Professor Daniel Immerwahr recently published an op-ed in The Guardian which outlines correlations between historical political conflict and physical geography.
In the article, Immerwahr describes how much of the world’s political history has been the direct result of physical geography. Immerwahr argues that most conflicts, such as the Cold War or the war in Ukraine, are due to resource placement and, ultimately, a country’s position on a global map. Natural landmarks such as mountains, oceans, and rivers all affect the world’s supply chain and trade routes between nations. The article discusses the history of modern geopolitics and how innovations in technology and trade have affected international relationships.
Immerwahr writes, “Ideas, laws and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics you must look hard at maps. And when you do, the world reveals itself to be a zero-sum contest in which every neighbour is a potential rival, and success depends on controlling territory, as in the boardgame Risk. In its cynical view of human motives, geopolitics resembles Marxism, just with topography replacing class struggle as the engine of history.”
Daniel Immerwahr is a professor of history, specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history within a global context. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, and Slate, among other places. Immerwahr regularly offers undergraduate courses on global history and U.S. foreign relations. He has taught graduate seminars on international development, global history, modern empires, the United States’ empire, and pedagogy.
Continue reading in The Guardian’s article, “Are we really prisoners of geography?”