ABSTRACT
Originally coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén in 1899 (Holdar 1992), few terms in the modern history of geography have been as controversial and emotive as ‘geopolitics’. From its obscure origins at the twilight of the nineteenth century through to the widespread and sometimes indiscriminate contemporary uses of the term, the label has frequently been the focus of intense and often acrimonious debate. At certain times, ‘geopolitics’ even attracted such enduring notoriety that political geography and even academic geography in general were tainted by what, in 1927, the geographer Carl Sauer felt able to call the ‘wayward child of the geographic family’ (Sauer 1927).
