Hegemony, popular culture and geopolitics: The Reader's Digest and the construction of danger

This paper is a continuation of one published in 1993. In the earlier piece, I joined the call for a 'critical geopolitics'. Here I want to both illustrate and develop the programmatic calls of critical geopolitics with the use of an empirical example. Critical geopolitics has demanded the siting of any geopolitical praxis - a refusal to accept the abstract logic of geopolitics but instead embody it in historically and culturally specific interests. In line with this, I contextualize the production of a geopolitical discourse by studying both the text produced and the institutional location within which it was generated. The example used is the popular American magazine the Reader's Digest and its changing perception of the Soviet Union and communism between 1930 and 1945. Copyright textcopyright 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.