What are cultural Shatterbelts?

Cultural shatterbelt. A politically unstable region where differing cultural elements come into contact and conflict.

What is an example of a shatterbelt?

The classic example of a shatterbelt is southeastern Europe, especially the Balkan Peninsula. This region has been functionally a shatterbelt for at least 500 years, as it has been geographically sandwiched between more powerful states that attempted to control part or all of the territory.

How Is Eastern Europe a shatterbelt?

Geographers have called Eastern Europe a shatterbelt. because of the conflicts and divisions that have occurred there. In spite of the problems with the transition in Eastern Europe, the region has nonetheless seen enormous economic gains.

Is South Africa a shatterbelt region?

A shatterbelt originates when rival great powers have footholds in a single area. Six contemporary world regions met the criteria of this standard: the Middle East, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle America, and South Asia.

Why were Korea and Vietnam viewed as Shatterbelts?

Which of the following explains why Korea and Vietnam were viewed as shatterbelts during the Cold War? Korea and Vietnam experienced conflict due to a dispute between global powers. Korea and Vietnam fragmented into new states due to internal tensions.

Why is the Caucasus region a shatterbelt?

The Caucasus remains a shatterbelt, where Russian interests are defined in such a way as to make them incompatible with the vision of the region’s future that is dominant in the West. The Ukrainian conflict seems to be exaggerating the degree of incompatibility.

What is the shatterbelt of Africa?

Moreover, shatter belts are geopolitical arenas in which Great Powers compete for advantage through client states and proxy forces or seek to maintain stability by intervening against aggressive regional powers. The modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the epitome of a shatter belt.

Why is Southeast Asia a shatterbelt?

This policy of containment turned Southeast Asia into what geographer Saul Cohen terms a “shatterbelt”—a region torn by internal strife whose fragmentation is further aggravated by the involvement of external major powers.

Why is Southeast Asia considered a Shatterbelt?

Why is south east Asia a shatter belt? its cultural-spatial fragmentation results from the collision of a stronger outside powers within the realm, much like Eastern Europe.

Why is Syria a Shatterbelt region?

Finally Turkey, Syria, and Iraq are a shatterbelt region because following the fall of the Soviet Union, ethnically defined territories pushed for autonomy and to claim more territory. Key states in the area involved themselves in the conflicts.

Is Turkey a Shatterbelt?

Sudan, Balkan, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea are all considered shatterbelt regions because each of these regions are endangered by local conflicts within the states/between the countries, that also includes the involvement of opposing great powers outside the region.

Why is Southeast Asia a Shatterbelt?