Considering geography's potential to inform research and teaching in Middle East studies, it is necessary to acknowledge that the discipline's full potential in the United States—despite many accomplishments in recent decades—is yet to be realized. In American higher education, this lack of engagement always seemed to me a consequence of at least four factors in both fields’ institutional and disciplinary histories. As a matter of self-examination, we should first acknowledge that regional orientations in geography (e.g., the Berkeley/Sauer school's emphasis on Latin America and its indigenous and agrarian landscapes) often overlooked the area, leaving engagement with the Middle East more to the efforts of individual scholars and students. Second, despite recent surges in geography's importance and institutional presence on many American campuses,Footnote ¹ for a variety of reasons (not all of which are agreed uponFootnote ² ) there were several periods in the 20th century when geography departments were eliminated from many of those universities regarded as leaders in Middle East studies. Third, forces of inertia—institutional, fiscal, pedagogical (e.g., offerings of language classes, particularly at advanced levels), and mental—set in place by the first two factors are impossible to overstate and difficult to overcome. Fourth and finally, American notions of how to define geography are often tenuous; this is true not only within the general population but also among scholars of other disciplines, compelling recurrent rediscoveries of the discipline.Footnote ³ As a consequence—and apart from the contributions of individual scholars—only in the past two decades has geography witnessed significant exchanges with Middle East studies beyond select areas of inquiry in the discipline (e.g., urban studies), and a regional specialty group for Middle East geography within the American Association of Geographers (known until recently as the Association of American Geographers) did not emerge until the late 1990s. In the following paragraphs, therefore, I introduce geography as a discipline for scholars of the Middle East. This introduction provides a useful starting point as I proceed to engage with one (sub)subfield of the discipline that features routinely in both academic and policy-making engagements with the Middle East and its study: geopolitics.

“What is geography”? It is a question that I raise on the first day of each course that I teach, and the query was a challenge confronting new graduate students when I began graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin roughly twenty-five years ago. Few of us majored in geography as undergraduates and even fewer could respond in a way that accounted for the discipline's breadth and scope. One definition cited in a then recent study by Yi-Fu Tuan was presented for our consideration: “geography is the study of earth as a human home.” This response accounted for the discipline's three major fields: physical (which includes geomorphology, climatology, biogeography, and numerous other subfields), human (comprised of cultural, economic, political, and urban geography, among other subfields), and people–environment relations (i.e., the “earth as a human home” aspect).Footnote ⁴ While I found this definition to be thoughtful and appreciative, I also felt it omitted the full range of questions that geographers might pose. Working toward my PhD at the University of Oregon, I encountered the same exercise but a different response. Rather than being encouraged to think about a singular topical focus of either the discipline or its three major fields, we learned to view geography in terms of the questions it might ask, an understanding that illustrates both what unifies the discipline and what distinguishes it from other fields. This view of geography stemmed from the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the German philosopher and luminary of the Enlightenment. He both described geography and articulated what set it apart from other disciplines: while most disciplines are defined by their subjects of inquiry, two are defined instead by their approaches.Footnote ⁵ Accounting for dimensions of both time and space, history and geography take temporal and spatial approaches, respectively. I viewed this perspective as both liberating and inclusive. From climate change to literary constructs of homeland and identity, in geography you can study anything you like, so long as you are taking some kind of a spatial approach (e.g., examining patterns, processes, and/or perceptions). Returning to Middle East studies, the critical turn that many scholars began to adopt between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s—a turn that instigated engagements with the region's “imaginative geography and its representations”Footnote ⁶ —compelled nongeographers to further interrogate the region's geopolitical roots and vernacular and to take advantage of the opportunities presented by geography as a discipline and approach.

As geography and Middle East studies began to complement each other, confronting these geopolitical histories emerged as a priority in each. Within historical and political geography, works in the humanities such as Edward Said's Orientalism attested to the relevance of taking geopolitical histories to task beyond just the discipline, and further strengthened emerging arguments to reclaim geopolitics itself as a field. This wresting control of geopolitics, however, entailed critical engagement with its historic and ongoing applications as a tool of power.Footnote ⁷ Tracing its pasts within the region, we see that throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, shifting agendas and contexts, emergent ideologies and ideas (e.g., nationalism and notions of the nation-state), and innovations in technology inspired new paradigms apparent in academic analysis and policy formulation. As researchers of the Middle East and geographers, we are keenly aware of how applications of the resultant geopolitical models in scholarship and diplomacy yielded even the region's enduring appellation, something that is more epithet than proper name.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, the West's geopolitical sensibilities also contributed to many of the subsequent national borders, identities, and institutions that would eventually contain, constrict, and divide the region into its present form. As it emerged, critical geopolitics challenged dominant geopolitical narratives: official (e.g., the discourse of leaders and states), expert (e.g., accounts and opinions generated by academics, reporters, pundits, and the press—especially those seeking to advise or affirm those in power), and popular media and culture.Footnote ⁹ While the first two targets comprise the sources of classic/traditional geopolitics, the third might range from the European literature analyzed by Said in Orientalism to the depictions of places, peoples, and policies found in contemporary films and comic books and on the Internet.

While critical geopolitics began by addressing imbalances in official, academic, and popular media through a privileging of particular top-down theories, narratives, and frames of analysis, additional perspectives inspired by this tradition have acquired new targets or expanded the scope of questions beyond just the power politics of states. In addition to popular geopolitics, therefore, we also witness a profusion of other (sub)subfields, including feminist, radical, banal, and progressive geopolitics. In some of its elaborations, today's work in geopolitics overlaps closely with studies of biopolitics and inquiries into the politics of so-called everyday life.Footnote ¹⁰ The need for maintaining observation of (and, in the view of many scholars, a vigilance against) traditional geopolitics, however, is no less significant today; balancing our attention to the various scales at which geopolitical dynamics and agendas are at play is essential.

As scholars in what we call area studies—a term that itself resonates the geopolitics of Cold War priorities that carried over into the academic world—we can discern these kinds of multiple scales of geopolitics at play. Illustrating this point is the 14 April 2008 announcement by then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates of the Minerva Initiative. Noting that shifting geopolitical contexts give way to new paradigms for analyzing world events and setting policy, Gates cited post–World War II developments of game theory and Kremlinology. Based on his comments, we might be led to believe that these concepts actually provided pronounced utility in the early Cold War era. Beyond critiquing these models, however, I contend simply that an overreliance on these concepts (especially Kremlinology) left not only policy specialists but also many academics entirely blind to on-the-ground developments within Eurasia that culminated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I further argue that in both Middle East studies and the world of policy making, we encounter a very similar overreliance on simplistic geopolitical approaches. Following 9/11, scholars and policymakers alike began to view the broad Islamic world almost exclusively in terms of questions of a geopolitics of political Islam only to be shocked by on-the-ground developments within North Africa and the Middle East that came with the 2011 Arab Spring and its ongoing reverberations throughout the region and the world. In both instances, an exclusive focus on overarching, top-down paradigms for understanding and analyzing political developments and security issues stifled consideration of alternative, broad-based, populist movements that emerged from disputes over matters of livelihood and political freedoms. Surely, assessments of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood were crucial in understanding organized political alternatives under the Mubarak regime and in its aftermath, but neither ideology nor party was the sole cause of what transpired in Egypt or in other countries at that time. Only when we reflect on both the individual case of Tunisian fruit vendor Muhammad Abu Azizi's suicide and its wider symbolic significance for people throughout the region do we appreciate fully the political importance of people's daily socioeconomic circumstances. Though his circumstances centered on local matters of food prices, state regulatory regimes, and abuses of power, they were common enough to serve as catalysts for the nationwide and then regionwide uprisings that characterized the Arab Spring. Indeed, struggles over livelihood and sustenance often compel far more profound geopolitical consequences than stern religious/political ideologies.

While some of my work does confront official, expert, and popular discourse,Footnote ¹¹ continued development of the critical geopolitical tradition can also benefit from moving beyond not only “how and with what consequences states use force against each other” to look instead at what geographer Gerry Kearns calls a “progressive geopolitics.”Footnote ¹² In line with accounting for factors that enable livelihood and sustenance (i.e., a geopolitics of biopolitics and/or of everyday life), I have tried through some of my own critical geopolitics research to take an alternative approach that employs ethnography and oral history. Footnote ¹³ How can we utilize geography and an expanded notion of the geopolitical to facilitate a rigorous unearthing and bringing to light of both the concerns and alternative geopolitical perspectives found among otherwise marginalized populations? And how can we better account for the geopolitics of both livelihood and the struggles for everyday life in the region? As noted earlier, many in Middle East studies are already engaging with these questions (e.g., biopolitics), but the questions facilitated by considering geopolitical factors (i.e., taking a spatial approach) are essential for linking the local and incidental with the national and regional and for evaluating these connections.