Federico Bordonaro, Ph.D.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to succinctly demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional geopolitical theories and to highlight the need for a more all-encompassing strategy that goes beyond critical and classical viewpoints. Jeremy Black’s approach shows promise; in addition to territorial and strategic conflicts, he suggests studying geopolitics as a politically influential intellectual tradition that aids in understanding the crystallization of national security traditions. Several historians in the last few decades proved that geopolitical concepts from the classical school are useful in explaining great powers’ grand strategy, its successes and its failures. The paper also discusses the contributions of historical sociology to geopolitical theory, with a special focus on State power and predicting the outcome of international conflicts. The article acknowledges the predictive value of Collins’s geopolitical theory in understanding the dynamics of the Cold War and subsequent political-strategic frameworks. A critique of critical geopolitics is also offered, centred on the shortcomings of a logo-centric, postmodernist, and subjectivist approach.
1. Introduction
Anglo-American geopolitical thought, which originated in the age of imperialism, was born with the dual intent of (a) analytically investigating the interactions between geography, strategy and historical constants, and (b) of providing support for the conduct of foreign policy. The second goal inevitably ended up casting a shadow over the discipline’s claim to social science, and this all the more so as the classical German school made even more ideologically aligned use of it. For this reason, the revival of academic interest in geopolitics has been wedded, since the 1980s, to a certain predilection for critical approaches (1).