Ongoing Series
Series 8: Vanguard States
This series analyses “vanguard states” which view themselves on the frontlines of civilizational struggle. It examines the kinds of national mythologies that these nations develop, and the subsequent effect of such mythologies on their foreign policies and regional geopolitics.
- Freikorps meets Mujahideen: How Russian invasion transformed Ukraine into a Neo-Nazi Incubator
- Enemy at the Gates: The Historical Roots of Modern Polish Nationalism
- Castles of Scar Tissue: Trauma Praetorianism in Interwar Poland and Contemporary Burma
Series 7: Hypotheticals of the stranger kind
As policymakers make hurried judgments with vast, life-altering consequences, they draw on a stock of intellectual capital assembled over decades. Every discipline — psychology, economics, biology, history — examines the world through a particular prism. Yet only fiction invites us inside the minds of others, transports us across time and place, and produces in us a kind of experience we could otherwise never attain. By enmeshing us in its characters and stories, reading fiction helps policymakers better understand the human condition, and more ably fashion responses to it.
Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security
This series explores geopolitics concepts through various science-fiction themes, premises and scenarios common in the science fiction media landscape. In doing so, it hopes that it can bridge common cultural discourse with gritty political realities, in the process more clearly articulating the mechanisms of global order/disorder and perhaps discovering a few new truths and pearls of wisdom hidden within our collective cultural imaginations.
- Abdicating Murder to the Machines: the Politics of Autonomous Killer Robots
- Final Pandemic: the Geopolitics of Zombie Outbreaks
- To Boldly Go: the Geopolitics of Space Colonization
Series 6: Unmasking the Middle East
The Middle East is an immensely complex region, explained by thousands of people in hundreds of ways. To provide a straightforward, but in-depth examination of the Middle East, this series will explain it through the framework of evaluating the greatest threats and developments several major states face. Thus, one can understand not just the Middle East, but the underlying mechanics and dynamics of different state and non-state actors who work in, around and for the Middle East.
- Chimeric State: Iran between Technocracy and Theocracy
- Game of Thrones: Saudi Arabia between Aristocracy and Absolutism
- Crossroad of Empires: Turkey between Brussels, Moscow and Washington
Series 5: Hydropolitics
A series analysing the politics and conflicts around water, ice, rivers and seas.
- Empire of Dams: China’s Hydroelectric Geostrategy and Conflicts
- Arctic Opportunity: Russian Roulette in a Warming World
- Thirsty Partition: Water Politics between India and Pakistan
Series 4: Anatomy of a Movement
A successful protest is not a loud complaint, a rambling production of noise, nor the establishment of a historical record of one’s opposition to something or another. A successful protest or demonstration is a negotiation, between movements and governments, measuring out both sides’ willingness to use their respective resources to inflict harm on each other and tolerate harm inflicted on themselves for the sake of achieving or conceding broader political or strategic goals. In other words, protest is politics by other means. This is the Clausewitzian thesis of Series 4, which analyses various movements to uncover how various methods, structures and approaches affected how they achieved, or failed to achieve their final objectives.
- Mindless Behemoth: The Tragedy of Leadership Absence in Hong Kong
- Frozen Catastrophe: Venezuela’s Neverending Nightmare
- Bucking the Trend: How peaceful protest won in Algeria
Series 3: The Rook’s Game
When it comes to geopolitics, middle powers with significant regional influence and autonomy of decision are often forgotten or disregarded as subsections of the wider Great Power Competition chessboard. However, these middle powers often possess substantial power as well as unique and specific strategies with different strengths and weaknesses and shine unique insights into regional politics. This series will analyse four substantial middle powers (France, Germany, Australia and Japan) that are often brushed aside as mere rooks within the United States’ broad coalition and seek to understand what their strategies are, how they work and what they have accomplished. As overviews of overall national geopolitical positions and strategies, these pieces are larger in scope than Series 1, which explored specific strategies.
- Returning Empire: Pan-Europa, African Order and other French Ambitions
- Cowardly Eagle: Germany’s Geopolitical Weakness despite Economic Dominance
- Shrinking Pacific: Australia’s Struggle for the Status Quo
- Rising Sun over Red Ocean: Japanese Power in a Chinese Asia
Series 2: Gaming in Geopolitics
How different popular video games represent geostrategic and political concepts and what that means for the future of modelling, teaching and understanding these concepts.
- Sid Meier’s Civilization: Geopolitical Realism vs Constructivism
- DotA: Tactical and Operational dynamics of war
- Europa Universalis IV: Mechanics and Sources of Political Development
Series 1: Mightier than the Sword
Series 1: Mightier than the Sword, looks at unique cases of political warfare which use unconventional and highly dangerous narratives to achieve regime interests.
It examines Russia, China and Syria to uncover how states can craft powerful narratives to recruit allies and weaken adversaries without the use of material assets, but also the troubling implications that using such means entails for the states in question as well as the world at large. Ultimately, it serves to prove the power of narratives in influencing the logic of politics and demonstrate that the diversity of forms of power extends far beyond material measures.
UnderStated 