Colin Flint, a geographer by training, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Utah State University. His research interests include geopolitics and peacebuilding. He is the author of Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower (Stanford University Press, 2024), Introduction to Geopolitics (Routledge, 4th ed. 2022), Geopolitical Constructs: The Mulberry Harbours, World War Two, and the Making of a Militarized Transatlantic (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and co-author, with Peter Taylor of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality Routledge, 7th edition, 2018). He is editor emeritus of the journal Geopolitics. His books have been translated into Spanish, Polish, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and Farsi.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

First, I should tell everyone that I am a geographer by training. All three of my degrees are in the discipline of geography. For many people, geography is a quiz category, a list of facts about mountains, capital cities, etc. How can you get an advanced degree in that?! Academic geography is a theoretically based social science, with some overlap with the humanities, that sees the social construction of places, territories, regions, networks, and scales as inseparable from the processes studied by political science and international relations scholars.

I don’t mean to give a lecture, but this understanding of who I am and what, as a geographer, I do is important to get at the term “field” in the question. I am a political geographer who is informed by world-systems analysis writing on the topic of the relative decline of the US as a hegemonic power, and the rise of China as a challenger, with a focus on seapower. Relations between the Global North and Global South play a big role in how I approach this topic.

Having said that, I see the most exciting development in my field as not a “what” but a “who.” The perspective on political geography, especially global scale changes, was once dominated by European and US voices. In fact, British and Irish scholars led the revival of political geography in the 1980s, though often based in US universities. Japanese scholars played a key role too. Now voices from China and the Global South are playing an increasing part in knowledge production. As we face a period of geopolitical competition, it is important that these different voices come together in dialogue. It is also the responsibility of senior scholars and journal editors to facilitate that dialogue. Now scholars, such as those in Iran, remain wedded to the theories of classic geopoliticians (such as Mackinder). Western scholars can learn from this focus on older theories, usually discredited by critical geographers, without dismissing them, while introducing scholars from the Global South to new theories. Putting pre-prints on ResearchGate and in articles on sites like E-Internaional Relations can help as scholars in the Global South struggle for access to journals.

In terms of approaches in the field, I sense a swing back to global and structural arguments that were criticized with the emergence of post-modernism and post-structuralism and the rejection of meta-narratives. For good or bad, we are experiencing change on a global scale. The global has to be seen as a system. I feel the onus is upon political geography scholars who focus on contingency and assemblages to say how smaller scale settings fit into the bigger picture.

Finally, I see exciting opportunities in the conversations between geographers, political scientists, and scholars in related fields around topics of peace that require consideration of the social construction of places and scales. Most critical peace scholars seem to “get” what academic geography is all about. I’ll expand on that in my response to the next question.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I was fortunate in the way that my undergraduate and graduate education blended very different but complementary approaches. I was a non-traditional student and was trepidatious entering the Geography program at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My eyes were opened by the teaching and scholarship of Peter J. Taylor who introduced me to world-systems analysis. He also gave me the courage to pursue graduate degrees and, ultimately, a career in academia.

I did my Master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Colorado-Boulder with John O’Loughlin as my advisor. In a dizzying switch, I was soon learning spatial statistics and applying the techniques to the electoral geography of the Nazi party. I learned an analytical and deductive approach, and my ability to conduct statistical analysis got me my first two jobs.

Lynn Staeheli, a pioneer of feminist geography, served on my graduate committees. She insisted I look beyond structural imperatives and the rigidity of statistics. Her influence allowed me to think across the discipline. That made me a more rounded scholar and enabled me to take on roles such as journal editor and putting together edited volumes that included a variety of theoretical perspectives. In combination, I’ve retained my interest in “thinking big” with global and structural approaches while considering research design and inference, and non-deterministic categories.

Throughout that process I have engaged the scholarship of world-systems analysis – the foundation of my approach. Hence, I am indebted and in awe of the contribution made by Immanuel Wallerstein. I found Giovanni Arrighi’s work to be particularly........

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