Understanding “Geopolitics” in an Era of Globalization

Abstract

An older European-Enlightenment geopolitical imagination was lost in the late nineteenth century with the rise of naturalized understandings of interstate and imperial relations that saw states and empires in terms of biological competition conditioned by relative location on the earth's surface. The word "geopolitics" emerged in that context and since that time the term has had to contend with this original sin. Arguably, however, Montesquieu and Voltaire in their references to Alexander the Great had a somewhat different conception of geopolitics in mind: one in which reciprocity and exchange between places as well as the redistribution of resources from colonies to homeland are at work. It is this broader sense of the word that has been revived over the