Geopolitics

"http://issuu.com/nations_emergentes/docs/nationsturquie300/1?e=3721641/7828238
"La réussite économique et la capacité à résister aux chocs exogènes de la Turquie.
La Turquie, un modèle pour les pays du “printemps arabe?” vs. Gezi
La Turquie tournée vers la Russie?
La Turquie en Afrique?"
pp. 9-11"

"Hospitality is an important part of geopolitical practice. This paper focuses on the welcome given to Commonwealth dignitaries in London, UK in the 1950s and 1960s, and at an intergovernmental conference in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1979, in order to highlight the centrality of hospitality to post-colonial international diplomacy. These examples illuminate four key contributions that a focus on hospitality can make to our understandings of geopolitics more broadly. First, they point to the role of the welcome, hospitality and the host in staging political relations, and to the value of attending to hospitality that is conditional and instrumental in our research. Second, they highlight the need to go beyond the current focus on violence
and exclusion in critical geopolitics, by illuminating the role of welcoming performances in a range of geopolitical contexts. Third, they elucidate a different set of spaces – bars, clubs, hotels and tourist sites – that form an integral, but often overlooked, component of political practice. Fourth, drawing on a broad range of literatures, including those around commercial relations, the paper proposes that hospitality – in contrast to dominant conceptualisations as either ethico-political position or embodied, economic and instrumental practice – is better understood as always moving and shifting between these poles. These contributions advance the field of critical geopolitics by highlighting international relations as performance:
a conceptualisation that makes space for diplomatic labour, the construction of atmosphere, and the often uneven power relations that such performances embody. "

"Research in postcolonial geography has overlooked the period, practices and spaces of political decolonization in favour of studies of high imperialism and ongoing contemporary colonialism. Here, I suggest geographers should look more carefully at the mid-twentieth century era during which people, institutions and states negotiated, performed and experienced becoming postcolonial. I make this case by focusing on the modern Commonwealth which emerged from the end of the British Empire, and specifically, on two Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings in the 1970s. At this time the Commonwealth was an important site for rehearsing anticolonial, anti-
British and postcolonial political identities, for contesting British policies in Southern Africa and intervening in ongoing decolonization. The paper makes three broader contributions. First, it highlights the need to grasp the specificities of institutions arising from decolonization, and to take this period seriously as one that was experienced, at least by political elites, as one of dramatic
change, characterized by exciting opportunities as well as uncertainty and frustration. Second, it broadens conceptualizations of geopolitical space and action by drawing attention to international
conferences as geopolitical events through which political positions and identities were staged and performed. Third, it contributes to (and complicates) notions of the subaltern within postcolonial geopolitics."