Commentary. Re-reading Bowman, Re-thinking Geopolitics

Abstract

this paper comments Geography versus Geopolitics, written in 1942 by Isaiah Bowman and published by the Geographical Review. In these lines it is argued that the aforementioned text, despite being the product of his geographic activism and beyond it, the result of a complex political context, if re-read in a critical view could be considered as an interesting reference for the contemporary Geopolitics. Indeed, what Bowman intended with his work was to deconstruct the old German Geopolitik, an ideological tradition that condensed, in its assumptions and in its procedures, most of the epistemological defects of Classical Thought, still detectable in some current ways of conceiving Geopolitics.