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This book presents the work of Gianfranco Battisti, on Geopolitics and Border Geographies in north-eastern Italy, Europeanization, and Globalization, contributing to debates on the inclusion of non-English speaking scholars in international geography. It highlights the institutions and cultures that shaped more than fifty years of his writing, as they emerged through his biography, theoretical contributions, and methods. Battisti uses historical geographies as tools to explain contemporary geopolitics while maintaining a high attentiveness to data-driven research. He applies these tools to investigate 'geographical facts' at the local, regional and global scale, viewed from the distinctive viewpoint of the city of Trieste, a laboratory of geopolitical change for more than two centuries.
To better understand the importance of place in the production of geographical theories and methods, this book discusses Battisti's biography in the context of the Triestino School of geography that started from the same French and German classics that shaped Anglo-American geography in the 19th century to later express original features. This book explains such features by introducing the concept of Geography as an industry that operates in a local and global context. It then deploys the methods Battisti developed within his school to discuss the realities and problems of borderlands in a historic and local context during the first and second World Wars and the geopolitical rationale that shaped the times between. The book continues to give an outlook, on how Europe reconstructed itself geopolitically, the implications thereof, and a comparison of how this fits in with geopolitical agendas on a global scale.
List of contents
Part 1: Triestino Geographical Thought.- Chapter 1. Becoming geographer in Trieste: autobiographical essay, with a reflection on the nature of Geography.- Chapter 2. Living in the borderlands: political geography, geopolitics and advocacy in the Triestino School of Geography during the long 20th Century.- Part 2: Historical Geographyas Method: Producing Geopolitics From The Julian Region.- Chapter 3 Urbanization processes in a transnational area. An application of the rank-size rule to the Austrian Littoral (1849-1918).- Chapter 4. Gorizia Nova, aka "New Gorizia:" a Euro-city on the border between Italy and Slovenia. A recommendation for local level territorial changes after Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004. Chapter 5. Inland areas and border regions: a geopolitical interpretation. Comparing the marginalization of Trieste and Umbria as an example of the dynamics of borderlands vs. remote inland areas. Part 3: From Trieste To The World: Deploying Triestino Geographical Thought To Grand Geopolitics In Europe And Beyond.- Chapter 6. The reshaping of German-Yugoslav Space from a middle European Point of view. Paper presented at the 2nd IBRU Conference, held in Durham, UK, on July 18-21, 1991.- Chapter 7. Europe. The many reasons of an epoch-spanning crisis. A long-term geo-historical and geo-economics analysis of the obstacles to European integration.- Chapter 8. A century of struggles. A comparison of multiple geopolitical agendas in Europe, the US and beyond.- Chapter 9. Cycles of geopolitical (dis)order, as determined by interactions between spatial systems. A theoretical model of the systemic drivers of geopolitics.
