An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire exercises political control over the peripheries. Within an empire, different populations have different sets of rights and are governed differently. Narrowly defined, an empire is a sovereign state whose head of state is an emperor or empress; but not all states with aggregate territory under the rule of supreme authorities are called empires or are ruled by an emperor; nor have all self-described empires been accepted as such by contemporaries and historians.
Imperialism is maintaining or extending power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power and soft power. Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire. While related to the concepts of colonialism, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.
The "Old World" is a term for Afro-Eurasia that originated in Europe after 1493, when Europeans became aware of the existence of the Americas. It is used to contrast the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia in the Eastern Hemisphere, previously thought of by inhabitants of European descent as comprising the entire world, with the "New World", a term for the newly encountered lands of the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Americas. While located closer to Afro-Eurasia within the Eastern Hemisphere, Australia is considered neither an Old World nor a New World land, since the phrase was coined by Europeans after the distinction had been made upon their discovery of the already inhabited lands; both Australia and Antarctica were associated instead with the Terra Australis that had been posited as a hypothetical southern continent.
Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation, or a quasi-federal system.
The Eurasia Party is a National Bolshevik Russian political party. It was registered by the Ministry of Justice on 21 June 2002, approximately one year after the pan-Russian Eurasia Movement was established by Aleksandr Dugin.
Sir Halford John Mackinder was a British geographer, academic and politician, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy. He was the first Principal of University Extension College, Reading from 1892 to 1903, and Director of the London School of Economics from 1903 to 1908. While continuing his academic career part-time, he was also the Conservative and Unionist Member of Parliament for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 to 1922. From 1923, he was Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics.
Geostrategy, a subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategies, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends Strategy is as intertwined with geography as geography is with nationhood, or as Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan state it, "[geography is] the mother of strategy."
Nicholas John Spykman was an American political scientist who was Professor of International Relations at Yale University from 1928 until his death in 1943. He was one of the founders of the classical realist school in American foreign policy, transmitting Eastern European political thought to the United States.
Geopolitik was a German school of geopolitics which existed between the late 19th century and World War II.
Central Asia has long been a geostrategic location because of its proximity to the interests of several great powers and regional powers.
Political geography is concerned with the study of both the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Conventionally, for the purposes of analysis, political geography adopts a three-scale structure with the study of the state at the centre, the study of international relations above it, and the study of localities below it. The primary concerns of the subdiscipline can be summarized as the inter-relationships between people, state, and territory.
The Rimland is a concept championed in the early 20th century by Nicholas John Spykman, professor of international relations at Yale University. To him, geopolitics is the planning of the security policy of a country in terms of its geographical factors. He described the maritime fringe of a country or continent; in particular the densely populated western, southern, and eastern edges of the Eurasian continent.
The Nazis Strike is the second film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series. Released in 1943, it introduces Germany as a nation whose aggressive ambitions began in 1863 with Otto von Bismarck and the Nazis as its latest incarnation.
The concept of imagined geographies originated from Edward Said, particularly his work on critique on Orientalism. Imagined geographies refers to the perception of a space created through certain imagery, texts, and/or discourses. For Said, imagined does not mean to be false or made-up, but rather is used synonymous with perceived. Despite often being constructed on a national level, imagined geographies also occur domestically in nations and locally within regions, cities, etc.
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) is one of the major works of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski graduated with a PhD from Harvard University in 1953 and became Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. He was later the United States National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, under the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
The Intermediate Region is an established geopolitical model set forth in the 1970s by the Greek historian Dimitri Kitsikis, professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. According to this model, the Eurasian continent is composed of three regions; in addition to Western Europe and the Far East, a third region called the "Intermediate Region" found between the two constitutes a distinct civilization. It roughly covers Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Afro-Eurasia is a landmass comprising the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia. The terms are compound words of the names of its constituent parts. Afro-Eurasia has also been called the "Old World", in contrast to the "New World" referring to the Americas.
Eurasia is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. According to some geographers, physiographically, Eurasia is a single supercontinent. The concepts of Europe and Asia as distinct continents date back to antiquity, but their borders have historically been subject to change. For example to the ancient Greeks, Asia originally included Africa but they classified Europe as separate land. Eurasia is connected to Africa at the Suez Canal, and the two are sometimes combined to describe the largest contiguous landmass on Earth, Afro-Eurasia.
World domination is a hypothetical power structure, either achieved or aspired to, in which a single political authority holds the power over all and/or virtually all the inhabitants of Earth. Various individuals or regimes have tried to achieve this goal throughout history, without ever attaining it. The theme has been often used in works of fiction, particularly in political fiction, as well as in conspiracy theories, particularly those fearing the development of a "New World Order" involving a world government of a totalitarian nature.
Geostrategy in Taiwan refers to the foreign relations of Taiwan in the context of the geography of Taiwan. Taiwan is an island country in East Asia, while it is also located at the center of the first island chain and commands the busy traffic of Taiwan Strait and Bashi Channel.
