Geopolitical Perspectives from the Italian Border

Gianfranco Battisti is a retired Professor of Geography at the University of Trieste in Italy.  He has served as vice president of the Italian Association of Geography teachers (AIIG) and editor (1992-2003) of  the journal "AST-Geografia nelle Scuole" (Environment, Society and Territory-Geography in Schools). Now he is supervisor of the "Permanent  Laboratory for dydactical innovation in geosciences", at the Dept. of Mathematics and Geosciences, University of Trieste, Italy.Christian Sellar is Professor in the Department of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi in the United States. He has published extensively on the interactions between economic policies and geopolitics, government support to firms’ internationalization, post-socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, and Europeanization. He served in a variety of roles in the American Association of Geographers.

• 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.