduate student participation and presentations will be welcome and a number of travel bursaries are available from the PGRG and Political Geography to enable postgraduate students to attend.

Themes explored in the conference might include (but are not limited to):

• Geopolitics and security

• Territory and boundaries

• Critical geopolitics theory and post-colonialism

• The geopolitical tradition and histories of geopolitics

• Visuality and geopolitics

• Geopolitics and development

• Critical geopolitics methodologies