ABSTRACT
The field of geopolitics – wherein the highly complex ‘geo’ is added as a prefix to the already complex, not to mention contentious, word ‘politics’ – can be described as a modern invention insofar as it emerges at a particular time and place. That is, the coining of the term can be traced back to the work of Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Rudolf Kjellén, at the turn of twentieth century (Heffernan 2000; Tunander 2001). Writing at a time when diverse European nation-states were engaged in economic, cultural and military imperialism across the globe, and Western social science largely sought to buttress such efforts via reference to environmental determinism and social Darwinism, Kjellén (1916) argued that states needed to protect and expand their territories at home and abroad so as to advance what he regarded as their racialised populations, or volk. Heavily influenced by his teacher, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who wrote in 1897 on the state as an organism subject to growth and decay (as opposed to a static, legally bounded entity), Kjellén emphasised state policy as a form of sustenance. A government’s raison d’etre, he argued, was, or rather should be, the social and economic health of its populace. (For an account of Ratzel, often termed the ‘father’ of political geography, see Chapter 1).
