Geopolitics by Metaphor: The Sweet Spot between Specificity and Ambiguity
Geopolitics by Metaphor: The Sweet Spot between Specificity and Ambiguity

Summary/Abstract: With ongoing war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, looming climate emergency, breakthroughs in AI technology, and the return of great-power politics, the present and coming years will be a time of conceptual realignment, of finding new language to describe, understand, and operate in a ‘new world order’. I propose this process begins with metaphor. In a time of uncertainty, it may seem counterintuitive to focus on a linguistic device as inherently ambiguous as metaphor. But it is this ambiguity that allows metaphors to bridge policy pragmatism and strategic vision. Foregrounding the tension between the pull of old, familiar metaphors (‘new Cold War’) and the desire for new conceptual frameworks (‘polycrisis’), this article takes stock of the ‘state’ of geopolitical metaphors today. It interrogates the appeal of Cold War language in a time of geo-metaphorical vacuum. It also highlights simultaneous attempts to inject complexity theory into current discourse on geopolitics and asks what we may learn from the first ‘post-Cold War president’, Jimmy Carter. How can we formulate new geopolitical metaphors that harness the strategic ambiguity of metaphor and become storytellers of democracy once more?

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