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Geopolitics is back. We are again grappling with 19th-century questions

Strategic thinkers now grapple simultaneously with the return of war and the weaponisation of everything. Revisiting the classics helps us understand where we are coming from.

World affairs in the last few years have made a certain gloom descend upon strategic thought. One does not need to be a pessimist to sense that something fundamental has shifted in international politics. War is back, not as an aberration, but as a centrepiece of international relations.

Yet the return of war is only one part of the story I wish to tell. More striking is the ‘return of geopolitics’.

Barely a decade ago, the term was relegated to a somewhat unfashionable corner of international relations (IR) scholarship. The war colleges and military academies of the world continued to study war because of institutional mandates, and armed forces continued to war-game. But mainstream IR had moved elsewhere. Its preoccupations were the politics of globalisation, the promises and failures of economic interdependence, the challenges of democratisation, and the social consequences of global integration or exclusion.

The dominant questions, therefore, were geoeconomic rather than geopolitical.

Economic statecraft sat at the centre of policy discussions and research. An aspiring IR scholar was expected to know the history of the World Wars and perhaps the ethnic conflicts that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the intellectual energy and synergy of the discipline had moved on. Conflict found its space in new courses focused on asymmetric warfare, terrorism, non-state actors, and the political costs of military intervention, while conventional war was treated as an outdated phenomenon. Researchers who were still war-enthusiastic were frequently discouraged as reductionists from an older worldview.

But how quickly intellectual fashions change!

Today, geopolitics has returned with a vengeance. It has re-occupied the centre of strategic discourse and once again commands the attention of policymakers, scholars, and military planners alike. The best minds in the field find themselves grappling with questions of nineteenth-century strategists: How does geography shape power projection? What is the relationship between territory, resources, and political vision? How is the world organised in terms of interests, rivalries, and, unfortunately, war?

This column is not an overview of the conflicts of the last five years, important as they are. Rather, it is an attempt to revisit the older intellectual traditions that shaped how great powers understood their geography and conceived their grand strategy. For it is these underlying assumptions—formed over centuries—that continue to influence how nations see themselves and their place in the fast-changing world.

In many ways, this is an effort to connect old geopolitics with the new. And to ask whether India has kept up.

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