ABSTRACT
There are two related reasons why geopolitics has rested uneasily within social science. First, the social sciences as a collective have developed in the twentieth century through what may be termed embedded statism (Taylor 1996b). By this I mean that states have provided the essential setting for analysis, whether as society, economy or political system. However, this setting has been taken for granted. Thus, until spurred by the Marxist critique after 1968, theoretical concern for understanding the state had been muted at best. Second, this statist perspective has had a strong propensity to focus upon one selected state per study thus neglecting the connections and linkages between states. By this I mean that the multiplicity of states as reflected in their inter-relations has been under-researched (Taylor 1995). This is rather an odd outcome in a century of world wars and much other inter-
state violence, no wonder Michael Mann (1988:viii) has condemned social science as ‘absurdly pacific’. Even in political science, International Relations has been the ‘Cinderella’ subdiscipline. Given this dual circumstance, if even IR’s social science credentials have been in doubt, social science has hardly been fertile ground for the growth of geopolitical research.
