The trajectory of Geopolitics: from the academic ostracize after Second War to the development of Critical Geopolitics

Abstract

The present study mainly aims at analyzing the history of geopolitics as an area of knowledge, taking the post-World War II period up to the emergence of the Critical Geopolitics current in the 1990s as the temporal selection. Before writing about this geopolitics’ trajectory in the selected period, a conceptual and theoretical distinction between geopolitics and political geography will be approached, since the study presented here refers to geopolitics only, without going into the merits of political geography, therefore the importance of distinguishing these areas, which are frequently treated in a mistaken way as the same thing. It is important to emphasize that geopolitics went through several changes during the studied period, going from its classical period, also called the golden age, to an ostracism and academic banishment, and rearising in the Cold War’s final years, recovering the classical geopolitics’ purposes, as well as the emergence of new currents, such as the case of Critical Geopolitics, in the 1990s.