human-meaning

In 1532, Francisco Pizarro captured the Incan emperor Atahualpa with 168 Spanish soldiers. The Inca Empire had millions of subjects and a sophisticated administration. Spain was a small European kingdom an ocean away. How did 168 men conquer an empire? The standard answer: guns, germs, and steel. But behind that

Why Maps Explain More Than History Books Here's a question that should bother you: Why did Europe colonize Africa instead of the reverse? Standard answers invoke technology, institutions, or culture. But there's a layer beneath all of them that rarely gets credit: geography. Europe has navigable

In 2015, journalist Tim Marshall published Prisoners of Geography, a book that did something unusual: it made geopolitics popular. Within a few years, it had sold over a million copies and introduced geographic thinking to readers who'd never heard of Mackinder or Spykman. Marshall's contribution wasn&

Peter Zeihan makes a provocative claim: the world order that has existed since 1945 is ending, and most countries aren't ready. For nearly 80 years, the United States guaranteed global security—open sea lanes, stable trade, protection for allies. This wasn't altruism; it was Cold War

We've covered a lot of ground: mountains and rivers, heartlands and rimlands, demographics and trade, water and oil, climate and conflict. Now let's pull the threads together and ask: what does geographic thinking actually tell us about power and politics? The honest answer is: more than

Between 2006 and 2010, Syria experienced the worst drought in its recorded history. Rural areas were devastated. Crops failed. Livestock died. Farmers abandoned villages and flooded into cities already strained by Iraqi refugees and unemployment. In 2011, protests began. Within a year, Syria was in civil war. Half a million