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Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century. In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History" to a packed house at the Royal Geographical Society in London about the historic changes then taking place on the world stage. Britain was the great power of that historical moment, but its political, military, and economic primacy was under serious challenge from the United States, Germany, and Russia. Mackinder predicted that the "heartland" of Eastern Europe held the key to global hegemony and that the struggle for control over this region would be the next great conflict. Ten years later, when an assassin's bullet in Sarajevo launched the world into a calamitous war, Mackinder's analysis proved prescient. As esteemed historian Jeremy Black argues in this timely new volume, the 2020s may be history's next great pivot point. The continued volatility of the global system in the wake of a deadly pandemic exacerbates these pressures. At the same time, the American public remains divided by the question of engagement with the outside world, testing the limits of US postwar hegemony. The time has come for a reconsideration of the 120 years from Mackinder's lecture to now, as well as geopolitics of the present and of the future.

An entirely new form of virtual weaponry is transforming the dynamics of geopolitics. The threat of cyber warfare is not new. The Internet was a product of the Cold War built in the 1960s by US military scientists to protect American communications infrastructure against a Soviet nuclear strike. Nearly a half century later, those threats remain. Today, however, cyber weapons are not only in hands of enemy and rogue states, but are being exploited by isolated individuals ranging from bored teenagers to wild-eyed terrorists. Today the impact of Web 2.0 goes beyond political mobilisation inside countries and digital diplomacy between states. It now includes virtual weaponry that has brought an entirely new form of warfare which is transforming the dynamics of geopolitics. We call this new global reality Geopolitics 2.0, which is –broadly speaking– characterised by three significant shifts: (1) states to individuals; (2) real-world to virtual mobilisation and power; and (3) old media to new media. Forced to react to the impact of these three Geopolitics 2.0 shifts, states are alternatively censoring or deploying Web platforms to achieve their goals and assert their influence –and in some cases, they are doing both–.

Garofano reviews 'Rethinking Geopolitics' edited by Gearoid O. Tuathail and Simon Dalby.

Geopolitics is a topic that again has taken the frontline in discussions of how to interpret Russia's foreign policy or Russia's relations with the West. Geopolitical thinking in Russia has often been identified with different schools of neo-Eurasianism, extreme versions of which contain expansionist, nationalist ideas. However, these schools do not characterize university teaching of geopolitics in Russia as a whole. Instead, teachers of geopolitics focus mainly on introducing various theoretical models and criticizing representatives of neo-Eurasianism. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate with survey data that there are differences in what we might call the published discipline and the taught discipline of geopolitics in Russia.