Ph.D. Research Profile: Peter Mayell
Reading Between the Li(n)es: A Critical Geopolitics of 11 September 2001 and the Consequent ‘War on Terrorism
Research Overview
My broad research area is geopolitics, the traditional branch of political geography concerned with the geography of international relations. Geopolitics has been revitalised in recent years through the emergence of Critical Geopolitics, which reflects the “new cultural turn” in human geography and the wider humanities. Critical Geopolitics is influenced by and applies, inter alia, the insights of post-modernism, critical theory, post-colonialism, and post-structuralism to traditional geopolitics and its readings and writings of international relations. More specifically, my research focus is in bringing various Critical Geopolitics approaches to the study and understanding of conflict and, in particular, post-Cold War conflict. The intention is to make a geographically sophisticated contribution to the important field of conflict research and resolution, usually dominated by quantitative political science approaches. In bringing Critical Geopolitics to bear on conflict, it is also proposed that this conflict research will contribute to the development of Critical Geopolitics.
These two interrelated strands are central to my doctoral research, which concentrates on events in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001 and the consequent and ongoing ‘war on terrorism’. I am specifically interested in the geopolitical discourses deployed by the US government, military, media, and popular culture to explain the events of 11 September 2001, and in particular to explain that violence in a particular way which legitimise the violence of the ‘war on terrorism’ in response. Moreover, I am interested in how these geopolitical discourses are contested by various subversive discourses that explain 11 September 2001 in an alternative way that consequently de-legitimises the violence of the ‘war on terror’. The research focuses on the discursive practices involved in each set of discourses and the inter-relationships between the two, as these ‘conflict discourses’ are conceptualised as being mutually interdependent and continually reconfiguring themselves and each other. The primary data used in this research are the speeches, interviews, and press-conference transcripts of various US and world leaders in the month between 11 September 2001 and the start of the military ‘war on terrorism’ against Afghanistan on 7 October 2001. These hegemonic geopolitical discourses of 11 September 2001 and the ‘war on terrorism’ are contested by subversive discourses circulating in critical commentaries by journalists, academics, and other intellectuals, which are used to de-construct the hegemonic discourses legitimating violence in world politics. It is through this critical examination of the geopolitical discourses used to (de)legitimate violence that I hope to make a significant Critical Geopolitics contribution to conflict research and resolution. I am also interested in how 11 September 2001 and the discourses surrounding its explanation and the legitimation of the ‘war on terrorism’ response have been re-configured and re-circulated in New Zealand and their consequent impact on the domestic political landscape and New Zealand foreign and defence policy.
This doctoral research is being conducted in the National Centre for Research on Europe (www.europe.canterbury.ac.nz) and is primarily funded by a University of Canterbury (www.canterbury.ac.nz) Doctoral Scholarship and the Department of Geography (www.geog.canterbury.ac.nz). Funding for overseas travel has also been obtained from New Zealand’s Peace and Disarmament Education Trust (PADET), established with money from France’s Rainbow Warrior reparation payments. The research is being supervised by Professor Eric Pawson, Head of the Department of Geography, Professor Martin Holland, Director of the National Centre for Research on Europe, and Associate Professor James Sidaway, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. I have a Master of Arts degree in Geography (1996) from the University of Canterbury and do some lecturing in the Department of Geography, primarily in GEOG 202 and I am currently working towards teaching my own fourth-year graduate class on Critical Geopolitics in 2004.
I started this doctoral research in September 2000 and am aiming to complete it in September 2004. In November 2000 I was selected as the University of Canterbury’s representative at a British Council - Auckland University of Technology conference, Turning the Tide: a New Approach to Conflict Resolution. In May 2001 I travelled to (London)Derry, Northern Ireland, for the Initiative on Conflict Resolution’s (INCORE; www.incore.ulst.ac.uk) Conflict, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: The Challenges Ahead conference, and in June to the Conflict and Development Programme’s (CODEP) The Economics of War conference in London. From April to July 2002 I took up a position as a visiting research fellow at the London Centre for International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent. On the way there I visited the site of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. In late June I attended the Third International Conference of Critical Geographers in Bekescsaba, Hungary, where I presented a paper titled “Exploring the geopolitical (dis)continuities of 11 September 2001 and the consequent ‘war on terrorism’”. In July 2003 I attended the New Zealand Geographical Society Conference (www.geog.auckland.ac.nz/nzgs2003) at the University of Auckland, where I presented a paper entitled “The Mackinder Century in New Zealand Politics: 11 September 2001 and its domestic impacts”. In late August 2003 I will be presenting a similar paper at the second New Zealand European Studies Conference, also in Auckland.
I am interested in establishing links with other academics working in Critical Geopolitics, International Relations, and Conflict Research, so please contact me at the above address or by e-mail if you wish to discuss research ideas.