ИСТИНА

The major wars of the 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan were not directly associated with grabbing new territories, which therefore supports the formerly made presumption. There obviously seems to be a strong belief inculcated in the minds of diplomats and politicians that any further round of map redrawing is bound to involve a high intensity armed conflict or other emergency situations of a veritably global magnitude. This has basically constituted the backdrop against which we have seen a clearly rising interest in privatising what is referred to as common spaces, that is World Ocean, airspace, outer space, information space, and polar regions. These spaces are seen by the world's leading nations as 'not yet distributed' and in a sense they indeed should be treated as such. The rivalry for common spaces reflects a fundamental shift in the global security environment. The appreciation of space per se has gone far beyond the XIXth century style geopolitics. On top of its physical and geographical dimensions, it has come to take on a number of new aspects: flows of information, communicative and public opinion shaping tools, etc. Hence, an increased interest in classical geopolitical concepts. Meanwhile, the soaring number of multiple shared spaces is giving birth to new disguises of interstate or even transnational disputes.