Geoffrey Sloan

This volume examines geopolitics by looking at the interaction between geography, strategy and history. This book addresses three interrelated questions: why does the geographical scope of political objectives and subsequent strategy of states change? How do these changes occur? Over what period of time do these changes occur? The theories of Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman are examined in order to provide an analytical narrative for five case studies, four historical and one contemporary. Taken together they offer the prospect of converting descriptions of historical change into analytic explanations, thereby highlighting the importance of a number of commonly overlooked variables. In addition, the case studies will illuminate the challenges that states face when attempting to change the scope of their foreign policy and geo-strategy in response to shifts in the geopolitical reality. This book breaks new ground in seeking to provide a way to understand why and how the geographical scope of political objectives and subsequent strategy both expands and contracts. This book will be of much interest to students of geopolitics, strategic studies, military history, and international relations.

Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

Colin S. Gray

Geopolitical conditions influence all strategic behaviour - even when cooperation among different kinds of military power is expected as the norm, action has to be planned and executed in specific physical environments. The geographical world cannot be avoided, and it happens to be 'organized' into land, sea, air and space - and possibly the electromagnetic spectrum including 'cyberspace'. Although the meaning of geography for strategy is a perpetual historical theme, explicit theory on the subject is only one hundred years old. Ideas about the implication of geographical, especially spatial, relationships for political power - which is to say 'geopolitics'- flourished early in the twentieth century. Divided into theory and practice sections, this volume covers the big names such as Mackinder, Mahan and Haushofer, as well as looking back at the vital influence of weather and geography on naval power in the long age of sail (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). It also looks forward to the consequences of the revival of geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia and the new space-based field of "astropolitics".

Geoffrey Sloan

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