From a geographer’s point of view, the U.S. military’s current involvement in the border country of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not really new, it’s simply the latest round of geopolitics for a region that has always been a chessboard for great powers.

That’s the message associate professor Robert Watrel in South Dakota State University’s Department of Geography hopes to convey Monday, Oct. 4, during a presentation on the Geopolitics of Central Asia. Watrel speaks at 7 p.m. in Dairy-Microbiology 100 on the SDSU campus. A panel discussion and question-and-answer session follow.

“This area of the world is quite isolated. But a lot of what we think are isolated conflicts actually are related to geopolitics,” Watrel said.