The Geopolitics of Scotland: Scottish Politics in a Global Context - With David Leask

Breaking Britain: A Podcast about the Politics of a Disunited Kingdom

As part of the Europe's Borderlands research group at the King's College London European Studies Department, this podcast series will take a deeper look at how the United Kingdom's crisis of unity will affect the nations on the islands of Britain and Ireland. In this episode, recorded on 28 January 2021, we examine how debates over Scottish independence interact with wider geopolitical pressures. How do international tensions over security and great power competition affect Scottish politics? What would the foreign and defence policy of an independent Scotland look like? In what way will transnational ideological trends affect Scotland whether as an independent actor or still within the UK Union state?
To help us explore these themes, this week we have been joined by David Leask. Through a long career in Scottish journalism, first as Chief Reporter at the Herald and now at a wide range of publications including the Times, he has frequently covered how Scottish politics and society have interacted with and been affected by wider geopolitical pressures. With his impressive work examining Scotland's role on the global stage, David Leask provides us with fascinating insights into the changing nature of the geopolitics of Scotland.
The background music is by Brother Monsplaisir, and the production for this podcast was by Daniel Mansfield.