Political Geography

Abstract

Political geography is a sub-discipline of geography focused on the nature and implications of the evolving spatial organization of political governance and formal political practice on the earth's surface. It is concerned with why political spaces emerge in the places that they do, and with how the character of those spaces affects social, political, economic, and environmental understandings and practices. The origins of modern political geography can be traced to the work of German geographers and English geopoliticians in the late nineteenth century. After a period of marginalization during the middle of the twentieth century, political geography has recently gained prominence as it has become increasingly clear that developments at different scales are challenging traditional political-territorial constructs. Work in the sub-discipline is characterized by four major approaches, with considerable blurring among them: (a) descriptive analysis of the spatial configuration and character of politically organized areas; (b) quantitative analysis of political developments, particularly electoral data; (c) structuralist analyses of the impacts of political-economic arrangements on the existing political-territorial order; and (d) post-structuralist analyses of the nature and meaning of the spaces of political practice and action.