The past few years have seen inter- and intra-state conflicts dominating the headlines. Rising casualties and destruction of public and private infrastructure are increasing economic misery and deepening existing societal fault lines. Reportage on all communication forms with the commentariat has led to one inescapable question—What is happening in geopolitics? Lots of interconnected events, actually.
Increasing flashpoints in several countries and regions—Gaza and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen—have been metamorphosing.
Each of these countries reveals how the legacies of the Second World War (1939-45) transformed into ideological extremes with absolute political personalities propped, leaving behind political, ideological and economic fissures compounded with a mix of societal divides in ethnic, historical, linguistic, pseudo-nationalist terms, hastening several sovereign states into becoming vacuum expressions, exhibiting anarchy and anomie.
Enthralling globalisation processes are determinants conveying economic success to be the only template of state legitimacy. The implosion of the erstwhile Soviet Union as an example to comprehend whether ‘stasis’ or ‘dynamic’ is better became a mantra for new-age economics.
The Second World War as security in theoretical and action terms came to an end decades ago, leaving behind devastated economic spheres globally, not restricted to Europe alone. Realism gave way to neo-realism, followed in tandem by Institutionalism and Constructivism.
With chaos appearing interminable, aren’t there any new theoretical vistas finding acceptance? Or, is theorising obsolescent?
Geographical differential markers with natural features like mountain ranges and rivers became zones of contestation, with newer political cultures announcing their arrival using force over negotiations. Rebecca West, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), comprehensively detailed the artificiality of Yugoslavia, brought together by empty ideological refrain for decades, unravelling with the Balkans remaking itself in the late 1990s.
Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia made new members joining the United Nations (UN)—over time, a mosaic advertising the success of one ideology over another. Newer spheres haemorrhaging geopolitical discourses beyond the Balkans were Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, former republics of the Soviet Union with maritime boundaries on the Black Sea and landlocked Caspian Sea.
These are countries with ingrained hostilities, making them regional powder kegs, until the next localised conflicts happen. Most of the new countries in these parts assumed being a member of the European Union (EU) would bring peace and prosperity to the living standards of established Western European countries. Not quite.
Transformations
The role of post-Second World War international institutional structures like the UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came under scrutiny for varied reasons.
First, do these institutions represent a past scheme of an ideological yesterday?
Second, is the comity of nations, the UN, being manipulated by one country, where the institution is based, with tacit support from countries that have had obnoxious histories as colonisers?
Third, have the ideals on which these totems were established been made hollow from within?
The answers to the questions are in the affirmative. Why and how? Has global security changed at all, or, are systemic ruptures intrinsic to current vacuity? Where are ideas in today라이브 바카라 international (in)security? Not answers, but many explanations are to be perceived.
The cataclysmic nature of geopolitics is, in many ways, to be traced to geo-economic rationale nowadays. Several countries mentioned earlier are coveted for their natural rare earths, fuel for the digital world and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
When Ukraine is belittled by the US and Russia, a wary world is silent when two erstwhile ideological opposites want to take away rare earth and critical minerals from Kiev, to profit. Geopolitics, by wearing a cloak of geo-economics, is indicative of technological/digital serfdom days in the coming years.
The inconsistent and irrational exuberance of the world라이브 바카라 supreme power—the United States—is reciprocated by several other countries to which international laws are a hindrance, with institutions they are a member of akin to revolving door diplomacy. The US considers the World Health Organization (WHO), and several other UN organisations as not worthy of any funding and illegal.
This behaviour from the founder of the UN and member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) lacks any legality and echoes irreverence for achieving global standards of participatory governance. The UN is the biggest loser in this with its impartiality scoffed at. The Gaza and Ukraine resolutions reveal setbacks to peace, a feature becoming determinant.
Ideals grafted aura to UN institutions for several decades, which are being eroded by established democracies with domestic conservative ballast. The US, Italy, Turkey, Germany and France are at the helm of internal democratic rainbows changing colour to suit agenda-spreading canards about those who have different views. The accepted structured versus personalised inchoateness has gained momentum with advertised technological fulcrums eroding political templates. Unmistakably, a collusive market decides the weakening.
Geopolitics and Geo-economics
It is to be inferred that perhaps the Westphalian interpretation of a state constricts civilisational expressions of people proud of their history, philosophy and cultural attributes. It appeals to a populace where perhaps there exists a spiritual vacuum and where the only panacea is the overwhelming influence of a material schema, where freedom is explained as choice in terms dictated by monetary values and individual freedom as the exemplar of democratic celebration.
Geo-economics lacks a conciliator aspect now and is more of a disruptor. A corporatist slant in geopolitics is discernible with Space emerging as the next zone for competition with lax international legal scrutiny. The controversial High Sea Treaty reveals a legal aggressiveness to identify the deep sea as a repository of minerals to be exploited for commercial purposes.
Will this treaty render the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) redundant? The US, while announcing its essentiality for maritime security, is yet to ratify UNCLOS.
Climate change is an issue of urgent importance as politics and economics are intertwined. Countries could face prolonged economic downturns if global warming induces ‘climate shock’, hobbling the stock markets and influencing events with strong domestic overtones leading to job losses and economic capacity rendered idle.
Influences impacting domestic politics are going to determine trajectories of geopolitics where the ‘external’ is decided by the ‘internal.’
Denials of global warming are worrying as they emanate from those responsible for this. Common initiatives leading to a consensual negotiating position at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where countries facing hostility from an organised plethora of interests, masquerading largely as civil society corporate interests, can be defused. This will also inspire other countries comprising G20 and BRICS to imbibe.
The Indo-Pacific is the new prism of international relations, much celebrated by the episteme of being the harbinger of the future of Asia-Pacific international relations. This concept requires theoretical approaches explaining the portmanteau and explanations basing the ideal as a construct not exclusive and involving China and India as two civilisational expressions needed to make the current impasse a thing of the past.
As a phraseology coined in the United States, India could convince China that this concept cannot work unless both countries forge a relationship where the Indo-Pacific is determined by the region, and not beyond, where the Atlantic countries have determined international relations for too long in a post- Second World War schema and now being dictated, especially with temperamental tantrums being policy in some places.
Borrowing from the adversary in verbal phraseology has been historical. The Chinese term weiji means ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity.’ When global geopolitics is a living paradigm of both, coalescing and cooperating by enriching and expanding known international multilaterals making interaction to include a wider panoply of collective interests motivating and guiding all members to express and not be kowtowed by the ‘irrational spoiler’ has to become central over peripheral.
Democracies, in effect, are hostage to domestic insecurities stemming from geo-economic aspects. Striking a balance requires the need for international geopolitics and geo-economics to evolve theoretical ballast to decipher, chronicle and juxtapose the ephemeral from the continuum. To conclude, the sovereign state in Westphalian terms has to re-invent itself or go the historical path backward to realms of influence, negating what we take for granted.
(Views expressed are personal)
Raviprasad Narayanan is faculty with Centre for East Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
This article is a part of 바카라's April 1, 2025 issue 'World At Reset', which explores the ongoing changes in the global geopolitical order. It appeared in print as 'Interminable Chaos'.
