Neoliberal geopolitics

Neoliberalism, taken to indicate social practices that enact multiple extensions of market logics, may be presumed to signal a kind of anti-or post-geopolitics. After all, the most famous adjective to describe the desired global space of neoliberalism is ‘flat’ (Friedman 2005; Ohmae 1991). The flatness indicates the eroded significance of national boundaries and of differences of most sorts between people and places across the planet (Brown 2006: 699). Geopolitics, by contrast, relies on a world whose surface is not flat. It is, rather, a world exhaustively divided into differentiated territorial states. Moreover, geopolitics understands each state as having its own interests and as pursuing these with force when and where it is expedient.