Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. While 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.
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—in this case, a country's resources with its geopolitical objectives. 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."
The basic concept behind critical geopolitics is that intellectuals of statecraft construct ideas about places; these ideas have influence and reinforce their political behaviors and policy choices, and these ideas affect how people process their own notions of places and politics.
In the United States Government, the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR) is part of the United States Department of State, charged with implementing U.S. foreign policy and promoting U.S. interests in Europe and Eurasia, as well as advising the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. It is headed by the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
The International Strategic Research Organization is an independent think-tank established in 2004. It pursues interdisciplinary studies on national and international political, economic and security issues.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an ethnic and territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians, and seven surrounding districts, inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis until their evacuation in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. Some of these territories are de facto controlled, and some are claimed by the breakaway Republic of Artsakh although they have been de jure internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict has its origins in the early 20th century, but the present conflict began in 1988, when the Karabakh Armenians demanded transferring Karabakh from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The conflict escalated into a full-scale war in the early 1990s which later transformed into a low-intensity conflict until four-day escalation in April 2016 and then into another full-scale war in 2020.
Carey Edward Cavanaugh is a former U.S. Ambassador/peace mediator who is currently a professor of diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and chairman of International Alert, a London-based independent peacebuilding organization.
The Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline is a proposed subsea pipeline between Türkmenbaşy in Turkmenistan, and Baku in Azerbaijan. According to some proposals it will also include a connection between the Tengiz Field in Kazakhstan, and Türkmenbaşy. The Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline project is purposed to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to European Union member countries, circumventing both Russia and Iran. It is also considered as a natural eastward extension of Southern Gas Corridor. This project attracts significant interest since it will connect vast Turkmen gas resources to major consumer geographies as Turkey and Europe.
Brenda Shaffer is an American scholar who holds positions as Fellow with the Atlantic Council and professor at University of Haifa. Shaffer was the former research director of the Caspian Studies Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and past president of the Foreign Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. She specializes on energy in international relations and energy policy in the Caspian region and has written or edited several books of these topics, including "Energy Politics" and "Beyond the Resource Curse." Shaffer has also written a number of books on the topic of identity and culture in the Caucasus including explorations of Azeri literature and culture. She has been accused of lobbying for Azerbaijan and failing to disclose conflicts of interest.
Svante E. Cornell is a Swedish scholar specializing on politics and security issues in Eurasia, especially the South Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is a director and co-founder of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy, and Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program (CACI), and joined the American Foreign Policy Council as a Senior Fellow for Eurasia in January 2017.
Eurasia is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelago and the Russian Far East in the east. The continental landmass is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and Africa to the west, the Pacific Ocean to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and by Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean to the south. The division between Europe and Asia as two continents is a historical social construct, as many of their borders are over land; thus, in some parts of the world, Eurasia is recognized as the largest of the six, five, or four continents on Earth. In geology, Eurasia is often considered as a single rigid megablock. However, the rigidity of Eurasia is debated based on paleomagnetic data.
The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute or CACI was founded in 1996 by S. Frederick Starr, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He has served as vice president of Tulane University and as president of Oberlin College (1983–1994) and the Aspen Institute. He has advised three U.S. presidents on Russian/Eurasian affairs and chaired an external advisory panel on U.S. government-sponsored research on the region, organized and co-authored the first strategic assessment of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Afghanistan for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1999, and was involved in the drafting of recent U.S. legislation affecting the region.
The Center for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SAM) is Azerbaijan’s first governmental, non-profit think tank founded on November 12, 2007 by the Decree of the President, Ilham Aliyev. Its headquarters is in Baku, Azerbaijan. In February 2008, by the Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Elkhan Nuriyev was appointed director of the Center for Strategic Studies, known by the acronym SAM in Azerbaijani language.
Mustafa Aydın is a Turkish academic, writer, columnist, TV commentator, and public intellectual. He served as the Rector of Kadir Has University between 2010 and 2018; and currently is the President of the International Relations Council (UIK) of Turkey.
The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. Its publication in 1997 was well received in Russia; it has had significant influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites, and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. Powerful Russian political figures subsequently took an interest in Dugin, a Russian political analyst who espouses an ultranationalist and neo-fascist ideology based on his idea of neo-Eurasianism, who has developed a close relationship with Russia's Academy of the General Staff.
Neil Melvin is a researcher and policy practitioner in contemporary forms of conflict and the current Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Armed Conflict and Conflict Management Programme. He has published on issues of conflict, with a particular focus on ethno-religious issues in the former Soviet Union and in Asia. In recent years he has broadened his research to consider the impact of resources on conflict, notably the issue of energy and conflict.
Alexandros Petersen, known as Alexi or Alex, was an academic, writer and geopolitical energy expert. He is the author, among others, of the book "The World Island: Eurasian Geopolitics and The Fate of the West".
Elkhan Nuriyev is a political scientist and a recognized expert on Russia, Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Greater Middle East. He has published widely as a scholar, and he conducts regular briefings at the request of the international organizations and think tanks. He is frequently called on by government agencies, media, academic circles and private-sector institutions for comment and consulting on Russian foreign policy, Caucasus, wider Black Sea-Caspian Basin, Central Asia and regional security issues in post-Soviet Eurasia. In 2014, Nuriyev was a DAAD Senior Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. In 2015, he was a Humboldt Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. In 2017, Elkhan Nuriyev served as Corridors Fellow for Dialogue and Cooperation at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany. He is a Global Energy Associate at the Brussels Energy Club and is also a Senior Expert on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia at L&M Political Risk and Strategy Advisory in Vienna. In 2019, Nuriyev worked as a Humboldt Senior Fellow at Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien (ZOiS) / Centre for East European and International Studies. In 2020, he was an Eastern Europe-Global Area (EEGA) Fellow at the Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University. In 2021, Elkhan Nuriyev worked as a Think Visegrad Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (IFAT) in Budapest.
David Klimi Babayan is the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Artsakh. From 28 December 2013 he served as Head of the Central Information Department of the Artsakh Republic. He also served as the Deputy Chief of Staff in the office of the President of the Republic. On 26 May 2020, he was appointed as an adviser to the President on foreign relations. On 4 January 2021, Babayan was appointed the Minister of Foreign Relations taking over from Masis Mayilyan. He founded and currently leads the "Artsakh Conservative Party".
Energy diplomacy is a form of diplomacy, and a subfield of international relations. It is closely related to its principal, foreign policy, and to overall national security, specifically energy security. Energy diplomacy began in the first half of the twentieth century and emerged as a term during the second oil crisis as a means of describing OPEC's actions. It has since mainly focused on the securitization of energy supplies, primarily fossil fuels, but also nuclear energy and increasingly sustainable energy, on a country or bloc basis.
