“A treaty can end a war, but a novel can show how that war continues inside memory.”

Literature has close ties to politics and power. Through novels, poems, stories, plays and epics, societies preserve the collective memory which includes their triumphs and their losses, their wounds, their humiliations, their fears and dreams. Usually, political power appears via official institutions, borders, armies, laws, leaders, and official decisions, but literature shows how power enters the human being: It gives language to exile, obedience, rebellion, nostalgia, faith, silence, and memory, showing how people experience the great forces of history inside their homes, their families, their language, their private fears, and the way they understand themselves.

A treaty can end a war, but a novel can show how that war continues inside memory. Additionally, borders can be drawn on a map, but a poem can explain the impact of that border to the lives of those who are affected. A regime can declare victory, national unity or progress but literature can reveal the contradiction, the loneliness, the fear, and the moral cost hidden behind official words. Literature gives us the voices behind the map turning history from an abstract sequence of events into something lived, remembered, inherited, and sometimes carried like a wound.

Every political community lives through stories. The empires had told stories regarding their superior civilization, their order, and their destiny. Nations tell stories regarding their origins, their sacrifice, and their glory. Revolutions also tell similar stories about oppression, struggle, awakening, and the heroic creation of the new order. Authoritarian regimes tell stories about loyalty, discipline, historical necessity and their domestic and foreign enemies. These stories have the power to shape how individuals perceive the worlds around them. The stories teach people what to admire and fear, what to remember and defend. From this perspective, literature matters exactly because it has an impact on every story either preserving them or complicating them.

Epics, Tragedy, and the First Language of Power

The epic is one of the oldest places where literature and power meet. Homer’s Iliad is a story of war, rage, honor, glory, and mortality, yet its emotional force comes from its awareness of suffering. The battlefield is full of heroic language, but death is always close. Kings, princes and warriors seek immortality through their reputation, however, the poem constantly reminds us of loss, grief and the fragility of human life. In this regard, Achilles is powerful and great, but he is wounded by rage and sorrow. Hector is the enemy of the Greeks, but he is also a husband, a father, and a noble man defending his city. The Iliad depicts the human cost of glory because behind every heroic name stands a world of mourning: fathers, mothers, wives, cousins, friends, the homeland, even the enemies.

The Odyssey on the other side carries a different political meaning. It is the story of returning where the memory, the identity and the struggle to find home, nostos, are powerful. The hero, Odysseus, does not simply travel through strange lands but he tries to recover himself after years of violence and displacement. This is a deeply political theme because war does not end when the soldier leaves the battlefield. It follows him into home, into the family, into language, into sleep, and into memory. In that sense, ancient literature already understood something modern societies still struggle to understand: the return from war can be as difficult as war itself.

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Power on Canvas.

Introduction

Painting gives power an image since it has the power to turn rulers, battles, revolutions, suffering, saints, workers, martyrs, and nations into scenes that people can see, remember, and emotionally understand. A painting can organize memory in a way that is more immediate than a speech or a document. It can tell people who mattered, who suffered, who won, who sacrificed, and what should remain alive in collective memory. Through painting, history becomes visible. It receives a face, a body, a color, a gesture, and sometimes a wound.

This is why painting has always been close to power. Long before photography, cinema, television, and social media, painting was one of the main ways authority made itself visible. Kings, emperors, generals, saints, revolutionaries, and dictators needed images because power has always needed recognition. They needed portraits, battle scenes, religious icons, heroic compositions, and public murals. In these representations they wanted to appear as more than ordinary human beings. Through painting, a ruler could become the father of the nation, the defender of faith, the bringer of order, the revolutionary hero, or the chosen figure of history.

Painting and power share a deep and old connection. In pharaoh Egypt, tomb paintings did more than just decorating sacred spaces. They put the pharaoh within the cosmic order where life, death, eternity, religion and kingship were connected. The ruler appeared larger, calmer, and more permanent than ordinary life. The image created a world where power seemed natural because it belonged to the divine structure of existence. Egyptian visual culture reminds us that political authority often tries to escape time. It wants to look eternal, even when every ruler is mortal.

Moving forward in time, in Rome, mosaics, images, and portraits helped spread the memory of imperial power across the private and public domains. The emperor’s image travelled through coins, statues, wall paintings, and ceremonial art, creating a visual presence that reached far beyond the physical body of the ruler. This mattered because empire is never present everywhere at once and thus it needs symbols to travel in its place. The image becomes a substitute for authority telling distant subjects that power has a face, a center, and a claim over their world.

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Power shapes space through architecture.

Introduction

If art gives form to political imagination, architecture is perhaps its most visible expression. Buildings serve practical needs, but they also organize space, shape memory, and teach people how to experience power. A palace, a parliament, a temple, a triumphal arch, a monument, a skyscraper, a train station, an airport, or a government square speaks before anyone says a word. Our buildings and our cities are statements telling people where authority lives, how it wants to appear, what kind of emotions it wants to produce, and what kind of story a society wants to talk about itself.

Architecture is power made visible. From the beginning of organized political life, rulers understood that power needed physical form. Laws could command obedience, armies could enforce order, and wealth could sustain authority, but buildings gave power permanence. They made it appear stable, sacred, and almost natural. A ruler may die, a dynasty may collapse, a regime may change, but the structure often remains. This is why architecture has always been one of the favorite languages of power: it survives longer than speeches, and it speaks loudly even when nobody is speaking.

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Before states act, they imagine who they are.

Introduction

Power is a complicated concept, expressed in different ways depending on the context. We usually discuss about military capabilities, how geography shapes policies, borders, technology and innovations, markets, treaties, and alliances. Power can sometimes be measured, and sometimes it remains more vague, symbolic, and difficult to define. Concepts such as hard power, soft power, and smart power help us describe some of its forms, but they do not exhaust its meaning. Power can also speak through buildings, paintings, novels, films, music, monuments, symbols, uniforms, ceremonies, and myths.

People, individually and collectively, express themselves reflecting the realities of their times. Thus, Art and Power, or perhaps more precisely power and imagination, are deeply connected. Before states act, they imagine what they fear, what they remember, what they have suffered, what they deserve, and what kind of future they believe belongs to them. Art is one of the places where that imagination becomes visible. Do not forget that human beings have always been storytellers. We understand the world through stories, and these stories reflect the ways we perceive the reality around us. In our stories, we preserve our ancestors, our most dramatic and epic moments, our dreams for the future, our arrogance, our fears, our triumphs, and our worst disasters. From those stories, we create art as a way to express who we are, what we believe, and what we remember.

This series will explore how power is depicted through major forms of art: architecture, painting, literature, cinema, music, monuments, and memory. Using examples from different civilizations, eras, and political contexts, Art and Power will look at the ways our stories reflect and influence our geopolitical realities. The goal is not to move away from geopolitics, but to look deeper into the human imagination behind it. Because power is never only what states possess but more importantly, what societies believe about themselves.

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GeoSec Insights Is 11 Months Old, and I Wanted to share something personal.

I still remember when this started mostly as an idea: a small independent space where I could write seriously about power, security, strategy, and the forces shaping the world. I did not know exactly how far it would go. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to build something with discipline, honesty, and a clear voice.

Eleven months later, GeoSec has become more real than I expected. More than 2,100 people have subscribed, more than 3,200 follow the platform, and readers now come from 118 countries. For an independent project-built step by step, this means a lot.

But numbers are not the whole story.

What matters more to me is that GeoSec has slowly become a place where I can bring together the things I care about: geopolitics, history, strategy, writing, and the deeper question of how power works in human life.

In one month, on June 19, GeoSec Insights will reach its first anniversary. To mark that moment, I will launch a new paid essay series:

Art & Power: Culture, Empire, and the Geopolitical Imagination

This series is personal to me. Before I studied international relations and political science, I studied culture. Art, literature, architecture, cinema, monuments, memory, these were never separate from politics in my mind. They were another way of understanding how societies imagine themselves, how states tell stories about power, and how empires try to make their authority feel natural, beautiful, eternal, or unavoidable.

With Art & Power, I want to open a more reflective space inside GeoSec.

The series will look at power not only through wars, borders, institutions, alliances, and strategy, but also through stone, images, stories, music, symbols, fear, ambition, beauty, and memory.

GeoSec will continue to publish geopolitical analysis, policy briefs, scenario assessments, and strategic forecasts. That remains the core of the platform. But as GeoSec enters its second year, I also want it to grow in a way that feels true to me.

In the coming weeks, I will share more details about the structure of the series and the essays that will follow. For now, I simply wanted to introduce the idea behind it and explain why it matters to me.

Thank you for being here during these first 11 months. Whether you have been reading from the beginning or only recently joined, your presence matters.

The first year is almost here.

And something new is coming.