Geography and the New Political Economy of US Intelligence

A lecture by Professor Susan Roberts, University of Kentucky, USA and University of Turku, Finland

Lecture

Political and economic geographer, Susan Roberts presents collaborative work with Jeremy Crampton and Ate Poorthuis on a troubling new political economy of geographical intelligence that has emerged in the United States over the last two decades, and further consolidated recently.

The United States is undergoing a dangerous drift toward the militarization and corporatization of geography knowledge that is far more extensive than previously acknowledged.

The discussion is two-fold. First, the authors describe the geography intelligence “contracting nexus” consisting of tens of thousands of companies (including those in the GIS and mapping sector), universities and non-profits receiving Department of Defense and intelligence agency funding.

Second, the lecture discusses the “knowledge nexus” as a way of conceptualizing the network and entanglement of knowledge that flows into and out of the intelligence community, academia, the private sector and scientific centers.

The result is tensions between different interests, particularly the purported clear line between government and non-government activities.

The authors compiled and analyzed extensive data on Department of Defense contractors, especially those contracts awarded by the country’s premier geographical intelligence agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

The lecture examines recent policy and doctrinal shifts toward increased emphases on  “human geography” in intelligence. Geography knowledges are increasingly “weaponized” to sustain the surveillant state.

About the Lecturer

Susan Roberts is Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Turku, Finland. 

She is an economic and political geographer whose research is focused on development, global economic and political restructuring, international finance, geopolitics, and U.S. hegemony and militarization.

She is the author of Economic Geography: Places, Networks, and Flows with Andrew Wood and co-editor of the volumes An Unruly World? Geography, Globalization and Governance and Thresholds in Feminist Geography.

Organisers

Department of Politics, Transnational Configurations Conflict and Governance Programme Group

More information

For more information you can contact Stephanie Simon: simon@uva.nl

Published by  AISSR