The world beyond war and peace

From debt diplomacy to the Global South, this book explores the defining issues of our times through a critical and often provocative lens

The World in Turmoil: Why Geopolitics Matters

By John Andrews

Published by Profile

Books/Hachette India

304 pages ₹599

 Addressing the Annual General Meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in Delhi on January 8, 2007, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “I dream of a day when, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.” He was optimistic that “business leaders from the region as a whole will strengthen the hands of the political leadership in promoting peace, security and friendship”.

 

 

Today, almost two decades later, relations between India and Pakistan on the one hand, and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other, have deteriorated to such an extent that Singh’s vision has begun to look more like a fantasy than a blueprint for a future that diplomats can champion and work towards. Terror attacks, military escalation, the downgrading of diplomatic ties, and water disputes have made the borders more volatile and the visa regime more stringent than before.

 

The simplistic binary of war and peace has become inadequate as a framework to understand the complexity of what is unfolding in the realm of international relations. What is useful instead is the lens of geopolitics, which John Andrews, author of The World in Turmoil: Why Geopolitics Matters, describes as the “links between (international) relations and geography” and “the study of the influence upon politics of natural resources, demography, and climate change”.

 

The first part of the book, “Understanding geopolitics” is a collection of essays, covering topics such as nations and empires, the rules-based international order, the force of ideology, non-state actors, hard and soft power, regional and global alliances, the scars of history, and moving into the future. The second part, “An A-to-Z of geopolitics”, is written in the form of encyclopaedia entries that introduce, in a nutshell, terms and ideas frequently used in geopolitical discourse.

 

Mr Andrews approaches his subject with the confidence and expertise that comes from having reported on major political developments while working with The Guardian and The Economist as a foreign correspondent and editor based in key capitals across the world, including Singapore, Hong Kong, London, Brussels, Washington DC, Paris and Los Angeles. His insights also draw heavily on his academic career at the University of Libya in Benghazi and the American University of Beirut after graduating from Cambridge University in classical and modern Arabic.

 

While the book is not written specifically for readers in South Asia, it is easy to extrapolate and apply when he writes about multipolarity, nuclear deterrence, peace dividends, colonialism, self-determination, and various other concepts that our part of the world is familiar with. It would benefit students pursuing international relations or international law, journalists writing on foreign policy, and avid non-fiction readers eager to develop a vocabulary to analyse geopolitics.

 

Mr Andrews writes, for instance, about “debt diplomacy”, wherein a creditor country like China offers “unsustainable loans” to smaller countries with “purpose of increasing the lender’s political influence when the borrower can no longer repay its debt”. Struggling with mounting debt, Sri Lanka had to sign a 99-year lease with a Chinese state-owned enterprise and hand over a 70 per cent stake in the Hambantota port. This helped China strengthen its strategic presence in the Indian Ocean, and also fanned India’s anxieties about the use of this port for surveillance.

 

The book is not merely informative. It has a worldview. Mr Andrews delights in being critical and provocative. He asks, “What does the ‘Global South’ mean, when it is actually a collection of countries, many of them north of the Equator, at different levels of economic development and with no coherence except a wish to be both richer and more respected?” This is an important question for India to grapple with, as we leverage platforms like the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Brics, and the International Solar Alliance to position ourselves as a voice for the Global South and advocate for the restructuring of the UN Security Council.

 

The downside of this book is that it seems out of touch with feminist interventions in the field of international relations, and the Women Peace and Security policy framework established by the UN to foreground the role of gender in armed conflict and participation in peace processes.

 

Statements like “Israel in 2024 emasculated Hizbullah in Lebanon” and “Within minutes, Hizbullah, the most effective of Iran’s political and military proxies, was reduced almost to impotence” conflate masculinity and virility with destruction. This is odd, given the author’s professed “distaste for fascism and dictatorship”, and his critique of US President Donald Trump.

 

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The reviewer is a journalist, educator, and literary critic. @chintanwriting