Choke Points

Choke points are narrow passages that allow access to important areas, making them crucial for trade, transportation, and military strategy

From battles to trade – Chokepoints

From its original use as a term in military strategy, the choke point has evolved to describe a whole host of geopolitical features which act to limit the smooth flow of trade. This still includes areas of the map which are difficult to navigate. The Caribbean, for instance, was a popular place for pirates and buccaneers in the early stages of Western expansion into the Americas because the geography made it easy to ambush merchant ships. A similar problem is presented by the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf, which receives 20% of the world’s oil traffic, making it an area of huge strategic importance to Western economies, and therefore, unsurprisingly, an area that has seen quite a lot of conflict over the last century. Busy seaports can be chokepoints due to the high concentration of goods flowing through them, which can often cause a bottleneck. It has also come to embrace more abstract geographical features, such as hard borders, protective tariffs and high concentrations of criminal enterprise, piracy, worker militancy or social movement activism.