A subaltern critical geopolitics of the war on terror: Postcolonial security in Tanzania

► Studies of non-western perceptions of current geopolitics and the nature of fear can benefit critical political geography. ► Geopolitical representations from Tanzanian newspapers challenges the binary geopolitics of the War on Terror. ► This subaltern geopolitics relocates fear in retaliation, recognising shared precariousness in the geopolitical realm. Currently, hegemonic geographical imaginations are dominated by the affective geopolitics of the War on Terror, and related security practice is universalised into what has been called “globalized fear” ( Pain, 2009). Critical approaches to geopolitics have been attentive to the Westerncentric nature of this imaginary, however, studies of non-Western perceptions of current geopolitics and the nature of fear will help to further displace dominant geopolitical imaginations. Africa, for example, is a continent that is often captured in Western geopolitics – as a site of failed states, the coming anarchy, passive recipient of aid, and so on – but geopolitical representations originating in Africa rarely make much of an impact on political theory. This paper aims to add to critical work on the so-called War on Terror from a perspective emerging from the margins of the dominant geopolitical imagination. It considers the geopolitical imagination of the War on Terror from a non-Western source, newspapers in Tanzania.