Kursinformation

The term “geopolitics” and its cognates emerged at the very end of the nineteenth century in connection to new forms of nationalism and inter-imperialist competition in Europe and the world. Emphasizing the mutually constitutive relationship among power, place, and knowledge, geopolitics has most often been associated with a “realist” and state-centric approach to international relations, although recent decades have seen the rise of a critical geopolitics that includes a far wider range of social actors. This course is both a conceptual history of geopolitics as the term has been defined and applied over the past hundred years, as well as a critical survey of the changing relations among technology, state power, and spatiality as they relate to strategies of global competition and conflict. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of the place and role of Russia in the modern world.