Dr. Eric Spears has spent thirty years studying how power organizes geographic space: from the politics of scale in Brazil and China to the antique maps that first charted Europe's entrance into North America. A geographer by training and international educator by praxis, his research has traced how politics and capital reshape territory in the global South and East Asia alike. That same question, who controls space, and how,  animates his current research on the geopolitics of maritime straits and passages throughout the world. Spears traces the arc from empire-era passages like the Panama and Suez canals to today's revisionist flashpoints in the Baltic and South China seas. Along the way, he examines the contested legal status of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, where narrow waters and unstable littoral states turn freedom of navigation into a live geopolitical question.  Spears brings to these global issues both a scholar's grounding in geography, and 26 years of hands-on experience navigating international education as an academic administrator.