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Geopolitics as Theory:

Historical Security Materialism

Johns Hopkins University

Despite its previous centrality in Western political science, materialist arguments in contemporary theories of security politics are neglected and attenuated due to several political and intellectual developments. The extensive geopolitical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was theoretically unsophisticated, deterministic and reductionist, but it was, along with classical Marxism, a branch of a broader attempt to historicize earlier materialist arguments in response to the industrial and Darwinian revolutions. In order to reformulate geopolitics as a more conceptually robust and sophisticated theory, I employ a generalized version of the apparatus of Marxian historical (production) materialism to construct geopolitics as historical security materialism. In this model, the forces of destruction, constituted by the interaction of geography and technology, determine the security functionality of different modes of protection. Two competing modes of protection, the real-state and the federal-republican, distilled from realist and republican (proto-liberal) security practices, entail differing forms of arms control and patterns of institution-building (asymmetrical binding vs co-binding), and in turn generate differing political structures (anarchy and hierarchy vs republics and states-unions). The security viability of these modes and their attendant structures is hypothesized to vary across three different sets of forces of destruction (early-modern, global-industrial and planetary-nuclear). Simple security, the absence of violence applied to bodies, can result either from the presence of a violence-poor material context, or the presence of political restraints on violence. Real-state practices and structures are security functional in material contexts characterized by low violence volume and velocity and dysfunctional in material contexts of high violence volume and velocity, while the converse is true for federal-republican practices and structures. The role of ancillary concepts of contradiction, reification and idealism is suggested and an agenda for further conceptual work and empirical research is outlined.

Key Words: geopolitics • historical materialism • Marxism • republicanism • security • technology

European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 6, No. 1, 77-107 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/1354066100006001004


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