section_path: Humans and land/Geopolitics
section_name: Geopolitics
paragraph_text: Geopolitics
  
  Borders are geographical boundaries imposed either by geographic features (oceans, mountain ranges, rivers) or by political entities (governments, states, or subnational entities). Political borders can be established through warfare, colonization, or mutual agreements between the political entities that reside in those areas; the creation of these agreements is called boundary delimitation.
  
  Many wars and other conflicts have occurred in efforts by participants to expand the land under their control, or to assert control of a specific area of considered to hold strategic, historical, or cultural significance. The Mongol Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries became the largest contiguous land empire in history through war and conquest.
  
  In the 19th-century United States, a concept of manifest destiny was developed by various groups, asserting that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. This concept was used to justify military action against the indigenous peoples of North America and of Mexico.
  
  The aggression of Nazi Germany in World War II was motivated in part by the concept of Lebensraum ("living space"), which had first became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918) originally, as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party (NSDAP). Lebensraum was one of the leading motivations Nazi Germany had in initiating World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of World War II.