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Geopolitics (from Ancient Greek γῆ gê 'earth, land' and πολιτική politikḗ 'politics') is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations.[1][2][3] Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation, or a quasi-federal system.
At the level of international relations, geopolitics is a method of studying foreign policy to understand, explain, and predict international political behavior through geographical variables. These include area studies, climate, topography, demography, natural resources, and applied science of the region being evaluated.[4]
Geopolitics focuses on political power linked to geographic space, in particular, territorial waters, land territory and wealth of natural resources, in correlation with diplomatic history, in particular the context of a larger power relative to its neighboring states of smaller or similar power. Some scholars have argued that geopolitics should serve as "an aid to statecraft."[5] Topics of geopolitics include relations between the interests of international political actors focused within an area, a space, or a geographical element, relations which create a geopolitical system.[6] Critical geopolitics deconstructs classical geopolitical theories, by showing their political or ideological functions for great powers. There are some works that discuss the geopolitics of renewable energy.[7][8] The relationship between geopolitics and geoeconomics is often analyzed by two main schools of thought: the strategic school and the political-economic school.[9] According to Christopher Gogwilt and other researchers, the term is currently being used to describe a broad spectrum of concepts, in a general sense used as "a synonym for international political relations", but more specifically "to imply the global structure of such relations"; this usage builds on an "early-twentieth-century term for a pseudoscience of political geography" and other pseudoscientific theories of historical and geographic determinism.[10][11][12][2]
The Austro-Hungarian historian Emil Reich (1854–1910) is considered to be the first having coined the term in English[13][10] as early as 1902 and later published in England in 1904 in his book Foundations of Modern Europe.[14]
- ^ An introduction to international relations. Devetak, Richard, George, Jim, 1946-, Percy, Sarah V. (Sarah Virginia), 1977- (Third ed.). Cambridge, United Kingdom. 2017-09-11. p. 816. ISBN 978-1-316-63155-3. OCLC 974647995.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link) - ^ a b Overland, Indra (2015). "Future Petroleum Geopolitics: Consequences of Climate Policy and Unconventional Oil and Gas". Handbook of Clean Energy Systems. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 3517–3544. doi:10.1002/9781118991978.hces203. hdl:11250/2451749. ISBN 9781118991978 – via ResearchGate.
- ^ Cope, Zak, ed. (2025). The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Geopolitics. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-25399-7. ISBN 978-3-031-25399-7.
- ^ Evans, Graham (1998). The Penguin dictionary of international relations. Newnham, Jeffrey. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-051397-3. OCLC 41113670.
- ^ Park, Jaehan (2023), Rethinking Geopolitics: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Fall 2023), The University Of Texas At Austin, Texas National Security Review, doi:10.26153/TSW/48843, retrieved 2025-06-09
- ^ Vladimir Toncea, 2006, "Geopolitical evolution of borders in Danube Basin"
- ^ Overland, Indra (2019-03-01). "The geopolitics of renewable energy: Debunking four emerging myths". Energy Research & Social Science. 49: 36–40. Bibcode:2019ERSS...49...36O. doi:10.1016/j.erss.2018.10.018. hdl:11250/2579292. ISSN 2214-6296.
- ^ O'Sullivan, Meghan; Overland, Indra; Sandalow, David (2017). "The Geopolitics of Renewable Energy". SSRN Working Paper Series. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2998305. hdl:11250/2447113. ISSN 1556-5068. S2CID 157400282. SSRN 2998305.
- ^ Sahakyan, Mher D.; Lo, Kevin (2025-03-09). "Hotspot Geopolitics: Political Economy of the Belt and Road Initiative in South Caucasus". Chinese Political Science Review. doi:10.1007/s41111-025-00281-7. ISSN 2365-4244.
- ^ a b Gogwilt, Christopher (2000). The fiction of geopolitics: afterimages of geopolitics, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock, 1860–1940. Stanford, Calif.; Cambridge: Stanford University Press; Cambridge University Press. pp. 35–36. ISBN 978-0-8047-3726-5. OCLC 44932458.
- ^ Dittmer, Jason; Sharp, Joanne P (2014). Geopolitics: an introductory reader. London; New York: Routledge. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-415-66663-3. OCLC 895013513.
- ^ Deudney, Daniel (March 2000). "Geopolitics as Theory:: Historical Security Materialism". European Journal of International Relations. 6 (1): 77–107. doi:10.1177/1354066100006001004. ISSN 1354-0661. S2CID 146194629.
- ^ GoGwilt, Christopher Lloyd (1998). "The Geopolitical Image: Imperialism, Anarchism, and the Hypothesis of Culture in the Formation of Geopolitics". Modernism/Modernity. 5 (3): 49–70. doi:10.1353/mod.1998.0058. ISSN 1080-6601. S2CID 144340839.
- ^ Reich, Emil (2010). Foundations of modern europe. [Place of publication not identified]: Nabu Press. ISBN 978-1-171-68627-9. OCLC 944201019.