Book Published

Over the past year I co-edited a collection of the academic works of Simon Dalby, Simon Dalby: A Pioneer in International Relations: Key Contributions on Critical Geopolitics, Environmental Security and the Anthropocene, with Mr. Dalby. This was published in May. As an academic book, of course at an incredibly high price of US$149; meant for institutional libraries rather than individual purchase.

This work involved going through articles, book chapters and books that Mr. Dalby had written since the start of his academic career in the late 1980s to select which ones best represented his career’s work. The first one selected, the 1988 “Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other” which was based upon his PhD thesis, could have been written today simply by changing “The Soviet Union” to “Russia”. The first paragraph:

The vociferous criticisms of superpower detente heard repeatedly in Washington and to a lesser extent in other NATO capitals, in the 1970s, were supported by arguments concerning a massive political and military “Soviet threat” to Western security. Among the highest profile proponents of the “Soviet threat” was the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), many of whose members subsequently attained important policy-making positions in the Reagan Administration. Their arguments in favor of a reversion to the foreign policy of containment militarism, have had a significant influence. To date, while the CPD’s political campaign has been examined in some detail, and its links to the “Team B” intelligence estimates review process [to overcome an intelligence community that refused to fabricate scary assessments of the Soviet Union] have been traced, no comprehensive examination has been made of the structuring of their arguments. This paper shows how they drew on a series of “security discourses,” namely sovietology, the realist literature in international relations nuclear strategy, and geopolitics to ideologically construct the Soviet Union as a dangerous ‘Other’. It traces how each of these discourses operate ideologically to hinder progressive political change and to perpetuate militarization.

And here we sit in 2025, with Russia and Iran “Othered” in very much the same way and China well on its way to being “Othered”. In the same way that the regimes of Iraq (“babies thrown out of incubators” and “WMD”), Libya (“crimes against humanity”), and Syria were to facilitate their defeat and subjugation. In the same way that the national liberation movements of Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Alllah have been through the “Muslim terrorist” trope and those fighting for freedom in Haiti are seen through the pejorative of “criminal gangs”. The first threatening Other of the Amerindian population of North America, which needed to be ethnically cleansed and genocided to make way for “Western civilization”, is constantly recreated. “The only good [sic] Indian is a dead [sic] Indian” has been transformed by the Zionist regime into “the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian”, calling upon the tropes of the Terror Dream (The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, by Susan Faludi 2007) of the first 150 years of British colonization in North America. A dream that the capitalist oligarchy do not want us to awake from; there must always be an Other that is somehow threatening “our way of life”. As Dalby stated later in the article:

The ideological moves of geopolitics are powerful because of how they act to exclude alternative formulations of politics. They are powerful because they draw on a number of “common sense” themes in Western metaphysics. Specifically, this paper suggests that rethinking geopolitics requires a refusal of the dichotomous formulation of the identity-difference theme in security matters. Geopolitics is about the formulation of security in spatial terms of identity and difference, difference being inherently inferior to identity. Universalizing a particular identity does not lead to security but to a replication of security problems at a larger scale, or to a blatantly imperialistic situation. Security requires a reformulation in terms that refuse the dichotomous structures of them and us, Same and Other.

The next papers that we selected, Environmental Insecurity of 1996 that covered the attempts to securitize environmental degradation, Globalizing Environment: Culture, Ontology and Critique of 2000 covered the intersection of globalization and environmental degradation; Geopolitical Identities: Arctic Ecology and Global Consumption of 2003 touches on the same subjects. With Geopolitics, the Bush Doctrine, and War on Iraq of 2003, Dalby returned to the subject of geopolitics and the propagandist constructions required to support wars of conquest and regime change, and policies of preeminence and preemption. As he notes:

The policies of preeminence and pre-emption are the key to understanding what is going on in Iraq, they may be the key to the next few years also. But this is a foreign policy agenda that is driven by a small but influential group of intellectuals and political operators who have used the events of September 11th to change American foreign policy and have triumphed in Washington in recent months. They have done so primarily because they have seized an opportunity presented in the war on terrorism to militarize other aspects of American policy. These are mostly civilians drive by an ideological agenda to remake the world according to their own view of American prosperity. In the aftermath of September 11th, the complete unwillingness of the Democratic Party to challenge the interpretation of the world as a dangerous place in need of pacifying, gave Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz their chance.

Perhaps a little naivete with respect to a Democratic Party that is just as much a tool of the US capitalist oligarchy as the Republican Party, with Democrats such as Biden enthusiastically pushing for the invasion of Iraq. Currently with respect to Iran we are faced with the policies of preeminence and pre-emption (once more a fake “WMD”). That reminds me to rewatch the 2018 movie Vice which was about the rise of the “Darth Vader” Dick Cheney. The militaristic and propagandistic tropes utilized by an aggressive US Empire and its mainstream media were detailed in Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and the Kingdom of Heaven of 2008 that covered three specific movies.

Of late, combat movies have been an integral part of the production of geopolitical spaces which construct identities of heroes and villains on the one hand but also provide both fictional and mimetic discourses of the terrain of danger.

With Ecology, Security and Change in the Anthropocene of 2007, Dalby had started to address the role of humanity in the large scale terraforming of the Earth and the implications of notions such as security and geopolitics. With the need to connect social science with the rapid changes in the Earth System. Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene of 2014 proposed a rethinking of geopolitics. Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene of 2018 noted the use of fire as “both as an ecological transformation device and a weapon of warfare” with opposition to climate change initiatives based in both political economy and “conservative” cultural themes:

The intense political opposition to climate change initiatives in the United States in particular, but also in other places of the Anglosphere, notably in Canada and Australia, isn partly driven by the short-term economic interests of coal and petroleum sectors. But, as will be elucidated further later in the paper, climate change ‘deniers’ also frequently articulate ‘conservative’ cultural themes that emphasize competition, struggles for dominance and status tied to technological artefacts, notably ‘firearms’ and petroleum powered vehicles. These often encompass colonizing tropes, of wilderness and danger in need of conquest, pacification and where that fails, violent policing to deter threats. In the Canadian case during the years when Stephen Harper was prime minister these themes were explicitly articulated in terms of Canada as an energy superpower, coupled with the suppression of government scientific discussion of environmental topics and rhetoric of support for military solutions to external political problems in the Middle East in particular. Australian politics has mirrored many of these themes in the last decade too, and in particular themes of the hostility refugees and migrants fleeing violence in Asian and Africa and antipathy to serious climate change action.

As Dalby notes, the combustion of fossil fuels must be contained in contrast to the alternative of a Trump administration “that is to go on burning things with abandon and then attempt to ride out the increasingly severe environmental consequences.” How so little has changed in seven years, even with the Canadian Liberal prime minister that echoes Harper in his calls for a Canadian energy superpower. With the increasing possibility of the usage of solar radiation management being raised by the state, Dalby’s statement that “Obviously the technological temptations toward controlling global change by using solar radiation management, or in the current jargon albedo modification, by the rich and powerful will grow in coming decades” may prove prescient.

Unsustainable Borders: Globalization in a Climate Disrupted World of 2021, To Build a Better World: Securing Global Life After Fossil Fuels of 2021, and Peace, Violence and Inequality in a Climate Disrupted World of 2022 consider the realities that will face a world where climate change has not been adequately mitigated and what they will mean for notions of territoriality, security, equality, geopolitics and even survival. The last paragraph of that second paper could so easily sum up our present predicament:

The nightmare scenario is of warfare resulting from efforts by the elites to maintain economic and political control if climate change accelerates towards a hothouse earth. If that transpires, alas, an old-fashioned geopolitical focus on interstate conflict - potentially in the form of a major confrontation between China and the USA, reminiscent of the superpower rivalries that were a backdrop to the Stockholm Conference - will once again tragically be germane for security scholars. The alternative geopolitical framing that is even more urgently needed now than in the 1970s is one that replaces competition with a recognition of common vulnerabilities to climate change and global species extinction. Anthropocene security requires a flourishing global biosphere, rather than the attempted imposition of modern modes of combustive consumption on a world that cannot accommodate them, if the conditions for civilized life are to be provided for future generations.

As the global average surface temperature of the earth has passed irrevocably beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade above the late nineteenth century benchmark, the Trump administration has heightened the tensions between the USA and China, the US supports its proxy Israel in its drive for dominance in the Middle East (including the possible use of the combustion of nuclear weapons), and the Ukraine proxy war drags on into a fourth year; the old-fashioned geopolitics of interstate conflict is fully in focus. Even mirrored in my own institution’s major turn to the “dark side” of support for foreign aggression and proxy wars, and the construction of threatening external and internal Others, reflecting the shift in the Canadian academy. While Western governments, including Canada, ramp up military spending and ramp down the focus on climate change initiatives.

From the 1970s when I was just a teenager, to the present, we have come full circle from one arrangement of global power politics to another, but in a present where global power politics blocks the societal paths that are required for the long term survival of modern human civilization. Trump, Merz, Macron, Starmer, Meloni, Carney, Albanese and von der Leyen represent the societal dead end presented to us by the capitalist oligarchy. Putin is utterly dependent upon the financial flows that stem from Russia’s massive fossil fuel exports. It is only China that seems to both genuinely strive for peace and non-intervention, and a transformation of its energy and transport systems away from combustion.

For my own non-fiction book on this subject, now titled Great Power Politics, Elites & Energy, I am engaged at an early stage with a publisher. We will see how that goes. As the days go by my unpublished novel The End of the Beginning, serialized here, becomes more and more prescient. The only change that may be required is a change of the timeline to four years later than it currently is; or perhaps not given the recent acceleration in climate change.

Mr. Dalby is now retired from academia, but his “in retirement” academic output would rival that of many full time academics. His book Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World was published in late 2023 at the much more reasonable price of US$27 for the kindle version and US$29 for the paperback. The kindle version of his 2020 book Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability is available for the princely sum of only US$7.86. His 2022 Rethinking Environmental Security is priced at US$42.95 for the paperback version. Such are the wide variations in the prices of such work depending on the publisher and envisioned audience.