The Geographer’s Revenge

Geopolitics and Geographical Fate

In his recent book, the Revenge of Geography: What the map tells us about coming conflicts and the battle against fate (Random House, 2012), Robert Kaplan returns to the classical geopolitical works of Halford Mackinder to explain the constraints that geography places upon foreign policy choices. His argument is that conflict in Eurasia is governed by land allocation, average temperature, and the distribution of minerals. The book is announced as ‘A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography.’ Instead ‘timeless truths and natural facts’ overwhelm political economy or foreign policy. In this talk, I will examine Kaplan’s arguments and develop an alternative historical geography of globalism that suggests very different policy choices that those encouraged by Kaplan.

Organised by the Conflict, Rights and Security research cluster

Links

Whitaker Institute Seminar Series