Overview

The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic "misshaping" of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this volume explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The distinguished scholars in this multidisciplinary volume bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance.