Yves Lacoste

Yves Lacoste (born 7 September 1929) is a French geographer and geopolitician. He was born in Fes, Morocco. In 1976 he established the French geopolitical journal Hérodote and published a work that shook the French academy, 'La Géographie ça sert d'abord à faire la guerre'. The central thesis of the latter work was that "geography was a form of strategic and political knowledge, central to the military strategy and the exercise of political power". Lacoste had earlier earned international renown in 1972 during the US Vietnam War by publishing a spatial forensics analysis of the US bombing campaign of the Red River Delta. He agreed with claims from the North Vietnamese government that the US was deliberately targeting the hydrological infrastructure of the river in an attempt to trigger flooding and cause mass civilian casualties, a war crime.

He is currently co-editor of Hérodote with Beatrice Giblin, head of the French Institute for Geopolitics (Institut Français de Géopolitique) at the University of Paris VIII.

Lacoste played a key role in reviving the word 'geopolitics' in the Francophone and Anglophone worlds. It had previously been tarnished by association with the Nazi regime due to the involvement with the party of German geopolitician Karl Haushofer. In an earlier work, La Géographie du sous-développement, Lacoste suggests a spatial explanation of underdevelopment.

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