Focus on discourse trades off with complex analysis of political and military structures, abandoning them to the elites

This focus on how geopolitics plays out in particular places links to Thrift’s (2000) frequently cited argument that critical geopolitics leaves out ‘‘the little things’’. Thrift had two criticisms of critical geopolitics. First, critical geopolitics is apparently mesmerized by texts to the exclusion of the sociology of power. Which leads to the second apparent problem – the failure of critical geopolitics to deal with matters of embodiment and the actual functions of the clerks and secretaries, the functionaries of foreign ministries and defence departments who actually make foreign and military agencies operate. In suggesting that texts are merely texts, rather than discourses embedded in the practices of security with all their multitudinous representations of places as sources of threats requiring military action and practices of security, Thrift misrepresents the purpose of the critique. Thrift wants critical geopolitics to do all sorts of things, but not it seems, engage in the critique of the reasoning practices of intellectuals of statecraft, whether in terms of formal geopolitical reasoning, or the more practical versions in media and political discourse. In diverting attention from the political purpose of critique to the practical lived experiences of people in bureacracies and the non-representational aspects of text and identity production, Thrift also facilitiates the traditional modes of doing geography, field work, ethnography, interviews and giving voice to many who are not usually heard. But in doing so the engagement with the rationalisations of military power and the practices of mapping that legitimize military action, are abandoned. This may be an engagement with geopolitics very loosely understood, but it is not the ‘‘tactical’’ form of knowledge that challenges and deconstructs the imperial justifications of violence that Gerard Toal discusses in the epigraph to this paper. While Thrift (2000) may have no interest in tackling the conceptual infrastructure of military violence, in abandoning this critical edge his suggested agenda eviscerates the political purpose of critical geopolitics precisely as Macdonald (in press) suggests by leaving out the ‘‘big things’’.