Strategic geographies: Dialogues,totality and the modern prince

Abstract

Strategy is a pervasive yet undertheorised concept in geography. While spatial strategies have been analysed across sub-disciplinary areas, and ‘strategic interventions’ invoked in debates, the term remains poorly defined and often conflated with tactics. The core contribution of the paper is to develop strategic geographies as a heuristic for understanding geography’s role in crafting an engaged and collective project of social transformation. It does so by developing the conceptual triad of dialogues, totality, and the modern Prince, to clarify the relation of tactics to strategy, build bridges across fragmented debates, and link them outward to the practice of engaged scholarship.

Introduction

There is an urgent need to think strategically as geographers: building ‘persuasive arguments’ that present a narrative of the future through the lens of an uncertain and conflictive present (Freedman, 2013: 614). It may be cliché to say we live in times of crisis (e.g. Hilbrandt and Ren, 2025; Temenos, 2025), yet the intersection of broken neoliberal funding models and overt attacks on academic freedom and the value of critical scholarship from right-populist governments worldwide make the conjuncture particularly challenging. For early career scholars considering a career in academic geography, these challenges are further compounded by increasingly unrealistic expectations for research output metrics, alongside the persistence of Anglophone hegemony (Paasi, 2025; Zielke et al., 2023). Geographers have developed an impressive repertoire of tactics to confront such pressures – from the politics of citation and publication practices (Jazeel, 2016; Müller, 2021) to sustaining community partnerships (Shannon et al., 2020). These draw on a long and resurgent tradition of engaged geography (see Wills, 2014), a broad category that includes feminist, public, community, and scholar-activist approaches (Derickson and Routledge, 2015; Frazier, 2025; Koopman, 2024; Plyushteva, 2023; Taylor, 2014). What remains striking, however, is that while much geographical literature foregrounds the tactics of engagement, there has been little sustained discussion of what it might mean to build a strategy in and for geography. Without strategy, geography risks becoming fragmented, reactive and vulnerable to the very forces undermining critical scholarship.

How geographers understand strategy and how they may act strategically are necessarily related and this paper bridges scholarship on the geographies of strategy with work on strategic interventions in the discipline. Although literature on geography’s relationship to strategy can be found in most sub-disciplinary areas (Hall, 2022; Jackson, 1988; McCarthy, 2005; Roca, 2020; Routledge, 2017; Swanlund and Schuurman, 2019), and in methodological debates such as Wyly’s (2009) proposal for ‘strategic positivism’ or more recent interest in strategies of relational comparison (Robinson, 2016), this work has rarely been brought into dialogue with each other, with strategic questions over geography’s role in the world left aside. The paper starts by tracing how geographers have mobilised strategy in sub-disciplinary areas with traditions of public engagement: urban planning (e.g. Roy, 2009a), political geography (e.g. Routledge, 2017), and postcolonial geography (e.g. Robinson, 2003). These fields, which take seriously the relationship between research and activism and occasionally draw lessons from the strategies of those being studied, provide fertile ground for clarifying the stakes of strategy. Yet, despite a wealth of research into geographical strategies, there has been little attempt to define strategy itself or to build dialogue across different areas of debate, leading to conceptual ambivalence and a persistent slippage with tactics. Only by clarifying the use of strategy can we begin to build a more coherent strategic approach to geography, bridging disciplinary debates to our role in the wider world. The remainder of the paper then charts a possible way forward by developing a conceptual framework to support a more strategic approach to geography’s future(s). Guided by the dialectical insights of Antonio Gramsci and Henri Lefebvre, alongside Mikhail Bakhtin, the aim is not to prescribe a particular geographical strategy – a task beyond the scope of this paper – but to situate conceptual discussion within a longstanding commitment to engaged scholarship. Throughout, I maintain dialogue with concrete examples of strategic action familiar from my own engaged scholarship, including contemporary Latin American politics and the 2011 Occupy movement, to highlight the stakes of geographical approaches to strategy.

The core contribution of the paper is to develop strategic geographies as a heuristic for understanding geography’s role in crafting an engaged and collective project of social transformation. It does so by developing the conceptual triad of dialogues, totality, and the modern Prince, to clarify the relation of tactics to strategy, build bridges across fragmented debates, and link them outward to the practice of engaged scholarship. First, dialogues provide a strategic practice for reworking uneven terrains of encounter, connecting academic and public spheres, and, following Bakhtin and Gramsci, turning the multiplicity of voices and narratives into a site where tactics can be articulated into broader socio-spatial projects. Second, totality is a necessary component for giving sense, or drama, to everyday life, moving beyond its fragmented and disconnected appearances. An appreciation of open totality, following Lefebvre, is vital for the tactic-strategy dialectic; without it, strategic geographies risk collapsing into isolated interventions. Finally, the modern Prince represents Gramsci’s attempt to update Machiavelli’s figure into a collective political project: more expansive than a mere political party, and oriented toward fusing ideas, practices, and passions into a collective will (Thomas, 2013, 2017). The modern Prince is a metaphor for reimagining how intellectual work and political practice can be brought together in a strategy of collective transformation. Geography, I argue, can form part of such a modern Prince, translating between tactics and strategies to generate persuasive narratives of possible futures. The modern Prince is thus both heuristic and provocation for reimagining geography’s future(s) as a long-term project for social and spatial transformation.

Strategy and geography

Deriving from the Greek stratēgia (‘generalship’), strategy is notoriously difficult to define. Long deployed in the context of military studies, strategy gained in popularity among scholars of politics and later business studies during the twentieth century (Freedman, 2013). Authors such as Sun Tzu (2008) and Machiavelli (1993), while writing from different contexts, have been influential in providing manual-like reflections on the ‘art’ of war, emphasising the need for deception when confronting greater strength in an opponent, and detailed, empirical readings of power that rely on a capacity to foresee and respond to changing situations. Clausewitz (1976: 177) gave one of the first explicit definitions as ‘the use of the engagement to achieve the objectives of war’. Strategy tends to be conditioned by an initial set of objectives and requires a long-term vision, constantly adapting to changing circumstances, with regards how to achieve them. Yet strategy should not be reduced to a mere ‘plan’ as it is precisely a process of responding to unexpected or undesired events that comes into being with a recognition of conflict and changing context. Strategy often starts as an intuitive response to unpredictable situations yet depends centrally on a capacity to communicate political judgements into ‘persuasive arguments’ (Freedman, 2013: 614). It is thus an art rather than a science that has a crucial dramatic dimension, as I explore below.

In geography, strategy is a ubiquitous-yet-obscure concept, frequently invoked but rarely defined. This is perhaps not surprising given that strategy is a notoriously ‘elusive, protean creature’ that lacks a fixed meaning (Brands, 2023: 2). Nevertheless, geography, broadly understood as the physical environment including land and sea, has been theorised as the ‘mother of strategy’ (Gray and Sloan, 1999: 3), and there is a long tradition that emphasises the importance of ‘knowing terrain’, the topographies of mountains, rivers etc., across which wars are made (Elden, 2010; Sloan, 2017). In the 20th Century, geopolitical thinkers argued that strategy is always contained within its geographical limits (Gray and Sloan, 1999; Mackinder, 1942; Sloan, 2017), demonstrating that the effective use of space, not just time, is a key determinant to success (Gray, 2018). More recently, critical geopolitics has generated nuanced critiques of the discourses that produced grand strategies (Tuathail and Gerard, 1994) and the assumptions underlying geo-strategies (Dittmer, 2021) yet has paid little attention to understandings of strategy itself, as the focus has been to deconstruct how strategy has been discursively deployed. This theoretical deficit runs across much of contemporary geographical literature, including areas with traditions of engaged scholarship and sensitivity to grassroots or insurgent strategies, to which I now turn.

Urban planning

Urban planning has long engaged with questions of strategy, while also being sensitive to the potentials of collaborating with insurgent planning strategies (Miraftab, 2009; Savini, 2024). Foundational work explored the concept of ‘strategic spatial planning’ developed by Healey (1996, 2008). Building on this, Albrechts (2015: 511) defined strategic planning as a ‘sociospatial process’ that seeks to reimagine a city, urban region, or region and to translate the outcome into priorities for investment, conservation, infrastructure, and land-use regulation. Here, strategy is assumed to be the collective and concerted efforts of planners and allied actors (e.g. police, Raco, 2003) directly involved in shaping urban space. In this framing, strategy entails meticulous planning and control, with everyday users of urban space relegated to the realm of tactics. For example, Kärrholm (2007: 441) addresses this division in his study of pedestrian spaces, contrasting ‘territorial strategies’ as impersonal, planned, and mediated forms of control with ‘territorial tactics’ rooted in interpersonal relations.

This distinction between tactics and strategy was most famously articulated by de Certeau (1988) through his contrast between the ‘strategic’ vision from atop the World Trade Centre and the ‘tactical’ manoeuvres of walkers below. Drawing on Clausewitz, de Certeau (1988: 37–38) framed tactics as ‘the art of the weak’ and strategies as the privilege of ‘places of power’. This reading has been influential, shaping scholarship in urban and cultural geography in the 1990s (Mitchell, 2000) and speaking to debates on engaged scholarship (Elwood and Mitchell, 2013). Yet it is also deeply hierarchical: separating tactics and strategies according to the relative position of actors (powerful institutions vs everyday users) rather than interrogating their overlapping spatial logics. Domosh’s (1998) excellent work into ‘polite petty acts’ in nineteenth-century New York exemplifies this tendency. She explored how fleeting tactical transgressions subtly reworked public norms without overt confrontation, resonating with Scott’s (1985) everyday resistance and Cresswell’s (1996) notion of transgression. While powerfully capturing the politics of the everyday, it also reinforced the alignment of tactics with fragmentary, embodied gestures and strategies with durable, institutional projects. The binary even travelled into physical geography, where tactics were mapped onto short-term events and strategies onto longer-term spatial control in ecological adaptation (Perramond, 2007). While productive, these readings ultimately narrow the conceptual scope of strategy, deepening top-down/bottom-up and temporal/spatial divides rather than expanding the possibilities for strategic thought and collaboration.

Political geography

Political geography, which has a lively tradition of engaged and collaborative research (see Menga et al., 2024), has primarily examined strategy through the lens of political actors and institutions. The growth of electoral geography sought to show how and why geography matters to party strategies (Johnston and Pattie, 2006). Scholarship on gerrymandering and boundary disputes (Johnston et al., 2013), the importance of local branches for generating resources (Johnston and Pattie, 2014), and local campaigning as a strategy for national power (Cutts, 2006) expanded debates otherwise confined to political science, demonstrating how spatiality – including digital forms – mediates electoral success (Halvorsen, 2020a; Potter and Olivella, 2015; Temple, 2023). Yet rarely is strategy itself defined, with its spatial component left implicit. A similar pattern is found in literature on ‘state space’. Jessop’s (1985, 2008) strategic-relational approach framed the state as a ‘strategic field’ of class struggle, demonstrating that strategies are never enacted on a neutral terrain but through the state’s strategic selectivities, privileging certain territorial alliances and political scales over others. Despite detailed accounts of the spatial strategies of state power (Brenner et al., 2008), including rescaling as a strategy of capitalist accumulation (Brenner, 2003; MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999), scholars largely stopped short of interrogating the meaning of strategy itself, nor folding this back onto their engaged practice. Indeed, as Hall (1985) argued in his dialogue with Jessop, there is a risk that ‘strategies’ become detached from their historically specific, concrete use, reducing concepts to a level of abstraction that are less politically useful, a concern that has been taken up with recent turns to conjunctural geographical analysis, as discussed below.

Relatedly, literature on social movements has shown how place, scale, and network shape activists’ strategic decisions (Leitner et al., 2008; Martin, 2003; Miller, 2000; Nicholls et al., 2013). Routledge (2000, 2017) is notable for advancing ideas of spatial strategy, including a direct engagement with Tzu (1988) to stress terrain and local knowledge as critical resources for subaltern actors. This work has been central in shifting focus from state-centric strategies to ‘anti-geopolitics’ (Routledge, 2003) and to an alternative tradition of ‘radical geopolitics’ informed by Yves Lacoste (Hepple, 2000; Taylor, 2003). Moreover, much of this scholarship has argued for a militant and engaged scholarship (Routledge and Derickson, 2015) that works beyond binaries of scholar or activist (Routledge, 1996). From Latin America, engaged scholarship has reframed territory not only as a state strategy but also as a grassroots one, where movements appropriate space for diverse political outcomes (Halvorsen, 2026). Across these literatures, however, attention to particular forms of spatial strategies or engaged research has not been matched by sustained reflection on strategy itself. The result is a proliferation of insights into specific historical-geographical struggles without a parallel engagement with strategy, limiting the capacity of geographers to articulate dialogue over strategic visions for the discipline and their engagements with the world.

Postcolonial geography

Postcolonial scholarship has been among the most explicit areas in taking conceptual work on strategy – notably from subaltern studies and Spivak’s (1990) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, a temporary use of collective identities for political purposes – and putting it to work via disciplinary ‘interventions’ (see Jazeel, 2014). There has been a slow yet persistent attempt to acknowledge and confront Anglo-American hegemony and Eurocentricism across the discipline (Aalbers, 2004; Banski and Ferenc, 2013; Hassink et al., 2018; Minca, 2003; Paasi, 2005; Peake, 2011; Slater, 1992; Yeung, 2001). This has provoked a concerted effort to develop a repertoire of tactics for ‘postcolonising’, ‘worlding’,‘decolonising’ or otherwise disrupting hegemonic practices in the spaces of scholarly dialogue (McFarlane, 2022; Müller, 2021; Radcliffe, 2017; Robinson, 2003). In an early intervention, Slater (1992) appealed to geographers to learn from the south and promoted dialogue across difference against a temptation to merely replace northern theory with its ‘other’. The imperative to ‘provincialize’ Eurocentric knowledge would gain traction beyond the discipline through Chakrabarty's (2000) influential text and soon inspired attempts to outline practical tactics for doing so, such as Robinson’s (2003) call to ‘postcolonialise geography’. Specific tactics, such as ‘acknowledging location’, ‘reincorporating area studies’ and ‘engaging with regional scholarship’ were highlighted by Robinson (2003) and subsequent interventions (McEwan, 2003; Noxolo et al., 2008). In a related attempt to open ‘new geographies’ of theory beyond the EuroAmerican experience, Roy (2009b: 822) called for ‘strategic essentialism’, understood as ‘highly selective and strategic rather than comprehensive’ engagements with theories from different world areas.’

In a subsequent intervention on ‘postcolonial strategy’ in geographical knowledges Jazeel (2014) also draws on Spivak as part of a move towards subaltern geographies. Together with related works cited above, Jazeel’s (2014) ambition is one of both pluralising geographical knowledge and mapping the marginalisation of certain spatialities in Anglophone geography. Unusually, Jazeel (2014: 89–90) directly addresses his use of the term ‘strategy’ and mobilises it as a ‘contingent methodology’ that, following Spivak (1990: 345) has an ‘interventionist value’ to make certain (spatialised) power relations visible. The strategy rests on the notion of ‘subaltern geographies’: ‘a figurative term strategically deployed to intervene in the stabilising power of disciplinary geographical knowledge production’ (Jazeel, 2014: 96). The ambition to disrupt Eurocentric hegemony by building subaltern geographies is of clear strategic potential, attempting to confront deep-set structures and articulate across multiple tactics (such as those Jazeel, 2016 spells out in a related paper). Yet the persistent slippage between tactics andstrategy poses a limitation. Postcolonial geography often clarifies the political stakes of intervention without elaborating a strategy that articulates them into a coherent and persuasive geographical project.

Tactics and strategies

Across much geographical literature, then, tactics and strategies are used interchangeably, with ‘strategic interventions’ often reduced to little more than tactics (e.g. Jazeel, 2016; Müller, 2021; Robinson, 2003). Yet the distinction is crucial to theories of strategy (e.g. Guevara, 1997; Tzu, 2008; Machiavelli, 1993) where strategy concerns the pursuit of long-term, structural aims and tactics the means to achieve short-term objectives (Knox, 2010: 197). The tactic-strategy relation was evoked in Napoleon’s claim that ‘strategy is the art of plans of campaign and tactics the art of battles’ (Freedman, 2023: 17) and Clausewitz’s distinction between ‘the art of using troops in battle’ (tactics) and ‘the art of using battles to win the war’ (strategies). Gramsci (1971: 176–177) reworked this into a political register, distinguishing between conjunctural (‘occasional, immediate, almost accidental’) and organic (‘relatively permanent’) ‘movements’. The conjunctural and organic, or tactical and strategic, are not opposed but dialectically related, yet a ‘common error in historico-political analysis’ (Gramsci, 1971: 178) has been to conflate these movements or not sufficiently understand their inter-relation.

This conflation is evident in Spivak’s (1990) idea of strategic essentialism, which lacks criteria as to when an argument should become essentialist or to how they may form part of longer-term structural transformations (Knox, 2010: 194). The possibly deliberate ambiguity between strategy and tactics of some geographical scholars could be interpreted as a means of recognising a more ‘intuitive’ strategy at play, oriented around a reflexive process of shifting interpretations of the world (Doherty and Hayes, 2019: 280), what Freedman (2013) terms ‘system 1’ strategy, rather than a conscious and sequential process of action (‘system 2’). More likely, the slippage is a push-back against the colonial logics implied in strategic thinking, captured in the de Certeauian reification of micro-practices of resistance, and a cautious reaction against attempts to build a totalising approach to knowledge (e.g. Jazeel, 2018). The experiences of the World Social Forum (WSF), born at the turn of the century in Porto Alegre on the back of an insurgent wave of alter-globalisation movements such as the Zapatista uprising, presented a similar dilemma. Based on an attempt to promote dialogue across difference, the WSF deliberately challenged common distinctions between long-term strategy and short-term tactics as a means of avoiding fragmentation (Santos, 2014). Yet the WSF also demonstrated the limits to dialogue when framed as an attempt to create other possible worlds without taking power (see Holloway, 2002). By the time of the 2009 WSF in Belem the largest activity took place in a stadium outside the Forum itself, where thousands came to hear five heads of state from the new Pink Tide that had swept across Latin American governments. The WSF quickly became a less strategically relevant space, with rapidly declining attendance in subsequent years.

Beyond semantics what is at stake in explicitly mobilising strategy is the capacity to articulate tactics, and ‘essentialist’ interventions, into broader projects and ambitions. The failure to do so risks an endless perpetuation of geographical tactics that are quickly and easily subsumed within those very same structures being critiqued. As a starting point geographical strategy implies a recognition of the structural role of space in capitalist society and a capacity to understand and transform it. In his magnum opus Lefebvre (1991: 60) presented the ‘strategic hypothesis’ as ‘a long-range theoretical and practical project’ that aims to ‘point the way towards a different space, towards the space of a different (social) life and a different mode of production’. Such a strategy strives to ‘centre knowledge around a particular focal point’ that will ‘govern tactical operations in the fields of knowledge and action’. Crucially, whereas spatial tactics such as the (re)appropriation of urban space towards alternative means (e.g. a former food market turned into a site of play and festivity) will only generate a ‘temporary halt to domination’, strategy must confront the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991: 167–168) from the perspective of totality, implying an awareness of space’s role mediating between different moments (perceived, conceived, lived) and levels (especially the global and the everyday). A common trap of social movements that explicitly centre ‘space’ in their strategies, often celebrated by geographers (including myself!), is to fetishise the spatial forms they appropriate. The 2011 ‘Occupy’ and related movements exemplify this tendency, basing their strategy on protest camps in prominent public spaces and thereby conflating tactics with strategy and losing sight of the wider political project (Halvorsen, 2017a).

Within geography, calls to postcolonise and decolonise knowledge are rightly motivated by the urgency of engaging subaltern voices beyond the Anglo-American core. Yet too often these interventions conflate strategies with tactics, leaving little room for discussion of the kinds of long-term political projects that might sustain them. As a way forward, Gramsci’s philosophy of ‘living philology’ is instructive. Through a critique of positivist sociology, Gramsci argued that the ‘art of politics’ rests on ‘human awareness’ rather than ‘naturalistic spontaneity’, and that a ‘conscious and critical’ articulation of popular feeling guides Marxist strategy (1971: 425–430). This depends on language as a historical institution that bridges representation and material social reality (Hart, 2013; Ives, 2004b). Here Bakhtin’s work on dialogues (1981) is useful, to which I will shortly turn. Considered an important influence on Gramsci’s understanding of language and strategy (Brandist, 1996; Ives, 2004a), Bakhtin describes how seemingly dispersed space-times of languages inform chronotopes and their dialogic strategies, linking dispersed tactics to broader projects of transformation.

At the same time, locating the tactics–strategy dialectic within a totality of socio-spatial relations emphasises mediation and articulation: the conjoining of moments of political praxis in the conjuncture with the broader organic movement of development. Here, we can turn to the significant body of scholarship on Gramsci’s geographies (Ekers et al., 2013) and related interest in the spatialities of articulation (Ekers et al., 2020; Featherstone, 2011; Hart, 2013), which emphasise the need to analyse how tactical interventions in given moments are articulated with(in) wider relations of forces across different levels and scales. This was made explicit in Gramsci’s writings on ‘The Southern Question’, where he stressed the importance of articulating alliances between ‘southern’ peasants and ‘northern’ workers to build a revolutionary force in Italy. Articulation provides an analytical bridge between tactics and strategy, offering an epistemological and practical understanding of how specific political interventions are translated into wider systems and processes. In this sense, geographical strategy implies not only a structural reading of the role of space (in relation to time) within capitalist society, but also a political commitment to articulation across places and scales (Clarke, 2023; Halvorsen and Torres, 2022; Hart, 2024). Despite this foundation for building a geographical theory of strategy, most geographical scholarship has left strategy implicit, vague, or ambiguous. The following two sections therefore develop the concepts of dialogue and totality as necessary pillars for clarifying and advancing strategic geographies.

Dialogues

Dialogue, or lack thereof, is the starting point for much geographical scholarship, whether as research method or a metaphysical claim for relational thinking (Demeritt and Dyer, 2002). Evoked as a strategy, dialogue has been mobilised as an explicitly political act that responds to uneven power relations inside and outside the academy. On the one hand, strategies of dialogue respond to an ‘uneven terrain of dialogical encounter’ (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018b) by, for example, ‘mobilising the politics of citation’ to reshape epistemological hierarchies (Mott and Cockayne, 2017) or reforming journal procedures (e.g. open access, diversifying languages) as a ‘strategy to challenge the political economy of publishing’ (Moss et al., 2002: 3). Conversely, acknowledging how dialogue can legitimise certain hierarchies, strategies may seek to refuse dialogue with(in) a colonial-capitalist epistemological framework (Hawthorne and Heitz, 2018; Wainwright and Mann, 2018). On the other hand, mobilising dialogues with(in) spaces of public engagement beyond academia has long been presented as an urgent strategy for maintaining a relevant and radical discipline (Alderman and Inwood, 2019; Chatterton et al., 2010; Fuller, 2008; Sultana, 2023). This includes an interest into how geographers perform their ‘representational strategies’ (Ward, 2007) as well as pedagogical strategies such as online dialogue (House-Peters et al., 2017). In both cases, however, there is a tendency to conflate dialogue as means and ends – evoked by Janz (2018: 124) when commenting: ‘[w]ar, to co-opt Clausewitz’s phrase, might just be the continuation of dialogue by other means’ – and it is not surprising that dialogues are often evoked as strategy and tactic in the same breath. For example, Rose-Redwood et al. (2018b: 165) note: ‘even in cases where dialogue is used as a strategy of inaction, delay, and deception, these political tactics are still forms of action…’

Despite such ambiguities, Rose-Redwood et al. (2018a, 2018b) helpfully reframe the spaces (and terrain) of dialogical encounter as the key strategic objective in itself, providing crucial arenas for articulating demands. Dialogues (or their refusal) are ‘affirmative critique’ that aim to generate new dialogic spaces that can themselves constitute power relations in broader struggles (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018b). Acknowledging the lack of a ‘foundational’ condition across which all dialogue unfolds (Mott and Cockayne, 2018), and recognising how dialogue is always produced in, and productive of, particular places (Janz, 2015), a key question is not if but how dialogue is mobilised: to what ends. To address this, it is useful to move from empirical debates about the terrains of encounter to the conceptual resources that can help us think dialogue as strategy. Bakhtin’s dialogism provides one such resource, offering a way to frame dialogue as a strategy that emerges through the narratives and space-times that shape and inform their construction.

For Bakhtin (1986), dialogue was central to how individuals and meanings are constructed, with dialogues having both spatial (between people) and temporal (e.g. earlier and later self) articulations. Space-times of dialogue do not lead to a ‘merging’ of cultures; ‘each retains its own unity and open totality…they are mutually enriched’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 7), part of a ‘heteroglossia’. Geographers have highlighted the importance of spatiality to Bakhtin’s oeuvre (Holloway and Kneale, 2000) with particular interest given to his concept of chronotope (Folch-Serra, 1990; Klinke, 2013; Lawson, 2011). Rooted in the Greek chronos (time) and topos (space), chronotopes are ‘intersections of temporal and spatial sequences’ (Folch-Serra, 1990: 261) that condition and shape narratives. Bakhtin examined multiple chronotopes, which varied according to literary genre, such as the Greek romantic encounter or the carnivalistic threshold of Rabelaisian novel (Vaara and Pedersen, 2013), while noting that chronotopes are both ‘actual’ contexts that provide the source of representation as well as ‘created’ representations of the world (Folch-Serra, 1990).

Bakhtin’s dialogism refuses a neat separation between the lived and produced, and there is an inevitable slippage between the ‘real’ and the ‘material’, further complicated by his insistence on heteroglossia: the coexistence of multiple languages and language styles. In a rare attempt to deploy a Bakhtinian analysis of chronotopes to geographical strategy, Lawson (2011) considers the narratives of indigenous peoples in modern Canada and demonstrates the power of chronotopes due to their bridging role between the space-times of narratives (fiction) and materialities of landscape (reality). Of course, chronotopes can be easily dismissed by a failure to generate verifiable ‘ground truths’, yet it is precisely the dynamic spatio-temporal, dialogic, nature of chronotope narratives that renders them a strategic device (Chatzidakis, 2019), for it is through spatio-temporal strategy that truths about landscape are defined and made common sense (Lawson, 2011).

Bakhtin thus provides one means for conceptualising a geographical strategy of dialogue, with chronotopes articulating the space-times of (relational) human material experience and those of narratives (or ‘literary times’) that follow some sequencing of past, present and future. Based on this, Vaara and Pedersen (2013) argue that narrative strategies rely on forward-looking ‘bets’ that re-organise representations of the future. Building on Morson and Emerson (1990) they suggest that such strategies rely on the spatiotemporal metaphors of foreshadowing, backshadowing and sideshadowing (acting upon the future, past, and alternative present respectively), all of which attempt to shine light on what could or could not be possible. Such narrative strategies are enabled and constrained by chronotopes, which in turn are constituted dialogically (Vaara and Pedersen, 2013). Given that, for Bakhtin, there is no master chronotope (or universal, transcendent language) the role of dialogue can be related back to Gramsci’s living philology and the role of popular culture within heteroglossia. Gramsci’s Marxism is a ‘vernacular materialism’ (Ives, 2004a: 10), that avoids pitting language against materiality (cf. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), and mobilises philology as a living term that engages subaltern experiences, articulating language as a historical (and geographical) institution that avoids the pitfalls of both structuralist readings of universal linguistics and also the strategic need for an elite vanguard. For Gramsci’s (1971: 429) living philology, ‘a close link is formed between great mass, part and leading group; and the whole complex, thus articulated, can move together as “collective-man”’.

As geographers continue exploring postcolonial dialogic strategies Gramsci’s living philology and Bakhtin’s dialogism may provide a helpful framework that can situate tactical ‘ethico-political moments of disruption’ (Gidwani, 2008) within what Janz (2018) terms an ‘ecosystem’ of thought (speaking and listening). Such an ecosystem can be strategically mobilised as a popular (understood as the articulation of working-class and other counter-hegemonic political identities, see Halvorsen and Angelcos, 2025) and subaltern project when understood as a totality in which the agency of parts to inform the whole is an ongoing process. To return to the WSF example, from a strategic perspective it should be seen as a starting point, demonstrating ‘the need for articulation and aggregation’ (Santos, 2014: 221). This was a key lesson learned by the movements that propelled national-popular and socialist-populist leaders in power across Latin America (Levitsky and Roberts, 2011), an experience that a latter wave of movement parties in Europe and North America attempted with less success (della porta et al., 2017). A dialogic strategy, while open ended, requires a clear narrative or script that is communicated and persuasive in its capacity to articulate real and imagined chronotopes – a lesson that nascent populist right seems to have grasped effectively (Hart, 2020). Geographers, must therefore treat dialogue not only as a tactical intervention to reshape uneven terrains of encounter (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018b) but as a strategic practice oriented toward reworking the socio-spatial totality.

Totality

Whereas tactics may intervene in particular (battle)fields, strategy operates across a totality, not determined by any individual part (or tactic), but co-evolving through the relations with wholes, in a dialectic of tactic-strategy. Totality is the central concept to strategic thought that emerges in Western Marxism as both normative ideal and descriptive (dialectical) method for analysing the social world (Jay, 1984). Lukács, in his early work, developed the importance of a normative totality through his reading of the Greek epics which, in contrast to the modern novel form, reflected an idealised notion of the Homeric world, in whose subjects lived in an ‘immediate and fulfilled manner’ (Jay, 1984: 84). By the time he was writing in the early 1920s, normative totality could only be possible through the role of the working class as both subject and object of history, as the only agent capable of ‘penetrating’ totality, acting as an expression of the whole (Lukács, 1972: 39). Central to Lukács’ Marxism was the dialectical method, which provided a way beyond the one-sided and formalist approach of bourgeois thought. Against the fetishisation of the commodity form and the reification of social life; ‘dialectics insists on the concrete unity of the whole’ (Lukács, 1972: 6) through the unity of theory and praxis and the internal working of social relations. Concrete totality is the starting point for any epistemological-practical strategy:

‘only in the context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality.’(p. 8).

Lukács’ insistence on totality spurred major debates over question of strategy and the challenges of mediating and articulating a revolutionary struggle (Garo, 2023; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Nevertheless, despite stating that ‘totality permeates the spatio-temporal character of phenomena’ (Lukács, 1972: 23) the seeming dismissal of the role of nature (cf Altun et al., 2022) and his essentialist understanding of class provides a legacy that is understandably of concern to those seeking to build a postcolonial geographical strategy today. Indeed, totality has received a rocky reception in geography (Goonewardena, 2018). Fortunately, there is an alternative lineage of totality and strategy with deeply geographically implications.

Lefebvre (2002: 106–109) argued that every social group (including academic) has both tactics and strategies, whether or not they are consciously aware, yet these can only be grasped in everyday life as a ‘medium zone’ of mediation between individuals and society. Everyday life is thus a privileged vantage point into the totality of socio-spatial relations, mediating between tactics and strategies. This is further elaborated via a tripartite conceptualisation of everyday life as operating across ‘levels’: (i) the level of ‘triviality’ and mundane dialogue where reality is ‘stagnating’; (ii) the level of everyday life as concrete reality and that which is ‘known’ (tactics) and (iii) the level of strategy which ‘gives a sense to groups and their lives’, through a sense of ‘drama’ (p. 135). Everyday life provides concrete spatio-historical forms through which mediations, such as Gramsci’s living philology and Bakhtin’s dialogism, can unfold. When grasped as part of some greater whole, a totality, strategy gives ‘sense’, that is ‘direction, orientation, expression goal’ (p. 135), understood as drama. Mediating between the chronotopes of concrete reality and the revolutionary narratives of history becomes a key function of everyday life. Lefebvre (2003) subsequently elaborated an urban strategy, arguing that urban space mediates between different levels (the global and the everyday) in the attempt to narrow the gap between the ‘real’ and ‘the possible’ through a theory and praxis capable of grappling with totality. Echoing Lukács, Lefebvre (2002: 181) argued that a failure to relate strategy to totality is to ‘accept the “real” just as it is, and “things” just as they are: fragmentary, divided and disconnected’.

Recent debates on urban epistemology demonstrate ongoing concerns over the language of totality (Conroy, 2024; Derickson, 2018; Goonewardena, 2018; Jazeel, 2018; Oswin, 2018) yet Lefebvre’s dialectical and open approach is attentive to postcolonial critiques (Buckley and Strauss, 2016; Goonewardena, 2018; Kipfer et al., 2012; Robinson, 2022a; Schmid, 2018). Lefebvre (1955) made explicit that he did not see totality as a closed or fixed end-state that is ever achieved, rather, he saw strategy as part of an open totality, or process of totalisation, which urban space makes possible. As he states: ‘What about totality? Dialectically speaking, it is present, here and now. It is absent as well’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 144). On the one hand, as the site of centrality and encounter, the urban brings together culture and nature, theory and praxis, and moves beyond seemingly unresolvable divisions. On the other hand, as a site of difference and mediation, Lefebvre (2003: 144) was acutely aware of the tensions between homogenisation and differentiation (Schmid, 2022: 493; Kipfer, 2008) and saw urban strategy as a ‘path’ rather than a ‘model’. In this open reading of totality, urban strategy operates against fragmentation and ‘pluralisms’ but not against difference and diversity: ‘Thus the idea of totalisation is formulated not ontologically, but strategically’ (Lefebvre, 2002: 188).

Lefebvre’s open totality provides a way to work through the lingering suspicion in urban theory that strategy is inherently tied to domination (following de Certeau), a concern that has often led scholars to retreat into more modest ‘gestures’ and ‘tactics’ (Boudreau, 2023; Chakrabarty, 2000; Robinson, 2011). Similar critiques are evident in debates about comparison, where calls to develop methodological-analytical ‘strategies’ (McFarlane, 2010; Nijman, 2015; Robinson, 2016; Yeung, 2024) frequently blur into tactics – perhaps as a conscious move against the reductionism of ‘encompassing’ comparative modalities (e.g. Tilly, 1984) that ‘presumes a whole that governs its “parts”’ (McMichael, 1990: 386; Hart, 2018: 6–7). Yet, for those who approach comparison as a genuinely strategic method (McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2016), Lefebvre’s open totality offers an indispensable analytical tool: it rejects any master vantage point while highlighting how relations between parts themselves constitute the dramatic movement of strategy. Rather than positing a singularly defined totality, Lefebvre (2002: 191–192) conceptualised multiple formants – ‘dimensions’ or ‘determinations’ – usually organised as a ‘triplicity’ (Schmid, 2022). These tripartite totalities, like Bakhtin’s chronotopes, generate valuable analytical vantage points for examining the strategies of social groups as deployed in geographical analysis (Halvorsen, 2017b). When part of an engaged scholarship, they provide powerful tools.

To briefly return to Latin America, the successful experiences of Pink Tide governments would soon come up against their own strategic limits as they failed to mediate the ‘chronotopes’ of key popular demands, particularly those emerging from eco-territorial conflicts at the frontline of extractivist industries (Svampa, 2019). Losing sight of the socio-spatial totality undermined both the articulation of a popular movement and the productive basis of development as resources were depleted and ever-more dependent on international finance (especially Chinese). From this perspective, the analytical capacity generated by totality allows tactical interventions in and from geography – whether ‘ethico-political moments of disruption’ in knowledge production (Gidwani, 2008), dialogic practices that reshape terrains of encounter (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018b), or efforts to provincialise epistemologies (Jazeel, 2014; Robinson, 2003) – to be explicitly understood in relation to a broader geographical strategy. The recent ‘territorial turn’ in Latin American scholarship can be partly read in such a light, as a strategic movement that resonates with Lefebvre’s call to grasp space as mediation between the everyday and the global, and with Gramsci’s insistence on articulation across diverse social forces. (Re)uniting theory and praxis, or the empirical phenomena of concern and the tactical ‘interventions’ in the discipline, totality opens a perspective for geography to be both subject and object of strategy, opening strategic possibilities that are often only gestured to in the literature but rarely developed.

The modern Prince

Bringing the discussion to its final moment, this section asks what it would mean for geography to act as part of the modern Prince, and how this can sharpen a strategic orientation for the discipline. Gramsci’s well-known writings on the modern Prince provide some of his most nuanced reflections on political strategy. As Thomas (2020: 5) argues, the modern Prince is not simply a metaphor for the operations of the (communist) party, as often assumed, but an attempt to extend Machiavelli’s work into a ‘“dramatic” or “living” book, an “historical drama in action.”’ Gramsci (1971: 125) was insistent that Machiavelli’s The Prince should not be read as a ‘systemic treatment’ with ‘pedantic classifications of principles and criteria for a method of action,’ but rather as a ‘live’ work in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of a ‘myth’. It is precisely this emphasis on drama, imagination, and myth that resonates with the paper’s earlier discussion of dialogue and totality, for it is through narrative and affective force that dispersed tactics can be articulated into strategy.

Gramsci (1971: 125), the former theatre critic, celebrated Machiavelli’s innovation by invoking a ‘dramatic character’ that ‘stimulates the artistic imagination of those who have to be convinced, and gives political passions a more concrete form’. The Modern Prince, then, would incorporate ‘intellectual and moral reform’ and in so doing develop a ‘national-popular collective will’ (Gramsci, 1971: 133). This is not reducible to the pragmatic work of a party machine but, as Thomas (2013, 2017: 85) emphasises, points to a broader ‘totalising political, social and ultimately ethical process, capable of embodying the learning processes of the subaltern classes.’ In this sense, the Modern Prince is less an organisational blueprint than a provocation: an invitation to think how intellectual work, political practice, and popular passions might be fused into a strategy of collective transformation. Drawing on Buci-Glucksmann, Thomas (2009: 97) proposes a ‘politico-gnoseological thesis’ of Gramsci that insists human knowledge is itself a form of political praxis, not reducible to epistemology alone. ¹ From this perspective, geography’s role within the Modern Prince lies precisely within such a dialectic of ideas and political action.

Gramsci’s modern Prince operates as a dialectical and dramatic process of transforming totality that exceeds dualisms of leader and led, thought and praxis, or even emotion and objectivity. It is from such a perspective that strategic geographies can be re-imagined as a living and dialogical practice, building on calls to postcolonise knowledge (Jazeel, 2014; Robinson, 2003) but moving beyond tactical interventions towards durable projects of transformation. What form the modern Prince may take is a key strategic question, to which geographers must remain attuned to debates across civil and political society, but will inevitably involve political institutional articulations while acting as a laboratory for ‘negotiation’ and ‘dialogue’ across difference (Thomas, 2023: 226–227). Breaking the boundaries between universities and insurgent movement parties would seem to be an important part of the task. Following Lefebvre (2002), while tactics attempt to intervene directly in everyday life, strategy constitutes a totalising move of thought and action that grasps the dialectical relation between the real and the (im)possible, capturing the ‘dramatic movement of human affairs’ (Lefebvre, 2009: 137). This emphasis on drama and narration echoes Bakhtin’s chronotopes and Gramsci’s ‘living philology’, highlighting how strategies must articulate between concrete moments and wider socio-spatial projects.

The limits of the aforementioned Occupy protests were precisely in a failure to dramatise the movement beyond immediate spatial appropriation, fetishising urban space at the expense of the wider totality. In contrast, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) built a strategy that took the founding mística of cutting the wire (Branford and Rocha, 2003) and transformed it into a counter-hegemonic project that re-territorialised itself across multiple scales, always with a global ambition (Halvorsen et al., 2019; Karriem, 2009). The MST’s success rested on a living attempt to organise chronotopes – centred on the drama of land occupations – into a narrative that bridged fiction and reality, acting upon and informing interpretations of past, present, and future. For geographers, these examples highlight the task of engaged scholarship: not only analysing but actively participating in the articulation of tactics into strategies that rework the socio-spatial totality (Chatterton et al., 2010; Derickson and Routledge, 2015) and constructing dramatic and persuasive narratives (see for example Arboleda, 2020 or Wainwright and Mann, 2018).

The significance of drama has been highlighted in strategic studies. In his comprehensive review of strategic thought, Freedman (2013) ends by proposing a dramatic (re)conceptualisation that centres stories, scripts and narratives as communicative devices through which people give meaning and behave in response to new and conflictual situations. Strategy is anything but a fixed ‘plan’: it comes to life in unexpected and dynamic situations that rely on flexibility and imagination. One way of understanding strategy is ‘a story about power told in the future tense from the perspective of a leading character’ (p. 608), an approach that resonates with the prior discussion of foreshadowing and narrative chronotopes. Yet unlike the dramatist, the strategist cannot fully write or control the plot, and sufficient flexibility must be built in to sustain protagonism and keep the story moving.

In Argentina, the strategic re-territorialisation of post-industrial workers’ movements illustrates this dynamic. The so-called piqueteros became notorious for shifting the picket line from factory gates to highways, using road blockades as leverage for demands (Stratta and Barrera, 2009). As a left-Peronist government rose to hegemony in the early 21st century, many of these movements recast their role as builders and defenders of a national-popular project, re-scaling their strategy from the urban to the national (Rossi, 2017). Geography, as both intellectual project and academic discipline, was implicated in this process – for example through the construction of popular universities that forged strong linkages with communities and popular demands, or building ties to movement parties (Halvorsen, 2020b). A successful strategy, then, provides a script that persuades and mobilises, moving between intuitive judgements (‘system 1’) and deliberative arguments (‘system 2’). As geographers have argued, such ‘scripts’ are embodied and material, and through language they retain creative and transformative potentials (Rogers, 2010).

The recent interest in conjunctural analysis in geography is perhaps the clearest contemporary debate where the stakes of strategic thinking are being worked out. A recent intervention by Hart (2024) builds on her ongoing attempt to combine conjunctural analysis with relational comparison (Hart, 2018,) yet explicitly positions itself against those who see conjunctural analysis as ‘a method in need of clarification’ (p. 126) and towards a more overtly political reading grounded in Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis, the Modern Prince, and revolutionary strategy’ (p. 150). Indeed, while scholars in urban studies have made productive developments in terms of elaborating the ‘methodological implications’ of doing conjunctural analysis (Leitner and Sheppard, 2020; Peck, 2024) these moves ‘may be at risk of losing the political impulse driving conjunctural analysis in the process of undertaking such methodological manoeuvres’ (Lorne et al., 2024: 2). Embracing the ‘multiple, interconnected spatio-temporalities’ inherent to conjunctural analysis (p. 150) Hart (2024) highlights Gramsci’s notion of ‘provision’ as being key to the sorts of strategic political work involved in struggles on the ‘terrain’ of ‘the conjunctural fluctuations of the totality of social relations of force’ (Gramsci cited in Hart, 2024). ‘Provision’, contrasted to prediction or foresight, is a means of intervening in the present with a view to bringing into play alternative spatio-temporal articulations of the totality. Read this way, conjunctural analysis is closely bound up with socio-spatial strategies whose dramatic qualities depend on the articulation, and translation, of intellectual (geographic) labours with praxis. Again, the experiences of ‘open faculty programmes’ in Argentine universities are one of many examples of practical articulations that could form the basis for such conjunctural work (Ruggeri et al., 2018).

To the extent that geography can be oriented around a modern Prince, conjunctural analysis could provide one means of informing a dialogical process of articulation that is attuned to how tactical interventions form part of broader strategies. Conjunctural analysis is led by praxis (Thompson et al., 2025) and not some romanticised notion of the scholar as organic intellectual. Geography is not constrained to its disciplinary-institutional silo but is a relational process, in which academics can be part of a collective process of articulating and translating (see Doucette, 2020), paying attention to how scripts and narratives are constructed. Language matters through its role shaping the ‘intellectual and moral reform’ and ‘national-popular collective will’ of the modern Prince (Gramsci, 1971: 133). The institutionalisation of education by the MST, including creating a school with close links to universities and geography departments, was key to their long-term strategy (Meek and Simonian, 2017). Gramsci’s language contains an internal dialectic between spontaneous (immanent, intuitive) and normative (organised, legitimised and codified) grammars (Hart, 2013: 311–312), akin to system 1 and system 2 strategic thinking mentioned earlier. The shift from ‘intuition to deliberation’, turning spontaneous judgements into ‘persuasive arguments’ is central to strategy (Freedman, 2013: 615), and is a decisive move yet one to which geographers often stop short. As noted, the ‘conjunctural turn’ in geography remains ambivalent about such a strategic move and the stakes of how (and why) to deploy conjunctural analysis remain high. Davidson and Ward (2024) warn against its normative over-reach, yet Gramsci’s understanding of the modern Prince provides a way to embrace conjunctural analysis as a dramatic practice capable of generating narratives that both explain and transform the balance of forces (Thompson et al., 2025). While such narratives are necessarily open, contingent, and provisional, the central challenge is to translate political judgements into persuasive arguments (Freedman, 2013: 614) that can reorganise visions of the future.

Conclusion: Future strategic geographies

Geographers have long critiqued the strategies of political-economic actors and developed an impressive repertoire of tactical ‘interventions’, yet have rarely paused to ask what strategy itself might mean for the discipline. At a moment of deepening and intersecting crises the question is not whether geography needs strategy, but what kind of strategy might orient the discipline toward transformative ends, working towards not only the survival of an academic discipline but developing the role of geography as an intellectual-political praxis of engagement. Despite a persistent (and understandable) suspicion of the vanguardism that strategy can imply, its lure and potential seem unavoidable. Developing the conceptual triad of dialogues, totality, and the modern Prince the paper has sought to clarify the relation of tactics to strategy and make the case for bridging fragmented debates and linking them outward to the practice of engaged scholarship. The purpose has not been to reject or dismiss the rich debates in areas such as postcolonial geography but to support and (re)energise them by offering conceptual tools that can help turn dispersed interventions into more durable projects of transformation. Most urgently, however, the task of scripting a strategic geography is one that exceeds this paper but requires our attention.

There is already a rich history of normative and politically engaged approaches to geography to which the heuristic developed here could be applied. The tradition of ‘public geographies’ (Fuller, 2008; Jones et al., 2024; Koopman, 2024; Lake, 2023; Ward, 2006, 2007), or Mitchell’s (2006) project of a ‘people’s geography’, provide fertile ground for thinking about language, chronotopes and strategic understandings of totality. A related tradition of participatory geography (Pain and Kindon, 2007) has often nodded in the same direction, even if it has sometimes stalled on questions of methodological detail (Kindon et al., 2007). From Latin America, we inherit a rich tradition of popular geographical education, where universities are embedded in communities through extension programmes, at times building explicit alliances with movements such as the MST, working on the frontline of extractivist industries (Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021), or supporting socialist governments (Ivancheva, 2023). Across these experiences geographically-minded scholar-activists have experimented with different representational forms (Cole et al., 2023; Goldhaber et al., 2021) through which to articulate a forward-looking set of persuasive arguments, attentive to shifting conjunctures. Dialogues, totality and the modern Prince, and their related concerns (chronotopes, conjunctures, etc), outlined in this paper are intended as conceptual tools for supporting the above traditions and making them relevant to key debates in the discipline.

Any geographical strategy must necessarily begin from the conjuncture in which it finds itself (Sheppard, 2022). Forming part of Gramsci’s (1971: 172) modern Prince, the strategic geographer, like Machiavelli’s figure, is ‘not merely a scientist’ but a:

‘partisan, a man [sic] of powerful passions, an active politician who wishes to create a new balance of forces and therefore cannot help concerning himself with what “ought to be” (not of course in a moralistic sense)’.

Strategic geographies thus contribute to ongoing debates about geography’s future(s), positioned between the imperative to embrace diversity and difference (Rose-Redwood et al., 2024) and concerns over the political costs of fragmentation (Castree, 2022). The tension between coherence and plurality mirrors the slippage between tactics and strategies that underpins recent epistemic interventions. Here, a relational-dialectical approach to dialogues and open totality offers a way forward, moving beyond sometimes entrenched debates. ² As Doucette (2020: 326) suggests, a Gramscian approach to strategy centres language and translation across the totality not ‘as a means of mastery’ but as a way of taking historical and geographical difference seriously (see also Jakobsen, 2022).

Any geographical strategy will depend on the ‘powerful passions’ that, for Gramsci (1971: 171), sharpen intellect and sustain the arduous task of scripting a persuasive narrative of the future from the perspective of an uncertain present. Following Lefebvre (2002: 188), such a strategy does not work ‘against differences and diversities, but against pluralisms which beyond a certain point of affirmation split totality’. Geography as modern Prince becomes a storyteller of futures, capable of presenting convincing narratives that move between tactics and strategies and translate between scholarship and popular struggles. This story is thus both told ‘inwards’, in disciplinary spaces such as this, but is also outward facing. Strategic geographies can not only rely on ‘interventions’, which fall back on tactics, on operational moves (e.g. who to cite, where to publish), but depend on a movement between the part and the whole, a collective and dramatic process of becoming.