Publications

Recent publications

For descriptions of current research themes, see the ‘Research Themes’ section.

Copyright laws do not permit me to post PDF files on the web. If you have trouble accessing the articles, feel free to request a copy from me.

Books

Kuus, M. Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, in press.

 

Geopolitics and Expertise is an in-depth exploration of how expert knowledge is created and exercised in European Union institutions. It traces how geopolitical arguments are deployed by foreign policy professionals there and how these practices fit into and transform the social milieu of the European Quarter. Rigorous, empirical, and engaging, the book offers a nuanced analysis of diplomatic practice, a sphere that is opaque and inaccessible by design. It incorporates over 100 interviews with EU foreign policy professionals over the course of seven years. 

This study is unique in its focus on qualitative and contextual evidence gathered from interpersonal interviews rather than quantitative and questionnaire-based data. A rare full-length analysis of transnational decision-making, the book elucidates the complexity and creativity of European diplomatic practice. Blending human geography with international relations, anthropology, and sociology, this account illuminates the inner workings of knowledge and power in transnational regulatory institutions.

Further information on the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers book series is found at http://www.rgsbookseries.com

 

Dodds, K., Kuus, M. and Sharp, J. (eds). The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics, Ashgate, 2013. ISBN: 1409423808, 9781409423805.

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices.

Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect.
It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

Link to the book's site: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409423805

 

 

Kuus, M. Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Security and identity are the rhetorical pillars of European Union (EU) and NATO enlargement. Across Europe, enlargement – not a one-time event but an ongoing process -- is proclaimed to stabilize East-Central, Europe, to codify its European and western identity, and to create a Europe that is finally “whole and free”. Enlargement is a profoundly geographic and geopolitical project as it is based on geographically and territorial conceptions about the essence of places, the borders of cultures, and the locations of threat. It inextricably ties security and threat to the unresolved questions about the borders of Europe and Europeanness. It bundles up security and geopolitics with culture and identity.

Geopolitics Reframed asks how the bundling up of geopolitics and culture works, how it affects political debate, and how it is transformed in the course of Europe’s eastern enlargement. It pursues these questions by combining constructivist approaches from international relations and human geography with rich empirical material from Central Europe. It provides the first in-depth analysis of security discourses in the region – defined here as the states that acceded into EU or NATO, or both, in 2004. Tracing the reframing of security and geopolitics from a military to a more diffuse cultural and quality-of-life issue, the book illuminates the link between security rhetoric and identity politics.

 

Articles, commentaries, book chapters:

Kuus, M. ‘Places of Lower Rank: Margins in Conversations’. Invited commentary. Political Geography, 34, 2013.

Kuus, M. ‘Introduction: Human Agency in Geopolitics’, In Dodds, K., Kuus, M. and Sharp, J. (eds). The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics, Ashgate, pp. 383-386, 2013.

Dodds, K., Kuus, M., and Sharp, J. 'Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics'. In Dodds, K., Kuus, M. and Sharp, J. (eds). The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics, Ashgate, pp. 1-18, 2013.

Kuus, M. Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Skeptical Intervention’. Geopolitics, 18 (1), 2013: 115-131

Kuus, M. ‘Banal Huntingtonianism: Civilizational Geopolitics in Estonia’. In Stefano Guzzini (ed.) The Return of Geopolitics in Europe?: Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy Identity Crises. Cambridge University Press, 2012, 174-191.

Kuus, M. ‘Bureaucracy and Place: Expertise in the European Quarter’. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 2011 (4), pp. 421-439.

Kuus, M. ‘Policy and Geopolitics: Bounding Europe in EUrope’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(5) 2011, 1140-1155.

Kuus, M. ‘Whose Regional Expertise?: Political Geographies of Knowledge in the European Bureaucracy’. European Urban and Regional Studies, 18 (3), 2011, pp. 275 - 288.

Kuus, M. ‘Geopolitics. Part II’. In Agnew, J., and Duncan, J. (eds.) Companion to Human Geography. Blackwell, 2011, pp. 512-522.  

Kuus, M. ‘EUrope and the baroque.’ Commentary in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 28, 3, 2010, pp. 381-387.  

Kuus, M. ‘Critical Geopolitics’. In R. Denemark (ed.) The International Studies Encyclopedia. Blackwell, Volume II (Co-Ec), 2010, pp. 683-701.

Kuus, M. ‘Europe’, in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift. (Editors-in-Chief) The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier (2009), pp. 644-648.

Kuus, M. ‘Political Geography and Geopolitics’. (Contribution to a special series of articles on the direction of Canadian geography.) The Canadian Geographer (TCG) / Le Géographe Canadien (LGC) 53 (1) 2009: 86-90.

Kuus, M. ‘All We Need is NATO? Frontiers of Security Cooperation in Europe’. In Klaus Dodds and Alan Ingram, eds. Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 185-204.

Kuus, M. ‘Cosmopolitan Militarism?: Spaces of NATO Expansion’. Environment and Planning A. 41 (2009), pp. 545-562.

Kuus, M. ‘Professionals of Geopolitics: Agency in Spatializing International Politics’. Geography Compass. 2/6 (2008): 2062–2079.  

Kuus, M. ‘Civic Militarism?’. In Flusty, Steven, Dittmer, Jason, Gilbert, Emily, and Kuus, Merje. ‘Interventions in Banal Neoimperialism’, Political Geography 27 (2008), pp. 617-629.

Kuus, M. ‘Marginals and Outsiders’. Contribution to the discussion forum ‘Teaching European Identities’ in Journal of Geography in Higher Education. 32 (3), 2008.

Kuus, M. ‘Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe’. Geopolitics vol. 13, no. 2, 2008, pp. 257- 277.

Kuus, M. ‘The Ritual of Listening to Foreigners: Appropriating Geopolitics in Central Europe’, in N. Parker (ed.) The Geopolitics of Europe's Identity: Centers, Boundaries, and Margins. New York: Palgrave, 2008, pp. 177-194.

Kuus, M., and J. Agnew. 'Theorizing the State Geographically: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Territoriality', in K. Cox, J. Robinson, and M. Low (eds.) The Handbook of Political Geography. Sage Publications, 2008, pp. 117-132.

Kuus, M. ‘‘Love, Peace and Nato’: Imperial Subject-Making in Central Europe’. Antipode, vol. 39, no. 2, 2007, pp. 269-290.

Kuus, M. ‘Ubiquitous Identities and Elusive Subjects: Puzzles from Central Europe’.  Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 32 no. 1, 2007, pp. 90-101.

Kuus, M. ‘Intellectuals and Geopolitics: The ‘Cultural Politicians’ of Central Europe’. Geoforum, vol. 37, no. 2, 2007, pp. 241-251.

Kuus, M. ‘Multiple Europes: Boundaries and Margins in European Union Enlargement’. Editorial introduction to a discussion forum on EU enlargement Geopolitics, vol. 10, no. 3, 2005, pp. 567-570.

Kuus, M. 'Europe's Eastern Enlargement and the Re-Inscription of Otherness in East-Central Europe' Progress in Human Geography, vol. 18, no. 4, 2004, pp. 472-489.

Kuus, M. ''Those Goody-Goody Estonians': Toward Rethinking Security in the European Union Applicant States'. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 191-207.

Kuus, M. ‘Toward Co-operative Security? International Integration and the Construction of Security in Estonia’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 2002, pp. 297-317.

Kuus, M. ‘Sovereignty for Security?: The Discourse of Sovereignty in Estonia’, Political Geography, vol. 21, no. 3, 2002, pp. 393-412.

Kuus, M. ‘European Integration in Identity Narratives in Estonia: A Quest for Security’, Journal of Peace Research vol. 39, no 1, 2002, pp. 91-108.

Feldman, M (former name). ‘European Integration and the Discourse of National Identity in Estonia’, National Identities, vol. 3, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5-21.

Feldman, M. ‘Waterfront Revitalization and Local Governance in Tallinn, Estonia’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 5, 2000, pp. 829-850.