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PDFA regime’s geographical location may provide access to resources and a temporary respite from democratic demands, but not for long, according to a new analysis.
In Russia, for instance, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, “have had no uplifting ideas to offer, no ideology of any kind, in fact: what they do have in their favor is only geography. And that is not enough,” writes Robert D. Kaplan, in The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate.
“That same geography ‘commands a perennially tense relationship between Russia and China,’ even as a shared commitment to authoritarian government and sovereign prerogatives pushes their regimes together,” writes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor of politics and international affairs.
But, contrary to Kaplan’s determinism and foreign policy ‘realism,’ geography is not destiny, says the former State Department policy planning director:
Social media and mass data flows of all kinds now give us the ability to see and represent human interactions as never before, mapping emotions, desires, aspirations and connections. The intersection of millions of small worlds can now be tracked and visualized: human galaxies every bit as dense and complex as the stars above.
“The result will be a new discipline of sociography,” says Slaughter, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group:
In the end, the revenge of geography will be the revenge of human as well as physical geography: a world much more, and much more democratically, of our making.
Kaplan may argue that the brightly colored patches of sovereign territory on a two-dimensional map obscure Nature’s primordial blueprint, but citizens now have incentives to obscure the lines of their governments with the demarcations of their own communities, imagined and real.
In the end, the revenge of geography will be the revenge of human as well as physical geography: a world much more, and much more democratically, of our making.
