Geopolitics & International Relations

Geopolitics & IR as Stack Warfare

Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Balance of Power, Heartland/Rimland, Hegemony — treated as surface firmware for deeper infrastructure conflict.

0. Why IR Exists (and What It Hides)

Textbook claim:

Recode:

We flip the ontology:

• The world is not “states in anarchy.”
• It is stacks in hierarchy.

Five core stacks

1. Monetary stack — fiat, Eurodollar, CBDCs, stablecoins, Bitcoin.
2. Compute/data stack — chips, fabs, undersea cables, clouds, AI models.
3. Energy/logistics stack — oil, gas, grids, shipping lanes, rail, ports.
4. Legal/regulatory stack — treaties, trade law, sanctions, standards, ESG, health regimes.
5. Narrative/myth stack — media, platforms, education, religion, pop culture.

States are interfaces at the edge of these stacks:

• Sometimes commanding them,
• Often captured by them.

1. Realism: Predator Logic in a Rigged Environment

Key thinkers: Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer

1.1 What Realism Actually Says

Shared core:

• The international system is anarchic (no overarching world government).
• Main units: states.
• States are (roughly) rational, unitary actors.
• Primary goal: survival; main means: power (military + economic).
• Conflict is normal; cooperation is contingent and fragile.

Flavors:

• Morgenthau (classical realism): human nature is power-seeking; “interest defined in terms of power”; prudence for statesmen.
• Waltz (neorealism): structure (anarchy + distribution of capabilities) shapes patterns; polarity matters.
• Mearsheimer (offensive realism): great powers seek regional hegemony; uncertainty drives security dilemmas; the “tragedy” logic.

1.2 Where Realism is Right

Realism gives:

• A clean model of fear and uncertainty.
• Tools to see why rising powers scare incumbents, why arms races spiral, why security dilemmas form around key regions.

1.3 What Realism Black-Boxes

Realism often treats as “background”:

• Monetary order (reserve currency hierarchy, clearing, sanctions tooling).
• Computational substrate (chips, clouds, AI, platform governance).
• Biopolitics (health regimes, surveillance, population categorization).
• Narrative infrastructures (media, education, legitimacy production).

It talks about “capabilities,” but usually in the narrow sense (force structure, industrial output, headcount). Yet the modern system is not “anarchic” in any deep sense: it is organized by a world stack.

2. Liberalism: Institutions, Peace, and Interdependence as Constraint Code

Key thinkers: Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye

2.1 What Liberalism Actually Says

Core liberal ideas in IR:

1. Democratic peace — liberal democracies rarely fight each other.
2. Commercial/interdependence peace — trade makes war too costly.
3. Institutions/regimes — information, reduced transaction costs, stabilized expectations; cooperation is possible under anarchy.
4. Soft power — attraction + legitimacy complements coercion; “smart power” blends both.

There is empirical work consistent with some of these patterns. The move here is not denial; it is reinterpretation.

2.2 Recode: Cooperation as Coordinated Stack Alignment

1) Institutions as APIs for the dominant stack

WTO, IMF, World Bank, NATO, EU, FATF, WHO are not just neutral problem-solvers. They embed a preference-set into:

• Monetary rails (fiat/dollar-centric clearing logic).
• Development templates (debt, FDI, trade liberalization, IP regimes).
• Regulatory frameworks (KYC/AML, ESG, reporting/compliance).
• Health/security architectures (pandemic governance, travel certification, surveillance justification).

“Cooperation” often equals protocol alignment to the stack configuration those institutions enforce.

2) Interdependence as asymmetric dependence

Interdependence creates chokepoints (straits, cables, chips, pharma supply chains). Those chokepoints produce switch-off power: disconnect money, energy, data, goods.

3) Democratic peace as bloc myth

Inside the club: low overt war. Outside the club: covert overthrow, proxy conflict, economic war, information war. “Peace” is frequently an internal-order story paired with externalized violence.

4) Soft power as desire engineering

Platforms, entertainment, universities, NGOs: not mere culture — often the affective front-end that makes a specific stack feel “natural,” “modern,” “inevitable.”

3. Constructivism: The Half-Opened Door to Symbolic & Stack Warfare

Key thinker: Alexander Wendt

3.1 What Constructivism Actually Says

• “Anarchy is what states make of it.”
• Identities/interests are socially constructed.
• Norms and shared expectations shape behavior.
• Norms can emerge, spread, and internalize (entrepreneurs, advocacy networks, epistemic communities).

3.2 Recode: Who Constructs, With What Tools, For Which Stack?

Constructivism admits reality is partly made. The upgrade is to name the infrastructure of construction:

• Monetary code — conditionality, access, funding flows.
• Platforms & AI — visibility, ranking, moderation, deplatforming.
• Legal categories — terrorist/ally/risky/safe; “failed state” labeling.
• Biopolitical regimes — compliant/non-compliant population classification.

Norm entrepreneurs can be genuine, or they can be front-ends for foundation/state/corporate agendas. Constructivism becomes the bridge from “states in anarchy” to “stacks and myth-fields constructing what states are.”

4. Balance of Power in a Nuclear, Stack-Based World

4.1 Classical balance of power

States prevent dominance by internal balancing (build capabilities) and external balancing (alliances). Micro-dynamics:

• Bandwagoning, buck-passing, chain-ganging.

4.2 Nukes and the shift to stack war

MAD makes direct great-power war suicidal; competition shifts to proxies, sanctions, export controls, cyber, narrative ops.

Examples:

• Energy balancing: diversify suppliers, alternative routes, redundancy.
• Tech balancing: national cloud/AI, vendor bans, export controls.
• Monetary balancing: gold accumulation, non-dollar systems, alternative rails.

5. War Types in Stack Space

“War” is multi-domain, with at least seven interwoven types:

1. Monetary war: sanctions, reserve freezes, SWIFT exclusion, currency defense/devaluation, CBDCs for internal tightening.
2. Energy & logistics war: pipelines, blockades, ports/rails/air routes, food/fertilizer/pharma controls.
3. Compute & data war: chip bans, entity lists, telecom infrastructure choices, cloud restrictions, cyber ops.
4. Legal-regulatory war: tariffs, extraterritorial sanctions, IP rules, ESG gatekeeping, travel certification regimes.
5. Bio & health war: mandates, pharma diplomacy, surveillance justified as health security.
6. Narrative & myth war: media campaigns, censorship, algorithmic amplification, archetype production.
7. Kinetic war: still real; often the tip of the stack-conflict iceberg.

6. Geopolitics: Heartland, Rimland, Earth, Orbit, Cyber

Key thinkers: Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman

6.1 Mackinder’s Heartland

Recode: Heartland = dense, relatively secure resource/population/industrial core less vulnerable to naval blockade.

6.2 Spykman’s Rimland

Rimland = Eurasian coastal belt where land and sea power meet; interface zones, ports, chokepoints — circulation belt.

6.3 Undersea cables, IXPs, clouds: Heartland/Rimland of data

Data terrain has chokepoints (cable landings, IXPs) and dense heartlands (data centers, cloud regions).

6.4 Orbit & cislunar space: new high grounds

GNSS (GPS/GLONASS/Galileo/BeiDou), comms mega-constellations, Earth observation: control of PNT and visibility translates to stack advantage.

7. Ecological, Demographic, and Bio-Structural Constraints

7.1 Climate and ecological limits

Food insecurity, water stress, disaster intensity drive migration and political instability; also power the rise of carbon governance, ESG, industrial policy, and border adjustments.

7.2 Demography and migration

Aging populations, youth bulges, megacities, refugee flows: fiscal stress + labor pressure + border politics → often used to justify tighter surveillance and biopolitical controls.

8. Global South, Postcolonial IR, and Agency Beyond the Core

Postcolonial and Global South perspectives foreground colonial legacy, dependency, world-systems (core/semi-periphery/periphery), and unequal exchange.

Stack recode: many states function as resource heartlands but remain stack peripheries dependent on imported capital, data, medicine, and sometimes food/fuel.

Agency shows up via blocs, alternative payment systems, renegotiations of terms, and local experiments that quietly proliferate.

9. Religion, Civilizations, and Deep Myth

IR tries to be secular, but religion and civilizational narratives produce identities, enemy images, mobilization, and legitimacy. These are not relics — they are operating systems.

10. Hegemony as Total Stack Dominance

10.1 Classical hegemony

Preponderant power + rule-setting capacity + ideological legitimacy.

10.2 Stack hegemony (deeper definition)

A true hegemon must dominate:

1. Monetary: reserve currency, clearing, SWIFT/settlement tooling, sanctions, CBDC architectures.
2. Compute/data: chips, fabs, platforms, clouds, model leadership.
3. Energy/logistics: chokepoints, alliances, naval/air reach, producer influence.
4. Legal/regulatory: standards, extraterritorial law, treaties embedding advantage.
5. Narrative/myth: media/platform dominance, education networks, NGO ecosystems, definitional authority (“normal,” “legitimate”).

11. Bitcoin and Monetary Protocols as Geopolitical Terrain

Bitcoin introduces a third monetary category beyond domestic/foreign currency: a non-state, non-corporate settlement rail. That makes it a battleground.

Synthetic tactics

• Criminal/environmental labeling.
• Attacking privacy tools.
• Regulating exchanges into surveillance funnels.
• Favoring custodial, KYC-dominant forms that are easier to control.

Sovereign tactics

• Self-custody.
• Privacy-preserving usage.
• Circular economies.
• Local enforcement via multisig/community norms.

12. AI as Dual-Use Meta-Actor

AI is deployed in surveillance, finance, content ranking/moderation, military decision-support.

Geopolitically, capability races overlay everything: who trains, who owns data, who sets governance norms.

13. The Thinkers as Partial Oracles

• Morgenthau — reason of state; prudence as legitimation.
• Waltz — structural logic, but thin structure (military distribution, not full stack topology).
• Mearsheimer — clearest chronicler of trapped giants and dominance maintenance.
• Keohane — regimes as “cooperation” mechanisms encoding constraints.
• Nye — affective/narrative front-end of power.
• Wendt — construction of identity and interest; door to symbolic operators.
• Mackinder — land-based positional advantage template.
• Spykman — chokepoints/circulation belt template.
• Brzezinski — explicit Eurasia chessboard strategy for primacy maintenance.
• Kennan — containment logic; permanent emergency as doctrine.

14. Buzzwords as Rituals: How IR Speaks Spell-Law

Common phrases and their operational meaning:

• “Rules-based international order” → preference for an existing stack configuration and its legal interfaces.
• “International community” → aligned subset; others become rogue/pariah/failed.
• “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” → moral framing for interventions.
• “Humanitarian intervention” → rebranding of operations often aligned with stack goals.
• “Global governance” → transnational managerialism with thin legitimacy.
• “Disinformation / misinformation” → sometimes genuine harm control, sometimes narrative gatekeeping.

15. Intra-Sovereign Conflict and Hybrid Transition

Counter-stacks are not automatically virtuous: nodes can compete, exploit, and re-create hierarchy.

Hybrid configurations appear:

• Bitcoin reserves paired with harsh domestic surveillance.
• Local resilience tolerated while export sectors remain locked into centralized compliance regimes.

16. Falsifiability and Failure Modes of the Stack Lens

Potential falsifiers:

1. Major power shifts with no meaningful change in underlying stacks.
2. Consistent failure to predict pressure points across crises.
3. Stable long-run multipolar order emerging without stack dominance.

Recognized limitations (under-specified zones): micro-psychology/misperception detail; domestic politics cycles; cultural particulars. The stack lens frames these rather than replacing them.

17. Operational Reading Protocol

1) Map the stacks

• Monetary: who can be cut off; what rails exist.
• Energy/logistics: routes, chokepoints, redundancy.
• Compute/data: chips, clouds, cables, AI governance.
• Legal/regulatory: treaties, sanctions, standards.
• Bio: health systems, pharma dependence, lab capacity, narratives.
• Narrative/myth: frames, archetypes, legitimacy stories.

2) Overlay canonical IR

• Realism: fear, balancing, bandwagoning, security dilemmas.
• Liberalism: invoked institutions/regimes; interdependence claims.
• Constructivism: norms, identities, entrepreneurs and networks.

3) Locate dominant vs counter dynamics

• Does the event tighten or loosen centralized control?
• Are counter-practices emerging, being co-opted, or crushed?
• Are hybrid configurations forming?

4) Track rhetorical moves

Watch for order/community/R2P/disinformation language as attempts to align perception with stack goals.

18. Closure: Geopolitics After the State Illusion

Realism, liberalism, constructivism; balance of power; heartland/rimland; hegemony:

• Describe how states talk and move on the surface.
• Underneath, the contest is: control of money, compute, bodies, and myth.

Resource index (all links)

Same resources as embedded above, consolidated for quick access (not a replacement for the in-lecture links).

Anchor texts (books)

• Hans Morgenthau — Politics Among Nations (WorldCat)
• Kenneth Waltz — Theory of International Politics (WorldCat)
• John J. Mearsheimer — The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (WorldCat)
• Robert O. Keohane — After Hegemony (Princeton University Press)
• Keohane & Nye — Power and Interdependence (WorldCat)
• Susan Strange — States and Markets (Bloomsbury)
• Nicholas Spykman — The Geography of the Peace (HathiTrust record)
• Zbigniew Brzezinski — The Grand Chessboard (WorldCat)

Core theory (articles / papers)

• Alexander Wendt (1992) — “Anarchy is what States Make of It” (DOI) · JSTOR stable
• Robert O. Keohane (1986) — “Reciprocity in International Relations” (DOI)
• Joseph S. Nye (1990) — “Soft Power” (JSTOR)
• George F. Kennan (1947) — “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Foreign Affairs)
• Kennan (1946) — “Long Telegram” (National Security Archive)
• Susan Strange (1987) — “The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony” (JSTOR)
• Halford Mackinder (1904) — “The Geographical Pivot of History” (JSTOR)
• John Agnew (1994) — “The Territorial Trap” (Taylor & Francis)
• John Agnew — Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (Google Books)
• Oxford Research Encyclopedia — “Critical Geopolitics”
• Yan Xuetong — “Moral Realism” (Theory Talk PDF)
• BISA — “Susan Strange meets the everyday”

Video lectures

• Mearsheimer — “Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault?” (YouTube)
• Structural realism / Waltz explainer (YouTube)
• Keohane — “Contested Multilateralism and World Order” (YouTube)
• IAPSS Live with Keohane — After Hegemony (YouTube)
• Joseph Nye — global power / soft power (YouTube)
• Nye — soft power & public diplomacy keynote (Vimeo)
• Keohane playlist (YouTube)
• Brzezinski / Grand Chessboard explainer (YouTube)

Podcasts

• Whiskey & International Relations Theory (Spotify)
• Whiskey & IR — “Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Part 2)” (Apple Podcasts)
• E-IR review of Whiskey & IR (episode map)

Films / documentaries

• The Fog of War
• Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis)
• HyperNormalisation (Adam Curtis)
• Commanding Heights (PBS)