Issues in Anglophone political geography

Abstract

Japanese geographers tend to consider political geography to be one of the least-established subfields in postwar Japanese geography. Aware of this reputation, Japanese political geographers have often attempted to introduce theories established in Anglophone political geography to Japan. This attempt, however, has been unsuccessful thus far. Since academic practices by Anglophone geographers are not necessarily transferrable to the Japanese context, the mere introduction of Anglophone theories does not contribute to the revitalization of Japanese political geography. In order to avoid a repetition of these unsuccessful attempts, this paper reviews the theoretical development of Anglophone political geography since the 1970s and identifies two important research subsets from these developments: new geopolitics and the politics of place. New geopolitics consists of world-systems theory and critical geopolitics while studies on the politics of place are based on critical/postmodern social theories. After an examination of studies from these two subsets, the paper suggests what kind of theoretical issues discussed in Anglophone political geography are likely to stimulate politico-geographic research in the Japanese empirical context.