Usually, geopolitics is a word associated with matters involving international relations, diplomatic agreements and all kinds of conflicts between countries, cultures or territorial disputes. It is very common for people to understand geopolitics as a synthesis of current events in our society. These definitions are closely linked to the media, but the concept of geopolitics and its distinction in relation to political geography it is still the subject of debates among social scientists from different areas of knowledge.
In fact, the concept of geopolitics began to be developed in the second half of the 19th century due to the redefinition of borders in Europe and the expansionism of European nations, what became known as imperialism or even neocolonialism. We can highlight the analyzes carried out by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), responsible for the creation of geographic determinism and the Vital Space Theory. In a political scenario of unification of Germany, in counterpoint to the already consolidated expansionism of Russia, England, France and even even from the United States, Ratzel helped to create a German geography that was ready to justify the territorial conquests of the Germany.
For Ratzel, the full domination of a given territory would characterize the State. In this way, geopolitical knowledge would point to the State as the centralizer of strategic decisions, which legitimized the actions imperialists of Germany, as can be seen in the disputes that gave rise to the two great wars and, in part, in the precepts used by Nazism.
In opposition to Ratzel's postulates, we can cite the French geographer Paul Vidal de La Blache (1845-1918), who created another approach, known as possibilism. At the end of the 19th century, France still did not have an established geographical knowledge and, fearing the German pretensions, the French state handed La Blache the responsibility of creating a Geography French. According to La Blache, geographic space should not be the only objective of a nation, as it would be necessary to consider the historical time, human actions and other interactions, which actually ended up laying the foundations for a geography regional. Thus, sovereignty over a territory would be linked to regional knowledge, such as the understanding of landforms, climatic aspects, economy, population, among others.
Within this context, we can also cite the British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), who published in 1904 the essay "The Geographical Pivot of History", which highlighted the power of continental territorial conquests, presenting a greater concern with the occupation of Central-Eastern Europe, not least because of transport land began to favor the interiorization of occupations, changing a little the strategies that until then placed greater importance on maritime conquests.
But it was the Swedish jurist Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), a follower of Ratzel's ideas, who created the term geopolitics in 1916, seeking to establish relationships between political events and geographic aspects. It is noteworthy that, nowadays, geopolitics is considered as a theoretical front that comprises the territory and its political nuances, not only on the external plane, but also on the internal issues of a particular nation-state.
The period known as the Cold War expressed many of the principles of geopolitics, as it involved a great ideological and territorial dispute between two powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, with great emphasis on the role of the state in strategic decisions and in the definition of values and standards social.
With the end of the Cold War, the biggest geopolitical discussions correspond to the fight against terrorism, to the issue nuclear, the redefinition of borders in African and Middle Eastern countries and even the problems socio-environmental Some issues such as the increase in the reach of transnational organizations vis-à-vis States, growth Chinese economic and the formation of economic blocs can be grouped into a new theoretical branch known as geoeconomics.
For all that has been exposed, we will use this geopolitical channel not only to present some of the current issues and the major international conflicts, but contextualize these events in a critical and engaged with theories scientific.
Julio César Lázaro da Silva
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
Master in Human Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
