King's College London

Our Geopolitics, Resources and Territory (GRT) MA is a unique multidisciplinary programme that has a dual focus on the territorial and resource-related components of inter-state relations, rooted in the social sciences but also engaging with important areas of international law. It delivers research-led teaching on critical and fundamental questions relating to international boundaries, sovereignty disputes and environmental geopolitics. This is supplemented with teaching and guidance from leading external practitioners (including savvy, experienced international lawyers) in the field of international dispute resolution and environmental management.

The increasing saliency of destabilising territorial conflict and critical resource challenges in many areas of the world as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century means that our GRT programme is better suited than ever to provide students with an unmatched foundation in geopolitics. You’ll study a topic that has been taught at King’s for 25 years. This MA programme draws on the wealth of experience of its successful predecessor, the Geopolitics, Territory and Security MA, which has produced alumni in the fields of international civil service and diplomacy, international law, academia, NGOs and specialised political and security risk agencies. You’ll be taught by leading academic specialists with extensive policy networks and experience and practising international lawyers to gain an understanding that goes above and beyond traditional international relations perspectives. Exciting recent Geography staff hires in the geopolitics field will further enrich our coverage of the history and intellectual foundations of the discipline. But you won’t just learn about geopolitics and its latest academic framings - you’ll also study the causes of international strife, the consequences of it, and the potential ways of ameliorating their worst effect in ground-up pragmatic, everyday global settings. This constructive engagement is a hallmark of all Geography’s PGT offerings.

You’ll learn how to apply critical scrutiny of resource and territorial disputes involving - as you might expect in a geography department - a clear focus on their spatial manifestations. You’ll also be exposed to cutting edge debates on border and territorial disputes, resource frontiers, water diplomacy and the major drivers of global, regional and local geopolitical change.

You’ll examine a range of issues, ranging from topical issues such as water conflicts to long-standing themes like the creation and maintenance of international boundaries and borders on land and sea at varying scales of operation. You’ll also study the factors that drive contemporary territorial disputes, and how the scarcity of natural resources impact this.
At the end of this Geopolitics, Resources and Territory MA, you’ll become skilled at geopolitical and political geographic analysis and be able to contextualise these issues within the wider social sciences, and the relevant aspects of international law.

When you graduate, you will join an alumni network that has gone on to work in academia, the FCTO, in international NGOs involved in dispute resolution, international law firms, and departments of the United Nations and the European Union.

This Geopolitics, Resources and Territory MA will teach you about how international boundaries on land and sea are created, maintained and questioned – a traditional focus, concentrating not only on how the social sciences have covered all this but also the legal, technical and practical factors that are involved here.

You’ll gain insights into how border and territorial disputes are resolved, and how contemporary issues such as water conflict can be tackled – not just from internationally-renowned academic researchers but also leading practitioners with an everyday familiarity with and involvement in such issues

You’ll explore how academic disciplines have evolved to cover territorial questions and specific analysis such as critical water scholarship, including cutting edge new research and emergent critical lenses. This will give you an appreciation of how to develop new approaches within critical border studies and critical water scholarship.

This Geopolitics, Resources and Territory MA focuses on how these processes play out at the international, regional and local levels, with in-house regional specialisation on critically important areas of the developing world, most notably the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia.

You’ll develop multidisciplinary lenses capable of focusing sharply on crucial world challenges, applying geopolitical and political geographic analysis, relevant elements of international law, and other approaches from the social sciences /humanities and international relations theory.

You’ll get ample opportunity to specialise in the areas of territorial and resource geopolitics that interest you most. We allow students a lot of freedom in developing their own coursework and research, guiding individuals in shaping their approaches to these issues and associated questions of environmental security.

The GRT programme makes full use of KCL’s magnificent central London location on the Thames. We build in programme field visits to the British Library at St.Pancras, the National Archives in Kew and other significant repositories and institutions. We also stage an irregular series of talks and seminars, delivered by experts passing through London – from subjects as diverse as specialised research on artificial islands in the South China Sea to navigating ancient maps and documents on territorial dispute sin the archives.