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Principal Research Areas

Geopolitics

My principle concern is with the sub-field of geopolitics and work in two related areas. First, on the intellectual tradition associated with geopolitics and the connections therein between European, Latin American and North American strands of geopolitical thought. Second, in the area of popular geopolitics and in particular examining the role of cartoons, film and the Internet in creating and circulating representations and understandings of global geopolitics.
With regards to the above, I have published three books including Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2007) and edited a number of books and special issues, which consider the geopolitical tradition, including Spaces of Security and Insecurity (Ashgate 2009).

Polar Geopolitics

I work on the geopolitics on the polar regions and have visited the Antarctic continent and various parts of the high Arctic over the years. I am interested in the ways in which issues such as resources, ownership, accessibility and knowledge creation provoke anxieties about governance and control of the Polar Regions. In the Antarctic, for example, I have carried out extensive research on the kinds of ‘sovereignty games’ the Argentines, British and Chileans engaged in during the 1940s and 1950s onwards. The creation and entry into force of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty while significant in terms of shaping a new governance regime has not resolved a central dilemma – who owns Antarctica? I have written a number of books on the subject including Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (2002 I B Tauris).  
In the Arctic, much of my research has considered recent interest in submitting outer continental shelf claims to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf and the ways in which the Russian flag planting episode in August 2007 provoked a host of reactions from other Arctic coastal states and beyond. In 2009, I delivered a series of lectures on Arctic geopolitics at the Nordic Geographers Meeting, the Norwegian Geographical Society, the University of Illinois and the Dutch Polar Network attached to the Willem Barentz Polar Institute.
My next book will be on Arctic geopolitics and I hope to finish it in 2010/2011.

Media, Popular Culture and Public Diplomacy

My interest in media and geopolitics has been developed over the years and recent work has explored the action-thriller with specific reference to James Bond and Jason Bourne. When not writing and watching spies and amnesiac assassins, I also work with a colleague Al Pinkerton on media and public diplomacy. Recently, we worked on a US Air Force funded project called Revere (1951-1954) and with a co-researcher Stephen Young (University of Washington) we have started some new research on rumour and Cold War America. In 2009, I co-edited a special issue with Lina Khatib on media and public diplomacy in the Middle East which was published in the Middle Eastern Journal of Culture and Communication. You can read the editorial essay here: http://www.brill.nl/brochures/MJCC-002-01-Editorial.pdf

Grants

Listed below is a selection of recent grant awards:

• 2008 British Academy £7476 for a project on 'Icy nationalism: geopolitics, resource speculation and the polar regions'.
• 2005 Leverhulme Trust £50,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize.
• 2003 British Academy £8,746 for a project on 'Race, citizenship and the overseas territories of the Falklands and Gibraltar 1964-2002'.