Ungoverned+Spaces

Are wide open spaces breeding grounds for grandiose, expansionist leaders and ideologies who may want/believe they have a right to possess all they can survey? Do steppe lands, plains or this kind of lack of mountains or wide rivers encourage their inhabitants to not see "natural" or "rightful" limits to power? Does this aspect of geography influence the entire "nation's" culture, such as in Russia, Germany, China, the Mongols, and the US?
 * DC Hypothesis: **


 * Urbanization and Radicalization:** Look more into the likely effects of urban life on the development of radical ideologies - how does this separation from the land engender radicalism?

In the case of radical Islam, Kaplan says, in //Revenge//, p. 121: "Forget the image of the Arab as the nomad or inhabitant of an oasis on the steppe-desert. In most instances, he is a city dweller, of a crowded and shabby city at that, and is at home in vast crowds. It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way, states weaken, or at lest have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization." //- Take Pakistan as prime example//

Kaplan: the steady filling up of space to create closed geography where states and militaries have less room to hide - //Revenge// p.47

Kaplan quotes McNeill's __The Rise of the West__, "the closing of barbarian or empty spaces via encroachment of civilization"

Dr. Phil Williams, “Here Be Dragons: Dangerous Spaces and International Security,” Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas, eds., Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Kaplan says Malthus "treats humankind as a species reacting to its physical environment, rather than a body of self-willed individuals motivated by ideas" - Revenge p. 120 - An Essay on the Principles of Population - Available on Hammermill Ebooks

SSI May 2009 by [|Dr. Max G. Manwaring]
 * State and Nonstate Associated Gangs: Credible "Midwives of New Social Orders"**