Geography remains the enduring core of international relations. It is not merely a question of where a country is located. The physical geography of mountains, plains, rivers, coastlines, and seas shapes how nations behave in both war and peace. While warfare and military technologies have evolved dramatically, the fundamental issues over which States continue to fight haven’t changed much: territory, sovereignty, and identity. Geography remains inseparable from these contests.
States and non-state actors alike continue to strategise, fight, and seek leverage through the opportunities and constraints imposed by geography. If the Russia-Ukraine war is being fought over a combustible concoction of territory and identity, conflicts in West Asia have demonstrated how geography itself can serve as a strategic asset, enabling actors such as Iran to challenge materially superior adversaries. Far from being sacrificed at the altar of globalisation, geography has reasserted itself with renewed force. Terrain, resource endowments, critical minerals, energy corridors, and transport routes across land and sea are shaping strategic calculations and driving State behaviour.
When geography strikes back
The return of competition with the great powers of the world is closely intertwined with renewed contests over markets, infrastructure, strategic chokepoints, migration flows, and access to resources. Energy security remains deeply influenced by crises in specific geographies, while climate change is producing uneven regional impacts. Geographical vulnerabilities and advantages are being tested in real time across contemporary conflict zones.
One of the clearest manifestations of this trend is the growing convergence of economics and geopolitics. Major powers increasingly deploy trade agreements, infrastructure financing, investment flows, technology partnerships, and supply chains as instruments of strategic influence. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) exemplifies this phenomenon through its network of ports, railways, roads, and pipelines spanning Eurasia and beyond. In response, the United States, the European Union, and like-minded partners have pushed ahead alternative connectivity initiatives, particularly across the Indo-Pacific.
The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, sanctions regimes, and intensifying geopolitical tensions have reinforced this reality. Global value chains once optimised primarily for efficiency are increasingly being reassessed through the lenses of resilience and security. Governments and corporations are diversifying suppliers, relocating production, and restructuring supply chains in response to geopolitical risks. Geography is clearly shaping where production takes place, how goods move, and which States command strategic leverage.
The rise of the Indo-Pacific as a significant geopolitical theatre further underscores the enduring importance of geography. At the heart of this competition lies the struggle for access to and influence over critical sea lanes, particularly in the South China Sea. The majority of global trade continues to move by sea, making ports, shipping routes, and maritime chokepoints indispensable to the global economy. The answers to the questions over who can secure and disrupt strategic waterways are becoming instrumental to wielding outsized regional influence with global ramifications. Consequently, naval modernisation, maritime partnerships, and maritime domain awareness have become central pillars of national security strategies. Instability in the Gulf and the Red Sea, coupled with the growing strategic significance of the Arctic amid climate change, further highlights the enduring power of geography.
Energy security reinforces this reality. Oil, natural gas, critical minerals, and electricity networks remain inseparable from physical geography. Pipelines, LNG terminals, refineries, power grids, and shipping routes as fixed assets derive their strategic value from location. The wars in Ukraine and West Asia have exposed the fragility of energy networks and intensified efforts to diversify supply sources and transit corridors. Geography also shapes access to critical minerals and rare earths that underpin advanced technologies and the global energy transition.
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Globalisation and geography
The advent of globalisation and new communication technologies led many to believe that geography was losing its relevance. As information, capital, goods, and people moved across borders with unprecedented speed, the world appeared to be becoming increasingly “flat.” Growing economic interdependence and institutionalised cooperation seemed to offer powerful incentives for peace, leading some to suggest that the traditional constraints of geography had been transcended.
Yet contemporary realities tell a different story. Globalisation may have altered how geography influences a country’s behaviour, but it has not diminished its importance. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, confidence had begun to erode in unrestrained globalisation. The 2008–09 global financial crisis exposed the fragility of economic integration, while America’s prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq underscored the enduring relevance of geography even in an era of unprecedented connectivity. The seeds of the Russia-Ukraine conflict were already visible in the 2014 Crimea crisis, where competing visions of territorial control, strategic depth, and alliance expansion revealed the geography of great-power rivalry.
The subsequent rise of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic construct and the return of large-scale land warfare to Eastern Europe marked the revival of both maritime and continental geopolitics. While technological innovations have transformed the conduct of warfare, the underlying drivers of conflict remain deeply rooted in geography-territory, sovereignty, borders, resources, and identity. This contemporary version of the old battles is being shaped not in opposition to technology, but through its interaction with technology, economics, security, and politics.
Information may flow across borders with little regard for distance, but the physical realities of land, sea, air, and space continue to structure the movement of people, goods, energy, and power.
Even the digital economy remains anchored in geography. Data centres, semiconductor facilities, undersea cables, satellite ground stations, and critical mineral supply chains are concentrated in specific locations, creating new dependencies and vulnerabilities. Climate change is amplifying the strategic significance of location and land. Melting Arctic ice is opening new maritime routes and intensifying competition over resources and influence, while rising sea levels are raising complex questions of sovereignty, migration, military basing, and economic resilience.
Technological advances that have given rise to long-range missiles, drones, satellites, and cyber capabilities have not eliminated the significance of geography. They all depend on physical infrastructure, terrain, and access points. Concepts such as anti-access/area denial, strategic depth, island chains, littoral operations, and maritime chokepoints remain central to military planning.
The verdict is clear: geography still matters and will matter. Therefore, in times to come, the primary challenge will remain how effectively States can leverage their geographical strengths and mitigate their vulnerabilities in an increasingly competitive world.
Monish Tourangbam is a Fellow at the Chintan Research Foundation (CRF), New Delhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)