Polymorphic Political Geographies

Abstract

NEW POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES Welcome to another issue of Territory, Politics, Governance that illustrates the expanding breadth and depth of an inter-disciplinary engagement with political geography. The papers represented here come from six disciplines – Geography, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Economics, Area Studies – and have been written by interesting authors drawn from across the northern hemisphere – these scholars being based in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Finland and Greece. Their topics and methodologies range from North American water governance to European Union (EU) diplomacy in Kenya, from the political science of intergovernmental relations to neo-Marxist situations of the state as a social relation, capturing how exciting and dynamic the field of territory, politics and governance has become. In doing so, they illustrate the importance of this journal in providing the collective platform for bringing together these bodies of critical thinking. It is a pleasure to position these papers, individually and collectively, in their broader intellectual environment of ‘new political geography’ (JONES et al., 2004, 2015a ,p . 2–4). There have, of course, been a number of different approaches to defining the shifting field of political geography. To some scholars, political geography has been about the study of political bounded territorial units, demarcated borders and administrative sub-divisions (ALEXANDER, 1963). For others, political geography is the study of political processes, differing from political science only in the emphasis given to geographical influences and outcomes and in the application of spatial analysis techniques (BURNETT and TAYLOR, 1981). A third approach holds that political geography should be defined in terms of its key concepts, which the proponents of this approach generally identify as territory and the state (COX, 2002, 2013). This approach shares with the earlier two approaches a desire to identify the ‘essence’ of political geography such that a definitive classification can be made of what is and what is not ‘political geography’. Yet, the doing of political geography, i.e. how it is actually researched, is much messier than these definitions suggest (witness the variety of papers published in Territory, Politics, Governance to date – compare, ELDEN, 2013 ;J ESSOP, 2016 ;P ECK, 2013 ;S ASSEN 2013; STORPER, 2014). As such, scholars, who have sought to define political geography in a much more open and inclusive manner, have taken a fourth and more relational approach. Agnew, for example, defines political geography as ‘the study of how politics