Strategic Culture & Identity in Geopolitics

Geopolitics is universally understood as the study of the relationship between geography and political power. Yet geographical conditions do not often determine state’s behaviour directly, they are filtered by identities, historical experiences, collective representations, and strategic cultures to ultimately acquire a political meaning. The model of analytical geopolitics (Morgado, 2023) integrated these aspects into a set of intervening variables (the geopolitical agents’ perceptions and capacities). In this line of thought, this panel proposes to advance geopolitics as a science by examining identity and strategic culture, discussing how states (and possibly even other political actors) interpret their geographical environments and transform these interpretations into political and strategic action.
The panel starts from the premise that state’s behaviour cannot be often explained through material capabilities, territorial position, or spatial constraints alone. The same geographical environment may generate radically different strategic perceptions depending on how geopolitical agents perceive their history, identity, borders, threats, opportunities, and place in the international system. Strategic culture provides an important bridge between these subjective interpretations and observable foreign and security policies, while identity helps explain why particular geographical spaces acquire symbolic, historical, and political significance.
The panel therefore invites theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore the relationship between geography, identity, strategic culture, and foreign policy. Contributions may examine how national identities shape geopolitical designs, how historical memories influence perceptions of territory, how strategic cultures evolve in response to changes in the international system, and how geopolitical agents perceive their country’s geographical position and strategic role.