The Politics of Global Space

Course content

This course is about space and politics in international affairs, often associated with geopolitics, a quasi-systemic approach to space and military strategy in global society constituted by states, or blocks of states, engaged in interest pursuit and power maximization. The bulk of the course is premised on geopolitical thinking in the West in the last century, including the post-Cold War extensions or transformations of traditional geopolitics. It also seeks an exploration of critical probings into geopolitics by geographers as well as assessments of space and superpower politics outside the mainstream. The course at once ventures into the politics of space beyond strategic thinking, and aims, informed by recent insights from social and political theory, to trace the uses of space and spatiality in the discourse of transnational, trans-local encounter.