Geopolitics as theory: Historical security materialism

Despite its previous centrality in Western political science, materialist a rguments in contemporary theories of security politics are neglected and at tenuated due to several political and intellectual developments. The extens ive geopolitical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was t heoretically unsophisticated, deterministic and reductionist, but it aas, a long with classical Marxism, a branch of a broader attempt to historicize e arlier materialist arguments in response to the industrial and Darwinian re volutions. In order to reformulate geopolitics as a more conceptually robus t and sophisticated theory, I employ a generalized version of the apparatus of Marxian historical (production) materialism to construct geopolitics as historical security materialism. In this model, the forces of destruction, constituted by the interaction of geography and technology, determine the security functionality of different modes of protection. Two competing mode s of protection, the real-state and the federal-republican, distilled from realist and republican (proto-liberal) security practices, entail differing forms of arms control and patterns of institution-building (asymmetrical b inding vs ca-binding), and in turn generate differing political structures (anarchy and hierarchy vs republics and states-unions). Thr security viabil ity of these modes and their attendant structures is hypothesized to vary a cross three different sets of forces of destruction (early-modern, global-i ndustrial and planetary-nuclear). Simple security, the absence of violence applied to bodies, can result either from the presence of a violence-poor m aterial context, or the presence of political restraints on violence. Real- state practices and structures are security functional in material contexts characterized by low violence volume and velocity and dysfunctional in mat erial contexts of high violence volume and velocity, while the converse is true for federal-republican practices and structures. The role of ancillary concepts of contradiction, reification and idealism is suggested and an ag enda for further conceptual work and empirical research is outlined.