Human geopolitics. An unprecedented juxtaposition of terms, yet, according to Dario Fabbri, a journalist and expert on these issues who recently published a book that reads just that, it is an approach that today can help us “step into the gaze of others to make us more aware of our surroundings in the world.” But the others who, precisely? “Other peoples, as subversive as it sounds to say, in an age when it is strongly argued, at least in the West, that peoples no longer exist. Rather, it is believed that there are only individual citizens, individualities.”
The fundamental thesis of the book is that in history we need to distinguish peoples’ attitudes by looking at their deep ‘spirit’, and not on the basis of Western criteria such as culture or economic system. There are peoples who are or aim to be powers, and others who instead come into the sphere of influence of others. The tool that moves this mechanism is, needless to say, violence, which is capable of redrawing the map of human geopolitics.
“Let’s clarify one point,” Fabbri says. “To understand other peoples, we have to start from the assumption that they do not live by economics, as we do. They live on glory: they want to be in the history books. The Russians don’t have food, they don’t have a big economy, they don’t have political rights. But they do have a sphere of influence, as do the Americans on the other hand.”
With our tools we certainly struggle to grasp this perspective: “The Russians invade Ukraine? We believe it is because they are racist, because they hate them, but this is our reading,” Fabbri points out. “For them, Ukrainians simply belong to their people: they are Russians. Or: in Iran in 2020 an uprising broke out, and we celebrated believing that ‘finally’ they wanted to live like us. Except to note, then, that they stand for very different principles. Persian women do not want to live like us, they want an empire, a little less Islamic, yes, but certainly not like the West.” Understanding this requires, first and foremost, a human geopolitics.