Geopolitics is the set of ideas and activities about how a country's position, land, and population affect its political life and its relationships with other countries — and also the study of that. It is the noun beside geopolitical. People use it for the chessboard of countries: who sits where, who needs whose oil or ports, who fears whose army because of a shared border. In newspapers it often just means 'world power politics.' In universities it is a subject with a history. Though actually the word is younger than it sounds: English built geo- + politics as a copy of Swedish geopolitik, a term Rudolf Kjellén coined in 1900. Older talk had geography and politics; this word ties them into one. People still stretch it until almost any international fight counts as geopolitics, even when the map is not the real engine.