#explaining geography/culture/cultural and geopolitical dynamics of their world

[olis-inkwell-symposium]

As I develop my Pantheon and world of Sonoric Sorcery, I created a detailed guide for…

Geographical Creation by Divine Influences

Purpose and Cosmic Intentions

Start by determining the underlying reasons for the gods’ involvement in geographical creation. Did they shape the world to foster life, establish realms for their divine power, or create natural barriers for protection or punishment?

Establish how the divine will interacts with the world—whether it’s nurturing or harsh, collaborative among deities or singularly tyrannical.

Pantheon Influence and Divine Roles

Outline which gods or celestial beings are responsible for specific parts of the world. A god of oceans might have sculpted the vast seas, while a god of fire could be the origin of volcanic regions.

Clarify if these divine creators acted alone, in alliances, or through conflicts. Introduce rivalries where a god of order creates plains and structured landscapes while a chaotic deity disrupts them with jagged mountains and whirlpools.

Creation Myths and Narratives

Craft epic stories that detail the moments of creation. These myths might include dramatic events, such as titanic battles that split continents, tears shed by a mourning goddess creating lakes, or the laughter of a trickster god forming rolling hills.

Ensure these stories are not just tales but have religious and cultural significance, with ceremonies or pilgrimages tied to these narratives.

Unique Divine Marks on the Landscape

Highlight distinct features that could only be formed by gods. This might include:

Sacred Mountains: Peaks imbued with divine energy, often home to shrines or ancient temples.

Enchanted Forests: Woodlands blessed or cursed by gods, filled with mystical creatures or shifting paths.

Celestial Rivers: Waterways said to carry pieces of stardust, linking the mortal world to celestial realms.

Mythic Abysses: Deep chasms rumored to be gateways to the underworld or places of divine punishment.

Mortal Interaction with Divine Geographies

Explain how mortals view and interact with these divine creations. Do they see them as blessings or threats?

Are there rituals or traditions based around sacred lakes, healing springs, or cursed wastelands? Define the taboos or reverence attached to certain areas.

Divine Errors and Cataclysms

Introduce instances where divine actions caused unintended destruction or shifts. For example, an angry god might have triggered earthquakes that reshaped the terrain or split civilizations apart.

These cataclysms could be seen as divine retribution or warnings, shaping not just the land but the evolution of societies and their beliefs.

Cross-Pantheon Influence

Determine if the world’s geography shows the influence of multiple pantheons or opposing divine forces.

This can create places where magical energies clash or merge, resulting in areas that defy natural laws, such as floating islands, frozen deserts, or fire-fueled glaciers.

Residual Divine Power and Resources

Discuss the remnants of divine creation in the form of powerful minerals, crystals, or herbs that mortals seek for their magic or technological advancements.

These elements might carry divine essence, offering great power but at potential costs to those who use them.

Geopolitical and Theological Influence

Describe how these divine creations influence politics and power dynamics. For example, a city might be built around a sacred waterfall said to have healing properties, making it a pilgrimage site that brings wealth and influence.

Other civilizations might go to war to control such places, viewing them as conduits of divine favor.

Mystery and Forbidden Zones

Leave space for unexplored or forbidden areas said to be shaped by gods whose motives are unknown or feared.

These could be deserts filled with mirages, haunted forests, or towering monoliths etched with inscriptions no mortal has been able to decipher.

This template provides the framework to enrich your world with divine geographies, turning the physical landscape into a character itself, imbued with history, power, and profound cultural meaning.

tag list ; @slenders1ckn3ss @lucistarsfire @mai2themai @fond-illusion @p00lverinecentral

[puc-puggy]

oh that’s gorgeously written.

also!!!! placemaking! via Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel by Sean Kicummah Teuton

Oral Traditional Homelands

In the preceding pages, I have been sharing my account of the loss of Cherokee cultural geography and the process for its recovery, which re. lies on the evaluation of experiences as they shape self-understanding.

In that first visit to the Southeast, I soon discovered that to decolonize our lands we must first decolonize our identities. Since land, identity, and experience are inextricably linked sources of knowledge, the political struggle to decolonize Native America also bears close yet subtle ties to cultural identity: the deeper understanding of oneself as a colonized Indigenous person, dispossessed and displaced from ancestral lands, brings greater clarity to one's often vague experiences of oppression. In other words, the political is continuous with the epistemological. The recovery of ancestral places is thus, in part, a process of identification with lands.

For this reason, the political defensibility of American Indians' relationship to the earth depends on the clarity of theories about individual and collective tribal selves. A clear understanding of Native identity thus explains the relationship to homelands, and, interactively, the land shapes American Indian self-understanding. Through this mutually constituting dynamic of land and identity. Indian people build what is often called a sense of place. Because Native cultural identity organizes experiences of homelands, dispossession, and exile, American Indian studies requires a thoroughgoing account of the constructed yet legitimate status of Native cultural geography. To support an Indian geopolitics, I propose a philosophically grounded approach to land and selfhood that I call geoidentity.

Clearly, Native concepts of land, identity, and experience prove vital to Indian livelihood. In the next chapter, I focus on the concept of American Indian identity, and in chapter 3 I address tribal experience, but here I wish to introduce the interweaving of land, identity, and experience in the preservation of Indian culture.

…European tradition that rejects metaphysical knowledge are likely to toler. ate but not to seriously consider these explanations. To demystify Allen's approach to Native homelands, we might remember that, while the bones of our families form the earth under our feet, it is the stories of their lives that inform the land.

Allen's statement poses a critical problem to Native scholars theorizing place: How do we explain the Indigenous relationship with the land without appealing to spiritual concepts, which are often mystified yet fundamental to that relationship? Later in her essay, she begins to explain Native geography in social terms, thus shifting her holistic view of land to the place of humans, where she considers how Native writers suffer the pain of dislocation and await the recovery of homelands. In so doing, Allen recognizes that Native identification with lands can be wounded and "lost," remembered and regained. And if it can be regained, it can be ex-plained. Of Navajo writer Larry Emerson's short story "Gallup" she claims:

"The protagonist, lost on a Saturday in Gallup, alienated from himself, his people and his family, still can remember what was good about being, can wonder at its disappearance" (I979, 192). Allen thus migrates toward an admittedly underexamined, though finally nonessentialist, theory of American Indian dwelling as a conscious social practice. Jace Weaver understands this need to resist essentialist or romantic explanations of American Indians' connections to the natural world: "One strain of this stereotype of Natives as 'environmental perfectionists' holds that they did not use the land, existing on it as in some ecological stasis box and leaving no tracks or traces of their presence. This seemingly affirmative, if highly romantic, vision in reality contributes to the exploitation of Natives and their land. It denies Indian personhood and erases Natives from the landscape where they lived for countless generations before the advent of European invaders" (1996, 4). After all, since invasion, Europeans have justified on essentialist footing their very presence on Native lands, from the Puritans' idea of the preordained City on the Hill to the metaphysics of manifest destiny in the nineteenth century? In their potential also to serve empire, essentialist explanations of the human place in North American land should be tempered with a more self-examining, and thus politically enabling, theory of American Indian dwelling. On a realist theory of Indigenous place, American Indians critically construct, evaluate, and improve their relationship with the land through and for tribal identity.

Linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso asserts that "place-making is . . . a form of cultural activity" (1996, 7). In this profoundly social sense, selfhood is continuous with homeland.

Of course, Native sense of place is also imbricated with other crucial cultural conceptions such as history and morality, and other practices to sustain cultural knowledge. As I have described, this vital relationship to the land is maintained in oral tradition through language, the medium by which tribal peoples recall and interpret significant events on the land to serve an ethical theory. In this way, Native sacred sites are such not only because ancient cultural events transpired on them, but also because stories of those places continue to guide moral behavior and sustain cul-ture. The cultural construction that is sense of place demands work of the imagination to recall exactly how a tribal event took place and to interpret the story to answer today's ethical questions. This is a process Basso calls "world-building" (1996, 5). But in creating a past mediated through earth, experience, and story, this oral dynamic should not be treated, as by Indian trickster critics, as a "fiction of the colonial mind" as Louis Owens describes it (I998, 27), or as nonterritorial "transmotion" in the words of Gerald Vizenor (1998, 82). Native relationships with the land are not illegitimately fabricated because geoidentity operates in reference to a reality composed of material facts. If this were not the case, senses of place would be insignificant and interchangeable; instead, the materiality of the land itself often determines the realm of possibilities for a homeland, as a community adheres to the distinct ecological character of a region over time.

Indeed, the very fact of the land - its particular features and rhythms-shape a tribe over millennia into a specific people with a cultural tradition created in response to unique topography? Basso describes this process thus: "For Indian men and women, the past lies embedded in features of the earth - in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields - which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think. Knowledge of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one's position in the larger scheme of things, including one's own com-munity, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person" (1996, 34).

Language, the vehicle for Native places, sustains and communicates ideas through oral tradition, a flexible collection of stories to explain one's relationship to the land. It is nothing less than the corpus of communal knowledge through which ideas are introduced and evaluated, accepted or rejected, and replaced or refined on their ability to order the world. In managing this open-ended hermeneutic, storytelling cultures offer new, revised accounts of events tied to places, and thus maintain a center of historical and moral value. Regulated through the normative lens of oral tradition, American Indian attachments to land are continually shaped yet stable. In "Through the Stories We Hear Who We Are," Leslie Mar-mon Silk explains how her Laguna people "depended upon collective memory through successive generations to maintain and transmit an entire culture, a worldview complete with proven strategies for survival. The oral narrative, or story, became the medium through which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and belief was maintained. Whatever the event or the subject, the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient, continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories. . . . The myth, the web of memories and ideas that create an identity, is part of oneself. This sense of identity was intimately linked with the surrounding terrain, to the landscape that has often played a significant role in a story or in the outcome of a conflict" (1996a, 30-31, 43). Because oral tradition acts as a communal tool for the democratic interpretation of tribal knowledge, its function is highly social in maintaining a people's collective attachment to a place.

Through this reciprocal relationship with the earth, one knows one's homeland by recalling some of the countless stories that took place on that land's specific topographical features: on the peaks, in the hollows, at the banks of streams, within the whirlpools. Indigenous people maintain their social world by pointing to significant places and recalling (often word for word) the legendary and historical events held secure in the tribal imagination. Storytellers are the elected keepers of a group's oral tradition, for they are especially adept at reconstructing a narrative world where stories reduce the distance between the individual and the com-munity, and between the community of today and that of ancient times.S Barry Lopez explains this function as the creation of an "interior land-scape": the imagined response to the story -laden landscape, the internalized place world of the mind (1984, 51). The storyteller fulfills her or his responsibility by realigning tribal members' interior landscapes with the geography on which they daily interact. Most important, Indian people value story to convey and sustain a moral universe and to preserve a cul. tural identity. For this critical reason, tribal peoples must dwell within the edifying features of their ancestral geography. Denied their homelands, they risk disintegration. To displace Native people to unknown lands is thus an attempt to destroy them -to "obliterate all aspects of their moral relationship with the land, as Basso puts it (1996, 67). Because American Indian placemaking practices are socially constructed, however, they can be reconstructed, regained in the wake of colonial displacement, through the very process described in House Made of Dawn.

have an idea of when the essay will drop?

i've been working on it i promise. its been hard bc my computer hasnt been set up yet since i moved still. here's the latest paragraph or two of the script

The first trouble we face is that a traditional haunting is a symbiotic relationship, a form of mutualism where a spirit inhabits a place–a gray lady haunting a hospital; a black dog howling at the crossroads; a hanging tree that spins spidery black branches into the horizon. One half of the relationship is the haunting grounds themselves, places of power or importance to their resident spirit, which provide an anchor that they can latch onto. The other half is, of course, the haunting itself–a thing which is tied so fundamentally to a place that the boundaries between itself and its home begin to blur. If you’ll forgive the pun, this is the most foundational rule of hauntings: There is a place, and there was a person. But there is an important aspect, one that might arguably be more important, at least within the context of horror: there must be a third party. A haunted house is, after all, still a house. It demands to be lived in. Conflict emerges from the intersection of past and present in a place that demands to be able to define itself by its own metrics, rather than have definitions imposed upon it.

[strooples]

Slice-of-life stories

SOL stories or other genres (but with elements of SOL/a SOL feel at times) tend to be my favorite thing to experiment with when coming up with a lot of my stories. Whether they’re upbeat or depressive, more adventurous or more day-to-day realism etc.

So I thought about some of the story ideas I have plans to make one day or just like to think up! I have basically a billion different story ideas and more OC’s than I could count (IDK if I’ll ever post/talk about them here one day?? might have to do something separate there). Some of which have been planned for years — though never written down.

Off the top of my head we have:

A small story revolving around 3 young adult friends who live together in the top floors of a flower shop. The shop is located in the city center of a big city, where usage of public transport is common. The main character being a girl named Juniper, who gets taken in by 2 roommate friends named Pandora (whose family owns the flower shop) and Ainsley when Juniper’s family kicks her out. The story is just a series of the 3 helping Juniper navigate her first few years as an adult, Juniper playing catch up from not being able to learn how to do a lot of things under her parents’ care, as they all explore the city together.

A comic I have in one of my old sketchbooks from 2019 about a girl who does art but is the struggling-to-stay-motivated type (LOL, I guess this is relatable) and works at a sandwich shop. Basically just some small tidbits of her trying to find her place in the world as she introspects through her job, place in the world, future, and self-comparisons. Some goofy scenes happen too, like bumping into old high school classmates at her job or meeting an artist she’s both admired/compared herself to and becoming good friends in an ironic-kinda way.

Another comic idea of a girl who works in a tea shop but has a gigantic pink pterodactyl friend… it’s supposed to be random and on the humorous side here (but I suck with writing humor sometimes, so I’m figuring this one out). The pterodactyl basically gets the tea shop worker girl out of a ton of hijinks in their crazy/chaotic city, where some new customers or a new recently-hired worker tend to draw strings of crazy events that pile up into some more surrealist randomness. *TBH I sort of like having characters in service jobs of big city environments ((not necessarily food or drink places; it could be something random like a librarian bc of the observations they can make of a diverse range of people)).

Some series of short stories of a happy family I wanted to get down. Exploring a 3-generational household that includes: The grandparents, their daughter (the mom) and her husband (the dad) who marries into the family, their 2 kids, 1 of the kid’s friends who stops by often (as their household becomes like a 2nd home to him), and a single mom + her child residing in their extra room — a friend of the 1st mom and whose kid has been friends with the siblings for most of their life. They’re kind people who help others (which explains why the single mom + the siblings’ friend is integral to their family as one of their own), and everyone looks out for each other. TBH, this is probably a story intended to stay happy + wholesome since it’s a bit of an escapism to see everyone have such a happy place together, no one abandoned or left behind. So my intention was to create stories that abound. Like how the quieter sibling has always struggled to fit in at school, the parents’ past love story, the 1st mom’s childhood as the only child, the single mother and her daughter’s story (+ their previous struggles with a living situation), the friend who comes by often and his feelings, how the grandparents are coping in old (etc etc). I guess I also love weaving stories by understanding people in layers, remembering real life people I’ve interacted with, and trying to understand and envision those characters’ lives similarly.

I have one more that’s kind of a nod to Gary Paulson’s “Paintings from the Cave: Three Novellas” — a book I read in schooling that’s stuck with me for a long time. So basically, it’s 3 separate stories in the same book with a common theme: How the companionship of dogs and art have helped characters cope in difficult times. The first story being a kid who copes with a hopeless life by ceramics, the second a girl who never belonged at home or in school by the friendship of dogs, and the last, a guy whose hope in life is both drawing and dogs.

My own idea was generally theming it around sleep problems that pour into your life, and how kids similarly cope with cats and art. But like “Paintings from the Cave,” it’ll still have a bit of a depressive/somber undertone.

So you get sleep issues like:

Insomnia due to anxiety + trauma for the main character of the first story, whose semi-nocturnal cats and sketchbook keeps them company in the moments awake before dawn. I haven’t planned this part out a lot.

Narcolepsy, as a medical condition that screws with a girl’s life (cause community college + work always sucks if you get sleepy in the day but are utterly unable to sleep at night). Because of her situation, she’s almost flunked a few times and a lot of her employers sadly had to let her go. So she decides to use her imbalanced sleep cycle to volunteer at a local shelter that needs night volunteers — where friendly cats help her regain a sense of confidence. You can’t fail at cats or get rejected from them like in a work environment — so long as they’re given space, care, food, and adequate shelter. So their lack of judgment soothes her in such a way.

Being a self-taught lucid dreamer who often uses sleep to escape reality. That leads to their hospitalization later on. But after being let go, they’re guided by a social worker who’s now organized to come by + help plan their life. They decide one day to use some of their dreams’ events and adventures as the springboard to draw out stories. I guess in a way, using art as a new coping mechanism and way to experience joy while awake.

There was a last story I made for a project in my last year of high school that’s also primarily late night-based and involves a sleepless protagonist (IK this is kind of a running thread — unintentional here). I haven’t really taken it seriously or planned in-depth, but it’s also one that crossed my mind ever so often. The plot basically goes:

A young adult lady works as a translator whose job is to travel between countries to work on translation projects. Her company of employment has bases in tons of different countries that work to transcribe anything from newspapers, books, or subtitles on screen. They have different departments for stable work vs. freelancing, and she’s somewhat 50/50 an office worker and a freelancer (tho the freelancery bits take her all over). She’s fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and English — partaking a project that requires her Mandarin + Cantonese skills. But upon the journey, she meets someone who eventually shakes up her quiet, lonely life between countries.

All in all, each of these stories takes the day-to-day situations and pacing. SOL is sorta what I use as a tool to explore different people’s life situations or see through different lenses for a day. Every now and then, I get ideas for new SOL-themed stories but it’s mainly these in my mind right now. I have many that aren’t in this genre though… but explaining my magic-fantasy-adventure-worldbuildy stories will take forever in comparison lolol.

Maybe one of these days, I can motivate myself to act upon my ideas?

[cinematic-landscapes]

Post 6: Conclusion - The Role of Film in Academia

Still from ‘Rhine Kilometer 497′ (Ongley 2022)

Every perspective has value, therefore every film has value. Film is worth something to accademia, as it offers a visual medium for when certain sentiments can not be conveyed by text, spoken word or still imagery (Gough-Brady 2019). In fact, film can implement all of these forms of communicating knowledge within a single product. There are many ways to seek value in film. Blockbuster feature films offer a wealth of information on cultural representation, geopolitics and power dynamics and documentaries aim to engage while they educate. Arthouse cinema gives a voice to those who aren’t loudly heard in society and offers insight into the human condition (Sharman 2020). Film can be used as an explicit medium of accademia through digital papers. Speaking on this concept, filmmaker Cathrine Gough-Brady says:  

“​​Digital papers grew out of my desire to use my art medium (audio-visual) to communicate academic research to an audience. The digital papers are neither traditional academic essays, nor are they traditional documentaries. They have emerged from the intersection of my film and TV industry practice with academic research. This intersection has resulted in works that are a subset of essay films: I have created an ‘essayist author’ who is the storyteller and reveals reflections, theory and explication. My intention is that the author will not explain everything, as Laura Rascaroli writes, ‘The essayist does not pretend to discover truths to which he holds the key but allows the answers to emerge somewhere else, precisely in the position occupied by the embodied spectator’ (2009, p. 36).” (Gough-Brady 2019)

Gough-Brady (2019) also highlights the space for dialogue created by digital papers. Exposure to a narrative communicated visually opens up space for varied and innovative interpretations (Gough-Brady 2019). “Visual representation of landscape in cinema provide an opportunity for a wider social discussion and act as a synergy between human and geography” (Singh and Singh 2019, 98). Such expansions on perspectives and understandings affords access to new and diverse knowledge and may break down barriers to knowledge access and production. As technology becomes more accessible and social media more ubiquitous, the more opportunity there is for individuals to share and connect with under-represented narratives. Loosening academia’s grip on what is considered real allows space for understanding what is. “A region’s cinematic landscape can never be realised but always leads to new taste, new context, and new configuration of meaningful exchange within an ongoing system of production” (Singh and Singh 2019, 93).

Film can be a knowledge mine for understanding identity and culture and cinematic landscapes play a crucial role in that. “Cinema has a mechanical ability to represent the world through moving images which shapes our perception of ourselves, as well as the world. Cinema generally takes us to the world of imagination or fantasy; at the same time, it shows the truth or reality of the world. Cinematic landscape representation and interpretation is mediated by one’s attitude, perception and culture” (Singh and Singh 2019, 90). Film has power, and that power can be harnessed, shared and understood through academic channels. 

Lastly, film has the power to represent and communicate diverse narrative and identities. In order to achieve a just cinematic world, however, there must be further work on creating diverse representation in film production at all levels so as to include the cinematic landscapes currently underrepresented. Such work is necessary, as “Cinematic landscape extends far behind the silver screen to intersect how we narrate our identities in our landscapes and how we define the extent of ourselves within a global cinematic community” (Lukinbeal 2005, 17).

[johnmauldin]

These 4 Maps Show The Geopolitical Hotspots of 2017

GUEST POST BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN AND JACOB L. SHAPIRO

In geopolitics, a deep understanding of geography and power allows you to do two things. First, it helps you comprehend the forces that will shape international politics and how they will do so. Second, it helps you distinguish what is important from what isn’t.

This makes maps a vital part of our work, here at This Week in Geopolitics (subscribe here). So we have decided to showcase some of the best maps our graphics team (TJ Lensing and Jay Dowd) made in 2016.

These four maps help explain the foundations of what will be the most important geopolitical developments of 2017.

Map 1: Russia’s economic weakness

This map shows three key aspects to understanding Russia in 2017. (For my full 2017 geopolitical forecast for Russia, click here.)

First is the oft-overlooked fact that Russia is a federation. Russia has a strong national culture, but it is also an incredibly diverse political entity that requires a strong central government. Unlike most maps of Russia, this one divides the country by its 85 constitutive regions. (87 if you count Crimea and Sevastopol.) Not all have the same status—some are regions, while others are autonomous regions, cities, and republics.

The map also highlights the great extent of economic diversity in this vast Russian Federation. The map shows this by identifying regional budget surpluses and deficits throughout the country. Two regions have such large surpluses that they break the scale: the City of Moscow and Sakhalin. Fifty-two regions (or 60% of Russia’s regional budgets) are in the red. The Central District, which includes Moscow, makes up more than 20% of Russia’s GDP, while Sakhalin and a few other regions that are blessed with surpluses produce Russia’s oil.

The third point follows from the first two. Russia is vast, and much of the country is in a difficult economic situation. Even if oil stays around $55 a barrel for all of 2017, that won’t be high enough to solve the problems of the many struggling parts of the country.

Russian President Vladimir Putin rules as an authoritarian. This is, in part, because he governs an unwieldy country. He needs all the power he can get to redistribute wealth so that the countryside isn’t driven to revolt.

Russia is making headlines right now because of Ukraine, Syria, and alleged hacking. But the geopolitical position of Russia is better described by studying the map above.

Map 2: China’s cage limits access to the Pacific

Maps that shift perspective can be disorienting, but they are meant to be. Our minds get so used to seeing the world in one way that a different view can feel alien. But that is even more reason to push through the discomfort. The map above shows us the Pacific from Beijing’s perspective.

China's moves in the South China Sea have received a great deal of attention. In a Jan. 12 confirmation hearing with Congress, nominee for US Secretary of Defense James Mattish pointed to Chinese aggressiveness as one of the major reasons he thinks the world order is under its biggest assault since World War II.

But we believe the Chinese threat is overstated. This map helps explain why.

China’s access to the Pacific is limited by two obstacles. (I wrote about this extensively in This Week in Geopolitics… subscribe here for free). The first is the small island chains in the South and East China Seas. When we look at this map, China’s motive in asserting control over these large rocks becomes clear. If China cannot control these islands and shoals, they can be used against China in a military conflict.

The second obstacle is that China is surrounded by American allies. Some such as Japan (and to a lesser extent South Korea and Taiwan) have significant military forces to defend themselves from Chinese encroachment. Taiwan sticks out as a major spur aimed squarely at China’s southeast coast. Those that don’t have sufficient military defenses, like the Philippines, have firm US security guarantees. China is currently at a serious geographic disadvantage in the waters off its coast.

This map does not reveal one important fact. That is the US Navy outclasses the Chinese navy in almost every regard… despite impressive and continuing Chinese efforts to increase capabilities.

But looking at this map, you can see why China wants to make noise in its coastal waters and how China is limited by an arc of American allies. You can also see why one of China’s major goals will be to attempt to entice any American allies to switch sides.

China’s moves regarding the Philippines will require close observation in 2017.

Map 3: Geographical power in the Middle East

It has become cliché to point out that the Middle East’s current political borders were drawn after World War I by colonial powers (like the UK and France), and that the region’s recent wars and insurrections are making these artificial boundaries obsolete. What isn’t cliché is doubling down on that analysis.

We’ve drawn a new map… one that reveals what the Middle East really looks like right now. Some will object to some of the boundaries for political purposes, but this map is not trying to make a political statement. Rather, it is an attempt to show who holds power over what geography in the Middle East.

From this point of view, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya no longer exist. In their places are smaller warring statelets based on ethnic, national, and sectarian identities. Other borders (like those of Lebanon and Israel) are also redrawn to reflect actual power dynamics.

Here, a politically incorrect but accurate map is more useful than an inaccurate but politically correct one.

It is also important to note which countries' borders do not require redrawing. These include three of the region’s four major powers: Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The borders of the other major power, Israel, are only slightly modified. (Egypt is an economic basket case. It doesn’t qualify as a major power, even though it has one of the most cohesive national cultures in the Arab world.)

The Middle East is defined by two key dynamics: the wars raging in the heart of the Arab world and the balance of power between the countries that surround this conflict.

Map 4: Nationalism and the future of the EU

Analyzing this map must begin with a disclaimer: This is a tool and a means of thinking about Europe’s future… not a prediction of what Europe’s borders will look like in the future.

The map identifies areas in Europe with strong nationalist tendencies. The names of regions with active separatist movements are not italicized. Those that are italicized are demanding increased autonomy but not independence. The point here is not their size, but rather in all these regions, there is some degree of national consciousness that is not consistent with the current boundaries of Europe’s nation-states.

The European Union is a flawed institution because its members could never decide what they wanted it to be. European nation-states gave up some of their sovereignty to Brussels… but not all of it. So when serious issues arose (such as the 2008 financial crisis or the influx of Syrian and other refugees), EU member states went back to solving problems the way they did before the EU.

In 2016, Brexit shook the foundations of the EU. And in 2017, elections in France and Germany as well as domestic instability in Italy will shake those foundations once again.

But Brexit also brings up a deeper question: How will national self-determination be defined in the 21st century? Not all of Europe’s nation-states are on stable ground. The most important consequence of Brexit may be be its impact on the political future of the UK itself. And in Spain, Catalonia already claims it will hold an independence referendum this year.

Brussels, meanwhile, keeps trying to speak with one voice. This map shows exactly how hard that is… not just for the EU, but also for some of Europe’s nation-states. I wrote extensively about these challenges (and more) in my recent 2017 geopolitical forecast for Europe, click here.

Conclusion

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. Maps are worth many more. Our perspective on the world is rooted in an objective approach to examining geography and power. These four maps are essential tools for thinking about the geopolitical forces that will shape the world in 2017.

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