This article aims to develop the agenda of a grounded, contextual critical geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the interaction between local and hegemonic geopolitics. This is achieved by examining the local reception of the geopolitics of the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) in the context of the establishment of US bases on Romanian territory following the 2004 US Global Posture Review. A close reading of this context reveals a complex and ambiguous relationship, simultaneously assertive and subversive, between the GWOT's sui generis, territorially non-specific geopolitics of transit, and Romania's exceptionalist geopolitics of place, significance, and convergence. Not only did the GWOT geopolitics fail to erase local geopolitics, but it also became muddied, contaminated, and inadvertently destroyed by the ‘old’ local geopolitical knowledge. This suggests an understanding of geopolitics as a palimpsest, the product of serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings-over that produce geopolitical knowledge of, and in different contexts. In broader conceptual terms, this study highlights the heteroglossia of geopolitical knowledge, the resilience of local geopolitics, and the importance of contextual sensitivity in the pursuit of the normative mission of critical geopolitics
