Subaltern geopolitics: Introduction

Inspired by postcolonial, feminist and anti‐geopolitical interventions, this special issue brings together papers which present subaltern imaginaries that offer creative alternatives to the dominant (critical) geopolitical scripts. The concept of subaltern makes direct reference to postcolonial notions of power relations, suggesting a position that is not completely other, resistant or alternative to dominant geopolitics, but an ambiguous position of marginality as the term is used by bell hooks (1990). The papers collected together here focus on the various practices engaged with by people who have been marginalized by dominant geopolitics. The practices, whether strategies of survival or getting on with everyday life in Palestine, newspaper publication in Tanzania, or practices of peace‐building in the Philippines or Colombia, are all ways of reworking dominant geopolitics not simply through critique, but through offering up lived alternatives. Thus, the notion of subaltern geopolitics used here both looks past the binary vision of geopolitical reasoning and much critical engagement with it, and also seeks to go beyond the endlessly critical nature of critical geopolitics, to offer alternative ways of imagining and doing geopolitics.