What Is Geopolitics?
The Study of Power and Geography
An introduction to geopolitics—the study of how geography shapes international relations. Understanding geopolitical concepts provides a framework for making sense of world events.
Concepts
Theoretical frameworks, strategic doctrines, and analytical tools for understanding how power operates between states.
38 articles
Theory & Doctrine
Realism
The dominant paradigm in international relations theory
Realism holds that international politics is fundamentally driven by power, self-interest, and the absence of a world government—an anarchic system where states must ultimately rely on themselves for survival.
Neoliberalism
Market-oriented economic and political philosophy
Neoliberalism describes an economic and political framework that emphasizes free markets, deregulation, privatization, and reduced state intervention—an ideology that has shaped global economic policy since the 1980s and generated intense debate about its benefits and costs.
Balance of Power
The Oldest Principle of International Relations
The theory that peace and stability emerge when no single state dominates the system. For centuries, the balance of power has shaped alliances, wars, and the fundamental structure of world order.
Heartland Theory
Mackinder's Geographical Pivot of History
The foundational geopolitical theory arguing that control of Central Eurasia—the 'Heartland'—is the key to world domination. Mackinder's 1904 thesis reshaped how nations think about geography and power.
Rimland Theory
Spykman's Challenge to the Heartland
Nicholas Spykman's counterargument to Mackinder, proposing that the Eurasian coastal regions—not the interior—hold the key to world power. This theory directly shaped American Cold War strategy.
Sea Power
Command of the Oceans and Global Influence
The theory that control of the seas is the foundation of national greatness. From Alfred Thayer Mahan to modern naval strategy, sea power has shaped the rise and fall of empires.
Containment
The Grand Strategy of the Cold War
The American strategy of preventing Soviet expansion through a combination of military alliances, economic aid, and political pressure. Containment defined four decades of global competition.
Thucydides Trap
When Rising Powers Challenge Established Ones
The dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace an established hegemon—a pattern identified by the ancient Greek historian that may illuminate the US-China rivalry.
Deterrence Theory
Preventing war through the threat of unacceptable retaliation
Deterrence theory explains how states prevent adversaries from taking unwanted actions by maintaining credible threats of punishment—a logic that underpins nuclear strategy and extends to conventional, cyber, and economic domains.
Economic Power
Geoeconomics
The use of economic tools for geopolitical ends
Geoeconomics describes the practice of wielding economic instruments—trade, investment, sanctions, technology controls—to achieve strategic objectives that were once pursued primarily through military means.
Sanctions
Economic Warfare in the Modern Era
The use of economic restrictions as instruments of foreign policy—from targeted measures against individuals to comprehensive embargoes against nations. Sanctions have become a primary tool of statecraft, though their effectiveness remains debated.
Weaponized Interdependence
How global networks become tools of coercion
Weaponized interdependence describes how states exploit their central positions in global economic and technological networks to coerce others—turning the infrastructure of globalization into instruments of power.
Debt Diplomacy
Strategic lending and the geopolitics of finance
Debt diplomacy describes the use of loans and development financing as instruments of foreign policy, enabling creditor states to gain political leverage, access strategic assets, and expand influence over debtor nations—with China's Belt and Road Initiative representing the most prominent contemporary example of this practice.
De-dollarization
The Global Push to Reduce Dependence on the US Dollar
De-dollarization refers to the accelerating efforts by countries—particularly China, Russia, and the BRICS bloc—to reduce their reliance on the US dollar in trade, reserves, and financial transactions. While the dollar remains dominant, the trend toward alternatives is reshaping global finance and challenging American economic power.
Belt and Road Initiative
China's grand strategy to reshape global infrastructure and influence
The Belt and Road Initiative represents China's most ambitious foreign policy undertaking: a multi-trillion dollar program to finance infrastructure across Eurasia, Africa, and beyond, creating new trade corridors while extending Beijing's economic and political influence worldwide.
Rare Earth Elements
The hidden minerals powering modern technology and great power competition
Rare earth elements are a group of seventeen metallic elements essential to advanced technologies from smartphones to missiles. China's dominance over their mining and processing has created critical supply chain vulnerabilities that reshape geopolitical calculations.
Globalization
The integration of economies, societies, and political systems across borders
Globalization describes the intensification of cross-border flows of goods, capital, people, and ideas that has reshaped the world economy and international politics—a process now facing unprecedented challenges from geopolitical rivalry, technological change, and domestic backlash.
Geopolitical Risk
Political uncertainty and its implications for markets and policy
Geopolitical risk refers to the potential for political events, conflicts, and policy changes to disrupt economic activity, affect asset prices, and alter the operating environment for businesses and governments across borders.
Technology
Semiconductor Geopolitics
The strategic battle for chip supremacy
Semiconductors have become the most critical strategic resource of the digital age, with control over advanced chip manufacturing concentrated in a few vulnerable locations—most notably Taiwan—creating dependencies that now drive great power competition, industrial policy, and the restructuring of global technology supply chains.
Artificial Intelligence and Geopolitics
The strategic competition to dominate transformative technology
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a decisive arena of great power competition, reshaping military capabilities, economic power, and the nature of statecraft itself. Control over AI development and deployment may determine which nations lead the international order in the coming decades.
Cyber Warfare
Digital conflict in the age of connected infrastructure
Cyber warfare has emerged as a defining feature of modern conflict, enabling states to attack adversaries' critical infrastructure, steal sensitive information, and conduct influence operations while maintaining deniability—creating a persistent gray zone of digital hostilities that blurs the line between peace and war.
Digital Sovereignty
State control over data, networks, and technology
Digital sovereignty refers to a nation's capacity to govern the digital infrastructure, data flows, and technological systems operating within its borders—an increasingly contested domain as power in the twenty-first century flows through fiber optic cables as much as oil pipelines.
Data Localization
Requiring data to remain within national borders
Data localization encompasses the legal requirements that compel organizations to store and process data within the territorial boundaries of a specific nation—a policy instrument that has become central to debates over digital sovereignty, national security, and economic competition in the twenty-first century.
Techno-nationalism
Technology as an instrument of national power
Techno-nationalism describes the strategic orientation in which states treat technological capability as fundamental to national security, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical influence—merging industrial policy with foreign policy in pursuit of technological supremacy.
Space Geopolitics
The new frontier of great power competition
Space has transformed from a domain of scientific exploration and Cold War prestige competition into a contested strategic environment where nations compete for military advantage, commercial opportunity, and the resources of the Moon and beyond—challenging the international frameworks designed for a simpler era of space activity.
Conflict & Security
Great Power Competition
The Return of Rivalry Among the World's Strongest States
Great power competition describes the strategic rivalry between the world's most powerful states—primarily the United States, China, and Russia—for influence, security, and the right to shape international order. This dynamic, which many believed had ended with the Cold War, has returned as the defining feature of 21st-century geopolitics.
Hybrid Warfare
The blending of military and non-military tools below the threshold of open war
Hybrid warfare combines conventional military operations with cyber attacks, information warfare, economic coercion, and proxy forces to achieve strategic objectives while avoiding the costs and risks of traditional armed conflict.
Gray Zone Conflict
Competition below the threshold of conventional war
Gray zone conflict describes activities that fall between routine statecraft and open warfare—coercive actions that challenge adversaries while remaining ambiguous enough to avoid triggering decisive military response.
Nuclear Proliferation
The spread of nuclear weapons and the quest for non-proliferation
Nuclear proliferation—the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states—represents one of the most consequential challenges in international security, with the nonproliferation regime under strain from states pursuing weapons capability, questions about security guarantees, and the risk that additional nuclear powers could destabilize regional balances and increase the probability of nuclear use.
First Island Chain
The Geographic Barrier to Chinese Sea Power
The archipelagic line running from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines that contains China's navy within East Asian waters. Breaking through or controlling this chain is central to Chinese strategy—and to American efforts to maintain regional primacy.
Multipolarity
The distribution of power among multiple great powers
A multipolar world is one in which power is distributed among several major states, none of which can dominate the others—a configuration that may bring both greater regional autonomy and heightened risks of great power conflict.
Strategic Autonomy
The capacity to act independently in defense and foreign policy
Strategic autonomy refers to a state's ability to make and implement decisions in defense, foreign policy, and critical technologies without excessive dependence on external powers—a concept that has gained urgency as great power competition intensifies.
Nationalism
The political ideology centered on the nation
Nationalism holds that the nation—a community defined by shared culture, history, language, or identity—should be the primary unit of political organization and the supreme object of loyalty, a force that has both unified peoples and divided continents.
Global Challenges
Climate Geopolitics
How climate change reshapes international power and conflict
Climate change has evolved from an environmental concern into a central driver of geopolitical competition, reshaping resource distribution, triggering migration flows, and forcing a fundamental recalculation of national security strategies as nations simultaneously compete for advantage and negotiate collective responses to planetary crisis.
The Geopolitics of Energy Transition
How decarbonization reshapes global power
The shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy is not merely an environmental or technological phenomenon—it is a structural transformation of the global order, redistributing power from hydrocarbon exporters to mineral-rich states and technology leaders while creating new dependencies, alliances, and vulnerabilities.
Migration Geopolitics
How human movement shapes international power and conflict
Migration has become a central force in geopolitics, driving domestic political realignments, straining international institutions, and increasingly being weaponized by states who use refugee flows as instruments of pressure against adversaries—transforming human movement into a tool of statecraft with profound humanitarian consequences.
Pandemic Geopolitics
Health security in an age of great power competition
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how global health emergencies intersect with geopolitics, transforming disease outbreaks into arenas of great power competition where vaccine diplomacy, supply chain vulnerabilities, and debates over pandemic origins reshaped international relationships and accelerated existing trends toward nationalism and bloc formation.