Geopolitics

As a formal reasoning, geopolitics emerged in Western Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and had its heyday between the two World Wars. After 1945, it was ostracized from academia and survived only in military academies, although it continued, as a practice, to inform the foreign policy of major powers throughout the Cold War. Since the 1980s formal geopolitical discourses have gradually come back and today geopolitics is once again a term widely used in academia, mass-media, think-tanks, etc. The aim of this course is to explore the genealogy of this concept, by critically analyzing its formal discourses and the practices associated with it. To this purpose, students will read both classic geopolitics texts (informed by political realism) and critical geopolitics literature (informed by post-modern, post-structural, and feminist thought). The course will not only focus on mainstream geopolitical production (USA, UK, etc.), but also discuss ‘minor’ geopolitical traditions (Japan, Italy, Brazil, etc.) as a way to offer students a wider context within which to understand the significance of geopolitics as both a theory and a praxis.

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