Geographic Mental Maps and Foreign Policy Change

5Geographic Mental Maps and Foreign Policy Decision-making

It has long been understood that the way individuals perceive their geographic environment is important to foreign policy decision-making and policy-making. Mackinder (1996: 21), the pater familias of modern geopolitics, recognized almost a century ago that each era has its own particular geographic perspective: “The influence of geographical conditions upon human activities has depended, however, not merely on the realities as we know them to be and to have been, but in even greater degree on what men imagined in regard to them.”

This view was perpetuated throughout numerous geographic treatises in the ensuing decades. The perceptions of geographic configurations and geographic patterns ...