The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World - The Much-Anticipated Sequel to the Global Bestseller Prisoners of Geography

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Anhand von 10 Ländern, bzw. Gebieten, wird exemplarisch versucht, den Einfluss der Geographie auf deren Politik und Geschichte zu erklären. Das liest sich im Großen und Ganzen ganz gut, dümmer wird man auch nicht unbedingt, nur fehlt dann aber auch der ganz große Erkenntnisgewinn. Space - the Artemis Accords (not signed by China and Russia). Control of Earth space where satellites live/work/spy on other countries and debris of decades is even more of a threat. Discussing agreements regarding settlements on the moon and who gets mining rights and how far would boundaries be. Tim Marshall ist anerkannter Experte für Außenpolitik und arbeitete als Politik-Redakteur für die BBC und Sky News. In seinen Büchern erörtert er die großen internationalen Konflikte unserer Zeit auf geopolitischer Ebene. Sein neuestes, von Lutz-W. Wolff übersetztes Buch "Die Macht der Geographie im 21. Jahrhundert" wurde mir vor allem zum Verständnis des Kriegs in der Ukraine und den damit verbundenen Hintergründen und Zusammenhängen empfohlen. Turkey: Former ruler of the Ottoman Empire which controlled the Middle East and North Africa, it now rules a country primarily in minor Asia with a large percentage of its people living in the European capital Istanbul. It has a large Kurdish minority in Turkey and surrounding countries and uses its military might to stymie efforts for an independent Kurdistan in Iraq, Syria and at home. Has allied with Libya to compete with the influence of Egypt and support its claims over territorial waters controlled by Greece. Ongoing disputes with Greece over islands and territorial waters.

Prisoners of Geography” с актуализация към 2020 г., и фокус към държави с по-слаб акцент от предната книга, или с нови такива. Стилът е все така журналистически достъпен, на места с размах, на места с хумор, макар на моменти вдъхновението му май да се поизчерпва. It wasn't that Turkey opposed the intervention against Saddam; it was more than it helped create a semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq (which, as we will see, was problematic as Turkey was trying to suppress its own Kurdish nationalism)." Which is another way of saying that we don’t always accept the topographies we inherit. The world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, sprouts from Dubai, which was for centuries an unpromising fishing village surrounded by desert and salt flats. Little about its relief map destined it for greatness. Its climate is sweltering and oil sales, though once substantial, now account for less than 1% of the emirate’s economy. If there’s something distinctive about Dubai, it is its legal landscape, not its physical one. The emirate isn’t governed by a single lawbook but is chopped up into free zones – Dubai Internet City, Dubai Knowledge Park and International Humanitarian City among them – designed to attract various foreign interests. The Dubai desert is essentially “a huge circuit board”, the urban theorist Mike Davis once wrote, to which global capital can easily connect. Writing for The Hindu, Prasanna Aditya judged the book to be a good introduction to its topics that opens the way for the reader to further research. [4]Greece: A nation limited by its small amount of arable land near the coast and its mountain terrain. It has many islands in the Aegean Sea which demands a strong navy and military to protect. Ongoing disputes with its neighbour Turkey who claims islands and drilling rights in its territorial waters. Saudi Arabia: The kingdom of the house of Saud rules this oil rich nation that has been allied with the western powers and spread Wahhabism around the Muslim world. As oil is replaced with renewables it will be less important for the West to protect the kingdom. Saudi Arabia seeks to diversify its oil dominant economy. Saudi Arabia's main rival for regional influence in Middle East is Iran. Even topography, geographers note, isn’t as immutable as geopoliticians suppose. Zeihan, a vice-president at Stratfor for 12 years (“You can only speak at Langley so many times”, he sighs in a recent book), has long insisted that the outsize power of the US can be attributed to its “ perfect Geography of Success”. Settlers arrived in New England, encountered substandard agricultural conditions where “wheat was a hard no”, and were fortunately spurred on to claim better lands to the west. With those abundant farmlands came “the real deal”: an extensive river system allowing internal trade at a “laughably low” cost. These features, Zeihan writes, have made the US “the most powerful country in history” and will keep it so for generations. “Americans. Cannot. Mess. This. Up.”

The last section actually has the takeaway that 'cooperation is the key to the future' and it is true on the moon, in space and definitely on the Earth. Where Prisoners was almost solely the influence of physical geography, The Power of Geography is almost exclusively human geography (see also: history) and I am personally more of a fan of the former.The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World is a book on geopolitics by the British author and journalist Tim Marshall. It was published by Elliott & Thompson in 2021 and is the sequel to his 2015 book Prisoners of Geography. Prisoners Of Geography was a deserved smash, a clever angle to use geography to actually tell historical stories about current affairs, why the world is the way it is partially due to the way countries grew from their physical limitations. And so there is no shame in a sequel, and it is partially the fault of doing such a good job the first time around that what is left does feel like the off-cuts and crumbs from that book. The focus has shifted slightly, to look to the future. and how geography might affect future conflicts. But considering the land masses looked at in Prisoners were so massive, there is a little bit of going over the same ground.

Marshall is a journalist for the BBC and Sky News. [1] In the book, he focuses on ten areas that he considers to be potential hotspots in the future due to their geography, for reasons including climate change, ethnic strife and competition for resources. The areas in focus are Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey, the Sahel (the transition zone on the edge of the Sahara desert), Ethiopia, Spain and outer space. [2] The book also explores Iran. Walking the reader through the mountains of Iran and its huge landscape it puts Iranian history into perspective due to its mountainous geography. I cannot even count the number of times I've passed like a complete illiterate by saying stuff like Iranians are Arabic. And this is no small thing. One day a girl asked me if all Colombians were Mexicans. I was so confused by what she even meant with the question. Of course, I'm sure I've been on the ignorant side of the question more times that I've realized. The planet's geography is apathetic, indifferent, absolutely heartless and therefore - it rules. Those who proclaim to be its imperators and czars are able to hold those epithets only by being indistinguishable in its camouflage - the fusion thereby making 'geopolitics'. He has written for many of the national newspapers including the Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times.Geography is unfair,” Ian Morris writes, and if “geography is destiny”, as he also contends, then this is a recipe for a world in which the strong remain strong and the weak remain weak. Geopoliticians excel at explaining why things won’t change. They’re less adept at explaining how things do. Delivered with Marshall’s trademark wit and insight, this is a lucid and gripping exploration of the power of geography to shape humanity’s past, present – and future. Spain: Ongoing independence movement from Catalan and other areas that threaten to divide the country. Geopolitics wonks will find Marshall’s prognostications to be reasonable, believable, and capably rendered.

Geography is not necessarily fate, but it is more important, insists Marshall, than individual politicians. Consider Australia, he writes in the first chapter: It sits 5,000 miles from Africa, more than 7,000 miles from South America, and more than 2,500 miles from its supposed neighbor, New Zealand. The isolation of the island continent once allowed it to maintain a small White settler population and conduct genocidal wars on Indigenes largely unseen. Today, connected by air and sea routes and communication lines, it is “a territorially huge, Western-oriented, advanced democracy” that sits next door to China, “the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship.” This makes Australia a bulwark. What of Iran? Will it ever become a world power, as it was in the days of Darius and Xerxes? Hemmed in by mountains, “Iran’s main centers of population are widely dispersed and, until recently, poorly connected. Even now, only half of the country’s roads are paved.” This dispersal favors ethnic and cultural diversity, and Iran’s overwhelmingly young population is beginning to resist a fundamentalist ideology “more in tune with the sixteenth century than the twenty-first.” Regional rival Saudi Arabia contains vast resources of oil, a commodity that is increasingly less important than before, so much so that much of the vast sandy peninsula remains unexplored. The U.K. is another region that, Marshall projects, will become less important in world affairs as the U.S. looks to the Pacific rather than Europe. The author also considers the secondary effects of the movement for Scottish independence and, of course, China, with designs everywhere around the world, especially in a developing Sahel—and, significantly, in space, where it is vying with Russia to be the first to build lunar bases. Marshall also looks at Greece and how they became seafarers forced by their immovable terrain. Marshal then looks at Turkey and her position as the controller of eastern, western, northern and southern trade.Tim Marshall has become the most reputable and authoritative writer on modern geopolitics and current affairs. To say I have greatly enjoyed every book of his thus far is an understatement: I loved them. But there is something about The Power of Geography which fell a little short for me, this time. A fat old middle section that goes through a very basic overview of the history of that country. Usually a third of this part is dedicated to the politics of the second half of the 20th century. Tim Marshall’s third book, The Power of Geography,is just as relevant for Economists as books about Adam Smith are. Marshall proves the importance that geography has on international trade and the development of countries around the world. Nations have fought wars and built empires to source resources such as raw materials and even slaves. Since the dawn of trade, geography has been the primary constraint in determining which trade routes grew and which economies developed. Countries with access to seas, rivers, mountain ranges, and even soil types all determine a country’s trade routes and defence concerns. Marshall takes nine countries (and Space) and explains how their geographical makeup determines their geopolitical stories. After three years as IRN’s Paris correspondent and extensive work for BBC radio and TV, Tim joined Sky News. Reporting from Europe, the USA and Asia, Tim became Middle East Correspondent based in Jerusalem.