geopolitica articulo

1. Commentary
Why criticizing grand regional
narratives matters
John Agnew
University of California, USA
Abstract
Writing regional narratives of the sort envisaged in this article is much more fraught with difficulties than
acknowledged by its author. Four conditions are identified for avoiding the glib story telling that afflicts the
genre: reflecting on the limits of previous narratives, particularly the foundational myth of the disinterested
observer of timeless truths; being clear about the metanarratives that unavoidably inform meaningful
descriptive narratives; avoiding the call of elite and popular appeal at the expense of scholarly integrity; and
cultivating an outsider status that speaks to the epistemological fragility of all regional narratives including
those we might write, particularly when the emphasis in academia, for good philosophical as well as practical
reasons, is on more analytic endeavors. The barriers set by these conditions suggest reasons why the genre
is so little practiced.
Keywords
geopolitical flimflam, grand regional narratives, metanarratives, popularity
This article (Murphy, 2013) is bemusing. It proposes
to be about encouraging “geographers” to write
“grand regional narratives,” but its critique of such
efforts mainly by “non-geographers” is its strength.
I think that this happens because once Murphy
reaches the examples, he realizes that writing such
narratives is a fraught exercise unless the writer is
willing to reflect self-consciously on their limits. Few
of those he mentions in the conclusion as influencing
US “elites” (Thomas Friedman, Robert Kaplan, and
so on) show such scholarly inclinations. They are in
fact propagandists for various types of geopolitical
snake oil in which empirical information is cherry-
pickedtofitinterpretiveframeworksthatappealtothe
simpleminded or ignorant who have little knowledge
of previous incarnations of these narratives or of the
places swept up into the narratives.
I hasten to add that I think it is possible to write
critically informed “grand narratives” of the type
Murphy is advocating, but only on four conditions.
The first is to reflect on the historiography of previ-
ous grand regional narratives. “Knowing your
natives” was the basic adage that informed hubristic
colonial-era European and American geography. In
our collective retreat from the simple generaliza-
tions about places that the old explorer-empiricist
logic authorized, we should remain sensitive to the
fact that the narratives in question are always written
Corresponding author:
John Agnew, Department of Geography, UCLA, 1255 Bunche
Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-15, USA.
Email: jagnew@geog.ucla.edu
Dialogues in Human Geography
3(2) 160–162
ª The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2043820613490132
dhg.sagepub.com

2. from somewhere with someone’s interests and iden-
tities foremost in mind. So, if you wish to write for
US elites you need to give them stories they can make
use of. Mackinder, as most professional geographers
know, was primarily an apologist for the British
Empire of his day in developing a geopolitical logic
in service to that cause. Mackinder must be given a
transcendental “scientific” authority his framework
manifestly lacks (e.g. what is the technological
equivalent of the railway giving Eurasia a new geos-
trategic advantage today?) in order to provide
grounding to contemporary US debates about
“pivoting” to China. I think that, as geographers often
familiar with these old stories, our duty is not to
endorse such flimflam but to actively expose it as
such (e.g. Agnew, 2012a).
Even if there is no “view from nowhere” that
stands beyond geography, quite where to locate your
focal point as you try to write a regional narrative is
a serious problem. Different regions at different
geographical scales are needed for different
purposes (Agnew, 2012b). Murphy’s examples
range far and wide: some are truly global, based
on polarities such as the Global North and South;
others are more conventional accounts of world
regions that are themselves impositions on the
world map (such as the “Middle East”). Some sort
of world-ranging theoretical framework would seem
to be absolutely necessary to provide a basis other
than ad hoc reasoning for the narratives one wishes
to relate, particularly when one is aiming for the
“grand.” Inevitably, this leads us to the “metanar-
ratives” that Murphy (2013: 4) seeks to avoid in pur-
suit of descriptions that are somehow not
“conceptually rooted.” This seems like an impossible
task to me. Many of the grandest narratives necessa-
rily fall back on theoretical assumptions that, while
providing principles for selecting what information
to privilege, such as material factors versus ideas or
“drives” within cultural contexts, are often deliber-
ately vague about why they chose the approach that
they did. To open up their hidden metanarrative is
to question the total geography on offer. In my efforts
at providing “global stories” with serious geographi-
cal analysis (Agnew, 2005, 2009), I have tried to lay
out very clearly the metanarratives that inform my
perspectives. By contrast, only in an interview (Parry,
2013) did I discover that Ian Morris (2010), author of
Why the West Rules . . . For Now, based his grand
regional narrative on the adage that: “Change is
caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for
easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things.”
Although this sentence helps me understand his book
a whole lot better, I also feel even more intellectual
unease about the book than I did before. In the end,
a synthesis is only as good as the analytic principles
that inform its construction. As a result, analysis
versus synthesis should be seen as a false polarity.
Unfortunately, it is very much at the center of the
claims made on behalf of regional narratives, grand,
or otherwise. Ad hoc synthesis usually trumps rooting
the synthesis in careful analysis.
Grand regional narratives may appeal to Murphy
and to many others because they provide synthetic
accounts of information about places that address
one of the great themes of geography: integrating
knowledge in broad accounts that also, coinciden-
tally, appeal to wider publics put off by more analy-
tic approaches to geographic (or any other)
understanding. But the latter part of Murphy’s
article leads me to suspect that the question of scho-
larship is entirely secondary. The appeal of the
grand regional narratives is much more about the
style of presentation, and about the possibility of
publicity and recognition by elites than it is about
scholarship. The goal is getting your book reviewed
in the New York Times Book Review or the London
Review of Books and having extended book tours
that publicize your personal and disciplinary brand
to the general public. I fear that complex historical
geographies that invoke the vital importance of
colonialism for the contemporary world order and
pointtotheinadequacyofAmericanorEuropeannos-
trums about “modernization” or “the Steam Engine”
as the motors of history (or, for their part, say Chinese
ones about the miracle-working properties of
“Confucianism”) will not make it into print with trade
publishers, let alone show up in airport bookshops. It
is not only about dumbing down; it is also about con-
forming to popular prejudices. So, in writing grand
regional narratives, the temptation to enter into a
Faustian Compact with commercialization and elites
should be rejected as often reflecting the betrayal
rather than the fulfillment of scholarly purpose.
Agnew 161

3. Academic geography is a relatively “minor” and
marginalized field in terms of numbers of self-
labeled practitioners and institutional presence
within universities around the world, even relative
to fields such as economics and political science, let
alone history. Moreover, its outsider status as a field
predating the “variable”-defined (the social, the
economic, etc.) and superanalytic disciplines of the
late 19th century such as sociology, economics,
political science, and so on, has always left it open
to the charge as a haven for dilettantes and misfits
producing pedestrian travelogues. As a counter, this
has led to much imitation of the other fields in
philosophy and method, thus eschewing the goal
of writing “descriptive” narratives about places.
Purportedly, “explaining” and “predicting” relatively
limited phenomena under limited geographical
circumstances have become much more important
to professional careers than writing broad syntheses
about large parts of the earth’s surface with which
any one person can only have at best a nodding famil-
iarity. In addition, “regional specializations” have
long been in retreat in Anglo-American academic
geography, which makes the emergence of the
broader narratives based on first-hand local knowl-
edge rather than half-baked generalizations culled
from second-hand sources even less likely than in the
past. Finally, the academic pressures to write
relatively brief articles rather than books, such as
3-year personnel review periods in many US univer-
sities andtheResearchAssessmentExercise/Research
Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom,
encourage an emphasis on explicitly avoiding grand
regional narratives of the sort envisaged by Murphy.
Yet, in my view, the outsider status is actually a valu-
able one to cultivate, not just in providing justification
for the sort of syntheses that Murphy is proposing, if
accompanied by a large dose of critical self-
awareness, but also in challenging the presuppositions
and simplicities that attend the writing of grand
regional narratives of whatever type no matter what
the departmental affiliations might be under which
they are advertised.
References
Agnew JA (2005) Hegemony: The New Shape of Global
Power. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Agnew JA (2009) Globalization and Sovereignty.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Agnew JA (2012a) Is US Security Policy “Pivoting” from
the Atlantic to Asia-Pacific? Berlin, Germany:
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
Agnew JA (2012b) Arguing with regions. Regional
Studies 47(1): 6–17.
Morris I (2010) Why the West Rules . . . For Now. New
York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Murphy AB (2013) Advancing geographical understand-
ing: why engaging grand regional narratives matters.
Dialogues in Human Geography 3(2). doi: 10.1177/
2043820613490253
Parry M (2013) The shape of history: Ian Morris, historian
on a grand scale. The Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 25.
162 Dialogues in Human Geography 3(2)