Geopolitics has acquired a new dimension and responsibility in the present-day world. Its importance can be attributed to the cleavage-ridden plural society, where people seek to preserve and spread their distinctiveness and regional claims, many times organized politically. There are several determinants in geopolitics such as maritime waterways, frontiers, population composition, resources among others.

Frontiers, synonymous to boundaries, have gained prominence with rise of global economy. They define the sovereignty of nations, which is closely intertwined with state resources- their utility and management contingent to the topography of the nation states.  

A large number of landlocked nations exist in Africa and Eurasia, which have access to waterways only through neighbors’ territories.  In geopolitical terms, their destiny depends upon their bilateral relations with their neighbors. Disintegration of Soviet Union, fall of socialism and the cessation of Cold War dissipated the buffer zones, making them irrelevant in global power politics.  Another critical potential power index of a nation is population. For example, a homogenous population versus a heterogenous one provides more stability, with nations in the second category often involved in ethnic strife or civil war.  Several countries in South Asia, Africa and Middle-East exhibit the latter tendency.

Clearly, geopolitics is dynamic, not static. It reflects the international realties and power nexus arising from the interaction of geography with technology, economic development and policy framework of respective nations.

Geopolitics evidently illuminates the range of strategic choices a nation has, thereby providing guidelines for achieving strategic efficiency. All along though, there is special focus on geographic space as an important strategic factor and is considered a source of power- recognizing that geography is only a part of the global phenomena. This has given rise to several paradigms within the study of geopolitics- environment, possibilist, regional, topical/ systematic and Marxist traditions; some of these which we will understand in the following posts.