Obviously, I am riffing
Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body — such as a galaxy cluster — causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens. The body causing the light to curve is accordingly called a gravitational lens.
Why?
As we pulled off the gate at Heathrow, to fly to Bengaluru, the Captain came on the air to provide some details of the route, indicating that we will be initially flying more south than normal, over Egypt and Saudi Arabia, going around the Iranian air space, before swerving eastwards over the Arabian Sea…
There are moments when the abstractions of mathematics suddenly reveal themselves in the sky.
I was watching the flight paths across the Middle East —those mesmerizing traces one sees on real-time aviation maps—and something curious appeared. Aircraft flying between Europe and Asia were not taking the straightest route. Instead, they curved gracefully around Iranian airspace, forming arcs that looked almost deliberate, as if an invisible hand were bending their trajectories.
To anyone familiar with physics, the resemblance is unmistakable. It looks like gravitational lensing—the phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general relativity, where light bends around a massive object because spacetime itself is curved. The paths of the airplanes seemed to mimic the geodesics of photons skirting a star.
Yet the “mass” doing the bending here was not physical. It was political. Conflict had warped the geometry of logistics.
And once I saw this analogy, it became difficult to unsee it.
Bengaluru’s Kempe Gowda International Airport was quieter than usual (as many flights from the Gulf, Etihad and Emirates among them, were cancelled): We touched down at 5:00 am, I was the first through Passport Control by 5:20am, driving out of the garage in a Four Seasons Mercedes before 5:30 am, in the lobby of the hotel and onto my (usual) corner Suite by 6:00 am!
I could not resist working on a model that extended the traditional Operations Management (OM) models by incorporating Political Economy (PE) – my POEM framework – that I first mentioned in Capitalism, Supply Chains and Democracy.
Here it is:
Conflict as Gravity: Geopolitical Risk and the Geometry of Logistics.
The Old Geometry of Supply Chains
Operations research, particularly the classical theory of facility location, has long assumed a rather serene universe. In this world, demand points lie peacefully on a map, transportation costs are stable, and the problem reduces to a beautifully simple calculation: find the centre of gravity of demand.
Mathematically, it is nothing more than a weighted centroid—the point that minimises aggregate transport effort. The idea dates back to Alfred Weber’s early twentieth-century work on industrial location, later refined by operations researchers who translated the theory into algorithms suitable for supply chains.
In its simplest form, the logic is straightforward: if customers are distributed across geography with certain weights—tonnage, shipments, demand volumes—the optimal hub sits at the weighted average of those coordinates.
It is a lovely piece of geometry. Elegant, tractable, and—like many elegant models—quietly unrealistic.
For the classical centre-of-gravity model assumes something that reality seldom grants: that politics does not distort space.
The Real World Is Not Euclidean
The modern logistics manager knows otherwise.
Sanctions close ports. Airspace restrictions redirect aircraft. Wars interrupt maritime lanes. Regulations impose compliance costs that are not evenly distributed across geography. And elections—those periodic earthquakes of democratic life—can suddenly change the policy environment on which supply chains depend.
In short, the map through which logistics flows is not a flat plane.
It is a curved surface shaped by political forces.
The insight I explore in the underlying paper is simply this: geopolitical risk acts like a kind of repulsive gravity. Instead of pulling routes inward the way physical mass attracts light, political risk pushes routes outward, distorting the geometry through which supply chains move.
A conflict zone becomes a forbidden region. Routes curve around it.
And the optimal logistics hub shifts accordingly.
A Small Mathematical Twist
The mathematics required to capture this idea is surprisingly modest.
In the classical centre-of-gravity formula, each demand node carries a weight representing its economic importance. The optimal hub location emerges from averaging these weighted coordinates.
But suppose we introduce a risk index—a measure of geopolitical danger associated with each node. The weight of a node then becomes inversely proportional to its risk: a highly unstable region contributes less to the gravitational pull of demand.
In effect, political danger weakens a node’s influence on the optimal hub.
The resulting “risk-adjusted centre of gravity” shifts away from dangerous regions.
Conceptually, the mathematics mirrors physics in reverse. In general relativity, mass curves spacetime inward. In geopolitical logistics, conflict curves the effective geometry outward.
The mathematics remains classical. But the geometry becomes political.
When Risk Moves the Hub
To illustrate the effect, consider a logistics network spanning the Middle East and South Asia: Istanbul, Dubai, Riyadh, Karachi, Mumbai, Muscat, Amman, and Tehran. Each node carries demand weight, and each also carries a composite risk score reflecting conflict exposure, sanctions pressure, and institutional stability.
When risk is ignored, the centre of gravity lies roughly in northwestern Iran.
When geopolitical risk is priced in, the optimal hub moves westward—toward the northwestern Gulf and southeastern Turkey.
The shift is not enormous in absolute terms—roughly a few hundred kilometers—but in logistics terms it is decisive. A regional distribution center placed on one side of a border rather than another can change insurance costs, flight permissions, regulatory exposure, and the political acceptability of routing choices.
And this shift arises not from changes in demand, but from changes in politics.
The geometry of supply chains bends.
Politics as a Random Process
But political risk is not static.
Elections happen. Regimes change. Conflicts escalate and de-escalate. Diplomatic agreements appear unexpectedly and vanish just as quickly.
In the language of operations research, the risk index is not a fixed parameter—it is a stochastic variable.
One can model it as a Markov process, where risk evolves across discrete states influenced by political events. Electoral cycles increase volatility. Institutional structures—what political economists call varieties of capitalism—shape how quickly policy changes occur.
In liberal market economies, policy can reverse rapidly with elections. In coordinated systems, consensus institutions dampen volatility.
Thus the political structure of a country influences the geometry of global logistics.
This is a subtle but important point. Supply chains are not merely economic structures. They are political artifacts.
A Game of States and Firms
Push the logic one step further and the risk index itself becomes endogenous.
States decide whether to close airspace or impose restrictions. Airlines decide whether to reroute flights. Logistics hubs compete to capture the diverted flows.
What emerges is a strategic game among governments, firms, and infrastructure operators. A government may close its airspace for political or military reasons, but the decision has economic consequences: lost overflight fees, trade diversion, diplomatic pressure.
The equilibrium outcome of this strategic interaction determines the effective risk level that logistics networks must navigate.
Politics does not merely distort the map.
Politics creates the distortion.
The POEM Perspective
This view sits within what I call the POEM agenda—Political Economy meets Operations Management.
For decades, operations management has treated political conditions as background noise: parameters to be inserted into models after the fact. Yet the world increasingly reminds us that political forces are structural features of the system itself.
Supply chains now operate in a landscape shaped by sanctions regimes, geopolitical alignments, trade wars, and shifting alliances. Firms respond with strategies such as friendshoring—routing production and logistics through politically aligned countries even when they are not strictly cost-optimal.
The models we use must therefore evolve.
Political economy is not an exogenous disturbance.
It is the field equation within which logistics moves.
Curved Space, Political Mass
There is something almost poetic about the analogy that began this reflection.
In Einstein’s universe, mass curves spacetime and light follows the resulting geodesics. Photons do not choose their paths; they obey the geometry imposed upon them.
In the geopolitical universe, conflict curves logistics space and aircraft follow the resulting routes. The paths we observe in the sky are the visible traces of political curvature.
Yet there is one crucial difference.
Stars do not negotiate with photons. Governments do negotiate with airlines, voters, and other states. The “mass” bending logistics space is not inert; it is strategic.
In this sense, supply chains inhabit a universe even stranger than Einstein’s.
Their geometry is shaped not by gravity, but by human decision.
And the arcs we see across the sky—those elegant curves around forbidden airspace—are the visible geodesics of politics itself.
In parallel, Tinglong Dai has creatively created a
wonderful interactive, visual app
that is a magnificent companion to my text-only writing!
