From one of the most admired admirals of his generation—and the only admiral to serve as Supreme Allied Commander at NATO—comes a remarkable voyage through all of the world’s most important bodies of water, providing the story of naval power as a driver of human history and a crucial element in our current geopolitical path. From the time of the Greeks and the Persians clashing in th…
As the Arctic is getting warmer, ice at sea and on land is melting. Great powers appear ready to conflict over resources appearing from under the ice. Science tells us about this climatic thaw already happening; much commentary and great power strategies want us to believe that a geopolitical freeze is inevitable. Either way, the Arctic region we have known since the end of the Cold …
What configuration of institutions and policies is most conducive to human flourishing? The historical and comparative evidence suggests that the answer is social democratic capitalism — a democratic political system, a capitalist economy, good elementary and secondary schooling, a big welfare state, pro-employment public services, and moderate regulation of product and labor markets. Lane Ke…
In recent years, the emergent field of critical infrastructure studies has turned to interdisciplinary analysis of infrastruc-tures as complex worldmaking systems: They produce shared space and time, connect cultures and subjectivities, negotiate power relations, inequalities, or the mediation and circulation of material agency.1 Infrastructures often appear as networks of media technologies th…
In places such as Iraq or Lebanon, moving a few feet on either side of a territorial boundary can be a matter of life or death, dramatically highlighting the connections between geography and politics. This Very Short Introduction illuminates the concept of geopolitics, revealing how a country's location and size as well as its sovereignty and resources all affect how its people understand and …
Given Australia’s lack of energy security strategy, it is not surprising that the country is void of institutional knowledge and know-how of Russian foreign energy strategy. The ‘lucky country’ as it were, relies entirely on sea lines of communication to the north to supply fuel and to export Australian coal and natural gas. Australia has entered the 2020s as the world’s largest liquefi…
This timely and important book provides a critical look at borders and belonging. It illuminates the tensions and contradictions that often exist within the logic of legal and political mechanisms that define regional and national boundaries and the reality of the lives lived within these constructions. The resulting essays are instructive, thought-provoking and sometimes very moving exploratio…
During a break in the COVID-19 pandemic, the foreign ministers of China, Russia, Japan and the United States boosted Mongolia into international headlines. Returning from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Moscow, for instance, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stopped in Ulaanbaatar (15–16 September) with a message: Do not take sides with China’s competitors if Mongolia wants …
In Singapore, a sensor ticks rapidly upward, logging the location of individu-als connected to a mobile network. Such data will register the trace of the digitally savvy citizen, while excluding others subjects such as the migrant or the elderly. In doing so, it constructs a very particular understanding of national territory.In Hong Kong, a protestor dons a gas mask, …
The world’s polar regions are now central to geopolitical and strategic com-petition. Spillover effects from rapid political, social, and environmental change present unprecedented challenges for governance, environmental protection, and maritime operations in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Both geographic areas can be distinguished by specific terms—namely, the “Arctic” and…