Conflictos geopolíticos y tensiones en el mundo actual

Despite the evolution and importance of the events and factors at play in our world nowadays, the subject of Geopolitics has never been thoroughly explored by Geographers in Spain, and the situation does not seem to be changing today. Research and contributions to this open and stimulating debate from the field of Geography are truly scarce. There is neither a tradition to explore these topics, nor a preference among geography researchers to go in this direction. In consequence, this is an understudied field of work. In the face of the crises, conflicts, and battles currently going on in the world where a number of resources, factors and elements are used to boost division and confrontation, geography and geographers are absent. Does this mean geographers are failing to do their job? In a recent paper entitled "El nuevo mapa geopolitico del mundo", Ricardo Mendez, the author of the opening article in this monograph, emphasises the terms "hydropolitics" and "petropolitics" (coined by Ohlsson and Klare, respectively), and the expression "environmentalisation of geopolitics", used by Nogue and Vicente in their book Geopolitica, identidad y globalizacion. Every line, column, and page written about this topic in the media or in specialised journals has been designed and commented on by analysts belonging to other fields that do conduct research and investigation projects on this topic. We can undoubtedly say that in Spain, there is a lack of social recognition towards the role that geographers and Geography in general can play on this topic. Our citizens are simply not aware of it.