Shatter belt (geopolitics)

Shatter belt, shatter zone or crush zone 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.

The term was first applied in geopolitics in 1961 by Gordon East, an American scholar from Indiana University Bloomington. 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".

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.