11:00 - 13:15
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Manuel Bagues
Discussant/s:
Shared by Panellists
Meeting Room B

Michael Strebel
Trading Wealth for Political Control? The Political Economy of Territorial Reforms

Yael Shmaryahu Yeshurun
Political Geography: Class VS. Ethnicity in Contested Cities

Julio Cáceres, Antoni-Italo De Moragas, Gabriel Facchini, Ignacio González
Intergroup Contact and Nation Building: Evidence from Military Service in Spain

Manuel Bagues, Chris Roth
Interregional Contact and National Identity

Nuno Dr. Morgado
Geopolitical constraints? Explaining Geography and Potential in International Politics
Geopolitical constraints? Explaining Geography and Potential in International Politics
Nuno Dr. Morgado
Assistant Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest

The realist theoretical tradition and the (neo)classical geopolitical approach equally departure from the examination of the international systemic constraints to explain the external behavior of states. This paper is an attempt to gain insight into these international systemic constraints – or the distribution of capabilities – which exist in the international arena and which are considered as an independent variable, thus influencing the dependent variable (state’s behavior). Geopolitical studies, and their theoretical principles, in addition to the author’s pioneering definition of geopolitics, provide the angle of observation of the problem. The objectives help in structuring the research by (a) contextualizing potential and geography as pillars of the independent variable of the model of neoclassical geopolitics, (b) defining potential and explaining how potential can become a predictive tool of state’s behavior, (c) distinguishing potential from power, and (d) offering introductory traces on how to evaluate state’s potential through six geopolitical factors, at the same time, listing a set of difficulties that such a task carries. The objectives are, consequently, conceptual and operational. One of the innovative contributions of this paper is to place geography as, simultaneously, a set of factors of potential and a determinant of systemic constraints – the latter is concerned with the limitations imposed by geography, whereas the incentives open the possibilities for the intervening variables of the neoclassical geopolitics’ model (the geopolitical agent’s perceptions and capacities).