An excerpt from the Preface:
I was not sure I wanted to write this book. Or, perhaps more accurately, I was not sure I wanted to write yet another book on geopolitics at a time when geopolitics seems to be everywhere. Open a newspaper, scroll through social media, sit through an academic conference, and it will not take long before you are exposed to the term. Everyone appears to have an opinion on geopolitics, and many seem to have become experts overnight. In this respect, my unease was not too different from that which pushed me to write Thirst, when I found myself wondering what it meant to add yet another voice to a debate in which everyone was suddenly talking about water, water crises, and how to solve them. More recently, as the world appears to be sliding from one international crisis to another, geopolitics – and with it the risk, and indeed the reality, of war – is said to be back. And yet, the more often I heard the term, the less clear it seemed to become. Much of what now passes for geopolitics still revolves around a familiar cast of characters: states, borders, wars, leaders, strategic rivalries, great powers. Of course, these things matter. But do they really tell us enough about the world we inhabit today? Can we still make sense of the present using the same vocabulary that was meant to describe other moments, other crises, and other material conditions?
These questions have bugged me for a long time, and in many ways they still do. This book is the result of trying to think through them. More than anything else, however, this book grew out of teaching. Over the last ten years or so, I have discussed many of these themes with students in different classrooms, as well as in seminars and workshops, often while teaching courses on resource geographies, environmental governance, geopolitics, and globalization. One of the key challenges, for a lecturer, is to find examples that are not only relevant, but that also help students engage with what is being discussed and relate it to the world around them. And this matters because the book is indeed written with students in mind, and that is why I tried to provide as many concrete examples as possible. I hope the book will also be useful to colleagues, researchers, policymakers, and readers outside academia who are trying to understand a fast-changing world. Part of the problem, as I came to see it, is that the world has changed faster than some of the concepts we use to describe it. Or perhaps not the concepts themselves, but the way they are too often mobilized. Geopolitics is one obvious example, as it is still frequently narrated as a matter of territorial competition and interstate rivalry, as if geography were little more than a stage on which political actors perform.
But geopolitics is about much more than this. It is both a subdiscipline of geography and a social construct. In the broadest sense, it is the study of geographical factors in global politics. Clearly, those factors (consider, for instance, the presence of oil in a certain part of the world) may well help explain why countries invade one another. But this is only part of the story, and increasingly not the most interesting part. If we want to understand contemporary power, we need to pay closer attention to its material infrastructures, and also think about pipelines, dams, grids, minerals, energy systems, logistics corridors, digital technologies and extractive frontiers. We need to think about water, energy, and minerals as some of the very terrains through which power is organized and contested. And when we say power, we should not think only of the state. This is, in broad terms, what the book tries to do.
Continues….
Filippo Menga 