This article was automatically translated from the original Turkish version.
Human activities, despite their immense diversity in purpose, style, and content, share a commonality in that they all occur within specific spaces. For a military maneuver, the terrain serves as the space; for the evacuation of a school during an emergency, the school building is the space; for a hashtag campaign, a specific social media platform functions as the space. Equating space with the spatial dimension of the physical world constitutes a significant obstacle to properly understanding the inherent heterogeneity embedded in this concept. Indeed, unlike the concept of space, which is widely used in the natural sciences to imply a uniform void, space is a concrete entity whose heterogeneity offers distinct opportunities and constraints within human activities. For instance, varying slopes on a terrain may render certain locations suitable for military maneuvers while making others unsuitable. The design of a school building may increase survival chances during disasters by facilitating the evacuation of students in certain classrooms, while simultaneously reducing them in others. The visibility policies of a social media platform may enhance the popularity of certain accounts while acting as a handicap for others. Ultimately, thinking about space requires directly considering the constraints and facilitations it offers for human activities in any given field.
The discipline of international relations distinguishes itself positively from other social sciences through its strong emphasis on the determining influence of space. At the heart of this emphasis in international relations is the concept of geography. Over certain periods, the determinative role of geography and geographic location in interstate interactions has become so fundamental within international relations scholarship that the term geopolitics—literally meaning “geographic politics”—has long been used synonymously with the realist approach, which interprets international relations primarily through the lens of power. The fundamental reason for this is that the concept of power, central to realism, is nearly impossible to conceive independently of geography. It is therefore unsurprising that Hans Morgenthau, the first systematic realist thinker in modern international relations, placed geographic location, natural resources, and population at the top of his list of building blocks of national power. While natural resources and population directly constitute a state’s raw power, geographic location determines the extent to which this raw power can be effectively projected among actors. Thus, placing geography at the center of mainstream international relations approaches reveals two important implications regarding the relationship between power and geography: (1) The emergence of power is directly linked to the opportunities provided by geography. Following Morgenthau’s example, the superpower status of the United States and the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century was a consequence of their geographic capacity for food self-sufficiency. In this sense, a geography capable of producing sufficient yields to feed its population is a necessary condition for superpower status. (2) The quantity of power a state possesses can be efficiently transformed into foreign policy outcomes within the constraints and opportunities offered by geography. The United States’ ability throughout the 19th century to protect its mainland from foreign invasions without maintaining a standing army is undoubtedly the result of being bordered by two vast oceans. Its limited power was thus effectively converted into a highly efficient defensive posture thanks to its secure geography.
Interestingly, the strong emphasis on geography in realism experienced a significant interruption beginning in the 1970s. It is necessary to highlight the role played by Structural Realism (or, popularly, Neo-realism), which emerged during this period and is regarded as the founding school of contemporary international relations theory. Kenneth Waltz’s neo-realist approach, developed to establish international relations on solid theoretical foundations, treated international politics as a unified system in which states were identical entities differentiated solely by their relative power (Waltz 1979). This theoretical framework marginalized geography in international politics in two distinct ways: (1) The tendency to view all states as equivalent components of a single system severely limited the possibility of examining how geography’s constraining and facilitating effects shape interstate relations. In this view, the international system resembled not an authentic space with its own heterogeneous characteristics but rather a homogeneous void composed of empty space. States were imagined as billiard balls moving across a frictionless surface, while geographic elements such as rivers, oceans, deserts, and mountains—which significantly hinder or facilitate interactions among states—were entirely ignored. (2) Although power occupied a central role in neo-realist theory, it was valued more for its outcomes than its causes. Human and physical geographic factors directly linked to the production of power were treated as components of domestic politics and excluded from analysis. This led to the perception of geography’s role in power as exogenous and its relegation outside the explanatory framework of the state system.
The limitations of analyzing international politics when geography is neglected become evident in the historical development of the realist school. Neo-realist successors of Waltz, such as Mearsheimer, Walt, Glaser, Christensen, and Snyder (1990), recognized that realism’s capacity to explain concrete patterns in interstate relations suffered a striking erosion once geography was abstracted away. They therefore sought ways to reintegrate geography into Waltz’s theoretical framework. Traces of this effort can be seen in Mearsheimer’s conceptualization of the “tyranny of geography,” frequently invoked in his works (Mearsheimer 2001). With this concept, Mearsheimer emphasizes that geography is the greatest obstacle to large-scale power projection beyond a great power’s borders. Thus, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans prevented the United States from establishing full hegemony in Europe and East Asia after both World Wars due to the enormous material costs of maintaining continuous supply lines across these oceans. Consequently, rather than expanding its borders and establishing vast hegemony in these regions, the United States opted to sustain its influence through regional alliances such as NATO and SEATO. Similarly, Stephen Walt, in his analysis of alliance patterns in the Middle East, placed at the center of his analysis not Waltz’s abstract concept of “balance of power” but the concept of “balance of threat,” which incorporates a strong geographic emphasis. While the balance of power focuses on the distribution of capabilities, the balance of threat argues that when a state’s projected power is constrained by geography, it is not perceived as a threat by rivals and therefore does not trigger balancing behavior (Walt 1990). The fact that within just a decade of neo-realism’s launch, its own students delivered such fundamental critiques based on geography demonstrates how hollow a realism detached from geography becomes. Yet this should not lead to the misconception that geography has now regained its rightful place in international relations theory. Despite half a century having passed since Waltz’s work, his legacy in this context remains alive and influential. The strongest evidence for this is that even in contemporary international relations scholarship, both theoretical and empirical literature still contains relatively few studies focused on geography.
At the core of the criticisms leveled by Waltz’s realist successors lies certain theoretical tensions in how neo-realism approaches the issue of geography. As previously noted, neo-realism brackets the two primary roles of geography in international politics—(1) as a source of power and (2) as providing states with differentiated capacities for power projection—and refuses to treat it as an explanatory variable. As those familiar with neo-realist theory will recognize, this theoretical choice rests on shaky grounds for several reasons:
(1) We know that geography facilitates access to power through a state’s human and physical endowments, while simultaneously hindering it under other conditions. Power, as the central variable in neo-realist theory, distinguishes states from one another and exerts wide-ranging effects, from micro-level power balances to macro-level systemic configurations such as multipolarity and unipolarity. Given this, is it reasonable to treat geography—the most significant determinant of power—as merely a component of domestic politics and exclude it from analysis? Can the diverse patterns emerging from global power distributions be properly understood while ignoring the geographic factors that are tightly bound to power’s causality?
(2) Is it accurate to assume that international politics is a unified system devoid of geographic fragmentation and division? When considering how geographic features create barriers or opportunities for state interactions, it is highly plausible—and even intuitively necessary—to conceptualize geography as a systemic feature of the international system in the neo-realist sense and incorporate it into analysis. While theoretically possible and commonsensical, what is the benefit of persistently treating international relations as if it unfolds in a frictionless environment, detached from geographic realities?
Those familiar with Waltz’s intellectual orientation will likely respond to these questions by invoking the principle of parsimony: although geography enhances the explanatory power of neo-realism regarding observed patterns in international politics, its inclusion would significantly increase theoretical complexity and therefore should be excluded. While this is a reasonable argument in itself, we must not dismiss the possibility that neo-realism’s indifference to geography stems from a deeper, more political, and less theoretical motive. Indeed, neo-realism emerged as an intellectual movement within American political science during the height of American global hegemony, with the mission of rationalizing the dynamics of great power politics. This is most strikingly evident in Waltz’s complete absence of any meaningful analysis of the role of small and medium-sized states in international politics. On the contrary, for Waltz, systemic effects on states are entirely a function of the distribution of power among the great powers.
This central role assigned to great powers inevitably diminishes the importance of geography. Unlike small and medium-sized states, great powers possess extensive capability pools that enable them to overcome geographic constraints. These capabilities include not only military but also economic and technological dimensions: for example, overseas naval power (aircraft carriers), strategic airlift fleets, global logistics networks, and military bases scattered across the world all mitigate the constraining effects of geography. The United States’ current ability to project power effortlessly to any point on the globe, as if not bounded by oceans on either side, stems from material resources unmatched by any other state. Yet this remains an exclusive privilege of great powers, both historically and today. For small and medium-sized states, geography defines the natural limits of their foreign policy. States lacking the resources necessary to project power across the earth’s surface feel the constraining effects of geography intensely. Thus, resisting the constraining power of geography is feasible only for great powers, making geography an expendable variable in any theoretical approach whose sole aim is to explain great power politics.
On the other hand, a great-power-centered theoretical approach also leads to ignoring geography’s role in shaping the very origins of state power in human and physical terms. State power is built upon a material foundation: fertile agricultural land, navigable rivers, strategic ports, easily accessible mineral deposits, and energy resources. In the past four centuries, which we designate as the modern era, nearly all states that achieved great power status—such as Great Britain (coal deposits and island geography), the United States (vast and fertile lands and abundant natural resources), and Russia (enormous landmass and energy reserves)—exercised control over extensive and rich natural endowments. Undoubtedly, this reflects the notion that broad geographic resources are almost a prerequisite for great power status. Yet precisely because of this tight link between geographic resources and great power status, such resources become treated as constants in analyses of great power interactions and thereby lose their explanatory significance. After all, since all great powers observed within a specific historical period already possess these foundational capabilities, this factor no longer functions as an explanatory variable in explaining their dynamics. Consequently, when our sample consists exclusively of great powers, extensive geographic resources cease to be an explanatory factor. However, when we shift our lens to medium and small powers occupying more modest positions in the global system, the picture changes entirely. At this level, geography is not a constant but one of the most important variables. A vast disparity emerges in power, prosperity, and foreign policy capacity between a petroleum-rich Gulf state and a resource-poor African country, or between a mountainous landlocked state and one with an extensive coastline. For this reason, neo-realism, by centering its focus on great power politics, has overlooked geography’s role in generating power.
In conclusion, although traditional approaches to international politics, especially realism, have historically accorded significant importance to geography and geographic factors, their modern variants have departed from these traditional lines by analyzing interstate politics as if detached from geographic realities. This tendency stems from the relative neglect of geography’s role in analyzing great power politics, which became a primary priority for American academia during the Cold War. Despite internal disciplinary reactions against this tendency, it remains difficult to claim that contemporary mainstream international relations has fully shed its historical legacy. Geography, particularly in academic scholarship, is still treated as a secondary, non-systematic, and expendable factor. Therefore, when analyzing the foreign policy of medium-sized powers such as Türkiye, it is essential to move beyond current international relations trends and re-center geography as it was traditionally understood. This approach demonstrates that only through a substantive intellectual engagement with the dynamics of Türkiye’s own geographic context can its foreign policy be meaningfully guided.
Author: Abdullah Kabaoğlu.
