Leonard Hochberg

Senior Fellow

Research Areas:

GIS (ethnic mobilization, supply chains, war games), geopolitics

Dr. Leonard Hochberg is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum-US.

Before his retirement, Hochberg was a member of the faculty at Miami University (Oxford, OH), Stanford University, and the Louisiana State University.  At Stanford, his work focused on comparative revolutions, and he was named a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace.  While at LSU, he co-founded and co-directed the Center for Geopolitical Studies, where he worked with research teams on applications of Geographic Information Systems to ethnic mobilization, supply chains, and war games.  He co-founded Strategic Forecasting, Inc.–the precursor of STRATFOR, which is one of the world’s premier companies engaged in geopolitical analysis of contemporary international crises; he currently serves as the Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum-US, an informal group of diplomats, military officers, intelligence officers, entrepreneurs, and scholars interested in geopolitical and geostrategic analysis.  His relevant publications include co-authored essays: “Blockading the American Confederacy, 1861-1865: A Geostrategic Analysis,” for Revue Internationale D’Histoire Militaire (2010); “Winning the War, Losing the Peace: When Victory is Tantamount to Defeat,” for www.mackinderforum.org (2010), which offers an analysis of the geopolitics of the post-Cold War era; and “The Ukrainian Crisis” (2014), also appearing on the Mackinder Forum web site.  He has delivered papers to the Naval War College, the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) of the British Ministry of Defence, the European Strategy Institute, and to the annual meetings of the APSA, ASA, AGA, and SSHA. 

Leonard Hochberg received his PhD from Cornell University in political science.  Initially he studied political philosophy; however, eventually he worked under the direction of a geohistorian of modern Europe, Professor Edward W. Fox.  He is currently working on a several studies including a coedited volume, Geopolitics for the Twentieth Century