THE GEOPOLITICAL CONTEXT OF ENERGY SECURITY

PROROKOVIĆ Dušan (Naučni saradnik na Institutu za međunarodnu politiku i privredu), dusan@diplomacy.bg.ac.rs

Geopolitical conceptions also have an “energy dimension“, just as energy security can and must be considered in the context of geopolitics. The twenty-first century remains a century of fossil fuel use. It should be expected that the share of coal in the total energy balance will decline, but also that the share of natural gas use will increase. Political decisions and international relations as a whole will be correlated with the geographical distribution of oil and natural gas sources and routes of the strategic pipelines. This paper discusses this issue in five chapters. The first is introductory, explaining the definitions of energy security and geopolitics. The second chapter is devoted to explaining the importance of energy issues for political relations, and the third presents the geographical distribution of energy sources and reserves. The geopolitics of energy security with some examples from contemporary international relations is described in Chapter Four, while the last part of the paper deals with concluding considerations.

Keywords: energy security, geopolitics, crude oil, natural gas, the United States, Russia, China, the Middle East