What Global (geo)political Security?
When it was published in 2003, Robert Cooper’s “The Breaking of Nations” had piqued the attention of international relations specialists, geographists, politicists, geopolitics researchers, and even that of social sciences and the press, first and foremost because it was the first “wide audience” book of a diplomat and researcher who has been offering, for more than ten years, a very interesting reflexion on the way the world works and on the international system. Despite numerous ambiguities – which originate partly in the author’s personal path but mostly in the gradual update of the capacity of Cooper’s models to overcome their own internal contradictions – the work of Robert Cooper is a lot more stimulating than those of Thierry de Montbrial on “the world system” (Montbrial, 2003 and 2005), or the “hyperterrorism” of François Heisbourg in France for example (Heisbourg, 2003).
Since the 90s, Cooper has so published several important texts, particularly within the London’s Foreign Policy Center (Cooper, 2002). But until now, the diffusion of those texts remained, most of the time, limited to circles of international relations and geopolitics specialists, even though Cooper’s works could occasionally be used beyond those circles.
