The course deals with geopolitical happenings and its applications for business decision making.It is a course about economics, political and historical context in which businesses operate.It deals with Geopolitics, a word which has around 6 - 7 million hits, if you Google it. Anyone brave or perhaps foolish enough to wade through a fraction of those potential references would not necessarily emerge any wiser of the definition of Geopolitics.To paraphrase the social theorist Michael Mann, Geopolitics, like most terms that have attracted academic attention, is slippery.More often than not, it is used by journalists and pundits to convey a robust attitude towards political action using taken-for-granted geographical templates such as the "axis of evil” and outposts of tyranny.Rather than take those terms for granted, it is vital that we explore the sorts of consequences that follow from dividing the world into particular zones.

Our purpose would be to use Geopolitics as a way of looking at the world.The framework would be two-fold:First, Geopolitics offers a reliable guide of global landscape using geographical description, metaphors and templates such as Iron Curtain, Third World, and Rogue State. Each of these terms is inherently geographical, which helps us to generate a simple model of the world.Second, we would focus our attention on how Geopolitics of the world works in practice and how will it help us in designing a business strategy in the world that we assume to understand.

Most cases and discussion notes will focus on decision facing presidents,government officials and countries as a whole, rather than on the choices that firms' managers make within these environments.We study how policy makers comprehend and manage, competing political interests, the discipline of economic forces and the lessons of history.Our goal is to understand how and why governments implement particular polices and how these policies shape the world.That understanding will help us to recognize the threats and opportunities that these policies create for business and provide tools to help us evaluate the environment for short and long-term investments.Managers who do this well can create a significant advantage for the firms they lead and the industries they shape.