Human Geopolitics: Introduction

Human geopolitics, the competition for population rather than territory, has preceded violent conflict throughout
world history (Gamlen 2019). Such competitions have been minimised since the Peace of Westphalia, which brought
an end to the Thirty Years War in the mid-seventeenth century, setting in place the territorial foundations of the
modern international system. But human geopolitics is being resurrected today in unanticipated ways, as this system
evolves and governments are allowed and encouraged to engage their emigrant diasporas through ‘diaspora
institutions’.