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AbstractBureaucratic structures and procedures are an integral part of the production of political space today. Analyses of geopolitical practices must therefore unpack the bureaucratic context in which these practices unfold on a daily basis. This is particularly important if we wish to understand transnational processes that operate at scales and in contexts other than the familiar contours of the nation‐state. In this article, I focus on one bureaucratic centre of geopolitics – the European Quarter in Brussels, Belgium, the institutional centre of the European Union. Drawing from scholarship on geopolitics and policy‐making, as well as primary interview material from field research in Brussels, I make two related points – (1) that we need detailed close‐up studies of the bureaucratic settings of contemporary geopolitics, and (2) that we must carefully situate such settings in their place‐specific contexts to reveal dynamics that remain unnoticed from afar. Empirically, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the EU as a transnational power centre of global importance. Theoretically, it seeks to improve our understanding of geopolitics as a bureaucratic and material practice.

"Critical Geopolitics" published on by Oxford University Press.

This article uses the character of Josef Svejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it. By foregrounding Svejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency in geopolitical discourses. Adapted from the source document.

This article investigates how the notion of security is used in Estonia both to legitimise and delegitimise international integration. It outlines the assumptions, claims and modes of analysis that underpin security narratives, specifying what are constructed as threats to Estonia and what are framed as appropriate countermeasures to these threats. The article scrutinises in particular whether this discourse is undergoing a transformation from exclusive confrontational to inclusive cooperative conceptualisations. I argue that a shift has occurred from military definitions of security to those articulated in terms of culture and values, but that this cultural definition works not against but in tandem with the binary oppositions of inside/outside and us/them. The transition has been not from exclusive to inclusive operationalisations of security but from exclusions based on the notion of military threat to those invoking culture and values. This diffuse cultural discourse enables the selective deployment of divergent arguments to different audiences while maintaining the familiar underlying dichotomies.