UG event: Geographies of escalation - Disputes on territory, sovereignty and control in an ever-changing international system

Thursday 25 Sept 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

Zoom

Over the last decade, tensions over territorial control have been rising. From direct territorial disputes such as those over Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Ethiopia and Ukraine, to power politics placed on controlling territorial resources, such as the Trump regime’s proposal for Greenland, escalation has been mounting. Even if these experiences are not equal in their historical, political, economic and social aspects, they present the role territory plays nowadays in global escalation. To better understand these issues – and those that are to come – I present a debate on connections between Geography and IR beyond “pure geopolitics” and Realist rationales, focusing on the political side of territorial management by States.

Through this talk, we seek to explore some questions relating to current escalation in international politics such as why are we experiencing ever-increasing tensions over territorial issues in the last decade that arise worldwide, and what does accumulating local, regional and global escalations mean for our understanding of the International System.

Speaker

Dr Gustavo Glodes Blum is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Geosciences Institute, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), and his work focuses on theoretical and empirical links between Geography, Geopolitics, and International Security. He is a Fellow Researcher at the Laboratory for the Study of Regional and International Relations Geography at Unicamp (Brazil) and an Invited Researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CEIS20), at the University of Coimbra (Portugal).

Registration will close two hours before the deadline closes