The conference will provide a forum for exchange for political geographers prior to the IGC 2012 meeting in Cologne with the goal of moving forward current conceptual, methodological and empirical research agendas in Political Geography and Critical Geopolitics. During the conference two strands will be running parallel: The conference will provide a forum for exchange for political geographers prior to the IGC 2012 meeting in Cologne with the goal of moving forward current conceptual, methodological and empirical research agendas in Political Geography and Critical Geopolitics. During the conference two strands will be running parallel:

Strand A: Integration and Disintegration of the Nation State. The role of the nation state and the territorial order of the world’s political map have significantly changed over the past two decades. In the face of ongoing economic globalisation the geopolitical influences of transnational corporations and networks of financial speculation have become ever more palpable. In the political realm, networked players such as terrorist networks, regional warlords and new social movements are growing in importance. Simultaneously, ongoing inter-state conflicts, debates on homeland security, the biopolitics of citizenship, hardening borders and reinvigorated state institutions in the face of financial and fiscal crisis in the EU and the US show that the nation state is far from disintegrating into a space of flows. The conference seeks to invite contributions that discuss these challenging developments from different theoretical perspectives as well as through different case studies.

Strand B: Critical Geopolitics 2012. Four years after the Critical Geopolitics 2008 conference at Durham University, we seek to invite contributions addressing the state of Critical Geopolitics and its evolution as an interdisciplinary research approach across the social sciences. Particular attention shall be paid to Critical Geopolitics’ interdisciplinarity in both conceptual and methodological terms as means of exploring inter-dependencies between the global and the local. How do geopolitical conditions affect local settings and the daily lives of people and how do localized social relations and seemingly mundane practices develop wider implications? The conference seeks to investigate both how the geopolitical is enacted in local settings and how specific personal, social and institutional arrangements shape the geopolitical. Furthermore, it seeks to address how these developments are dependent on, and influenced by, different underlying spatial arrangements and scale interdependencies.

In addition to paper and roundtable session in each strand, there will be two plenary lectures by Alec Murphy (http://geography.uoregon.edu/murphy/) and Joanne Sharp (http://www.ges.gla.ac.uk:443/staff/jsharp). Abstracts will soon be available here.

The conference will be held at the university’s Campus Westend (Grüneburgweg 1, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany). It is organized by the Commission on Political Geography (CPG) of the IGU and the German ‘Arbeitskreis Politische Geographie’. It is sponsored by the journal Political Geography and will be hosted by the Department of Human Geography of the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main.

For more information, please follow the links on the left or send an email to precon2012@humangeographie.de