Blog Assignment 2
Feminist Geopolitics
In simple terms, the feminist approach to geopolitics disputes hierarchical and state-centric conceptualizations of geopolitics (Flint, 86).
With this in mind, let's consider the mission of the United States Department of Defense:
"The Department of Defense is America's largest government agency. With our military tracing its roots back to pre-Revolutionary times, the department has grown and evolved with our nation. Our mission is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security."
This mission is definitely state centric- and, as mentioned above, feminist geopolitics challenges this idea.
From what I got, where the Depart of Defense (DoD) might have a focus on ensuring our own nation’s security, feminist geopolitics would instead take an approach in which we consider how all nations relate to each other, without thinking that the US is the most important (Flint, 82). In addition to this, the idea of intimate geopolitics doesn’t start with “war,” or needing to “deter war.” In the previous way of thinking, as critical geopolitics does, something like war has to come first and then have an impact on “the home and bodies (Flint, 83).” For intimate geopolitics, though, there is no clear starting point; all of the relations and impacts on home and body are analyzed at the same time (Flint, 83).
With this ideology in mind, I think that the DoD mission statement can be seen as dated.
References:
Flint, C., & Taylor, P. J. (2018). Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality. Routledge.
https://www.defense.gov/
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