The historical context and theoretical foundations for the emergence of geopolitics
The development of geopolitics has recently become increasingly active,leading to the emergence of a series of new disciplinary branches.However,due to issues with its development path,the scientific validity of its research results has been questioned,greatly affecting the discipline's social influence.This paper combines the hundred-year development of geopolitics,particularly the construction of different classical and modem geopolitical theories,to summarize the three major historical backgrounds of geopolitics:the end of geographical exploration and overseas colonial plunder,the competition for space fix and mutual dependence in capitalist crises,and the formation of the capitalist world economic system.At the same time,this paper discusses the three major theoretical foundations for the creation of the geopolitical discipline,which are geographical space differentiation and the social construction of geography,the territorial logic of power and the logic of capital,and geographical complexity and geographical imagination.Thus,geography in geopolitics is a concept containing multiple layers of meaning and different interpretations,not just limited to the Greek term"earth".Although the expansion of the connotation and extension of geography has strongly promoted the development of the geopolitical discipline,it has brought difficulties to the predictive function and policy orientation of geopolitics.Under the complexity of geography and the mutual construction of geography and politics,the primary task of future geopolitics is to understand the role of geography through cross-scale coupling,cross-disciplinary interaction,and multi-dimensional geopolitical games within the framework of the capitalist world economic system.
geopoliticsspatial differentiationscale social constructionspatial fixgeographi-cal imaginationgeographical complexity