Dr Ian Klinke
Associate Professor in Human Geography
Fellow and Tutor at St John's College, Oxford
Associate Professor in Human Geography
Fellow and Tutor at St John's College, Oxford
Academic Profile
Ian Klinke is an Associate Professor in Human Geography and Tutorial Fellow at St John's College. Before joining the School of Geography and the Environment as a postdoc in 2013, he held positions in political geography at University College London and Queen's University Belfast. Ian's PhD and MA were obtained at UCL. His undergraduate was completed at Maastricht University.
Current Research
Situated in political and historical geography, Ian's current research explores the entangled histories of geopolitics and the intellectual far right. His most recent book, Life, earth, colony: Friedrich Ratzel's necropolitical geography (University of Michigan Press, 2023) surveys the life, ideas and reception of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), the founder of political geography and thinker of Lebensraum. Ian's first book, Cryptic concrete: A subterranean journey into Cold War Germany (Wiley, 2018) examines military landscapes which were designed in the 1950s and 60s to protect and take life in nuclear war. Ian frequently gives seminars and conference papers across Europe and North America and has spoken at events organised by the British Library, Chatham House, English Heritage and the Scottish Parliament. He co-edits the book series Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds at Bloomsbury. In 2023, he was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. He has held visiting positions at the Danish Institute of International Studies and National University of Singapore.
Teaching and Supervision
Ian contributes to a number of Prelims and FHS courses and convenes a second-year option entitled 'Geography at war'. He supervises DPhil students on a variety of topics and would welcome further doctoral projects in the following areas: geo- and biopolitics, military architecture, thinkers of war and space, the history of political ideas, German politics, and nuclear weapons.
Current Graduate Research Students
| Yi-Ting Chang | From geo- to astropolitics: How Taiwan constructs vertical territory within the global satellite network |
| Jin Hee Lim | Infrastructural intersection and everyday experiences of state and status in Northern Thailand. |
Recent Graduate Research Students
| Britain Hopkins | 'Accepting the competitive challenge': the intellectual and legislative origins of the student loan industry in the U.S. |
| Liam Saddington | Rising Seas and Sinking Islands: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in Tuvalu and Kiribati |
| Sofya Gavrilova | The present taxidermied: Soviet ‘common unsaids’ in Russian krayevedcheskiy museums |
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
- Klinke, I. (2025) Dead or dormant: German Ostpolitik after Ukraine. European Journal of International Security [online first].
- Klinke, I. (2024) Before astropolitics: Ratzel, Schmitt, and the question of cosmic colonisation. Review of International Studies [online first].
- Klinke, I. (2023) Of tanks and tankies: What's "left" for geography after the invasion of Ukraine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48: 811-815.
- Hopkins, B. and Klinke, I. (2023) Ellen Churchill Semple's Political Economy: Slavery, Frontier, Imperium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 113: 2237-2251.
- Klinke, I. (2023) Arguing with Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelten. GeoHumanities, 9: 462-479.
- Klinke, I. (2022) A theory for the "Anglo-Saxon mind": Ellen Churchill Semple's reinterpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropogeographie. Geographica Helvetica, 77: 467-478.
- Klinke, I. (2021) On the history of a subterranean geopolitics. Geoforum, 127: 356-363.
- Featherstone, D., Dittmer, J., Forsyth, I., Lossau, J., Squire, R. and Klinke, I. (2020) Reading Ian Klinke's Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey into Cold War Germany, Wiley Blackwell RGS-IBG Book Series, Chichester (2018), 192 pp. £24.99 (paperback) ISBN: 9781119261117. Political Geography, 77. 102062.
- Garrett, B.L. and Klinke, I. (2019) Opening the bunker: Function, materiality and temporality. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(6): 1063-1081.
- Klinke, I. (2019) Vitalist temptations: Life, earth and the nature of war. Political Geography, 72: 1-9.
- Klinke, I. (2018) Friedrich Ratzel, Lebensraum and the death motif. Journal of Historical Geography, 61: 97-101.
- Klinke, I. (2018) Geopolitics and the political right: lessons from Germany. International Affairs, 94(3): 495-514.
- Klinke, I. and Bassin, M. (2018) Lebensraum and its discontents: Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Historical Geography, 61: 53-58.
- Powell, R.C., Klinke, I., Jazeel, T., Daley, P., Kamata, N., Heffernan, M., Swain, A., McConnell, F., Barry. A. and Phillips, R. (2017) Interventions in the political geographies of ‘area’. Political Geography, 57: 94-104.
- Klinke, I. (2016) Self-annihilation, nuclear play and West Germany's compulsion to repeat. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(1): 109-120.
- Klinke, I. (2016) The Russian Cyber-Bride as Geopolitical Fantasy. Journal of Economic and Social Geography, 107(2): 189-202.
- Klinke, I. (2015) Commentary: Area studies, geography and the study of Europe's East. The Geographical Journal, 181(4): 423-426.
- Klinke, I. (2015) European integration studies and the European Union's Eastern gaze. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43(2): 567-583.
- Klinke, I. (2015) The bunker and the camp: inside West Germany’s nuclear tomb. Environment and Planning D, 33(1): 154-168.
- Klinke, I. and Perombelon, B. (2015) Notes on the desecuritisation of the Rhineland frontier. Geopolitics, 20(4): 836-852.
- Klinke, I. (2013) Chronopolitics: a conceptual matrix. Progress in Human Geography, 37(5): 673-690.
- Klinke, I. (2013) What is to be done? Marx and Mackinder in Minsk. Cooperation and Conflict, 48(1): 122-142.
- Klinke, I. (2012) Postmodern geopolitics? The European Union eyes Russia. Europe-Asia Studies, 64(5): 929-947.
- Klinke, I. (2011) Geopolitics in Germany: the return of the living dead? Geopolitics, 16(3): 707-726.
- Ciuta, F. and Klinke, I. (2010) Lost in conceptualization: reading the "new Cold War" with critical geopolitics. Political Geography, 29(6): 323-332.
Book Chapters
- Hopkins, B. and Klinke, I. (in press) Materialist approaches to geopolitics. In, C. Flint (ed.) Encyclopedia of geopolitics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
- Klinke, I. and Bassin, M. (2021) Ratzel in Nordamerika: Umwelt, Raum und Rasse. In, Jureit, U. and Chiantera-Stutte, P. (eds.) Denken im Raum: Friedrich Ratzel als Schlüsselfigur geopolitischer Theoriebildung. Nomos, Baden-Baden. pp. 25-57.
- Klinke, I. (2020) Geography at war. In, Domosh, M., Heffernan, M. and Withers, C. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography, Vol. 2. Sage, London. pp. 451-467.
- Klinke, I. (2018) The bunker and the camp. In, Katz, I., Martin, D. and Minca, C. (eds.) Camps revisited: Multifaceted spatialities of a modern political technology. Rowman and Littlefield International, London. pp. 281-294.
- Klinke, I. (2017) Security. In, Richardson, D., Castree, N., Goodchild, M., Kobayashi, A., Liu, W. and Marston, D. (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. ISBN: 9781118786352.
- Klinke, I. (2016) The German in the Kremlin: the rise and fall of German Eurasianism. In, M. Bassin and G. Pozo (eds.) The politics of Eurasianism: Identity, popular culture and Russia’s foreign policy. Rowman and Littlefield International, London. pp. 301-317.
Book Reviews
- Klinke, I. (2023) Review of Benedikt Korf: Schwierigkeiten mit der kritischen Geographie. AAG Review of Books. [forthcoming].
- Klinke, I. (2020) Review forum: David Simon's Holocaust escapees and global development. Journal of Historical Geography, 69: 94-95.
- Klinke, I. (2020) Review of Bradley Garret: Bunker: Building for the End Times. Society and Space.
- Klinke, I. (2018) Review of Jason B. Johnson: Divided village: The Cold War in German borderlands. H/Soz/Kult.
- Klinke, I. (2016) Review of Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan: On Schmitt and Space. Society and Space.
- Klinke, I. (2015) European Geopolitics after the Crisis. Geopolitics, 20(2): 479-483.
- Klinke, I. (2013) The geopolitics of European (dis)union. Political Geography, 37: 1-4.
- Klinke, I. (2012) Review of Jeremy Black: Geopolitics. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41(1): 154-156.
- Klinke, I. (2011) Review of Martin Müller: Making great power identities in Russia. Political Studies Review, 9(1): 90.
Outreach (Media)
- (2023) What's next for the anti-Nato left after Ukraine?. The Conversation.
- (2017) Why Territory? Weapons of Reason
- (2015) Why Germany's decision to join the fight against Islamic State is so significant - and misguided. The Conversation.
- (2014) NATO's nuclear relapse. Al Jazeera.
- (2014) NATO: the alliance that should have been dissolved. Al Jazeera.
- (2014) Geopolitical passport. Exploring Geopolitics.
