Geopolitics

Addressing the role and understanding of geographical factors in international relations - past, present and future - Jeremy Black presents space, location and distance as key issues. As a field on which policy makers rest (or even unthinkingly base) their decisions, geopolitics calls attention to the context in which national security decisions are made and issues of war and peace are decided, and, more particularly, the relationship between strategy and geography. Classical geopolitics discusses the key importance of geography for statecraft and defines the relationships between the exercise of power, changing geographic constraints, and the opportunities for success and failure. Black considers not only geopolitics before the term was employed from 1899, but also the geopolitics of British power, the Age of Imperialism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and the situation since 1990. He also assesses the geopolitics of the future.


Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter