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Just over a century ago, in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, British geographer Halford Mackinder laid out the fundamental tenets of a new discipline that came to be known as 'geopolitics.' Simply put, he said, international relations boiled down to the intersection of unchanging physical geography with the vagaries of human politics. Only one constant was ever in that equation: The social movements of all times, he said, have played around essentially the same physical features. But here's the thing: Today the 'geo' in 'geopolitics' is actually changing, chiseling away at one of the core principles that has guided foreign policy in the US, Europe, and Asia for the past 100 years. Oceans and islands are appearing where they weren't before, once-constant coastlines face a salty dissolution, and formerly fertile breadbaskets are doomed to be barren. The mutating landscape isn't only about a scramble for resources, but is sometimes also about a race for survival. Adapted from the source document.

Turkey has long been at the center of global pipeline politics. Since the 1990s, Europe has fantasized that natural gas pipelines would someday push fuel from the Caucasus and Central Asia to Europe. And Turkey's privileged geographical position would indeed allow for this, while there's abundant gas in places such as Azerbaijan. Europe's dreams finally seemed to be coming true in March 2015, when, after years of development, Turkey and Azerbaijan broke ground on a trans-Anatolian pipeline designed to shuttle gas from the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus and Turkey, and into Europe. But here's the rub: Europe doesn't consume enough gas to justify two new massive pipelines. Put simply, the road goes through Turkey, and Turkey will decide whom Europe will deal with on energy. Turkey's part in the newest pipeline project and the cementing of a strategic relationship with Russia amount to a massive bet that centuries of historical rivalry and animosity can be erased with cheap gas, some spit in a palm, and a friendly handshake. Adapted from the source document.

When, in 2013, Mexican Pres Enrique Pena Nieto announced a broad reform package that would end the government's monopoly over the country's oil sector, his argument was fairly straightforward: Foreign investment could be just the thing to reverse a decade of production declines and revitalize a state that has historically relied heavily on oil for its income. The president's idea was a revolutionary one in a country whose modern identity was forged thanks to the nationalization of its black gold in 1938. Critics, unsurprisingly, were quick to argue that Pena Nieto's reform was nothing less than a wholesale dismantling of Mexico's heritage. If successful -- a big if -- the president's experiment could finally kick-start production in the Gulf of Mexico and the desert. And if companies like ExxonMobil can turn oil potential into oil reality without prompting another revolution in Mexico's streets, other Latin American countries would almost be forced to follow -- or watch tens of billions of dollars of potential foreign investment pass them by. Adapted from the source document.

On a spring day in 2012, a Union Pacific train ground to a stop outside a sprawling construction site in Fulton, a blink-and-miss-it town in southwestern Arkansas. Piled high in the train's 135 cars was the first batch of black coal from Wyoming, about 16,000 of the 2 million tons needed annually to feed the brand-new John W Turk Jr Power Plant, set to go online within a few months. The Arkansas plant burns coal more efficiently than just about any of its 550-odd peers in the country. Packed with every sort of scrubber to clean up the nasty bits, Turk spits out fewer of the smoggy air pollutants and a lot less of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The reliance on coal indeed comes with heavy costs. Just look at China. The country's air pollution, much of which can be chalked up to its reliance on coal, costs at least 3% of GDP per year -- or more than $250 billion -- according to World Bank and Chinese government estimates. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractVariants of the project planning sequence or cycle are widely employed to provide the conceptual framework for investment in developing countries. However, the current models attempt to generalize activity sequences across a range of projects with differing objectives. They also tend to abstract project planning from its institutional context, and to make little allowance for the possibility that alternative approaches to organizational and managerial problems may be available. The article outlines a technique that facilitates the analysis of active‐organization patterns. Commencing with the classical tripartite system, a number of standard forms are identified and described. A series of observations are then offered on the organizational choices and control procedures that are available for public sector projects. The paper concludes with some remarks on the relationship between project planning and strategies for the development of indigenous institutional capacity in developing countries.