Understanding geo-setting research: a pluralistic approach to geopolitics

Over the past few decades, Chinese geographers have theorised ‘geo-setting’ (‘地缘环境’ in Chinese) as a pluralistic approach to understanding the multipolar geopolitical world. Conceptually, geo-setting refers to the complex geographical context, or decision-making dataset, that interacts with multiple actors and their geopolitical practices. Integrated with substantialism, relationalism and structuralism, it includes at least three ontological components: geographical environment, geo-relation and geo-structure. Epistemologically, geo-setting analysis encompasses both static compositional analysis and a dynamic process framework, grounded in structuralism and process philosophy, respectively. In contrast, qualitative analysis and quantitative models offer pluralistic methodologies that cover historical, scalar, discursive and network analyses. Compared with three Western schools of thought, it can draw further insights from human agency in geopolitical contexts, the bottom-up processes and affective forces of assemblage thinking, and the non-linear prediction framework of complex system theory. Geo-setting research has responded to the call for integrative pluralism and expanded Chinese knowledge production into global geopolitical theorising.