100 books like Hidden Geopolitics

I found this book eminently readable. It’s like a story about borders, offering vivid portrayals of real conflictual political geographies. Dodds makes clear that borders play political, social, economic, and environmental roles that must be considered for any prospect of peace in the future.

This is the sort of book that educated readers, from college students to international jet setters, would find enlightening as to borders’ breadth of relevance in the 21st Century.

I was drawn to this book for its depth of thought and critical perspective on bordering as a process. Paulina Ochoa Espejo covers the rich ground of political geography, mixing philosophical considerations of human place-making and how borders are integral to that process.

I returned to various chapters of this book whilst writing about other topics and regions. The book pulls readers from their comfortable perspectives and compels both fruitful and necessary reconsiderations of borders. 

I’m drawn to this book for shaking the tree. The environment is commonly depicted as a global cause. This book explains how self-interest and varied forms of disparity framed by an infrastructure of borders impede efforts to mediate the negative impacts of human activity.

Rather, oxymoronically, territorial interests inhibit human capacity to extract from extant patterns and practices that harm the natural systems upon which we rely. This book shows the role of borders on environmental issues and the planetary impact of the nation-state system. This is not a screed or a sermon but a well-reasoned consideration of how the political geographies affect the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. 

While somewhat of a departure from my prior favorites in scope, I love this book because it is a deep dive into a specific stretch of border in 21st-century Central Asia. Though most may be unfamiliar with the myriad complexities at the juncture of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Nick Megoran’s ethnographic treatment offers a window into how borders in the 21st century are lived with and through.

This is because changing a border’s porosity alters the routes, businesses, educational opportunities, and relationships of people on both sides and beyond. Megoran’s book puts you on that border and compels you to think about how the decisions made in capital cities radically affect the citizens at the margins of state territories. 

This book has helped me to frame my own experiences of travel and how to write about other countries. In his wry, low-key, non-academic style, Marshall sweeps through history, arguing persuasively that geography—mountain ranges, seas, rivers, deserts, and so on—has been key to the rise and fall of empires and nations. Mountains form a natural barrier, not only to migration and commerce, but to invading armies; open plains make the movement of people, goods, and armies easier. Many national borders, especially those of former European colonies, are artificial and, unprotected by natural barriers, consequently fragile. Marshall, who has reported on conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, breaks down geopolitics in clear and simple terms, with insightful chapters on countries and regions.

Liz Economy’s grasp of international relations is compelling and insightful as she sets out to explain how China sees itself in the world, especially in the light of the pandemic. Looking to recover its past glory and status, China under Xi Jinping has seized both on what he sees as the West’s economic and political failings, and China’s own accomplishments and size to advance new agendas. At home, a leftward lurch resembles a throwback to the Mao era. In the world, China wants to reshape global institutions to reflect better its interests and to get others, for example in The Belt and Road, to support China’s narratives. 

How Xi intends to do this, whether he is likely to succeed and how the United States and the international community should respond and prepare for the challenge ahead will hold your attention to the last page.

The “company-states” of the book’s title include the East India companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their peers in other regions, like the Hudson’s Bay Company. These corporations enjoyed many of the powers of states: they hired troops, armed ships, waged war, and signed treaties with foreign rulers. Some came to govern empires. The authors explain how these hybrid geopolitical actors—part capitalist businesses, part polities—came to acquire a key role in global politics, and why they subsequently lost it. Modern multinationals can be geopolitical actors too, we imagine, but Phillips and Sharman show how different the capitalist order of the past was from the world we live in today.

Geopolitics shape economies. Success in global business depends on understanding the economies in which you operate. That’s why I’m a major fan of this book by Tim Marshall. He’s a former diplomatic editor and foreign correspondent who uses his experiences and research in a really compelling way.

When I was leading international expansion and strategy for HubSpot, a large public software company, one of the factors I had to look at to choose our next office locations was the political and economic stability of the different countries we were evaluating.

For anyone working at a global company, it’s important to understand the relationships between nations that often underpin local economies and dictate their future. 

The book that has come closest to making me think it may really all be about oil after all! Or energy at least. Although written before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thompson shows that the origins of the war go back far beyond 2014 or even 1991, but rather lie in the 1950s – when Anglo-French power in the MENA region was broken, first by the 1956 Suez War and then by Algeria’s secession from France in 1962, which in turn would lead to West Germany becoming dependent on the USSR for energy – a dependence that lasts to this day. Her account of the geopolitical consequences of the US fracking revolution is superb – prompting me to think that the Ukraine war can be seen as a battle over who will supply the European energy market. Once the LNG terminals in northern Europe are built, the US has… show more.

Although the Napoleonic Wars are most commonly discussed from a French perspective, with their roots in ideology and the Wars of the French Revolution, they are increasingly being understood as the climax of conflicts over power and colonial possessions that had raged between the major European powers across the long eighteenth century. In this hugely ambitious and highly readable book, Alex Mikaberidze considers the Napoleonic Wars as part of a wider global conflict in which France and Britain struggled for dominance, a conflict that extended to the Americas, Egypt, Iran, the Indian Ocean, even to China and Japan, and assesses their role in defining the post-war world.