More than 10 years ago, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno, former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos, and former Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Adm. William McRaven observed that “conflict and competition are about people.” As a result “influencing these people—be they heads of state, tribal elders, and militaries and their leaders, or even an entire population—remains essential to securing U.S. interests.”
This is the promise and potential of human geography. It fulfills a critical national security imperative, delivering decision advantage to policymakers who must get ahead of the curve to protect U.S. interests at home and aboard. It has the predictive power to answer the most urgent questions, such as whether a population has the will to fight or how a partner country’s geopolitical allegiances may be shifting. Moreover, it is a vast improvement over existing analytic frameworks that have consistently failed to make sense of an increasingly complex, contested, and chaotic world. It is well-documented that in mid-2021, U.S. officials were stunned that the Afghanistan government collapsed so quickly in the face of a Taliban offensive, and in early 2022, U.S. intelligence leaders underestimated Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s invasion. It has become a familiar experience. When I served as President Joe Biden’s senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council from 2022–2024, we were caught flat-footed by Niger’s pivot to Russia following a coup in July 2023.
The answer to successfully navigating this new world is to fundamentally shift our lens and employ new tools. We can neither continue to prioritize winning hearts and minds nor can we return to counting satellites, missiles, and pro-Western proxies as we did during the Cold War. In the current environment, where there is a heated competition with U.S. adversaries, we need to train our focus on behaviors and attitudes informed by human geography: What do people believe, when do beliefs change, and how does it catalyze action?
The New Human Geography
Understanding human geography is mission-critical. It reveals what people look like, what they think, and how they behave. It enables one to interpret human behaviors and attitudes over space and time, as well as delineate physical, political, and cultural borders.
I serve on the board of Fraym, a human geography data provider, and my employer has a direct financial interest in the company’s success. Based on my experience, I am eager to make the case for our work, which marries human geography concepts with cutting-edge geospatial technologies. Specifically, we use Geographic Information Systems, remote sensing, survey data, and AI/machine learning to heighten the discipline’s explanatory and predictive power. This is how it works. We start with high-quality data that gives us details about the people who live in specific geographic areas — their sex, ages, ethnicities, political preferences, and media consumption. We then combine this information with geographic data, such as the location of health clinics, polling places, shopping centers, ports, and roads, as well as proximity to significant events, including political protests, labor strikes, and extremist attacks. We also add to the mix topographic features like soil conditions, rivers, lakes, hills, mountains, and valleys. Finally, we leverage AI and machine learning tools to produce dynamic maps down to the one square kilometer level that deliver insights on critical issues from vaccine hesitancy in Ghana by neighborhood to support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative in different cities in Pakistan.
Human geography is not only distinct from other disciplines, such as economics, political science, and sociology. It is a richer and more objective framework, especially compared to the controversial concept of “human terrain,” which was employed during U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. Whereas human terrain analysis, exemplified by the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, treated populations as part of the battlefield and deployed graduate-level anthropologists to warzones, human geography incorporates a wider lens. According to Dartmouth University, it focuses on the spatial and environmental processes that shape the lives and activities of people, and their interactions with places and nature. Richard Medina has recommended the discipline as a “safer, more systematic approach to sociocultural understanding.”
Mapping Humanity
Human geography is supremely suited for dynamism of today’s global challenges. It is an analytic approach that can reduce the frequency of intelligence failures and strategic surprises, such as Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel or Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation in Bangladesh. Human geography promises to bring into focus a new map, one that we can use to dispense with dated assumptions about media access and debunk received wisdom about the influence of local political and ethnic leaders. In short, it is a pathway to understand an increasingly unruly world.
The global media landscape, for example, has become more fragmented, discordant, and democratic. Information is no longer dominated by governments, and it is nearly impossible to broadcast an uncontested narrative or shut down alternative viewpoints — at least for prolonged periods of time. In the Philippines, less than a quarter of the population pays attention to the government’s three broadcasters while 98 percent get their news from social media, and more than half use social media as their primary news source. Accordingly, Filipinos have become sophisticated media consumers and more resilient to disinformation, especially from Chinese outlets. In fact, Filipinos are barely taking notice of Chinese media — Fraym’s findings indicate that even in Cagayan Valley and Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, the regions with the highest consumption of Chinese news, less than half of the population engages with Chinese media. According to Freedom House, Filipinos display widespread skepticism toward Chinese state media, especially in the midst of a worsening territorial dispute between the two countries in the South China Sea.
Similarly, the world’s youngest populations have become more politically engaged and independent relative to previous generations. Individuals are increasingly adopting positions that defy easy categorization by ethnicity, religion, or regional identity. In Kenya, Gen-Z protesters flooded the streets of Nairobi and other provincial capitals to express their discontent over government economic policies, corruption, and police brutality. Scholars have observed that the protests were more intense in the Rift Valley and in Central Kenya, which overwhelmingly supported President William Ruto in the 2022 elections, than in opposition strongholds. Contrary to past experiences, even Ruto’s appointment of several opposition politicians to his cabinet in late July failed to tame the crowds. Kenyans regularly use social media, but only a fraction follow political leaders. More popular are celebrities, which explains the power of party anthems such as Wadagliz’s “Anguka Nayo” in rallying protestors or the influence of actors who severed their affiliation with the country’s biggest telecommunications company after it disrupted the internet during the demonstrations.
The shifting landscape underscores why it is unwise to double down on existing paradigms or re-up past precedents to navigate today’s challenges. The virtue of human geography, in contrast, is its sensitivity to sentiment, capacity to detect change, and agility to inform critical national security decisions.
Forecasting the Future
Real-world examples have proven human geography’s unparalleled value, including when combatting dis- and misinformation and predicting the spread of extremism. In 2022, Kenyan vaccine uptake plateaued due to a variety of factors, including fatigue in the health system and an uptick in misinformation claiming that the side effects of the vaccine were worse than COVID-19 symptoms. Local health officials in Migori County in southwest Kenya wanted to reverse this trend, deciding to employ a data-driven strategy, informed by human geography, to increase vaccine demand. Fraym’s AI/machine learning-derived combination of survey data, imagery, and other spatial data was used to identify vaccine-hesitant groups in specific locations, and to illuminate which media sources each group was most likely to consume. These hyperlocal insights prompted county officials and their partners to mobilize religious leaders, target behavior-change communication campaigns, and adjust vaccine distribution. It led to an increase to 45 percent adult vaccination in February 2023 in Migori County compared to 29.9 percent in March 2022 — Migori County also outperformed Kenya’s national average by almost 10 percent.
Another successful application of human geography comes from Burkina Faso, where an international mining company was evaluating the risk associated with three mining sites located in the troubled Sahelian country. While Burkina Faso today has become a byword for political volatility and extremist violence, with two successive coups in 2022 and roughly half of the country outside of the government’s control, it was in a more nascent state of insecurity in 2018. By marrying AI/machine learning-derived vulnerability and poverty indicators with geo-tagged extremist and political violence incidents, Fraym was able to isolate which of the three mining sites was more at risk of an extremist attack or general unrest. It persuaded the company to refrain from developing one of three sites. This decision proved prescient because in subsequent years other mining firms in the same area have had their convoys repeatedly attacked and nearby populations have been massacred, including more than 100 people in 2021. The other two sites continue to function with hundreds of millions of dollars in booked value.
These examples show human geography’s potential to help tackle the hot topic of “will to fight.” In 2022, the U.S. intelligence community initiated an internal review on how it assesses a foreign country’s will to fight. Congress asked a similar question of the Department of Defense, spurring a mini cottage industry on the topic — from re-circulating a 2018 RAND report to more recent studies released by the National Intelligence University and published by the Army University Press. Each has generated important conclusions about overreliance on measuring manpower and materiel, but they have failed to offer a way forward. Indeed, RAND opined that “there is no way to accurately quantify will to fight or delineate its precise value.” Tech-enabled human geography data, in contrast, has been more accurate in its prognostic capabilities. If U.S. policymakers had availed themselves of analysis rooted in human geography, they would have uncovered which populations in Afghanistan would continue to fight the Taliban and learned that there were high levels of enthusiasm for joining the Ukrainian Territorial Armed Forces on the eve of Russia’s war of aggression.
This methodology is particularly salient with respect to Taiwan. Fraym’s AL/machine learning-derived findings, for example, indicate that almost half of Taiwanese adults (45 percent) in August 2024 agreed that Ukraine’s defense of its territorial integrity against Russian aggression has made friends and family more likely to resist external aggression in Taiwan. Moreover, it is easy to correlate and cross-tabulate Taiwanese resistance by geographic area, party affiliation, socioeconomic status, and preferred media outlets. Building on these insights, U.S. policymakers can refine their messaging, diplomacy, and operations to advance U.S. national security goals in the Taiwan Strait.
Conclusion
The post-Cold War era is over. We are consequently (and rightly) retooling our rhetoric, rewriting doctrine, recruiting new partners, and reallocating our resources to meet new geopolitical and transnational challenges. These efforts should be paired with a commensurate reworking of our analytic and policy frameworks. We cannot redefine our objectives without reexamining our underlying assumptions about the attitudes and perspectives of populations caught in between this competition over what comes next. Through human geography, it is possible to develop fresh insights about different populations and help U.S. national security leaders anticipate when and how targeted groups will respond to critical threats and opportunities. Understanding human geography is a vital part in this once-in-a-generation shift in national security priorities. Indeed, it is mission-critical.
Judd Devermont is an operating partner at Kupanda Capital and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He previously served as National Security Council senior director for African Affairs and national intelligence officer for Africa.
Image: Samuel Lamptey via Wikimedia Commons
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