Rethinking geopolitics: how the world looks from the East

Express Tribune

03-05-2025

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The prevailing literature on geopolitics is, in large part, an echo of how the world appears through the lens of the West. This dominant perspective has not only shaped the narratives of global power but has also denied many nations — particularly those of the East — the opportunity to express the world through their own conceptual and philosophical frameworks.
Deprived of this kaleidoscope, many nations have been constricted into worldviews not born of their own soil but superimposed through intellectual and institutional dominance of the West.
My new book, Geopolitics - Frameworks and Dynamics in a Multipolar World, is perhaps a natural reaction to this asphyxiation of expression, which has and will lead many observant minds to rethink national and geopolitical narrative.
Perhaps it is right time to rethink and re-narrate, when the unipolar world is changing into a multipolar world, and when the geo-economic situation of the world also seems to be at the edge of a polar-shift, rather it has become a compulsion.
The tyranny of political correctness and epistemological dependency has paralysed indigenous ideological growth, depriving nations of the very dream of becoming protagonists in their own historical unfolding. Breathing, thinking, working nations cannot be caged within the strictures of externally dictated norms any longer.
Nevertheless, to think geopolitics from the East is not to reject the West, but to decolonise the imagination. It is to assert that every culture has the right - and perhaps the obligation - to interpret the world through its own metaphysical lens. Western geopolitics, rooted in figures like Mackinder, Mahan and Haushofer, framed the globe as a chessboard for power acquisition.
To this day, with the aid of grand think-tanks and institutional power, the West deems to dictate their norms upon the rest of the world. But it is time to move beyond this imperial grammar of coercion, control and conquest, toward a philosophy of coexistence, reciprocity and shared stewardship of the Earth.
This new paradigm calls for a re-centring of geopolitics - not just as strategy, but as a phenomenology of perception. It is not merely about borders and treaties, but about how people and nations conceive of their space and time, and their roles within history. Geopolitics, rightly understood, becomes a metaphysical inquiry: what does it mean to belong to a place, to a people, and to a planet?
Globalisation has expanded our awareness, but not necessarily our understanding. While information is abundant, the frameworks to process that information remain narrow and often distorted. Hence, the call is not for more data - but for new ways of seeing, new epistemologies that are local, rooted and holistic.
Amidst the tremors of the Russia-Ukraine and Gaza-Israel wars, the old tectonic plates of Cold War polarity are shifting once again. But the fault lines no longer divide just East and West — they run deeper, between those who cling to a unipolar order and those who envision a world of plural sovereignties — between a Global South and a Global North.
The rise of multipolar alliances like BRICS, SCO and BRI — signals not simply new blocs of power, but new ontologies of global existence, and call upon nations to come forward and rewrite their own fates in these times of eventfulness and fortuity.
This transition is not without danger. At stake is more than military alignment - it is the philosophical soul of the world. Will we remain enslaved to binary models of capitalism and socialism, consumption and control? Or can we, as a species, forge a new path - one that values sustainability over speed, ethics over exploitation, and memory over myopia?
In a world increasingly beset by existential threats — climate collapse, nuclear peril, pandemics and moral exhaustion — the urgency is clear. We cannot afford to continue geopolitics as usual. The age of conquest must give way to the age of consciousness.
In his Zamana-e-Hazir Ka Insan, Iqbal has lamented upon the condition of modern man of today. Under the sway of modernism, he has become detached from soul, and is divided within and without, the same with nations.
Ishq na-paid o khird megzadsh soorat-e-maar
Aqal ko taba-e-farman-e-nazar kar na saka
Dhoondne wala sitaron ki guzrgahon ka
Apne afkar ki dunya mein safar kar na saka
Apni hikmat ke kham-o-paich mein uljha aesa
Aj tak faisla-e-nafa-o-zarar kar na saka
Jis ne suraj ki shuaon ko giraftar kiya
Zindagi ki shab-e-tareek sehar kar na saka!
Geopolitics, too, suffers this alienation. It has become a machine without spirit, a calculation devoid of compassion. To heal it, we must reintroduce the human agent - not merely as a player of power, but as a seeker of wisdom and compassion.
The faltering US hegemony that stands exposed through its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, and its economic hollowness that has led it to a trade war with the world, point to the fragility of imperial overreach. The world no longer revolves around a single centre. The end of the petrodollar era, the emergence of Eastern-led diplomacy, and the erosion of Western moral authority, all suggest a spiritual exhaustion at the core of the dominant order. It also points to a possible clash of civilisations, an Armageddon, because the West want to hold on to its unsustainable status quo.
In contrast, China's geopolitical strategy seems animated by reproachment, not rivalry. Whether in its overtures toward peace between Hamas and the PLO, or in its mediations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, China appears to be cultivating a diplomacy grounded not in control, but in harmony. This may not be idealism — it may be realism reframed through a different civilisational lens.
But the question remains: will this new multipolarity lead to balance or to fragmentation? Can we imagine a geopolitics no longer driven by Darwinian struggle, but by dialogical mutuality?
For geopolitics to evolve, it must cease to be the monopoly of elites and become the shared discourse of humanity. It must move from the war room to the classroom, from the treaty table to the kitchen table. It must speak to the sacred, the everyday, the moral, and the ecological.
My book, my journey, starts with and concludes upon the fact that geopolitics is not about states, but about the state of the soul. It is about how civilisations define themselves, how they treat the Earth, and how they imagine the future. The world does not need another empire - it needs another ethics. Not a new war, but a new wisdom.
To rethink geopolitics from the East is to recall what was forgotten, to restore what was broken, and to re-enchant what was rendered mechanical. It is not a return to ancient glories, but a recommencement of the human journey — together, on shared ground, beneath a shared sky. And the Book is a first calling that needs to be fortified by several other calling from observers and thinkers in the field.