Geopolitics occupies a central place in the literature of international relations as a discipline that explains not only the influence of geography but also the decisive impact of history, culture, identity, and civilizational imagination on states’ foreign policies. It serves as a conceptual framework for understanding and interpreting how major political organizations—such as the state, hegemony, empire, and civilization—structure their relations with their surrounding environment and develop modes of response to conjunctural conditions.

In other words, geopolitical plans and theories have historically been constructed as strategies whereby great powers sought to consolidate their own domains of authority by neutralizing potential rivals that could restrict their expansion, forging pragmatic alliances with other actors, and establishing hegemony over targeted geographies and societies. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Sea Power Theory is essentially a design for British maritime hegemony. Friedrich Ratzel’s conceptualization of Lebensraum (“living space”) constituted the theoretical foundation of the German imperial vision. Halford John Mackinder’s Heartland Theory and approach to land power provided one of the intellectual cornerstones of the American global power project. Karl Haushofer’s Continental Bloc doctrine, aimed at expanding German living space, likewise amounted to a German global imperial project. Nicholas John Spykman’s Rimland Theory served as a complementary pillar of American global strategy. Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasian geopolitical theory, in the modern era, emerges as a renewed imperial design for Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard and Thomas P. M. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map represent geopolitical blueprints of the United States’ (U.S) efforts to sustain its global dominance. A careful examination of all these theories reveals that nearly all of the powers behind them are actors pursuing claims to hegemony or empire, seeking to construct a civilizational order by placing their own geography at the center.

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