In the picture
Cover of Tim Marshall's book 'The power of geography' (London: Elliott & Thompson, 2021) 380 pages.
Geopolitics, it is said, is back in fashion; the huge number of recent publications that address issues related to this discipline from different angles would corroborate this statement. Tim Marshall, a British journalist with more than twenty-five years of professional experience in the field of international relations, is perhaps one of the authors who has been best able to capture the favorable wind of public interest in the fascinating relationship between geography and politics, as evidenced by the no less than five titles he has already published on this subject discipline. All of them have been widely distributed and have earned Marshall a place close to that enjoyed by Robert D. Kaplan in the olympus of geopolitical disseminators.
'The Power of Geography' is one such title, conceived by Marshall as a sequel to 'Prisoners of Geography', his first work, published in 2015, and soon elevated to 'best-seller' status. The book follows the same guideline as the previous one, offering the reader vivid geopolitical vignettes that use the geographical characteristics of different units - nation-states or regions - to explain their behavior in the international system, thereby highlighting one of the practical dimensions of geopolitics: reading maps with political vision to try to understand the past and shed light on the future, always bearing in mind that the discipline is not prescriptive, but merely inspires, never imposes, geographically based attitudes and policy preferences.
Like the previous book, 'The Power of Geography' is not academic but informative; the work is designed for a general public, perhaps not very well informed, but interested in understanding the reasons behind the international issues that surround them. To this end, with great skill, Marshall makes good use of his extensive knowledge of international relations and his extraordinary gifts as a communicator to analyze various entities from a geopolitical point of view in simple, accessible language, peppered with personal anecdotes with which he seems to want to demonstrate his pedigree as a traveler.
Each chapter of the book is devoted to a geographical unit; all of them, except for the Sahel and outer space, are nation-states. It is in this structure, and in the selection of cases, that perhaps one of the main objections to the work lies. Although the sections are independent and can be read separately, all of them, according to agreement as announced in the introduction, would merit inclusion in the book as hotspots of conflict emerging in the 21st century and with the potential to have a far-reaching impact on the multipolar world towards which we seem to be heading. However, it may be objected to the selection that some of the cases are well before the present century - think, for example, of the nationalist problem in Spain - and have experienced episodes of violence and conflict far greater than those currently being experienced; other scenarios, such as Palestine, Ukraine, the Arctic or the Indo-Pacific, would have deserved a chapter, according to the author's criteria, at agreement . As to why they have not been included, one can only speculate; perhaps because they were already subject of the previous submission , and it did not seem opportune to reiterate.
Equally problematic is the criterion of focusing on the nation-state level as the unit of analysis, with the exception, as has been said, of space and the Sahel. The book captures some dyads such as the Iran-Saudi Arabia dyad or the Greece-Turkey dyad. However, it treats them in separate and independent chapters; this may have certain advantages from the expository point of view, but it makes it difficult to understand the conflict in all its dimensions, and the interaction of all of them. A chapter dedicated, for example, to the Eastern Mediterranean, or the Aegean Sea, would have highlighted the connection of issues such as sovereignty in the Aegean, the use of Syrian refugees as a weapon of war by Turkey against Greece and the European Union, the division of Cyprus, or the dynamics derived from the finding of hydrocarbon deposits in the region. Similarly, a section devoted to the Middle East or, perhaps better, to the Sunni-Shi'a divide, would have made it possible to deal comprehensively with the multiple facets of this issue, such as, for example, Iran's efforts to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East, and the reaction of the other regional actors affected by them.
From the point of view of the study of geopolitics, the value of the chapters is uneven. They all begin with a brief and interesting geographical analysis of the unit in question placed in the context of its history; an apt approach which, moreover, has the virtue of clearly showing the relationship between the geographical conditions and the political evolution of each actor in question. However, while in some cases, such as that of Ethiopia, Ethiopia's geographical condition - as source of the Nile and with a mountainous nature, more pronounced to the east, and divided by the Rift Valley - appears as a thread of the country's political behavior throughout its history, in others, the relationship appears more blurred, or overlooks details of geopolitical interest that result in a somewhat partial analysis. In the case of Spain, for example, its maritime and Atlantic dimension - it is, de facto, an island separated from Europe by the Pyrenees - or the geopolitically anomalous fact of the lack of political unity throughout the Iberian Peninsula - with the utmost respect for the independence of Portugal - are ignored in the analysis or are very superficially treated, perhaps because, at present, they are not a source of conflict. More controversial is the interpretation of the episode of the "Corpus de Sangre", the consideration of the Basque Country and Catalonia as two monolithically different blocks, by geography and history, from the rest of Spain, or the reading of some passages of the recent history of the country.
All in all, the final balance is very positive. As with 'Prisoners of Geography', the final product is complete, accurate, interesting and highly recommended to readers who want to delve into the intricacies of global geopolitics. A good starter that leaves the reader hungry to dive into 'The Future of Geography', third submission of Marshall's geopolitical trilogy.