Introduction to Geopolitics

introduction
to geopolitics. The relatively recent
upsurge of academic interest in geopolitics has produced many excellent books designed
for graduate students, academics, professionals, and advanced undergraduates. This book
provides an examination of geopolitics for students at the beginning of their under-
graduate degrees, and so provides a stepping-stone to more theoretical approaches. My
aim is to ease and promote access to the more advanced books so that more students
and professionals are equipped with a critical understanding of geopolitics.
I feel lucky and privileged to have had the opportunity to teach and write on these
topics. I hope that you find my way of looking at current events or geopolitics helpful.
I wish you the best in your pursuit of greater understanding of our troubled world and
hope that this book is of some help to you.
After reading this book you will:
■
understand how politics create spaces and geographies;
■
understand how politics are shaped by geographic circumstances;
■
have a basic understanding of key persistent global conflicts;
■
be able to use theoretical perspectives to develop a deeper and critical
understanding of current events than can be gained by simply reading
the newspaper or watching TV news.
P R O L O G U E
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In this chapter we will:
■
situate geopolitics within the discipline of human geography;
■
define the key concepts of place and scale;
■
introduce the concepts of structure and agency;
■
show how place, scale, structure and agency will be used to understand
geopolitics;
■
define geopolitics;
■
introduce a brief history of geopolitics;
■
consider what is “power”;
■
provide examples of these concepts;
■
use our own experiences and knowledge to understand and investigate
these concepts.
Geopolitics: a component of human geography
Geopolitics is a component of human geography. To understand geopolitics we must
first understand what is human geography. This is easier said than done, precisely
because geography is a diverse and contested discipline—in fact, the easiest, and increas-
ingly accurate, definition is that human geography is what human geographers do:
accurate, but not very helpful.
Geography is a peculiar discipline in that it does not lay intellectual claim to any
particular subject matter. Political scientists study politics, sociologists study society,
etc. However, a university geography department is likely to house an eclectic bunch
of academics studying anything from glaciers and global climate change, to globaliza-
tion, urbanization, or identity politics. The shared trait is the 
perspective
used to analyze
the topic, and not the topic itself. Geographers examine the world through a geographic
or spatial perspective, offering new insight in related disciplines. For example, a polit-
ical geographer may study elections or wars (as would a political scientist or scholar of
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A FRAMEWORK FOR
UNDERSTANDING
GEOPOLITICS
1

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international relations) but argue that full understanding is only available from a
geographic perspective.
So what is a geographic perspective? In the modern history of the discipline, domin-
ant views of what the particular perspective should be have come and gone. In the 
middle of the twentieth century there was an emphasis upon geography as a description
and synthesis of the physical and social aspects of a region. Later, many geographers
adopted a mathematical understanding of spatial relationships, such as the geographic
location of cities and their interaction. Today, human geography is not dominated by
one particular vision but many theoretical perspectives, from neo-classical economics
through Marxism, feminism, and into post-colonialism, and different forms of post-
modernism. Furthermore, it would also be hard to think of a social or physical issue
that is