GEOPOLITICS

Geopolitics

Geopolitics

Introduction

The term Geopolitics derived from Greek word, which means everything related to power rivalries or influence over the territories and the people who live there. It is also related to the study of balance of power between various actors in a space more or less defined. Geopolitics is then based on the analysis of the objectives of the actors and their resources used to get there. These actors varied in range, which may be the states, but also political movements or armed groups' more or less clandestine (Benoist, 2007, p. 235).

In this paper, I will be going to analyze the Mackinder's Heartland theory, Alfred Thayer Mahan's Sea power theory and Rudolf Kjellen's theory on Geopolitics by providing brief description of each theory. Lastly, I will be discussing on the theoretical approach of one theory, which is more persuasive than other two theories.

Discussion

Originally, it was in Germany that the concept of geopolitics was built mainly by Friedrich Ratzel. But it served to legitimize the power and German expansionism. The use of the latter by the Nazi ideology was a proscribed times this discipline in the post-war, including France, largely because of connotations. However, there is crucial need for policymakers and citizens to better understand the conflicts that surround them, and thus to understand the issues that has contributed, since the 1980s by the revival of the discipline (Dale, 2008, p.27). As this was during the Vietnam War and the conflict between the Khmer Rouge, the North Vietnamese began to use geopolitics.

With the Columbia Mackinder appears a global vision of geopolitics. He outlined his theories in 1904 and revised forty years later, in the context of the 2nd World War. His theory is vision of a "world island" organized around a pivot, the heartland, the center of gravity of all geopolitical phenomena inaccessible to sea power, which has the heart of Russia. It is protected by crescent areas impeding the penetration from the coast, the inner crescent formed by Siberia, the Himalayas, and the Gobi Desert, Tibet. Beyond, these pivot regions are the countries with access to oceans, the coastland. Beyond the seas and the Sahara that define the world island is the outer crescent composed of Great Britain and Japan. Finally, he argues about the land, which is located farther to the New World whose heart is the United States.

All phenomena can be summarized in a geopolitical struggle between the ...