ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews a series of attempts to isolate and critique geopolitics in a critical way to explore the meaning and implications of these contextual instabilities, indeterminacies, and ironies. The various readings and writings of geopolitics considered in this chapter offer us a means to think about, first, the general problematic of geographical reasoning in global politics; second, the exorbitant meanings of geopolitics; and, third, the limits of the project of the critical geopolitics. In "Geography versus Geopolitics" Isaiah Bowman codified and starkly articulated a critical approach to the geopolitics that was to be the governing understanding of "geopolitics" within the Anglo-American geography until the early 1980s. Hartshorne's attempt to develop a functional approach in the political geography in 1950 was an attempt to create a political geography without politics, a diligent, scientific, civic-minded knowledge that was uncontroversial and consensual.
