Review of Bert Chapman's "Geopolitics: A guide to the issues" (2011).

As the author suggests in the introduction to "Geopolitics: A guide to the issues," the book is a guide that seeks to introduce “students, scholars, and curious readers to the burgeoning literature of geopolitics” (p. 5). Thus the objective of the book is to serve as a guide, rather than a synthesis, of geopolitical source material. However, the book’s audience is not only expert researchers, but also lay readers interested in conducting their own substantive research on the geographical aspects of international affairs.

The author provides eight chapters, plus map appendix and glossary, organized neither chronologically nor thematically but by “source” of information about geopolitics. Admittedly, each chapter is a selection of source material more than it is a complete inventory or even representative sample. The method by which certain personalities, countries, hot spots, or geopolitical scholars are chosen is not always elaborated at length, but the author’s intention is simply to give its readers a sense of the distribution and abundance of information across the vast ecosystem of publicly available source material on the subject of geopolitics. The book leaves it to the reader to sample and sort through that diverse ecosystem of information for the purpose of coming to conclusions or posing potential policy actions.

Chapter 1 introduces the history of geopolitics and presents eighteen key personalities in alphabetical order, all of whom are Western thinkers active during the early to mid-20th century. Chapter 2 presents thirteen selected countries and their geopolitical practices, again organized alphabetically, often defense white papers and annual reports published by the countries themselves. Chapter 3 on current and emerging geopolitical hot spots is another alphabetical list of 34 “hot spots,” mixing geographic locations of concern like the “Caspian Sea” and geopolitical issues without precise location like “Globalization.” Chapters 4 through 7 are bibliographic essays organized, again, by source. For example, Chapter 5 covers monographic scholarly literature while Chapter 6 concerns itself with indexes and scholarly journals. Each chapter is sub-categorized in various unique ways. For instance, Chapter 5 on monographic scholarly literature compares classical and critical geopolitical scholarship published since the 1980s. Chapter 8 presents brief biographical essays about eleven geopolitical scholars, which like the closely related Chapter 5 is organized on the basis of the sub-categories classical and critical geopolitical scholarship. The Appendix of maps is disappointing at first glance, but since the book was not intended as a geopolitical atlas one can only speculate as to whether the Appendix was the result of the need to include a limited assortment of common reference map sources to orient the reader to the countries and locations mentioned throughout the book.

As noted above, the book was not intended to do the heavy cognitive lifting work of synthesizing factual information from the vast ecosystem of currently publicly available information about geopolitics for the purpose of building evidence leading to a particular scholarly conclusion or policy decision. So then what exactly is the value of this kind of book to geopolitics, one might ask?
Many years ago, the esteemed American interdisciplinary scientist (and political scientist) Herbert Simon in his seminal book on administrative behavior suggested that the problem of political decision making was just the familiar problem of intra-organizational information processing. Decision makers are constantly in danger of drowning in a sea of information, so they have to learn to attend to information but attend selectively. Simon described the problem of attention and memory for organizations along two principal dimensions. First there was the organizational problem of relations between “experts” and “laymen,” two different kinds of “information processors” with different ways of selecting and attending to information. Then there was the problem of relations between people and computers, also two very different kinds of “information processors,” particularly with respect to symbolic reasoning. Simon considered these two dimensions and their relationships as a whole, in what he termed the “science of information processing,” i.e., relations between and among powerful artificial information-processing capabilities that do not reason per se; and at the same time, relations between and among human information-processing capabilities evolved to engage in symbolic reasoning but limited in terms of memory and attention.

One is challenged to find any other book on geopolitics intent on organizing its content for both experts and lay readers by source of information, including entirely new species of information about geopolitics. For instance, Chapter 7 is entirely devoted to new sources of information about geopolitics covering “Gray Literature: Dissertations, Theses, Technical Reports, Think Tank Publications, Conference Proceedings, and Blogs and Social Networking Utilities.” Ordinarily, chapter organization is something of concern only for the author or the editor, and does not merit much attention by the reader other than simply being a way of sequencing substantive content so that one can absorb a book in manageable portions. But we can read in the organization of the book itself a message about geopolitics. Instead of seeing geopolitical thought solely in terms of its final policymaking products often with a controversial history, or as a set of scholarly premises and conclusions with potential application to policy that can be classified into classical versus critical, we can see geopolitical thinking itself as a technology-supported cognitive activity by both decision making experts and affected laypeople of filtering out and processing new sources of information in order to draw conclusions about relationships in geographic space for the purpose of guiding choices and actions.

Geopolitics has always been a form of spatial thinking and information processing characterized by the use of narrative descriptions and graphic representations of geographical settings (e.g., maps). So what happens when the nature and abundance of these narrative descriptions and graphic representations of geographical settings are significantly altered by things like new information technologies? Maps themselves have undergone a widening of production from individual map copiers and printing presses to publishing on the Internet; a widening of creation from specialized cartographers to hundreds of thousands of GIS users; and finally, a widening of data and information provisioning itself, where map producers have become their own data providers through geospatially-enabled mobile devices and technology-supported networks like spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). The unique organization of this book and its content forces one to reconsider a number of interesting questions about unknown or unanticipated effects on geopolitical policy actions in the future as a result of our exposure to a new ecosystem of information, radically altered by the power of computing and a growing broadly-based mixing zone between expert and lay forms of geopolitical reasoning.

Robert Aguirre