Political Geography Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political geography is a field of inquiry concerned with the geographical organization of government, the ways in which geographical imaginations figure in world politics, and the spatial basis to political identities and associated political movements. Geography is often understood as the distribution of such physical features of the earth as mountains, rivers, and oceans, but it also includes human reactions to and impacts on the physical environment—from settlement and economic-development patterns to human-induced climate change.

Political geography is that part of human geography involved with politics. Compared with political sociology and political science, political geography is less concerned with the politics of social groups and the political preferences of individual persons and more with how social groups and people organize and orient themselves in space for political purposes. Examples of this include the field’s long-term focus on such phenomena as the dynamics of interstate borders, the history of modern statehood, electoral geography (including the geographical organization of elections), and the strategic ranking of world regions in foreign policies. Historically, the field has focused on the links between space, regions, and the natural environment, on the one hand, and politics (and polity), on the other. Such linkages were important to ancient and early modern political theory but have weakened in recent political theory, as its practitioners have tended to become largely state focused. Political geography, therefore, recalls a historically more integrative and perhaps more wide-ranging approach to understanding political phenomena.

Trajectory, 1890 To Present

As a modern field of study, political geography dates from the 1890s as initially an “aid to statecraft” in organizing their empires and confronting their adversaries on the part of the great powers—Germany, Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and Japan. Largely analogous to what was also known after 1899 as geopolitics, this political geography took contemporary national political identities and reason of state as givens. The “needs” of territorial states, and their relative location on the earth’s surface alongside the resources available in driving and determining the outcome of competition between the states, were the main concerns of the field. Lurking in the early history of political geography is the history of thinking about how nature relates to nation-state as inherited from the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and the early nineteenth-century Romantic reaction against it. If the idea of levels of development associated with different national territories comes from eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought, then that of hierarchies of national territories on a racial-natural basis competing with one another for domination comes out of nineteenth-century German idealism.

This intellectual trajectory long dominated the field. Indeed, until very recently, many political geographers were either camera lists—advocates of state-based economies that maximize their self-sufficiency and minimize their transactions with others—or imperialists—promoters of empire-building and controlling distant territories).There are still some of each around, even if many advocates of cameralism now think of themselves as on the political left rather than on the nationalist right. Changing times can produce strange bedfellows, but over the past twenty years, liberal perspectives that pit states against markets, and social perspectives that look to a plurality of forms of governance, have tended to become more influential. Of course, disputes among cameralists (both nationalist and state socialist), imperialists, liberals, and romantic localists have deep roots in many genres of modern political thought.

However, it is not only the range of implicit political projects informing the field that has changed. The intellectual attitude has moved 180 degrees. Since the 1960s, a more independent and critical approach has begun to develop, acknowledging the need to critically question rather than actively serve the particular interests of the political geographer’s “home state.”

At the same time, the empirical scope of the field has widened to consider questions about the origins, spread, and support for political movements and parties, the links between places and political identities, and geographies of nationalism and ethnic conflict. Along with many other parts of political studies, political geography has gone from presuming that states, particularly one’s own state, are everything to seeing “the political” as everywhere. This intellectual leavening of the field has simply transformed political geography from a particularly state-centered field at its origins to one interested in the range of ways in which geography intersects with the broadly construed sense of the political: from the material and discursive construction of states and their interrelations to the connections between places and political identities.

Geopolitical Context And Political Geography

A good case can be made that the geopolitical context of the time has been crucial for the emergence political geography over the past one hundred years. The field has not evolved simply as the result of an internal dynamic, as one paradigm simply replaced another because of intellectual fancy or academic competition. It is not that such considerations have been absent, but they have been relatively less salient to the making of the field than the nature of the world that political geography has claimed to directly report on and interpret. The time of modern political geography’s founding in the 1890s was one of burgeoning interimperial rivalry and arms races between a set of great powers that reached its twin peaks in the two world wars. This period gave rise to the political geography that privileged the role of physical geography and relative global location in determining or conditioning state prospects and limits. Major features of political geography during this phase included arguing for control over oceanic sea-lanes and articulating geopolitical pretexts based on the relative propensity of different states to expand.

The cold war from 1945 to 1991, with its emphasis on global ideological competition between two models of “modernity”—the democratic capitalism of the United States and the state socialism of the Soviet Union—initially produced a diminished interest in the study of political geography. The field as it had existed before World War II (1939–1945) did not seem to offer much food for thought in the new circumstances. Of course, the period did encourage freezing political boundaries and a seemingly permanent standoff between the two sides. Ideology, not geography, was what mattered. Nevertheless, even during this period, geopolitical claims to spheres of influence and the definition of buffer states between the two “sides” were important parts of the overall conflict. As the cold war slowly eroded, however, political geography underwent something of a revival in the United States and elsewhere, as questions of state territoriality and electoral geography emerged from the long sleep of the postwar period. The social upheavals of the 1960s focused on civil rights and the Vietnam War (1959–1975) provide something of the context for this shift.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a geopolitical context is emerging in which states, however mighty, confront shadowy networks of discontented and fanatic groups often based in failed or quasi states, following this or that utopian objective, often of a religious or ethnic nature. As this new world disorder—and other dimensions of it such as increased worldwide flows of money, goods, and people—take geographical shape, political geography can be expected in turn to change its shape to address the changes.

From Naturalized To Critical Knowledge

Political geography had a history before the term itself came into more widespread use in the 1890s. For example, the seventeenth-century Englishman William Petty’s idea of political arithmetic, and his book Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672), are historical precursors of late nineteenth-century political geography. In mid-eighteenth-century France, Anne Robert-Jacques Turgot used the ter m political geography to refer to the relationships between the facts of geography, seen as all physical and human features of spatial distribution, and the organization of politics. It is also apparent that many of the great figures in the history of political thought—from the ancient Greeks Aristotle and Thucydides to the early modern Florentine Machiavelli and later writers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles-Louise Montesquieu, A. R. J. Turgot, James Madison, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg F. W. Hegel, and Karl Marx—had ideas about political territoriality and the effects of geographical location and access to resources on conflict and war. These ideas can be regarded as basic elements of political geography. They picked up on the practical realities facing political elites and offered their solutions in the context of the historical periods in which they lived. Thucydides’s great work, The Peloponnesian War, concerns the two decades of war between Athens and Sparta (431–411 BCE) and forms the first example of use of the opposition between sea and land powers that later political geographers such as Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), in his famous work on control of the Eurasian heartland, used as a basic organizing principle of world politics.

The founders of modern political geography could therefore draw upon many centuries of relevant thought to inform their research and writing. Yet they were also creatures of their time. An important continuity across the early twentieth century is the naturalized understanding of knowledge that tended to dominate geography in general and political geography in particular. The university field of geography as a whole was invented in the late nineteenth century, in part, as an offshoot of the growth of national geographical societies devoted to exploration, collecting information about exotic peoples, and the opening up of foreign lands to commerce or conquest (or both). The other part of its origins lay in detailed mapping and portrayal of the regions and landscapes of national territories. This allowed communication of the material basis of national identity in the burgeoning elementary schools of the era. In this respect, geography was one of a panoply of subjects with ancient roots that were reinvented under their old names to service the needs of statehood and empire-building: from anthropology’s measuring of physical differences between human groups and literature’s capture of national literary genius, to history’s telling of distinctive and noble national histories. New fields such as sociology, economics, and political science acquired their own niches in the national service.

An increasingly prestigious and dominant thrust in all of the new disciplines, however, was toward a naturalization of knowledge claims. This is the tendency to want to explain human and social phenomena largely, if not entirely, in terms of natural processes, either physical or biological. In other words, scholars wanted to use processes assuredly not of mental construction outside the questionable “human” realm in which values, interests, and identities were all subject to divergent interpretations, and hence less amenable to “expert opinion.” The German thinkers who initially dominated the field, such as Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), were particularly given to this sort of approach.

Naturalization of knowledge claims had two vital intellectual preconditions. One was the separation of the scientific claim from the subject position of the particular writer. Claims were made to universal knowledge that transcended any particular national, class, gender, or ethnic standpoint. So, even as a particular “national interest” was addressed, a perspective that put it into the realm of nature, rather than that of politics or society, framed it. This “view from nowhere” was by no means new, but it was very important to the new university fields in supporting their assertion of expertise and relevance to addressing the problems of the age.

The second precondition was preference arguments drawn from the natural sciences to explain social and political phenomena. Thus, Charles Darwin’s principle of natural selection filtered down into popular culture, and into fields such as geography, largely in terms of the idea of survival of the fittest. This not only encouraged organic conceptions of nation-statehood (i.e., the state as a type of organism) but also stimulated ideas about racial competition, degradation, and dominion. Much of what passed for social Darwinism, however, was inspired by the older evolutionary ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Compared to Darwin’s reliance on variation over extended time periods, these were both more open to the immediate effects of the physical environment on social processes and, crucially, to the impact of will, or intervention, in creating more successful organisms. This allowed packaging seemingly contradictory elements into a single study, such as races as biological categories arrayed according to their superior “consciousness” for which there was no natural basis whatsoever. Such ideas were widely shared among elites, not least the new academic ones, across all of the great powers.

After World War II, such ideas began to fall into disfavor, particularly in the United States. There had always been those who thought such logic limited or fallacious. However, particularly in light of the way supporters of German and Japanese expansionism in the interwar period expropriated the term geopolitics—undoubtedly influenced in their reasoning by precursors such as Mackinder—political geography was tarred with the brush of a now defeated geographical determinism.

Political geography thus went into somewhat of a slump. It started to recover under two influences in the 1960s and early 1970s: One was the attempt to bring to bear classical concerns with territory back into political geography, but without the bio metaphysical bias. Crucial to this innovation were such figures as the French American geographer Jean Gottmann (1915–1994) and his 1973 The Significance of Territory, and the Norwegian political sociologist Stein Rokkan (1921–1979) in a 1980 article titled “Territories, Centers, and Peripheries. ”The emphasis on state territories as the outcome of historically institutionalized and geographically variegated processes involving sovereignty claims and nationalism marked a break with previous biological conceptions of territory. Later work, such as Robert Sack’s Human Territoriality (1986), both deepened appreciation for this contribution and extended it theoretically in new directions.

Another influence came from a revival of electoral geography, first explored by Andre Siegfried in France in the early 1900s, with its focus on geographical patterns of election results and what they said about how people came to vote in the ways they did. Kevin Cox, Ron Johnston, and Peter Taylor were particularly influential in this regard. This later developed into a more fully articulated connection between popular political views and the place settings or contexts in which people live, particularly as presented in John Agnew’s 1987 Place and Politics. If the approach of Sack and others tended to intersect heavily with positive political theory, electoral geography related more to research in fields such as political sociology and political science. In both cases, however, knowledge was seen as the outcome of human agency rather than of the direct effect of natural process.

Perhaps the most important theoretical departures, however, date from the 1980s when, respectively, Marxist ideas about statehood and capitalism, and feminist and postmodern ideas about the discursive construction of geopolitics and political identities, acquired increasing influence. In identifying the central role of the state in global capitalism and the social construction of political identities as a process beyond the realm of what was conventionally considered “politics,” these self-consciously critical approaches to knowledge called into question both the restriction of the “political” to a separate sphere and the independence of the state from broader economic and cultural considerations.

As a result, political geographers referred to the limits of thinking about states in purely territorial terms, argued for thinking about geopolitics in “critical” discursive terms, and refused to separate the economic from the political, although often with a tendency to privilege the former. Much of political geography’s renewal in the late twentieth century owes to factors including: explicitly normative critiques of the modern state system and the competitive war machines that drive it, proposals for transnational democracy, and increased attention to looming global environmental disasters for which the geography of existing political arrangements seems ill-prepared to respond.

Contemporary Political Geography

Three general approaches tend to dominate the field today even though the lines between them are not hard and fast. Indeed, more innovative research tends to work across them. The first, spatial analysis, involves the correlation of spatial patterns showing how a dependent variable, such as a vote for a specific political party, covaries geographically with various presumed independent or predictor variables. These variables include class, ethnicity, religion, and age. Stressing empirical data collection and analysis, this is akin to much of quantitative political science except, crucially, the emphasis is on how geographical variance fundamentally affects the nature of the correlations; closer locations are more highly related to one another than to more distant ones. Debates about important theoretical-methodological questions, such as the dependence of individual political preferences and behavior on spatial context (e.g., the local economy); the “levels” or geographical scales at which variance is more or less concentrated (i.e., whether differences are local or regional); and the clustering of different political phenomena (e.g., votes, riots, strikes, civil wars, territorial disputes, diffusion of different political institutions) in different places, tend to animate the approach. The popular idea of a United States divided up into so-called red and blue states reflects a primitive version of the notion that where one lives can have an independent effect on how one thinks and acts. This notion treats location as politically separate from simple demographic indicators added up irrespective of how they intersect in people’s everyday lives in particular places.

A second approach more clearly commits to political economic analysis that foregrounds the geography of uneven development at a variety of geographical scales—from the global to the metropolitan. From this viewpoint, geographical space constitutes a surface on which processes of capital accumulation and political resistance are inscribed but which also, over time, become embedded. These factors thus contribute to the difficulty of resolving inequalities in wealth and power between different places. The cycles of global economic expansion and contraction are seen as particularly influential in structurally shifting geographical patterns over time, as new places are incorporated and old ones shed their historic roles. By way of example, political parties can be viewed as arising to represent distinctive political-economic interests; these groups tend to cluster in different places because of the history of uneven development.

Finally, a third perspective tends to reject the overt rationalism of the first two perspectives. In a register that emphasizes the role of the observer, the world is seen as written about, rather than discovered or explored. Although writers under this rubric differ in the degree to which they see an “external world” as having an independent reality, the commonality is the rejection of the simple correlation and cause-effect relationships that are the basis to the other two. In a postmodern vein, language and discursive strategies become the focus. So-called critical geopolitics, for example, involves deconstructing the representational and communicative strategies employed by politicians in constructing foreign policy crises, situations, and wars. From this viewpoint, these things never “just happen.” Some of the narratives help anchor national identities, whereas others relate to the global agendas of elites in pursuit of this or that interest or policy.

Bibliography:

Agnew, John A. Making Political Geography. London: Hodder, 2002.
Place and Politics. London: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
“The Territorial Trap.” Review of International Political Economy 1, no. 1 (1994): 53–80.
Campbell, David. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Gottmann, Jean. The Significance of Territory. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
O’Loughlin, John. “Spatial Analysis in Political Geography.” In Companion to Political Geography, edited by John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal, 30–46. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
“Spatial Models of International Conflict.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 1 (1986): 63–80.
O’Tuathail, Gearoid. Critical Geopolitics:The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Osei-Kwame, Peter, and Peter Taylor. “A Politics of Failure: The Political Geography of Ghanaian Elections, 1954–1979.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (1984): 574–589.
Rokkan, Stein. “Territories, Centers, and Peripheries.” In Centre and Periphery: Spatial Variation in Politics, edited by Jean Gottmann, 163–204. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1980.
Sack, Robert D. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Sharp, Joanne P. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Taylor, Peter J., and Ronald J. Johnston. Geography of Elections. London: Penguin Books, 1979.

This example Political Geography Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.