Welcome
Every day brings another crisis, another summit, another election, another war. We are told what happened almost instantly. We are much less often told why it happened, why it happened now, or why it matters beyond today’s headlines.
That is what this publication exists to do.
At Challenging Geopolitics, we try to step back from the noise and examine the deeper forces shaping the world. Geopolitics rarely begins with the politician giving the speech. Wars are won or lost in supply chains long before the first shot is fired. Technologies succeed or fail because of incentives as much as engineering. Political decisions are constrained by institutions, demographics, geography and history long before they reach Parliament or Congress.
The headlines change every day. The underlying forces usually change much more slowly.
If this publication has a single purpose, it is to help readers see those forces more clearly.
Not simply what happened.
But why.
Why this publication exists
Too much modern commentary mistakes description for explanation. It chases today’s story whilst overlooking the structures that produced it. The result is an endless cycle of analysis that leaves us informed, but strangely unable to make sense of what comes next.
The questions that matter are usually different.
Why did this happen now?
What incentives produced it?
Who benefits?
What is changing beneath the surface that everyone else is overlooking?
Those are the questions I try to answer.
Sometimes that means writing about drones, artificial intelligence or critical minerals. Sometimes it means Roman history, Athens, demographic change or financial markets. The subjects vary. The method does not. The aim is always the same: to understand the world through the incentives, institutions and long-term forces that shape it, rather than through the outrage of the day.
If that sounds like your sort of thing, you’re in the right place.
What you’ll find here
Every week we publish original essays exploring topics such as:
Geopolitics and great-power competition
Technology and innovation
Defence and military strategy
Economics and industrial policy
Financial markets
History and institutions
They’re different subjects.
But they all help answer the same question:
Why does the world work the way it does?
Who are we
Challenging Geopolitics was founded by Dr James Reeves and Edward Shannon-Adams as the public-facing publication of Challenger Research.
Today it’s supported by a growing team of writers and contributors with backgrounds spanning defence, geopolitics, economics, technology, regulation and strategic intelligence.
What unites us is a shared approach.
We believe the best analysis comes from questioning assumptions, connecting disciplines and following the evidence wherever it leads.
Why subscribe
If you subscribe, you’ll receive:
Weekly original long-form essays free at the point of publication.
Ad hoc shorter strategic observations.
Our weekly podcast.
Ideas that connect today’s events with the broader patterns shaping tomorrow.
Headlines come and go, but the forces shaping them rarely do.
Become a Paid Subscriber
Our goal is to make our best ideas available to as many people as possible. That's why every new essay is available to all subscribers when it's published before becoming part of our subscriber archive.
If you’d like to go a step further, becoming a paid subscriber helps support the continued growth of Challenging Geopolitics and gives you:
Full access to our archive of original essays and analysis.
The opportunity to shape the conversation by submitting questions for our monthly subscriber Q&A podcast.
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