ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the recent trends in political geography and geopolitics embodied in the critical reading of the interrelations between nation, state, and geographic space. These trends challenge the traditional ethnocentric understandings and visions of geopolitical order.
This chapter also presents the elaborated spheres of geopolitics which produce geopolitical imaginations and their conditional affiliations using two spheres: ‘high’, which includes the geopolitical content produced by state institutions, political parties, and academia; and ‘low’ (popular) geopolitics, consisting of the popular media, and contemporary, popular, and traditional culture.
This chapter is also engaged with geographic and geopolitical imaginations as a rapidly expanding research area. The observed diversity in basic terminology is somewhat confusing and may even serve as an obstacle to constructive discussion among scholars. Based on the author’s long-term research, the chapter separates and qualitatively assesses 19 concepts of critical analysis through which nations read and politicise geographic space, such as geopolitical imaginations, geopolitical visions, geopolitical metageography, legendary spaces, and the image of the homeland, to name but a few.
The chapter ends with a conceptual model of the spatial imagination of the nation, which presents the chief dimensions of how national communities define the spaces and places which are significant for their identity, and their places in higher, external geopolitical order.
