ABSTRACT
Political geography has paid scant attention to theorizing the international. But the changing nature of power, as manifested today in the rise of non-state actors and transnational flows, challenges a continuing focus on the international as the scale par excellence of world politics. Systematic thinking linking geographical scale and politics is fairly recent and has remained largely without critical scrutiny. Political problems and policies have come to be defined in terms of the geographical scales at which they are seen as operative. Current talk of globalization and an emerging world of flows, point to both a new way of thinking about states and the declining significance of the international as a dominant scale in contemporary world politics. Moreover, critical geopolitics is not simply an alternative theory to that of formal and spatial geopolitics.
