Hello and welcome back to our final lecture. Today we are going to summarize everything that we have learned previously and to discuss how we can use all this knowledge, all these theories that we have discussed and the geopolitical approach that we have tried in cases of the United States, Russia and China. Despite the fact some scholars criticize geopolitics for paying little attention to quantitative methods and for using only qualitative methods, Geopolitics continues to contribute to our understanding of international relations, of relations between countries and of foreign policy of particular states. Geopolitics occupies a perfect balance between simplification and description of reality. On the one hand, geopolitics as many other International relations theories, simplifies our world and through this simplified model explains how relations between states work. On the other hand, geopolitics contains these geographic part and geographical background which is the most permanent in international relations. Altogether, these two factors form a perfect lens to look at international relations. The first and the most obvious way how we can use this lens is for foreign policy decisions. Historically, scientists and politicians use geopolitics to explain the world around themselves and to determine main foreign policy priorities for their countries. They understood that states could not escape geography. The allegation was predetermined they had particular location, they had particular neighbors with whom they were supposed to deal with. So scientists and scholars use geopolitical approach and continue to use it to determine threats and challenges that states face vulnerable points of their location and border lines to determine their allies and enemies in the world arena. They also learned how to use geography need in size of a country, its resources, geographical location or relative location, meaning its neighbors, to maximize profit, to maximize security of the country. They also use the geopolitical approach and continue to use it to understand what the other states think about their own foreign policy and what is the other states' geopolitics. For this, they usually looked at both classical and critical geopolitics. Even today, geopolitics is widely used not only within foreign policy decision making process but also by many think tanks and by some journalists or experts. They try to advise those people who are directly involved in the foreign policy decision making process in the governments of the countries. Of course, as long as many universities are deeply involved in foreign policy advising, geopolitics also finds its place among other courses related to foreign policy making in Bachelor and Masters program. Students also learn geopolitics here not only to explain contemporary relations between states and contemporary geopolitical factor within this relations but also to understand better historical background of current foreign policy of the country, its current geopolitics, and contemporary contradictions between some states. The academic sphere and the sphere of foreign policy advising are the two ones that are already familiar to us. However, relevance of geopolitics goes far beyond these two spheres. For example, it is becoming more and more important for business. In the year 2017, in the Magazine Financial Times, there was an article called Why geopolitics is finding a place on the business school map, related to the fact that geopolitical courses are becoming more and more popular in the MBA programs of many universities. The main idea of this article is that business activity of national and international companies is preformed in geopolitical reality. Among such geopolitical events mentioned in the article are Catalan independence from Spain, that was especially relevant in the year 2017, intention of President Donald Trump to pull out the United States from the NAFTA Free Trade Agreement and also intentions of Britain to leave the European Union. Ultimately, all these geopolitical events made the world increasingly uncertain place and shift the environment in which businesses operate. So the main outcome of this influence of geopolitical events on business activity of companies is that geopolitics is worth studied not only within its traditional fields like history, International relations and foreign policy making but also by students from other programs like management or International economics. As it is said in the article, the business school world is realizing that unless we are very much involved in the mega trends which are affecting civil society around the world, we are not going to make our students relevant to what the companies need them to be. As long as we remember, their traditional geopolitics is not only about the security issues, but also about economic activity of states and economic relations between countries. Geo-economic factors also contribute to a business activity of companies. We can give examples of economic restrictions for business activity because of geopolitical reasons such as sanctions, as well as economic pressure from one state's on business activity in other state's. One of the good examples here is the one discussed previously in one of our lectures about Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline going from the Russian Federation to the European countries and the pressure that is made by the United States, the US Congress, on the European countries threatening to sanction some of their national companies that cooperate with the Russian Gazprom. Another example is economic support for business from the state in strategic areas. Another relevant example here is the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, where the Chinese government is ready to provide economic assistance and support to its national companies that work within these big project. Because estates successful returned to the international arena after a short period of a unipolarity moment and the so called End of History and because the geopolitical competition between countries also came back, geopolitical factors influence not only activity of businesses, but also geopolitics is becoming more relevant for investors. Because of geopolitical events and usage of some geo-economic instruments, economic growth of a particular state may increase or slow down. There is also an impact of geopolitics and geopolitical events on national currency of many countries. We should also mention a huge role of geopolitics in predictability of resource prices. A very good example here is oil prices and the Middle East shutter belt, where a lot of oil extracting countries are located. Any geopolitical tensions in this region may increase oil prices dramatically as it was several times in the history. The last but not the least, the influence of geopolitics on market stocks where stocks of companies from particular countries and of these countries themselves are usually sold. After the end of the Cold War during the 1990's and even in the very early 2000's, it wasn't obvious that geopolitics was worth started and was necessary for everyone. However, according to Dodds, 2007, after terrorist attacks against the United States in 2001 as well as due to some other terrorist attacks in other cities like Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London and Madrid in 2000's, it became clear how peoples of one country and even one part of the world are very interconnected with peoples in another part of the globe. All these brings us to the conclusion that it is not only states that cannot escape geography and continue to be located in the places where they appeared, but also the peoples and nations that continue to live where they emerged to continue to live in the states where they emerged. Therefore, geopolitics is not in elite field of science anymore. It influences our everyday life and therefore it is relevant for everyone to be a geopolitician, it is smart to be a geopolitician. Luckily, we have access to tons of information to be geopoliticians, speeches, official documents, journalist articles and experts' comments, data and statistics. All we need is the skill to correctly interpret all this information with the help of geopolitics.
