Geopolitics

by Bernard Coupé

Content

Within the framework of international trade, it is of huge importance to be able to understand, define and react to commercial and political risks that may arise in the countries of clients with whom one is dealing. Within this perspective, geopolitics is a tool for apprehending reality, understanding events and the models used to classify countries in function of the economic, political and financial risks they represent.

The content of this course has been developed in order to enable participants to achieve a certain number of objectives that could be defined as follows:

• How to classify information available about countries and the risks they might present. Finding information is no longer a problem, but sorting it out is.
• Identifying the available geopolitical tools of analysis and using them wisely.
• Making a critical analysis of the tools available for political and/or economic classifications of countries. How to use them.

An overall knowledge of geopolitics permits an approach to the reality of a country via a body of different and complementary interpretations, without forgetting the mathematical models for ranking countries, each of which, in its own way, grasps this reality at a given moment. The key notions are as follows:

• Classic geopolitical descriptions (land, sea, personal space, competition, etc.)
• Permanent factors of geopolitics:
• Geographic perception
• Identity perception
• Perception via available resources.
• Factors of transformation in geopolitics (technical and industrial revolution, changes in “space-time” relationships, etc…)
• Globalisation
• Country ranking: types of risk (corruption, political, economic, etc.), selection of relevant risks in function of user needs, indicative factors of risk and modeling.

Pedagogy

The teaching methods used in this course enable participants to:

• discuss the multiculturality covered elsewhere in the programme but through the provision of geopolitical explanations;
• dismantle and explain the prevailing mechanisms used by rating agencies and credit insurers for classifying countries in terms of risk.
• discover their own perception of things and understand the complexity of countries in their daily reality and the importance of multidisciplinarity.

The pedagogy used is based solely on practical cases that oblige participants to make concrete analyses. This signifies:

• The use of a specific country as a common theme throughout the day (e.g. Turkey, India, Mexico);
• The use of specific current cases to explain certain concepts and to facilitate the constant link between theory and reality.

The main notions of geopolitics are always explained using current examples or instances taken from recent history. Participants can thus use the country employed as their theme to understand these notions in relation to a real case.

Articles from current editions of the international press also provide excellent teaching tools and these help participants to discover and clarify notions that are sometimes somewhat tedious both to explain and to listen to. Articles on economics frequently provide an excellent understanding of geopolitics.

The course also includes some more relaxed and fun moments in the guise of competitions:

• Which are the top ten oil exporting countries?
• Which of these are members of OPEC?
• What are the names of the Presidents of India and China?
• Name ten members of the Commonwealth… etc.

These quizzes serve not only to demonstrate the complexity of things, but also help explain them.

Some of the approaches serve to stimulate curious questions such as « If you had to evaluate the economic situation of a country and compare it with others, what factors would you take into consideration? » A similar approach might be used for the political and/or social situation.

A number of groups are designated (each with an economist as spokesperson) to reply to such questions, using the competencies of each member of the group, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each in relation to the subject, finding the relevant information and sharing it in a real process of apprenticeship.

Similarly, participants have to look for, by group, the definitions of concepts such as ‘nation’, ‘ethnic group’ and so on. Self-evaluation of the group’s work, the implication of the group members and the results obtained when confronted with the reality of the theories, enable the group and its members to judge the efficacy of their work.

Those participants who have already had some experience or training in international trade risk experiencing a certain “déjà vu”, so they are encouraged to provide explanations to the other participants, something that is often undertaken with as much pleasure as competence. The same is true for those participants who are economists or economists specialized in development. The participants’ own contribution to the search for knowledge is absolutely fundamental to the course.