Geopolitics: the Evolution of Ideas in the Context of Maintaining Peaceful Relations Between States

The article analyzes the main provisions of geopolitics, set out in the works of classics H.-J. Mackinder, R. Chellen, A.-T. Mechen, K. Haushofer, K. Schmitt, etc., as well as the main directions of implication changes in the main geopolitical positions. The aim of the article is to outline the main theoretical presentations of scholars who formed the basis of the geopolitical approach to the study of international relations, with a projection into the latest vision of geopolitics, its transformations and significance for the modern political world, secure coexistence, division of interests and balance of power.

The methodological basis of the study was the use of interdisciplinary combination of a number of approaches integrated from history, political science, theory of international relations based on general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, contextual analysis and generalization.

It is concluded that the common vision of researchers – theorists of geopolitics – is to understand the state as a separate spatial and geographical organism, whose features affect the specifics of its foreign policy priorities,
and accordingly – international communication. Today, they have formulated
the concept of confrontation based on naval power, although it continues to define the basic foreign policy doctrines of modern states, but does not remain the only and dominant. We believe that the eternal value of their ideas is the statement that taking into account ”geographical“ moments allows us to understand the true balance of power without the use of weapons, which, in our opinion, is an important factor in maintaining peaceful relations between states.

At the same time, the ambiguity and polarity of most modern critical publications, for example, on the ”Ukrainian question“ (although we are fair that most of them are partly journalistic theorizing that does not claim scientific analysis), serves as a kind of reinforcement of critical geopolitics on its verticality,
two-dimensionality, subordination, etc., which actually became the basis for
the formation of its alternative concepts in line with critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, alter-geopolitics, anti-geopolitics, biopolitics, etc.