External publications

Geopolitics

Petersen, Mirko / Dorothea Wehrmann
External Publications (2015)

published on Universität Bielefeld Center for InterAmerican Studies

Volltext/Document

Geopolitics is the struggle over hegemony in places and spaces. As a theoretical concept, located between geography and political sciences, it is contested because of its connections to colonial and imperial thinking and particularly due to its use in Nazi Germany. What is generally referred to as “classical” Geopolitics deals with the role of geography in international political relations and mostly focuses on strategic aims of states. This is also the way in which the term is generally used in mass media discourses as well as in strategy and policy papers. Today, scholars, often linked to the academic field of Critical Geopolitics, also include political and cultural production as well as the perception of geographical assumptions in their studies and take a wider range of actors outside the inner circle of political elites into consideration.