Developments in Political Geography: A century of progress

2011

Contemporary world is changing at an incredibly fast pace. IT revolution and globalization processes have led to a deep transformation of our social life and the change of relations between human activity and space in which this activity takes place. Growing correlation on a global scale, mutual conditioning of what is global (external) and what is local (internal), high mobility of people, capital, ideas flowing freely on a global scale affect the increasing permeability of borders, which to a lesser extent perform their functions. Political geography, which as a scientific discipline focusing on the spatial aspects of human activity, must find an answer to the question how to analyze spatial systems in their relation to power in the world where majority of processes assumes global character, spatial distances in their current meaning lose their importance, and human activity is often separated and independent from a specific location in space. In the submitted article the author a...

The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography, 2008

Political Geography, 2003

At the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Los Angeles in 2002 we organized two panel discussions around the theme of 'Political Geography in Question'. The framework that we gave the panelists read as follows:

Political geography is a field located at the frontier between geography and political science. Considering this, one could expect that cross-fertilization occurs across the two fields. Unfortunately, what we see is rather a different picture – that of mutual neglect, or worse implicit antipathy. This paper aims to discuss deeper cleavages that separate the field and to suggest some possible remedies. The key cleavages we analyse are: the broader goals of the social science; epistemological preferences; preferences for nomothetic vs. idiographic knowledge and preferences for description and interpretation vs. explanation; and attitudes towards methodologies. The paper illustrates these cleavages via a short comparative analysis of two papers (one written by a geographer, the other by a political scientist) that have similar research goals and general research designs. Greater attention to counterfactuals on the side of geographers, and greater willingness to consider more ideographic and descriptive pieces on the side of political scientists, are among the suggested ways to overcome this unproductive separation of political geography and political science

Political Geography, 2003

Concerns about the state of political geography seem to surface periodically. In the mid-1980s, a number of authors voiced their concern about the endless diversity of approaches and lack of theory in political geography . Kevin Cox and Murray Low in their original statement for the Panel discussion noted that "today, political geography seems to be more fragmented and 'unevenly developed' than its cultural and economic neighbours". My first reaction to this was that may be we are conferring on economic and cultural geographies a unity of purpose or theoretical cohesion which they do not have? Economic geography, though revitalised, has not expunged the more traditional concerns and analyses. Cultural geography, in its engagement with postmodernist approaches and identity politics, is being subjected to criticisms for its tendency to over emphasise the representational and the textual, and in doing so dematerialise human geography . Critiques of landscapes without peoples and the failure to address social relations in specific places at specific times (Smith, 2000) have been levelled at critical geopolitics which has been strongly influenced by the cultural turn. In questioning the state of political geography, it is important that we adopt an historical perspective in examining the development of political geography, and what has either influenced or had little impact on it. There seems to be an assumption amongst some critics that the problems of political geography are its failure to incorporate the kind of changes introduced through cultural geography, as for example, the attention paid to the everyday. Cultural geography supposedly deals with the everyday, whilst political geography does not. If this is the case, why not? Political studies and political geography too have had their protagonists of the everyday. The polemical feminist slogan of the 1970s 'the personal is political' was intended to challenge and contest the notion of the political, which was now to be seen everywhere and a matter of everyday relations; the political was no longer to be segregated

Geopolitics, 2019

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Political Geography, 2003

Political geography's problems, at the present, are both external and internal. Externally there are the challenges it faces as a result of recent changes in other sub-fields, particularly cultural and economic geography. There the post-positivist shift in human geography has resulted in a new interest in questions of power, which, arguably, has always been the focus of political geography. But if there are 'new' cultural and political geographies, arguably part of the newness of political geography itself has come from its contact with ideas of political economy and new, more critical concepts of the cultural. One might claim that the interest in power in political geography was in the past often rather submerged. This was certainly the case in early vintages of voting studies and in some of the work on welfare geography. Even so, in terms of political geography's identity, where does that leave us? How are we to be distinguished from cultural and economic geography, particularly in their more recent instantiations? What are the specific contributions we make to human geography on the one hand and to the understanding of the political on the other? These questions of identity are lent further urgency by the relative lack of internal cohesion in the field-always a problem in political geography. Political geographers study, seemingly, rather disparate things. There is a tremendous amount of theoretical work that needs to be done in the sub-field. For sure, one can point to a number of very lively and productive clusters of activity. But what do they all add up to? In consequence, and before addressing our relations to the rest of human geography, we need to consider just what it is we do in a coherent sense, in terms of overarching logics, even though I recognize that the latter term has become suspect and assimilated to the post-modern critique. I am going to argue that the specificity of political geography, our contribution to human geography's division of labor, lies in the exploration of our two big, twin concepts, territory and territoriality: territoriality as action to influence the content of an area; territory as the area in question. More concretely, the focus is on the

Geoforum, 1994