For two hundred years, the domination of some countries by others has been intrinsic to international relations, with national economic and political strength viewed as essential to a nation's survival and global position.
Mastering Space maps paths out of the tangle of international relations by identifying the essential features of this "state-centredness" and suggests an optimistic alternative more in keeping with the contemporary post-Cold War climate. Drawing on recent geopolitical thinking, the authors claim that the dynamism of the international political economy has been obscured by excessive attention on the state as an unchanging actor. Dealing with such topical issues as Japan's rise to economic dominance and the US's perceived decline, as well as the global impact of continued geographical change, the book discusses the role of geographical organization in the global political economy and the impact of increasing economic globalization and political fragmentation in future international relations.
The authors identify the present time as crucial to the global political economy, and explore the possibilities of moving the world from mastering space to real reciprocity between people and places.
Authors
Agnew is currently Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From 1975 until 1995 he was a professor at Syracuse University in New York. Dr. Agnew teaches courses on political geography, the history of geography, European cities, and the Mediterranean World. From 1998 to 2002 he chaired the Department of Geography at UCLA. He has written widely on questions of territory, place, and political power. He has also worked on issues of "science" in geography and how knowledge is created and circulates in and across places. He is best known for his work completely reinventing "geopolitics" as a field of study and for his theoretical and empirical efforts at showing how national politics is best understood in terms of the geographical dynamics of "places" and how they are made out of both local and long-distance determinants. Much of his empirical research involves Italy, Greece, and the United States.
