Political Geography: Boundaries and Frontiers, Heartland and Rimland, Federalism and Elections in India, Resource and Climate Geopolitics, the Indian Ocean and Regional Organisations

Halford Mackinder's paper "The Geographical Pivot of History" (1904) argued that the age of sea power was ending and that railways would allow a land power controlling the inner, river-drained and sea-inaccessible core of Eurasia — the pivot area — to dominate. In Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) he renamed it the Heartland, surrounded by an inner (marginal) crescent of Europe and monsoon Asia and an outer (insular) crescent of Britain, Japan, the Americas and Australia, and gave his famous dictum: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the World." In 1943 he added a "Midland Ocean" (the North Atlantic) as a counterweight. Nicholas Spykman (America's Strategy in World Politics, 1942; The Geography of the Peace, 1944) inverted the argument: power lies in the densely peopled, resource-rich coastal belt of Eurasia, the Rimland — "Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world." Spykman's view underlay the post-war strategy of containment. Other classic contributions are Alfred Thayer Mahan's sea power (1890), Alexander de Seversky's air power (1950) and Saul Cohen's geostrategic regions and "shatterbelts".

Trends in political geography run through four phases. The discipline began with Friedrich Ratzel's Politische Geographie (1897) and his organic theory of the state, which needs living space (Lebensraum) to grow; its distortion by Karl Haushofer's German Geopolitik discredited the field after 1945. It revived through the functional approach: Hartshorne (1950) analysed states through the balance of centripetal forces (a unifying state-idea, circulation, shared identity) and centrifugal forces (physical barriers, regional, linguistic or religious divisions); Jean Gottmann (1952) paired circulation, which unsettles, with iconography, the symbols that bind; Stephen Jones's unified field theory (1954) linked a political idea through decision, movement and field to a politically organised area. From the 1980s a world-systems political geography (Peter J. Taylor) and critical geopolitics (Gearóid Ó Tuathail, 1996), which studies how geopolitical knowledge is itself constructed, reshaped the subject, alongside the older electoral geography and the geography of federalism.

Federalism divides sovereignty between a central government and regional units, and its geography is the fit between those units and the country's regional diversity. India is described by the Constitution as a "Union of States" and by K.C. Wheare as quasi-federal: a strong centre, a single constitution and citizenship, but states with their own legislatures and lists of subjects. Its territorial design has repeatedly been redrawn in response to centrifugal pressure — the States Reorganisation Commission (1953–55) and the linguistic states of 1956, the north-eastern states of the 1960s–80s, and the new states of 2000 and 2014. Centre–state relations were reviewed by the Sarkaria Commission (1983–88) and the Punchhi Commission (2007–10), and the fiscal side is managed by the Finance Commission under Article 280, which divides tax revenue between the Union and the states and among the states by formulas weighting population, area, income distance and forest cover.

Electoral geography began with André Siegfried's study of western France (1913). The determinants of electoral behaviour in India include caste, religion, class, language and region, party identification, the candidate, incumbency and anti-incumbency, welfare delivery and the media; the geographer adds place. V.O. Key (1949) identified the friends-and-neighbours effect — candidates poll disproportionately well near their home areas — and Kevin Cox (1969) the neighbourhood effect, by which voters are influenced by the prevailing opinion of the people around them. The drawing of constituencies matters too: gerrymandering (named after Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, 1812) manipulates boundaries for partisan advantage by "packing" or "cracking" opponents' voters, and malapportionment gives constituencies very unequal populations — the problem the delimitation freeze has gradually created in India.

The geopolitics of climate change turns on the unequal distribution of responsibility and vulnerability. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities divides historical emitters from developing countries; the Alliance of Small Island States presses for 1.5 °C because sea-level rise threatens their existence; a fund for loss and damage was agreed at COP27 (2022); and warming is opening the Arctic — the Northern Sea Route and seabed resources — to new competition among Russia, the United States, China and the Nordic states. The geopolitics of world resources — and what the document calls their "neopolitics" — is the contest over supply and chokepoints: about a fifth of world oil trade passes the Strait of Hormuz; China dominates the mining and, even more, the processing of rare-earth elements; the "lithium triangle" of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, deep-seabed minerals and the Arctic are new frontiers; and shared rivers breed tension, from Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile to the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which India placed in abeyance in April 2025.

The Indian Ocean (the document's "India Ocean") carries the sea lanes linking the Gulf's oil and East Asia's factories, funnelled through chokepoints — the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca and the Indonesian straits of Sunda and Lombok. China's growing presence — port investments at Gwadar (Pakistan), Hambantota (Sri Lanka, leased for 99 years in 2017) and Kyaukphyu (Myanmar), and a naval base at Djibouti (2017) — has been called a "string of pearls". India's response combines the Andaman and Nicobar Command (2001), the doctrine of SAGAR ("Security and Growth for All in the Region", 2015), naval partnerships including the Quad, and forums such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association (1997) and the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (2008); the United States keeps its base at Diego Garcia.