Yves Lacoste

Yves Lacoste (born 7 September 1929) is a French geographer and geopolitician.

He was born in Fez, Morocco.

Lacoste had earlier earned international renown in 1972 during the Vietnam War by publishing a spatial forensics analysis of the US bombing campaign of the Red River Delta.

He agreed with claims from the North Vietnamese government that the US was deliberately targeting the hydrological infrastructure of the river in an attempt to Trigger flooding and cause mass civilian casualties, which it called a war crime.

He is currently co-editor of Hérodote with Beatrice Giblin and the head of the French Institute of Geopolitics (Institut Français de Géopolitique) at the University of Paris VIII.

Lacoste played a key role in reviving the word geopolitics in the French and English languages.

The word had been tarnished by its association with the Nazi régime because of German geopolitician Karl Haushofer.

Focussing on spatial dimensions of political affairs Lacoste defines geopolitics as the study of power rivalries over territory carried out on different levels of analysis: global, continental, national, regional or even local.

In an earlier work, La Géographie du sous-développement, Lacoste had suggested a spatial explanation of underdevelopment.

In 1976 he established the French geopolitical journal Hérodote and published a work that shook the French academy, La Géographie ça sert d'abord à faire la guerre.

Its central thesis was that "geography was a form of strategic and political knowledge, central to the military strategy and the exercise of political power".