Carly Hartel: GEO 230 Spring 2022

      For this blog I chose to look at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan. My dad was actually stationed here for about a year, right after my parents got married in 1985 and i enjoyed getting to learn a little more about the base and its history!     According to the  Military Bases website, Kadena was originally a small Japanese air field, but it was quickly overtaken by U.S. Marines and soldiers upon their invasion of the island (Kadena Air Force Base). After Okinawa entered into a shared cooperation agreement with mainland Japan, the U.S. was able to begin stationing permanent troops there, and in return the U.S. would shoulder some of the responsibility for the defense of the country (Kadena Air Force Base). While at first this sounds like a pretty nice deal, that changes a bit when considering this from a hegemonic view. Flint & Taylor (2018) explained that, "to represent its military actions as just, the United States represented its own ac...

  Module 2      I found that one of the most interesting topics in this chapter was the discussion around feminist geopolitics. I had never heard of such a thing, and the description was fascinating to me. Flint & Taylor (2018), speak of feminist geopolitics as challenging critical geopolitics in three main ways: it critiques the content for continuing to be state-centric, it reconceptualizes geography to different spaces as intertwined in vast ways, and they see critical geopolitics as “stopping at academic critique, rather than doing something. In other words, no normative geopolitical agenda is promoted” (p. 83). These ideas fascinate me – I especially enjoy that the content is challenged, considering that most still currently relates to the thoughts of old, white men. I also enjoyed the discussion around intimate geopolitics, which focuses on seeing violence and war in new ways, including how they impact the individual body and the home (Flint & Taylor, 2...

 Flint & Taylor (2018), described the model of the three geographical scales as a singular process that manifests at three scales. They further described this process as taking the following form: "the needs of accumulation are experienced locally ... and justified nationally ... for ultimate benefits organized globally" (Flint & Taylor, 2018, p. 38). One example of this process is the discussions around banning Russian oil imports.  Yaffe-Bellany  described this in his article in a few ways. First, he noted that President Biden and his advisors were worried that an oil embargo would make the prices of fuel soar (Yaffe-Bellany, 2022). This relates to the first scale, as the effects of an embargo would be felt locally, by citizens at the gas pump. Yaffe-Bellany (2022) also described that the reason for this proposed embargo is that the United States is looking for ways to punish the Russian government for their invasion of Ukraine. This attests to the second scale,...