Political Geography

Background

Political geography as a formally identified topic of academic inquiry dates back to the late 19th century and the work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel. But it is also true that some of political geography's conceptual heritage dates back to the ancient Greeks, including authors such as Aristotle. From its inception (however defined) through the 1950s, political geography frequently was fixated on analysis of the state as its sole unit of inquiry. During this period, political geography frequently viewed its preeminent purpose as the active furthering of state goals or at least the identification of characteristics facilitating the maintenance of the state if not the international system of states.

Efforts to further advance state goals were central to the development of geopolitics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Such an outlook reached its zenith in the development of German Geopolitik prior to World War II. Promoted as an objective science through propaganda, German Geopolitik provided a quasi-academic justification for Nazi violence and imperialism during the 1930s and 1940s. Due to its association with geopolitics, political geography was perceived unfavorably by many after World War II, and the area of study atrophied. During the past four decades, political geography has experienced a renewal, including an increase in its topical breadth, theoretical perspectives, and the geographic scales at which political geography research is conducted.

In spite of the many changes political geography has undergone during the past few decades, some of its core concepts have remained largely constant. For example, political geographers continue to consider the division of geographic space into units of political space, territoriality, boundaries, location, distance, and core–periphery relations, among others. Central among these is the concept of territoriality. Territoriality suggests human action in the acquisition, delimitation, and defense of geographic spaces. Thus, sizable demographic groups defining themselves as distinct nations have pursued the establishment of sovereign territorial states for their occupation. Recent successful examples of such efforts have emerged from the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union such as Croatia, Slovenia, Georgia, and Estonia. Clearly, a state is an embodiment of territoriality.

Renewal during the 1960s

Political geography has undergone a major revival, if not a renaissance, since the 1960s. As that decade began, political geography's prevailing views of its subject matter and role were largely static and generally accepted the state as the only critical political unit for analysis, giving little attention to the role of political units at other geographic scales. Due to the work of influential geographer Richard Hartshorne, political geographers had adopted a functional approach for their research that focused on the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful states. Well-functioning states, it was argued, were characterized by substantially greater numbers of centripetal forces than of centrifugal forces. Centripetal forces—those binding a state together—might include a common language or ethnicity. If these forces were insufficient to overcome the centrifugal forces pulling a state apart, some political geographers viewed their task as identifying additional centripetal forces for the maintenance of the state. Thus, political geography largely viewed the existing world political system as a given and accepted a role in its preservation.

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