About Geostrategy
Innovations in science and technologies permanently change society. In recent decades, the triumph of new means of communication and transport have made the environment less hierarchical and more like a network. But the international order remains essentially territorial and represents an agreement among sovereignties – the compartmentalization of space. Ironically, the decay of globalism and the rise of post-modernism have led to a crystallization of civilizations and the development of vast economic-political units on the international scene.
Scholars describe diplomatic-military relations in terms of geopolitics. Space is regarded as an abstract, simplified, stylized, and schematized theater, no longer as concrete environment. A geopolitician sees the geographical environment as a terrain of diplomatic and military interplay. Geopolitics combines a geographic schematization of diplomatic-strategic relations with an economic-geographic analysis of constant elements (land, sea, air, and space) and variable elements (mode of movement, population and natural resources, way of life, and extent of diplomacy) (Aron). Politicians, diplomats, and generals transform geopolitical theories into geographic ideologies to justify and plan geostrategy. Geostrategy encompasses the conduct and consequences of human relations in the context of actual or possible armed conflict (Luttwak). This conflict can involve local (tactical and operational), national (theater), and global (grand strategy) levels. For elites, the space itself becomes the stake in the struggle between human collectivities and states.
About Alexander Perepechko
Alexander Perepechko, PhD, has been a consultant in Seattle since 2006. His interests concentrate on elites, political geography and research methodologies. He co-founded ADS GIS & Mapping, a small IT business from 2004 to 2006. Between 1999 and 2004 he was a researcher in the Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies program at the University of Washington and an analyst at the City of Seattle. In these jobs, he participated in creating digital databases and analyzed data. From 1994 to 1999 he was a doctoral student in the geography graduate program at the University of Washington. For his PhD dissertation (1999) he applied information technologies and quantitative techniques to the electoral history of Russia. His Candidate of Science degree is from St. Petersburg State University (Russia). Before coming to United States, his academic work in Belarus and France was focused on geopolitics, geostrategy and elections. For over 25 years, in his writing he has tried to apply geographic theories and methods to the history, politics, and culture of Belarus, Europe, Russia and United States.