Political Geography

Abstract

Political geography is that part of human geography most directly involved with studying politics. It is a field of inquiry concerned with the geographical organization of governance, the ways in which geographical imaginations figure in world politics, and the spatial basis to political identities and associated political movements. The geopolitical context of the time has been crucial to the making of academic political geography over the past one hundred years. The field has not evolved simply as the result of an internal intellectual dynamic, as one “paradigm” has simply replaced another because of intellectual fashion or academic competition. At the same time, the empirical scope of the field has widened from the original focus on the spatial attributes of statehood and global geopolitics to consider questions, for example, about the origins and spread of political movements, the links between places and identities, and geographies of nationalism and ethnic conflict.