Geopolitics of the information age

The purpose of this article is to clarify the essence and nature of geopolitics as a social science and academic discipline. The author's position is that geopolitics is an academic discipline within the field of social sciences, and its purpose is to study how political phenomena are influenced by geographic conditions that change over time and space. Analyzing the evolution of geopolitics to date, the author posits that its nature is unchanging. In his opinion, geopolitics is still the same in its nature, while the geographical conditions (as well as the ways of understanding them), which act as explanatory factors in geopolitics, change. These changes, in turn, are a consequence of the processes of socio-economic development, especially successive industrial revolutions. It is due to the rapid development of information technology that the activity of political actors in cyberspace has been added to the list of geographical factors influencing political reality. The author postulates that the relevance of human information activity in cyberspace makes it necessary to distinguish another subdiscipline of geopolitics, namely information geopolitics.