At the moment, we know that critical geopolitics pays huge attention not to objective factors of geography and the role they influence on international relations, but it focuses rather on the role of men, the role of human in historical process, in how decisions of particular persons in the history influenced foreign policy and therefore the overall international relations. To make their arguments even stronger, representatives of critical geopolitics and particularly the well-known to us, Gearold O Toal, insisted that geography itself is also not an objective knowledge. They showed that the word geography actually means the 'earth writing'. It came from the previous centuries when the first people started to make maps and to put on these maps landscape around their countries and landscape of their country as well. Of course, something that the scholars put on the map could not leave without their own understanding of how the surrounding world was organized. Therefore, geo-graphing or earth writing could not be distinguished from how these people politically, socially perceived the outer world. Another source of problems was the fact that our earth is a globe and every time when you try to put this globe on a map, you usually have empty spaces and you need to somehow fill these empty spaces with something, and as a result, there are certain distortions in the places which are closer to the poles. These distortions historically were filled with earth and with water, making countries and making spaces closer to the poles bigger. This all came probably from the times of a famous geographer, Mercator, who drew one of the first maps, world maps in the late 16th century, and the result of his work is the so-called Mercator projection that is frequently used nowadays. You can actually find it in the Google Maps. This is actually the reason why some islands like Greenland look the size almost equal to some continents like Africa. Of course, these problems had certain influence on perception of some countries by other countries or by certain politicians. Let's give one example. In this slide, you see that the size of Russia, whatever it is, the contemporary Russia or the Soviet Union or the Tsarist Russia, in the Mercator's projection, looks really bigger. Actually, it is even gigantic if we try to compare Russia, which is of course big itself and has the largest territory in the world, with some other states. Probably it also impressed such geographers and geopoliticans as McIndoe. We'll talk about it a little bit later. At the moment, I wanted to show you a map of the World in the times of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the so-called Soviet Bloc where the Soviet influence was really strong, was perceived by the capitalist states, by the United States and especially by some countries in Western Europe as something very strong and powerful. However, as we remember, the white majority of population in Russia lives in the European part and most part of the territory is really inhabited. But due to the Mercator's projection in the times of the Cold War, this gigantic territory really impressed and really looked like a huge threat to the capitalist world. So we can conclude that geo-graphing or earth writing was one of the first human factors historically started by critical geopolitics that had its impact on foreign policy of states, on how politicians and scientists viewed the outer world, and therefore on international relations. It were mapped where we first could find division of the world into us and them, and of course, attitude of a particular geography to the outer world influence that division. As a result, every map contains among objective reality, a certain part of subjectivity. Mapping the world, however, was not the only human factor. From the very early stages of development of geopolitics, for example, from traditional geopolitics, we can find presence of other factors. In the late 19th, early 20th century, there was an influence of the so-called bourgeois ideology, meaning that a lot of European countries viewed the outer world in terms of materials. They were struggling with each other for markets, for presence in particular places of the world rich in resources, rich in cheap labor force, and it obviously influenced their foreign policy, making geopolitics bourgeois ideology or even bourgeois science. It is really difficult to overestimate the role of Nazi ideology in the German geopolitics prior and in the times of the Second World War. We will talk about it in details a little bit later. At the moment, we can just see that it was another human factor that really changed geopolitics and how it was used by particular states. Today, the influence of human factor on geopolitical knowledge is not so huge or probably is not so terrible as it used to be in the times of intensive geopolitical competition in bloody wars and conflicts. However, even now, according to critical geopolitics, geopolitical knowledge is used by certain scientists and politicians to justify, again, division of the world into us and them or in other words, it contributes to the so-called territorial exclusion of some states, of some people's from a certain place, from continents, from other territories. According to critical geopolitics, it is another contribution of human factor because it depends a lot on which politician or which scientist interprets this territorial exclusion. Critical geopolitics studies the role of these human factors and their impact on foreign policy and international relations of states. In order to do it, it looks at some things that we previously mentioned. Let's very briefly remind them. First of all, it is formal geopolitics. Critical geopoliticians look at scientists and scientific institutions which deal with international relations problems in order to understand what is their political, social, or cultural background. In other words, what factors may influence their judgment. The second instrument here is practical geopolitics. Critical geopoliticians in this case try to understand geopolitical reasoning of decisions made by certain politicians. So the first two instruments of critical geopolitics deal with particular people or institutions directly involved in decision-making process like scientists, academic institutions, bureaucratic organizations, or decision-makers like presidents and prime ministers. To the contrast, the other two instruments, number three and number four, deal with spheres where some geopolitical ideas can origin, can find their origin. For example, the instrument number three, which is popular geopolitics, is used by critical geopoliticians to study the so-called mass culture, where national identity is produced and where the images of outer peoples, of outer places are constructed. The instrument number four which is the final one, is the structural geopolitics is used to study the outer conditions where the country lives, meaning, how the structure of international relations in the world is organized, whether it is multipolar, bipolar, or some other characteristics of the structure, which is also influences perception of the outer world by decision-makers, by scientists, and therefore contributes to this human factor in geopolitics.
