Yves Lacoste
Lacoste in 1972
Born (1929-09-07) September 7, 1929 (age 94)
Fez, Morocco
Known forForensic analysis of the US bombing campaign of the Red River Delta
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Paris 8
ThesisTransformational Analysis (1955)

Yves Lacoste (born 7 September 1929) is a French geographer and geopolitician. He was born in Fez, Morocco.[1]

Life

In 1976 he established the French geopolitical journal Hérodote and published a work that shook the French academy, La Géographie ça sert d'abord à faire la guerre. Its central thesis was that "geography was a form of strategic and political knowledge, central to the military strategy and the exercise of political power".[2] Lacoste had earlier earned international renown in 1972 during the Vietnam War by publishing a spatial forensics analysis of the US bombing campaign of the Red River Delta. He agreed with claims from the North Vietnamese government that the US was deliberately targeting the hydrological infrastructure of the river in an attempt to trigger flooding and cause mass civilian casualties, which it called a war crime.[3]

He is currently co-editor of Hérodote with Beatrice Giblin and the head of the French Institute of Geopolitics (Institut Français de Géopolitique) at the University of Paris VIII.[4][5]

Understanding of geopolitics

Lacoste played a key role in reviving the word geopolitics in the French and English languages. The word had been tarnished by its association with the Nazi régime because of German geopolitician Karl Haushofer.[3] Focussing on spatial dimensions of political affairs Lacoste defines geopolitics as the study of power rivalries over territory carried out on different levels of analysis: global, continental, national, regional or even local.[6]

In an earlier work, La Géographie du sous-développement, Lacoste had suggested a spatial explanation of underdevelopment.

Writings

References

  1. ^ David Criekemans (20 February 2007). Geopolitiek: "geografisch geweten" van de buitenlandse politiek?. Garant. pp. 544–546. ISBN 978-90-441-1969-5. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
  2. ^ Hepple, Leslie W. (2000). "Geopolitiques de gauche: Yves Lacoste, Herodote and French radical geopolitics". In Dodds, Klaus; Atkinson, David (eds.). Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought. New York: Routledge. p. 268. ISBN 9780415172486. OCLC 52280424.
  3. ^ a b Claval, Paul (2000-01-01). "Herodote and the French Left". In Dodds, Klaus; Atkinson, David (eds.). Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415172489. OCLC 760457170.
  4. ^ "Hérodote". Retrieved 2016-08-19.
  5. ^ "Institut Français de Géopolitique". Retrieved 2016-08-19.
  6. ^ Yves Lacoste on geopolitics Retrieved 2021-10-19.


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