They write about geopolitics in the newspapers. They talk about geopolitics in the news. Geopolitical disputes between superpowers and small states excite the minds of the public. But what is geopolitics really?
The term "geopolitics" comes from the merger of two Greek words: γη - land and πολιτική - in fact, politics. For the first time in 1899 it was used by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen. The concept gained wide popularity in 1916, when Kjellen published his book "The State as an Organism." Today we can say that the meaning invested in the term "geopolitics" largely depends on the context of its use. In most cases, geopolitics is considered as a science that is part of political geography. In a broader sense, it is represented by a body of knowledge from the fields of various disciplines, as well as a set of methods for studying the patterns of political interaction between states and their alliances in the international arena, the prerequisites for which are geographic interests. The scientific interpretation of the term is very broad. Indeed, since the formation of geopolitics as a field of knowledge, it has undergone significant evolution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was assigned issues mainly related to the study of the existing political structure of the world in relation to the geographical distribution of the main political forces, as well as the forms, methods and mechanisms of control over territories. Now geopolitical science studies a wide range of problems associated with the formation and development of superpowers. globalization, opportunities for the formation and maintenance of a multipolar world based on both military-strategic parity and political and economic interaction between countries, etc. The methodology of modern geopolitics includes both social, historical, geographical and economic analysis of processes, as well as methods of synthesis and modeling. Strategically, geopolitics can be considered an integral part of the foreign policy of various states. In this sense, its scientific basis forms the necessary theoretical basis for analyzing the activities of competing entities and making forecasts. So Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the leading ideologues of American geopolitics, directly indicates that it is a theory of positional games on the world chessboard.