Tim Marshall is one of the world’s most successful authors on foreign affairs. He’s the writer who put the ‘geo’ into geopolitics with his multi-million selling books Prisoners of Geography and The Power of Geography. 

Marshall’s principal argument is that without geography we cannot understand the world. Geography explains why Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea: to remain a world power, Russia must have a navy and since Russian ports are frozen for half the year, Putin wanted to control the warm water port of Odessa. 

Geography also explains why Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has remained in place: he may at one point have lost half the land space of Syria but he kept control of the cities where most of the population lives. 

In February 2024 Marshall came to the Intelligence Squared stage where, in conversation with Ritula Shah, he discussed how geography can help us understand the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and other hotspots around the world. He also explained how his fascination with maps has led him to look upwards to space where, as he sets out in his new book The Future of Geography, planetary power play is likely to be the biggest geopolitical story of the coming century.