Shatter belt (geopolitics)

Shatter belt, shatter zone[1] or crush zone[2] is a concept in geopolitics referring to strategically-positioned and -oriented regions on a political map that are deeply internally divided and encompassed in the competition between the great powers in geostrategic areas and spheres.[3]

The term was first applied in geopolitics in 1961 by Gordon East, an American scholar from Bloomington.[4] It was borrowed from geology, in which a shatter belt refers to a fault line, i.e. "belt of broken rock, produced by horizontal movement in a more or less vertical plane".[1]

  1. ^ a b Raffield, B. (2021). "Broken Worlds: Towards an Archaeology of the Shatter Zone". Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 28 (3): 871–910. doi:10.1007/s10816-021-09520-y. S2CID 234870497.
  2. ^ O'loughlin, J. (1999). "Ordering the 'crush zone': Geopolitical games in post-cold war eastern Europe". Geopolitics. 4 (1): 34–56. doi:10.1080/14650049908407636.
  3. ^ Cohen, Saul (2003). Geopolitics of the World System. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 43. ISBN 978-0847699070.
  4. ^ Gosar, Anton (2000). "The Shatter Belt and the European Core – A Geopolitical Discussion on the Untypical Case of Slovenia". GeoJournal – Spatially Integrated Social Sciences and Humanities. October vol. 52, 2 (2): 107–117. doi:10.1023/A:1013306804212. S2CID 140390836.