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20 August 2024

Interview – Colin Flint

Colin Flint

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.

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