Geopolitics Renaissant: Territory, Sovereignty and the World Political Map

This special issue of the renamed journal, Geopolitics, attempts to place the renaissant discipline of geopolitics within the context of the post-modern debate concerning territory, boundaries and sovereignty, and the role of the State in a world which has been impacted by globalisation on the one hand, and the resurgence of ethnic and national identities on the other. Geopolitics, as a discipline, has undergone a major renaissance during the past decade, from being blackballed and excluded from much of the academic discourse during the three to four decades following the end of the Second World War, to having, once again, become a legitimate area of study. ¹ Its past associations with the German school of geopolitics of the 1930s and 1940s, not to be ignored, is being reassessed and located within a longer tradition of the study of geopolitics, broadly defined as the study of the changing world political map and an understanding of the ‘geo’ dimension of global, regional and state politics, ² or simply, the ‘political geography of international relations’. ³