1. Introduction — Does Mackinder Still Explain the World?
Teaching Geopolitics presents a particular difficulty: its subject matter seems to age more rapidly than the concepts used to explain it. Wars begin and end, governments are replaced, alliances are reorganized, and new technologies alter the capacity of states to control territory and project power. In the classroom, this produces an understandable temptation: to follow current affairs. Russia and Ukraine, China (external link) and Taiwan, the Middle East, NATO, the BRICS, oil, trade routes, and territorial disputes follow one another as topics, often accompanied by maps, news reports, and analyses produced while the events themselves are still unfolding.
It was from the experience with this type of class that the concern guiding this article arose. While teaching Geography and Geopolitics in secondary education, I realized that recognizing major international events did not necessarily mean understanding them. Students could locate Ukraine, identify Taiwan, recognize NATO, or discuss China's rise, and yet encounter difficulties when asked to establish relationships among territory, circulation, resources, technology, and power. The closer the class came to the daily succession of news, the greater the risk of Geopolitics turning into a sort of permanently updated inventory of international conflicts.
The problem does not lie in the use of current events. It would be difficult to imagine teaching Geopolitics without them. The issue lies in transforming information into an interpretive capacity. Knowing where a war is taking place does not necessarily mean understanding why a given territory has acquired strategic importance. Recognizing the location of a maritime strait also does not mean understanding the flows that lend it relevance. Likewise, knowing the member countries of an alliance or international organization reveals little, in itself, about the spatial distribution of power that conditions their choices.
It was at this point that the history of geographic and geopolitical thought began to interest me not only as subject matter, but as a methodological possibility.
This choice aligns with the discussion developed by Márcia Helena Alvim and Marcelo Zanotello (2014) regarding the relationship between the History of Science and science education. The authors advocate a dialogue capable of incorporating into teaching both the cultural aspects of scientific production and the historical conditions under which meaning is produced, with the ultimate horizon of fostering critical, reflective, and civic-minded education. The contribution of this perspective to Geopolitics seems particularly fertile. To understand a theory historically does not mean adding a few dates before presenting its concepts, but rather understanding that what later appears in textbooks as systematized knowledge was produced by individuals embedded within specific societies and confronting problems particular to their time.
Bringing this perspective into the history of Geography and Geopolitics significantly alters the way its classical authors are approached. Mackinder is no longer merely “the author of the Heartland”; Mahan does not have to be reduced to the formula of “sea power”; Ratzel can be disentangled from the automatic association between determinism and expansionism; and Spykman ceases to be merely the name accompanying a map of the Rimland. Before asking what these authors still explain, it is important to understand what they sought to explain.
This distinction matters because part of the didactic strength of geopolitical models lies precisely in their capacity for simplification. A map of the Heartland possesses enormous visual power. In a few minutes, students can identify a continental core, peripheral areas, and positional relationships. The problem arises when the representation is separated from the historical conditions that produced it and begins to function as a permanent interpretive key. In that case, the map risks ceasing to be a model and taking on the appearance of destiny.
The history of geopolitical thought can fulfill another function. Rather than serving merely as a chronological introduction—Ratzel, Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman—it can show that geopolitical concepts were also responses to historically formulated questions. Teaching their history thus means reconstructing the questions that made their elaboration possible.
The hypothesis of this article stems from this: what remains pedagogically relevant in the classics of Geopolitics is less the answers they formulated than the questions they taught us to ask about the relationship between space and power.
When Mahan observes the oceans, we are led to ask how circulation, trade, ports, and naval capacity relate to power. When Mackinder observes Eurasia, another question emerges: in what way can technical transformations in mobility alter the strategic importance of a region? With Spykman, the focus shifts to the zones of contact between land and sea powers. Even when their answers are no longer sufficient, some of these questions remain intellectually productive.
The methodological proposal presented in the following pages arose from this pedagogical problem and has been systematized into four movements: context, model, confrontation, and reinterpretation. This is not an experimental methodology whose learning efficacy has been measured. It is a systematization developed from the practice of teaching Geography and Geopolitics in secondary education, aimed at shifting the classics from conceptual memorization to problem construction.
The question that titles this article—Does Mackinder still explain the world?—will not be answered simply with a yes or a no. It will function as an investigative procedure. At times, Mackinder’s thought allows us to identify spatial relationships that remain relevant. At others, its limitations are pedagogically more interesting than its enduring aspects. Teaching the history of Geopolitics, from this perspective, does not mean leading students into the past before allowing them to understand the present. It means showing that the very tools used to interpret the present also have a history.
2. The Classics and the Construction of a Geopolitical Perspective
A conventional presentation of the history of Geopolitics usually organizes its authors in a relatively well-known succession. Friedrich Ratzel appears associated with territory; Alfred Thayer Mahan, with sea power; Halford Mackinder, with the Heartland; Nicholas Spykman, with the Rimland. The sequence is didactically convenient, but it exacts a price: concepts may end up divorced from the problems that gave rise to them.
A different possibility consists in asking, when considering each author: what was the problem they were trying to understand?
In the case of Friedrich Ratzel, this question leads to the late nineteenth century and to the consolidation of a Political Geography concerned with the relationships among the state, population, position, and territory. His Politische Geographie, published in 1897, features chapters dedicated to the state and the soil, the spatial growth of states, position, space, borders, and the relations between land and sea (RATZEL, 1897). This corpus already suggests something more complex than the textbook association between Ratzel and an elementary form of geographic determinism.
This does not mean removing his work from the political and intellectual conditions of European imperialism, nor ignoring the problems present in his formulations. It means avoiding the reverse path: interpreting a nineteenth-century author exclusively through the political uses and simplifications that his ideas subsequently received.
For teaching, perhaps the most productive aspect lies in realizing that territory ceases to function merely as a stage for politics. Spatial organization becomes part of reflection on the state itself. This seemingly simple shift opens up a set of questions: in what way does position affect the possibilities of a state? What does a border represent beyond a line? What relationship exists among population, political organization, and territory? One does not need to accept Ratzel’s answers to recognize the importance of the questions.
With Alfred Thayer Mahan, the problem changes in scale and perspective. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, published in 1890, Mahan placed maritime interests at the center of a historical interpretation that linked commerce, naval power, position, bases, and national prosperity (MAHAN, 1890). Reducing him to the idea that “whoever possesses a great navy possesses power” considerably impoverishes his argument.
The sea that interests Mahan is also a space of circulation. Sea power is not confined to naval combat; it involves conditions that allow for using, protecting, and contesting the routes through which trade and influence flow. This observation makes his thought especially engaging for the classroom because it compels us to look at the map differently. The ocean ceases to be an empty space between continents and becomes a surface of connection.
There is something very contemporary about this question, though not necessarily in all of Mahan’s answers. According to UNCTAD, approximately 80% of the volume of international merchandise trade is carried by sea (UNCTAD, 2025). Clearly, the contemporary maritime system is not the one observed by a nineteenth-century American officer. Containers, major port terminals, global value chains, digital logistics systems, and new corporate structures have profoundly transformed circulation. Even so, the question regarding the relationship between circulation and power remains.
Mackinder presents perhaps the most well-known case—and, for that very reason, the one that requires the greatest care. In January 1904, before the Royal Geographical Society, Halford Mackinder presented “The Geographical Pivot of History,” later published in The Geographical Journal (MACKINDER, 1904). His argument must be read within the strategic context of the early twentieth century, marked by imperialism, great-power competition, and profound changes in land mobility.
One of Mackinder’s concerns lay in railway expansion and the consequences that integrating vast continental expanses could have on the historical advantage of maritime mobility. Venier’s reading (2004) is particularly important on this point because it resituates the text within the strategic debates and British foreign policy of the Edwardian era. This reduces the temptation to turn Mackinder retrospectively into someone who merely “foresaw” the geopolitical disputes of the subsequent century.
There is also a conceptual distinction relevant to teaching. The 1904 text fundamentally works with the idea of the “pivot area.” Mackinder’s formulation did not remain static. In Democratic Ideals and Reality, published in 1919 after World War I, the author revisited and developed his interpretations of the “World-Island” and the “Heartland” (MACKINDER, 1919). Presenting students with a ready-made, immutable “Mackinder theory” erases precisely what is valuable for learning: theories also change as their authors confront new developments.
The question that can be recovered from Mackinder is far more engaging than merely memorizing the cartographic boundaries of the Heartland: how does a technical transformation in circulation alter the strategic value of space?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, railways were at the center of this problem. Today, we can pose the same question in the face of high-capacity railways, logistics corridors, gas pipelines, ports, satellites, telecommunications networks, or submarine cables. The answer will certainly not be Mackinder’s. The question, however, continues to prompt inquiry.
Nicholas Spykman provides one final shift. In works such as America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) and, posthumously, The Geography of the Peace (1944), the relationship between power and position is reconsidered from the perspective of United States security and the balance of power in Eurasia (SPYKMAN, 1942; 1944). The well-known emphasis on the Rimland directs attention toward the densely populated and strategically contested margins of the Eurasian landmass.
In the classroom, the goal should not be to substitute Heartland with Rimland, as though we were merely choosing the correct map. What changes is the question. Why do certain continental rims concentrate circulation, population, economic power, and competition among powers? What happens in the contact zones between continental and maritime forces?
Framed this way, Ratzel, Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman cease to be merely a timeline of Geopolitics. Each provides a distinct way of looking at space. It is precisely this plurality that allows us to turn the history of the discipline into a didactic tool.
3. What remains and what has changed?
Revisiting the classics does not imply assuming that the twenty-first century can be squeezed into models conceived between the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. That would be the exact opposite of what is argued here. The political map remains important, but it is no longer sufficient.
Borders, natural resources, territorial depth, access to the sea, and location continue to influence international relations. At the same time, contemporary power circulates through structures that cannot be understood exclusively through the territorial extent of states. Transnational corporations, financial systems, production chains, digital platforms, satellites, energy grids, data processing centers, and submarine cables have added other geographies to the political map.
Mahan wrote in a very different world, but the vulnerability of maritime corridors has not disappeared. UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport 2025 demonstrates how geopolitical tensions and shifts in shipping routes have increased distances, costs, and logistical uncertainties. In May 2025, tonnage transiting the Suez Canal was still 70% below 2023 levels; the report also highlights the significance of the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 11% of world trade and roughly one-third of seaborne oil pass (UNCTAD, 2025).
These data could be presented in class simply as current events. Mahan’s historical perspective allows us to do something different. The question becomes why certain nodes in a global network concentrate such importance, and how the control, security, or disruption of flows affects power relations.
The difference may seem minor on the surface, but it is substantial from a pedagogical perspective. Rather than memorizing that Suez or Hormuz are “strategic chokepoints,” students begin to ask what makes a place strategic.
Mackinder allows for a similar shift. The point is not to look for the Heartland in every conflict involving Eurasia. It is to recognize that the significance of a geographic location does not exist independently of the technologies of circulation available in each historical period. The railway that reshaped Mackinder’s perception of the Eurasian interior at the turn of the twentieth century reminds us that political distances are not measured in kilometers alone.
In A natureza do espaço, Santos (2006) enables us to conceive of technology, objects, actions, and networks as inseparable components of the production of space. The technical-scientific-informational milieu does not eliminate territory; rather, it relies on an extremely concrete materiality. Information can circulate almost instantaneously, yet it requires cables, antennas, satellites, energy, servers, and processing centers. Commodities integrated into global production chains continue to pass through ports, railways, highways, and canals.
This approach helps avoid another common oversimplification: the idea that globalization has rendered classical Geopolitics irrelevant because territory has lost its importance.
What has changed is not the existence of territory, but the way different territories are articulated by increasingly complex technical and political networks.
Milton Santos thus enables a move that is essential to the argument of this article: shifting from territory to networks without abandoning territory.
At this juncture, the limitations of the classics become productive. If Mahan teaches us to look at maritime routes, we can ask what happens when a significant share of strategic flows becomes informational. If Mackinder forces us to consider how the railway alters the importance of the continent, we can ask which infrastructures currently alter the relative value of places. If Spykman directs our gaze toward certain continental rims, we can investigate whether these areas continue to concentrate population, infrastructure, trade, and strategic competition—and why.
Theory ceases to be a mold into which the present must fit. It becomes a starting point that the present itself can challenge.
It is also here that the critique of determinism must emerge most clearly. A state's geographic position does not automatically determine its political choices. Resources do not inevitably produce conflicts. Borders do not possess a fixed strategic meaning. Geography establishes conditions, possibilities, costs, and opportunities that are interpreted by societies, governments, and other actors.
A map does not decide to start a war.
This simple statement is important in a Geopolitics class because cartographic models possess great persuasive power. Arrows, circles, colored areas, and spheres of influence can create the impression that a given political behavior is an inevitable consequence of location. The historical contextualization of these models helps precisely to break through this appearance of inevitability.
4. From the classics to the classroom: context, model, confrontation, and reinterpretation
If the history of science can contribute to revealing knowledge as a culturally and historically situated production, as Alvim and Zanotello (2014) suggest, the history of Geopolitics can be utilized in a similar manner. This requires, however, that it cease to be merely a chronology of authors.
The approach I have used to organize this path can be summarized in four movements: context, model, confrontation, and reinterpretation.
The sequence should not be understood as a rigid formula. Rather, it is a way to prevent the concept from being presented to the student before the problem that gave rise to it.
The first movement is context. Before presenting Mackinder's map, for instance, it is worth reconstructing the world he observed. What did the expansion of railways signify at the beginning of the twentieth century? What was Britain's position in the international system? What transformations were occurring in the competition between land and sea powers?
The initial question ceases to be “what is the Heartland?” and becomes: what problem led Mackinder to look at the map this way?
This inversion makes an important difference. The student first encounters a problem and only then a historical attempt to answer it.
The second movement is the model. Here enter the author's concepts, maps, and categories, but they appear as a construct that selects certain elements of reality. Every model sees some things better precisely because it leaves others out.
This realization can be made explicit to the student. Mackinder's map is not the world; it is a way of organizing the world to answer specific questions.
With Mahan, we observe maritime circulation, trade, bases, and naval capacity. With Mackinder, continental mobility and position. With Spykman, the peripheral zones of Eurasia. The exercise does not consist in memorizing each representation, but in discerning where each author directs our gaze.
The third movement is confrontation. The historical model is placed before a contemporary problem. It is here that current affairs return to the classroom, but with a different function. They do not appear merely as information to be updated, but rather as a situation capable of testing the model.
What does Mahan allow us to understand about contemporary maritime routes? What does he not? What does the physical integration of Eurasia suggest when viewed through Mackinder? Which elements of the twenty-first century completely escape his formulation?
The fourth movement is reinterpretation. It is at this stage that the student must abandon the security provided by the model. After identifying what the theory illuminates, they must search for what it obscures.
Technology, non-state actors, corporations, information, finance, environmental issues, and social transformations may demand other categories. At this point, contemporary authors and other geographical traditions cease to function as “competing theories” and begin to provide tools to broaden the analysis. Reinterpretation prevents the class from ending with the mere confirmation of the classic.
This is perhaps the central difference of the proposal. The goal is not to demonstrate that Mackinder remains correct. If the exercise always ends by vindicating the author studied, analysis has turned into confirmation.
The desirable outcome is more unsettling: to understand why a given model was compelling in its context, to perceive what it can still illuminate, and to recognize the moment it ceases to be sufficient.
5. Thinking China through three maps
Contemporary China offers a particularly interesting exercise because it defies any one-dimensional geopolitical explanation.
It is not necessary to begin the activity by presenting a theory. One can start with maps.
A first map can represent overland connections between China, Central Asia, and Europe. Another can highlight ports, ocean routes, and straits used by Asian commerce. A third can represent the territorial distribution of key political relationships and tensions across the Indo-Pacific.
The opening question is deliberately open-ended: where is Chinese power on these maps? The answer will hardly be singular. It is precisely here that the classics enter.
Through Mackinder's lens, attention shifts to the Eurasian landmass. Railways, economic corridors, and overland connections take on a different meaning. The Belt and Road Initiative makes the exercise especially interesting because its projects combine land and maritime connectivity.
This does not mean that China is “applying Mackinder.” Such an assertion would confuse spatial resemblance with causality and attribute a specific theoretical framework to policies whose development involves far more complex interests and processes. What we can state is that observing this infrastructure through Mackinder's question—how do shifts in mobility transform the strategic value of space?—produces one plausible reading.
Now the main elements are the coastline, ports, trade routes, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the straits through which a significant portion of maritime trade flows. The issue ceases to be merely continental integration and comes to involve the access and security of maritime networks.
Once again, the goal is not to demonstrate that Mahan “predicted” China. His historical world, his conception of power, and the economic structure he analyzed were different. The interest lies in the question concerning the relationship between maritime circulation and the capacity to project power.
With Spykman, the map reorganizes for a third time. Taiwan, Japan, the Korean peninsula, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and other areas along the eastern rim of Eurasia take center stage. The relationships between continental power, maritime power, alliances, and peripheral positions become more visible.
We have, then, three representations of the same country. None of them is simply false. None of them is sufficient.
The activity could end there, asking students to choose “which theory best explains China.” I find it more productive to do precisely the opposite: introduce elements that all three maps struggle to represent.
Where are the semiconductors? Where are the global production chains? How do we represent corporations? Where is information? Where are the digital networks? How do we place trade, finance, technology, military capability, and infrastructure on the same map?
At this moment, the exercise ceases to be an application of the classics and transforms into a critique of them.
It is here that Milton Santos gains importance along this path. Networks are not abstractions suspended above territory. They connect places unequally equipped with technical objects and embedded in different power relations. Ports, railways, cables, technological centers, and logistics systems come to be observed simultaneously as localized objects and components of broader networks.
The question “where is Chinese power?” becomes more difficult after the class than before it. This does not represent a pedagogical failure. On the contrary, it may be precisely a sign that the problem no longer admits of a simplified answer.
Chinese power may reside simultaneously in state capacity, territory, infrastructure networks, trade, technology, ports, productive capacity, and the relationships built with other states. The classics help initiate this inquiry. They cannot conclude it.
6. Final considerations — teaching how to think geopolitically
Let us return to the opening question: does Mackinder still explain the world?
Following the trajectory developed in this article, the formulation may seem less important as a question about Mackinder than as a question about how we teach Geopolitics.
If we look to the British author for a general theory capable of explaining state behavior in the twenty-first century, the answer will necessarily be limited. The world of 1904 is not ours. Technologies have changed, new actors have acquired power, networks have grown denser, and the very relationship between territory and circulation has assumed configurations that Mackinder could not have known.
The history of geopolitical thought enables something that simply updating content can hardly offer: tracing how questions about space were constructed and observing how different authors sought to answer them within their own contexts.
It was this perception that brought together, in this article, the history of Geopolitics and teaching. Alvim and Zanotello’s contribution to conceiving the History of Science as part of a reflective education helps shift attention from the finished product to the historical process of knowledge production. Applied to Geopolitics, this approach allows a theory to be simultaneously studied and questioned.
Ratzel can be read to understand how territory and the state became geographical problems without turning his formulations into laws of state behavior. Mahan allows us to recover maritime circulation as a dimension of power without reducing the present to the nineteenth-century naval world. Mackinder shows how technology and mobility can alter the strategic importance of space without transforming Eurasia into political destiny. Spykman makes it possible to observe contact zones between powers without turning the Rimland into a mandatory framework for any contemporary conflict.
This final step is decisive. If the history of Geopolitics serves merely to show that the classics remain right, we will have transformed the past into an argument from authority. Its pedagogical potential is greatest when we also allow the present to interrogate the classics.
It is in this sense that Milton Santos fulfills an important role in the proposal. Not to replace Mackinder, Mahan, or Spykman with a more recent theory, but to show that the historical transformation of space itself demands new categories. Networks, technique, and information do not render territory obsolete; they alter the ways in which it is used, connected, and valued.
Contemporary conflict enters into dialogue with the history of the ideas used to explain it. The map ceases to be merely an illustration. Theory ceases to be a definition to be memorized. And the classic ceases to be an authority whose enduring relevance must be proven.
In this sense, teaching the classics of Geopolitics means learning to think with them, against them, and, when necessary, beyond them.