THE POLITICS OF USING MACKINDER’S GEOPOLITICS: THE EXAMPLE OF UZBEKISTAN

Dr Nick MEGORAN

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Dr, Nick Megoran, Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College (Cambridge CB2 3HU, U.K.)

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Introduction—Two Approaches to Mackinder

As both recent scholarly publications, and colloquia in London, Glasgow and Tashkent demonstrate, there remains considerable interest in the thinking of Halford Mackinder. Two major streams of scholarship can be identified—the study of the application of his theories to international relations, and the investigation of their intellectual provenance. This paper will focus on the second of these concerns, making use in particular of a body of scholarship on Mackinder known as “critical geopolitics,” especially the work of Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal). It will consider what new insights can be gained from the application of this approach to studies of contemporary Central Asia that themselves use Mackinder’s ideas. It asks not, “what does Mackinder’s theory reveal about the world and Central Asia’s place in it?,” but, “what does Mackinder’s theory reveal about Mackinder” and, crucially, “how have citations of Mackinder’s theory been used to construct contemporary geopolitical narratives about Central Asia?”

The first approach to Mackinder takes his Pivot/Heartland theory as a model with predictive capacities that can be tested against the “course of events,” and from which policy recommendations can be derived. Such a method was used principally to analyze the Cold War, and was particularly popular with international relations theorists. It has almost entirely relied on limited readings of three of Mackinder’s works, his 1904, 1919, and 1943 iterations of………………..

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