Having previously examined the asymmetries that structure Europe and challenged the image of a homogeneous and unified entity, we now broaden the perspective to a global scale through a term that is both ubiquitous and problematic: geopolitics.
When designing this third workshop, we could not have anticipated how strongly its questions would resonate with recent transformations in the international order. Since 2022, wars have multiplied or intensified, borders have once again become sites of confrontation, and rivalries between powers have returned centre stage in political and media discourse. The situations in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran, among many others, have brought issues that we might have thought had been relegated to the background – undoubtedly in a naïve and excessively Eurocentric manner – back to the fore: imperial ambitions, control of strategic resources, and the use of force. The resurgence of the term ‘geopolitics’ in both the public sphere and academic debate is one of the most visible symptoms of this reconfiguration.
We use this term in a deliberately critical sense. Geopolitics is not a neutral concept. Its intellectual history is closely linked to projects of territorial domination, imperial expansion, and the normalisation of power relations between states. However, after the Second World War, it seemed to give way to a different political horizon – that of a world based on international cooperation and the search for institutions capable of responding to common challenges that necessarily transcend the framework of nation-states. Although this cosmopolitan ambition was never realised, it profoundly shaped the (geo)political imagination of the second half of the twentieth century.
Today, this vision is being severely tested. Geopolitical language is once again being used to describe a world conceived in terms of competing territories, spheres of influence and strategic competition, while the promise of an international order based on law gives way to the assertion of raw power. Geography itself is once again becoming a political instrument, with borders, trade routes, straits, natural resources, and infrastructure being mobilised as decisive factors in contemporary power dynamics. Nevertheless, it would be too simplistic to contrast the now-defunct cosmopolitan era with the sudden resurgence of geopolitical conflict. Globalisation never fulfilled the promise of cosmopolitanism. Beneath the narrative of the world’s growing integration lay relations of domination, asymmetrical dependencies, and forms of competition that never disappeared. The return of geopolitics, as it is now called, perhaps reveals not so much a historical rupture as an increased visibility of long-standing tensions and structural inequalities that narratives of globalisation had helped to mask.
This is why we propose approaching geopolitics not as an obvious explanation, but as a problem. Its resurgence challenges the limits of political categories inherited from the nation state, raising the question of how to conceive of a world that is both deeply interdependent and increasingly fragmented. Is this the definitive abandonment of any cosmopolitan ambition? Or can we still imagine forms of political community that recognise the reality of conflict while acknowledging a common belonging to the same world?
These questions directly concern literature, and more specifically the novel. Set in a world that is increasingly being described in terms of territory, borders, power and strategic rivalry, the novel opens up alternative ways of understanding political and social realities. Where geopolitics favours abstractions and statistics, it renders singular and incarnated experiences; where maps draw lines of division, it reveals multiple affiliations and cross-cutting solidarities; and it makes visible the contradictions and resistances that narratives of power tend to erase or smooth over.
The novel’s critical potential – which should be acknowledged rather than idealised – speaks to a conviction that runs through the entire CAPONEU project: literature does not merely reflect the political, it participates in its redefinition. By exploring experiences, circulations and forms of belonging that transcend state frameworks, literature can reopen spaces of imagination that are sometimes closed off by geopolitical language. Although it is itself caught up in unequal relationships that influence the production and circulation of works, it nevertheless enables us to think differently about borders, conflicts, mobilities, and power relations on a global scale. If we can speak of contemporary political literature today – and we are convinced that we can – can we also speak of geopolitical literature?
The papers collected here address these questions from a variety of theoretical, historical, and literary perspectives. Together, they explore how literature contributes to the construction of geopolitical imaginaries, while also considering the possibility of challenging, shifting or dismantling them.
Several contributions directly challenge the notion of geopolitics as the language of world order. Lisa Katharina Schmitz opens the volume by examining the ways in which literature can be used to “unlearn” geopolitics, challenging the categories through which the world is usually represented as a set of territories, borders, and competing interests. From a different angle, Korbinian Lindel explores the narrative and aesthetic dimensions of geopolitical thought itself, showing how it has been constructed historically through various ways of telling stories about the world. This line of thought is further explored in Louis Aubry’s study of Jean Genet’s Un captif amoureux. Drawing on the Palestinian experience, the article demonstrates how literary writing can destabilise dominant geopolitical narratives and reveal alternative forms of belonging, solidarity, and perception of the conflict.
Other contributions examine the links between fiction, power and imperialism. Ekaterina Vassilieva analyses the unique role played by fiction in the construction of contemporary Russian political power through the figure of Vladislav Surkov, situated at the intersection of literature and geopolitics. Meanwhile, Max Roehl explores representations of imperial domination and the forms of resistance that challenge it in Anna Seghers’ Der Führer. In a more contemporary context, Fanny Wehner rereads Mike Phillips’s post-Cold War thriller from an Afropean perspective, bringing into view the blind spots of geopolitical narratives inherited from the major confrontations of the twentieth century.
Another central theme of the volume is the spatial dimension of geopolitical representations. Marina Sivak explores the connections between travel writing, cartography, and the imperial imagination in the Soviet Pamirs, showing how spatial representation practices contribute to geopolitical worldviews. On an even broader scale, Nenad Ivić provides a reflection on the cultural forms produced by contemporary global circulations through his concept of Globalatinization. His analysis encourages us to move beyond the opposition between globalisation and geopolitics in order to consider the aesthetic and cultural changes that accompany increased global exchange.
Taken together, these papers do not seek to define what ‘geopolitical literature’ is or should be. Rather, they demonstrate that literature provides a privileged site from which to observe, test and sometimes challenge the logics of fragmentation that characterise the contemporary resurgence of geopolitics, and to remind us that what is often presented as strategic necessity is, in the end, a historical and political construction whose terms remain open to contestation and reinvention.
