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Political geography is a field of human geography that is concerned with politics. It is closely related to geopolitics, which is seen as the strategic, military and governmental application of political geographies. It is also closely related to International Relations.
Areas of Study Political geography is interested in the relationship between political power or politics and geography. Geography often influences political decisions and vice versa political power influences geographical space. It is often associated with the study of the practices of sovereign states, but it considers politics of all scales, from those of the United Nations to those of day-to-day life. In particular, then, modern political geography often considers: Pre-World War Two The term political geography was first used by Friedrich Ratzel in his book 'Politische Geographie', published in German in 1897. Geopolitics was then coined by the Swede Rudolf Kejell. The discipline gained attention largely through the work of Sir Halford Mackinder in England and his formulation of the Heartland Theory in 1904. This theory involved concepts diametrically opposed to the notion of Alfred Thayer Mahan about the significance of navies (Mahan coined the term sea power) in world conflict. The Heartland theory, on the other hand, hypothesized the possibility for a huge empire to be brought into existence which didn't need to use coastal or transoceanic transport to supply its military industrial complex, and that this empire could not be defeated by all the rest of the world coalitioned against it. The Heartland Theory depicted a world divided into a Heartland (Eastern Europe/Western Russia); World Island (Eurasia and Africa); Peripheral Islands (British Isles, Japan, Indonesia and Australia) and New World (The Americas). Mackinder claimed that whoever controlled the Heartland would have control of the world. He used this warning to politically influence events such as the Treaty of Versailles, where buffer states were created between the USSR and Germany, to prevent either of the them controlling the Heartland. Ratzel, at the same time, was creating a theory on states based around the concepts of Lebensraum and Social Darwinism. This stated that states were 'organisms' that needed sufficient room in which to live. Expansionist inclinations - such as the British of French empires were a result of this. Both these two writers created the idea of a political and geographical science, with an objective God's Eye View of the world. Pre-World War Two political geography was concerned largely with these issues of global power struggles and influencing state policy. The above theories were both taken on board by German geopoliticians (see Geopolitik) such as Karl Haushofer who - they claim inadvertently - greatly influenced Nazi political theory. The politics that were legitimated by 'scientific' theories such as a 'neutral' requirement for state expansion are those that were engaged in during World War Two. Though modern geographers have been more sympathetic to the likes of Haushofer, suggesting that he and his colleagues actually did believe that they were conducting neutral scientific study, it is also almost impossible that they could not have foreseen how their results would be used; Haushofer, in particular, actually tutored Rudolf Hess and is anecdotely said to have passed a copy of Ratzel's Politische Geographie onto Adolf Hitler, whilst he was writing Mein Kampf. Cold War Geopolitics After World War Two, the demonization of Nazi geopolitics lead to a fall in the popularity and legitimacy of the subject. Geographers of this time became more engaged in economic geography, and regional geography. Geography as a discipline went through what is called the quantitative revolution in the 1960s, moving it from a descriptive subject to a more rigorous, theoretically-grounded discipline. Ironically, this reflected closer the stances of inter-war geopoliticians, who cast themselves as scientific observers and analysers. During this time, when geography took a positivist stance, political geography remained a fairly narrow subject. It was still interested in the division of the world into different groupings - theories such as core and periphery were dominant, with a Marxist informed critique of capitalism. Critical Political Geography Critical political Geography is mainly concerned with the criticism of traditional political geographies. Focusing on the expansion of geographical knowledge, within each critical argument is generally nested an alternative cause for the issue at hand, such as within Andrew Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology. Notable Political Geographers Further reading See also | ||||||||
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