What Is Political Geography Definition

In The Library’s Collections

To find items about political geography or geopolitics, you can physically browse the shelves in the call number range JC 319 through JC 323 on Berry Level 4 . Other books will be found in the D’s, E’s, F’s,and J’s.

When you search the online catalog, use the subject headings “political geography” or “geopolitics.” Either subject heading will get you started. Don’t forget about the related subject headings.

Cultural Geographies Of The Sea

While contemporary studies of the political geography of the sea can draw upon a long history of political geographers studying maritime conflict, the study of marine issues is quite new in cultural geography. Of course, there always have been marine cultural geographies seafaring and fishing communities invariably display distinct cultural formations that reflect and impact the surrounding marine environment. Historically, however, few geographers have devoted their attention to the cultures of fishing communities and even fewer have studied the cultures of societies engaged in uses of the deep sea .

To ground Gilroy’s metaphors, some geographers have turned their attention to shipboard life. Shipboard life provides a unique environment for geographic research because it is simultaneously mobile and stable, it is both a workspace and a living space, it is both self-contained and open ended, and a ship is both an insular community and one that typically brings people of many backgrounds and nationalities together. Again, work in this area has been aided by advances outside the discipline, in particular by social historians who have researched the role of the 18th- and 19th Century seamen, pirates, and whalers in constructing modern norms and disciplines of nation, class, gender, sexuality, and labor.

C. Pattie, R. Johnston, in, 2009

Who Uses A Political Map

A political map is a map that depicts the political borders of nations, states, counties, and major cities. A political map can help determine regional socio-political patterns that influence group activity and government outcomes.

Political maps are frequently printed on paper or other physical media, but they can also be created digitally and viewed online. Millions of people use search engines every day to look for political reference charts. “United States map,” “World map,” “Europe map,” and “Florida map” are among the most common searches.

Thousands of various political reference maps have been created to depict the United States’ current geography. There are maps of the whole country, maps of each of the 50 states, and maps of the 3142 counties that make up the states . The majority of counties, boroughs, and parishes are divided into even smaller political divisions. Just to show the geography of the United States, an unprecedented number of political maps have been developed.

Political maps of the world, nations, and continents are the most popular maps used in classrooms and offices. They are sometimes annotated with push pins, sticky notes, photos, marker flags, and string to indicate a family’s journeys, a business’s locations, or other noteworthy locations and events.

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What Is A Political Map

Among the most commonly used reference maps are “political maps.” They hang on the walls of classrooms all over the world showing the geographical boundaries that separate administrative units such as nations, states, and counties. They depict major water features such as oceans, rivers, and lakes, as well as highways and towns. In a nutshell, a political map displays the political characteristics of a given area.

Political maps come in a variety of sizes, as you would expect. Some are large enough to span whole continents, while others are smaller, such as a state or a county. You’ve probably seen a lot of political maps in your life. Knowing how to read these maps is essential to their use.

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Political Geography In The Service Of Imperialism

Geographers have long been necessary to states for their essential work of gathering geographic data and making maps. Geography has been particularly useful in foreign relations and defense ministries of major governments, and one can find numerous descriptive geographical works that have helped countries conquer and administer other countries.

Four major figuresfrom the US, Germany, Russia, and the UKexemplify the type of political geography that went beyond this dry fact-finding to weave elaborate theories about geopolitics and the relationships between the great powers in the waning years of imperialism.

1) Friedrich Ratzel , a German geographer who introduced the concept of lebensraum in his Politische Geographie .1 Though he was an important figure in the origins of modern human geography, cultural geography, and political geography, his geopolitical theory also influenced Nazism.

2) Alfred Thayer Mahan , a historian and Navy admiral who wrote The Influence of Sea-Power on History, 1660-1783,2 in which he argued for the preeminence of naval forces in the rise to power of empires. The US Navy and US geopolitical theory and practice were heavily influenced by this book.

3) Pyotr Kropotkin , a Russian prince who, as a geographer and an anarchist, completely disavowed the state and centralized government, calling it unnecessary. He argued instead for mutual aid3 like what he saw practiced in the small peasant communities across Russia that he visited.

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Auxiliary Sciences Of Political Geography

Political geography has such a wide field of study that it usually intersects with other disciplines , such as economics , history , law , sociology , demography and other social sciences .

Also are frequent contacts with other branches of geography , and social geography , economic geography and physical geography .

Theories Of International Relations

Realism

Realism suggests that states should and do look out for their interests first. Realism presumes that states are out for themselves primarily. Therefore, the world is a dangerous place a state must look out for themselves and prepare for the worst. When George W. Bush convinced the U.S. Congress that he should send in U.S. soldiers into Iraq in 2003 and take out Saddam Hussein, this was realism in action. Realism suggests that international relations are driven by competition between states states try to further their interests. What matters, then, is how much economic and military power a state has. When your neighbor misbehaves, the police cannot be called.

Classical realists say this is just human nature. People, by nature, are at some level greedy and insecure and behave accordingly. Even if someone is not greedy and insecure, they must behave that way, because that is the game. Structural realists say it is more about how the world is organizedan anarchic system creates the Hobbesian state of nature, referring to the 16th century English philosopher who justified the existence of the state by comparing it to a somewhat hypothetical state of nature, a war of all against all. States should seek peace, but prepare for war.

Liberalism

Constructivism

Feminism

Neo-Marxism

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Political And Geopolitical Geography

We must not confuse these two terms. Geopolitics studies international struggles to exercise power in geographical domains , which occur between different states and global actors. It is an analytical science oriented towards rivalries, confrontations and conflicts, in which economic, diplomatic and military factors intervene.

Political geography, on the other hand, deepens the geographical constitution of states and many other elements that geopolitics, in its desire to focus on power , set aside.

Political Economy In Academia

Political economy became an academic discipline of its own in recent years. Many major institutions offer the study as part of their political science, economics, and/or sociology departments.

Research by political economists is conducted in order to determine how public policy influences behavior, productivity, and trade. Much of their study helps them establish how money and power are distributed between people and different groups. They may do this through the study of specific fields such as law, bureaucratic politics, legislative behavior, the intersection of government and business, and regulation.

The study may be approached in any of three ways:

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The Internal And External Relations Of Countries

• M.A., Geography, California State University – East Bay
• B.A., English and Geography, California State University – Sacramento

Human geography is the branch of geography concerned with understanding the world’s culture and how it relates to geographic space. Political geography is the further offshoot that studies the spatial distribution of political processes and how these processes are impacted by one’s geographic location.

It often studies local and national elections, international relationships and the political structure of different areas based on geography.

Benefits And Drawbacks To Collective Defense

Collective defense entails benefits as well as risks. On the one hand, combining and pooling resources can reduce any single states cost of adequately providing security. Smaller members of NATO, for example, have leeway to invest a more significant proportion of their budget on non-military priorities, such as education or health, since they can count on other members to come to their defense, if needed.

On the other hand, collective defense also involves risky commitments. Member states can become embroiled in costly wars in which neither the direct victim nor the aggressor benefit. In the First World War, countries in the collective defense arrangement known as the Triple Entente were pulled into war quickly when Russia started full mobilization against Austria-Hungary, whose ally Germany declared war on Russia.

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Scope Of Political Geography

Political geography’s scope is extremely broad. At the local scale, it might focus on the political concerns of a single community or neighborhood. At the global scale, it can analyze the geopolitics of large world regions or other global phenomena. It can also integrate scales, relating the broadest of global issues to the political geography of a single neighborhood.

Like all subfields of geography, political geography is related not just to its own concerns of territory, boundaries, state formation, electoral politics, and so forth, but also to questions of culture, economics, and the environment.

COVID-19: a pandemic studied by medical geographers. There are environmental, cultural, and economic components to the pandemic, and all of these have geographic dimensions. Is there also a political geographical component? Definitely! A political geographer might look at how different governments approached geographical components of the pandemic, like stopping its spread by limiting how people utilize space.

What Is Political Economy

Political economy is an interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences that focuses on the interrelationships among individuals, governments, and public policy.

Political economists study how economic theories such as capitalism, socialism, and communism work in the real world. At its root, any economic theory is a methodology that is adopted as a means of directing the distribution of a finite amount of resources in a way that is beneficial for the greatest number of individuals.

In a wider sense, political economy was once the common term used for the field we now call economics. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all used the term to describe their theories. The briefer term economy was substituted in the early 20th century with the development of more rigorous statistical methods for analyzing economic factors.

The term political economy is still widely used to describe any government policy that has an economic impact.

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Political Geography Important Definition

Political Geography Definition is not just a term you hear on the political forums. It is an academic discipline concerned with political systems and political geography. Political Geography is a branch of cartography that studies political systems and that is using specialized cartographic techniques. It combines political science, cartography, statistics, and history to provide geographic information about political systems and political geography. The political geography definition therefore is political systems, and it used to illustrate political systems and geography.

Introduction To Political Geography

Political geography emphasizes humans’ territorial natures. We claim and hold territoryas individuals and as societiesfor reasons of security, need for natural resources, and fundamentally, as space in which to reside. We administer those territories according to rules that are written and enforced in different ways depending on what types of governments we have.

Fig. 1 – A common type of boundary marker

Geographers say that people organize space. This means we establish boundaries between different types of territories, define the rules of each territory , and define how we interact with people who arent members of our territories .

Political geography takes a critical approach to how we organize space and how this relates to the state and to the individual. It considers different types of territories that are fashioned by people of all ethnicities, races, genders, and cultures, and how these territories are governed and defended.

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Who Coined The Term Political Economy

Adam Smith is generally considered the father of economics and the father of the political economy. But the term is generally ascribed to French economist Antoine de Montchrestien, who wrote the book “Traité de l’économie politique,” which translates to the treaty of the political economy.

An Example Of Political Map

Below is an example of a political map of the United States of America. The United States of America is a republic with a federal government. There are 50 states, one federal district , five larger territories, and some island territories that make up the United States. North America is made up of the 48 contiguous Continental United States and Alaska, while the Pacific and Caribbean are made up of Hawaii and smaller outlying areas.

The political map depicts the United States and its neighboring nations, the national capital, Washington, D.C., as well as US states, state borders, state capitals, and other major cities.

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Importance Of Using Political Geography

Importance of Using Political Geography

Political cartography uses many sophisticated techniques, such as demographic modeling, political decision modeling, political choice modeling, and political geography modeling. It makes use of scientific information concerning demographic information, economic information, cultural information, and natural environmental data. Cartographers use advanced statistical and geographical techniques such as statistical cartography, geographical information management, geographical information system cartography, and political science visualization.

In order to build political maps, cartographers make use of many specialized software programs. These programs allow cartographers to make accurate political maps that show the political boundaries, political settlements, and other political attributes of a region. These maps are very useful for researchers who want to understand political systems of different regions.

Political Geography definition is also concerned with geography and political systems that involve political boundaries and political settlements. It is therefore different from political cartography. In political geography, political leaders determine the demarcations of political entities in the space. They also determine the boundaries of popular political entities. Political scientists and researchers who study political systems usually make use of geographic information systems .

Read A Brief Summary Of This Topic

geopolitics, analysis of the geographic influences on power relationships in international relations. The word geopolitics was originally coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén about the turn of the 20th century, and its use spread throughout Europe in the period between World Wars I and II and came into worldwide use during the latter. In contemporary discourse, geopolitics has been widely employed as a loose synonym for international politics.

Arguments about the political effects of geographyparticularly climate, topography, arable land, and access to the seahave appeared in Western political thought since at least the ancient Greek era and were prominent in the writings of philosophers as diverse as Aristotle and Montesquieu . The best-known body of geopolitical writings is the extensive literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of which focused on the impact on world politics of the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford Mackinder, John Seeley, Karl Haushofer, Friedrich Ratzel, H.G. Wells, Nicholas Spykman, Homer Lea, Frederick Teggart, Frederick Jackson Turner, James Burnham, E.H. Carr, Paul Vidal de la Blache, and others applied materialist approaches to contemporary problems. These and other writers tended to mix analysis with policy advocacy, and some exhibited many of the most pernicious racial and class prejudices of the era.

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What Is Political Geography

We understand by political geography the branch of human geography that studies human political organizations and their territorial distribution of the earths surface. That is, study the geographical space determined by the boundaries and dynamics of nations, populations , cultures , etc.

Its object of study is truly broad, since they have to do with political institutions in the world. In addition to the division of the globe into countries and territories, it addresses geopolitical, economic and international dynamics, as well as population exchange dynamics and their repercussions on the mode of organization of human societies .

In the latter it is distinguished from Political Science or Politology, since it also contemplates culture, society and other important elements that escape the strictly political.

The origin of political geography is closely linked with that of human geography and ethnography , which initially responded to the needs of the great European Empires to know and organize the world that was distributed and considered as objects of study to the Other cultures and populations.

For these and other reasons the discipline began to decline in the mid-twentieth century. However, it resurfaced in the 70s and 80s free of geographical determinism and other problematic interpretative trends.

History And Development Of Political Economy

The roots of political economy as we know it today go back to the 18th century. Scholars during the period studied how wealth was distributed and administered between people. Some of the earlier works that examined this phenomenon included those by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

But the term is probably best ascribed to the French writer and economist, Antoine de Montchrestien. He wrote a book called “Traité de l’économie politique” in 1615, in which he examined the need for production and wealth to be distributed on an entirely larger scalenot in the household as Aristotle suggested. The book also analyzed how economics and politics are interrelated.

Smith was a philosopher, economist, and writer who is commonly referred to as the father of economics and of the political economy. He wrote about the function of a self-regulating free market in his first book, which was called “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” His most famous work, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” helped shape classical economic theory. It was also used as the foundation for future economists.

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