You Can Never Retreat from the World

Biographical Note

How human ideas (perceptions, ideology, belief, discourse, etc.) shape the world has been a continuous thread in my life and work as a geographer. It started on the micro scale, with a fascinating project on the development of urban knowledge in children, co-directed with a psychologist (Free University Amsterdam, 1975–77). Later on, I switched to “organizational knowledge” in cases like the processing of information about urban ecology and crime in the Amsterdam Police Department (PhD thesis, 1987). It was a small step to the discourse of municipal politicians in urban development programs, which became my expertise in the research program on urban governance at the Department of Geography of the University of Amsterdam, where I was appointed Associate Professor of Political Geography in 1987. State formation, another established topic in research and teaching at this department, set me on the track of exploring the link between national identity and geopolitical visions. The influence of events in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East cannot be denied of course. That was the first time that I felt an obligation to engage with certain (geopolitical) problems, somewhat in defiance of the research priorities suggested by our academic institutions.