Réhabilitation et rénovation en matière de pensée géopolitique

• Main Author: David Criekemans
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes 2011-02-01
• Series: L'Espace Politique
• Subjects: behaviorism; environment; image; intersubjectivity; psychology; representation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/espacepolitique/1723

Taking into account the issue of representations in geopolitics is not as recent as we think in France. United States, "the behaviorist revolution" has, immediately after the Second World War generated a new school, that of the Cognitive Geopolitics, which incorporates the teachings of the behavioral sciences. It is henceforth regarded with Kenneth Boulding (Boulding, 1971) that: "People whose decisions determine the policies and actions of nations do not meet the" objective "facts of the situation ... but to their" image "of the situation. It's how they think the world is not what it actually determines their attitude. " But the originators of the approach are Harold and Margaret Sprout, and it is worth recalling the importance of their contribution. According to them, the reality of the world is a complex formed by a real hardware and a multitude of performances that relativize the first. That is why they differ for each player, between an operational environment and psychological environment. For constructivist authors involved aware of the Critical Geopolitics, everything is played at the second type of environment, but with a double feature. The first, negative, is that they perceive in the psychological environment of the cultural and political actors capable of bringing to seek transcendence in physical space. What would be the major defect of geopolitics to Mackinder. The second, positive, is that this environment is also intersubjective, and therefore the players that build reality, are able to amend it and normativisation. Finally, by combining the suggestions of the two currents to previous contributions of other schools of thought, it seems possible to envisage a geopolitical understanding. Mots clés.