Political geography

Political geography is concerned with the analyse of both a spatially uneven outcomes of political processes as well as the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Conventionally, for a purposes of analysis, political geography adopts a three-scale cut with the discussing of the state at the centre, the study of international relations or geopolitics above it, and the study of localities below it. The primary concerns of the subdiscipline can be summarized as the inter-relationships between people, state, and territory.

Areas of study

From the late-1970s onwards, political geography has undergone a renaissance, and could fairly be returned as one of the near dynamic of the sub-disciplines today. The revival was underpinned by the launch of the journal Political Geography Quarterly and its expansion to bi-monthly production as Political Geography. In factor this growth has been associated with the adoption by political geographers of the approaches taken up earlier in other areas of human geography, for example, Ron J. Johnston's 1979 defecate on electoral geography relied heavily on the adoption of quantitative spatial science, Robert Sack's 1986 have on territoriality was based on the behavioural approach, Henry Bakis 1987 showed the impact of information and telecommunications networks on political geography, and Peter Taylor's e.g. 2007 work on World Systems Theory owed much to developments within structural Marxism. However, the recent growth in vitality and importance of this sub-discipline is also related to the undergo a modify in the world as a a thing that is said of the end of the Cold War. With the emergence of a new world grouping which as yet, is only poorly defined and the developing of new research agendas, such as the more recent focus on social movements and political struggles, going beyond the study of nationalism with its explicit territorial basis. There has also been increasing interest in the geography of green politics see, for example, David Pepper's 1996 work, including the geopolitics of environmental protest, and in the capacity of our existing state apparatus and wider political institutions, to extension any sophisticated and future environmental problems competently.

Political geography has extended the scope of traditional political science approaches by acknowledging that the object lesson of power to direct or build is non restricted to states and bureaucracies, but is factor of everyday life. This has resulted in the concerns of political geography increasingly overlapping with those of other human geography sub-disciplines such as economic geography, and, particularly, with those of social and cultural geography in version to the study of the politics of place see, for example, the books by David Harvey 1996 and Joe Painter 1995. Although sophisticated political geography remains many of its traditional concerns see below the multi-disciplinary expansion into related areas is part of a general process within human geography which involves the blurring of boundaries between formerly discrete areas of study, and through which the discipline as a whole is enriched.

In particular, contemporary political geography often considers:

Critical political geography is mainly concerned with the criticism of traditional political geographies vis-a-vis modern trends. As with much of the come on towards 'Critical geographies', the arguments have drawn largely from postmodern, post structural and postcolonial theories. Examples include: