Introduction to Political Geography

Class 2
BIR 2018
Course: 1206
1st Year, 2nd Semester

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Discussion Points
1. Understanding Political Geography.
2. Nature and Scope, Objective of Political
Geography.
3. Evolution
4. Ideas and Developments
5. Brief History
6. Major Concepts
7. Suggested Readings.
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Understanding Political Geography

What is Political
Geography?

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 Understanding Political Geography
• Politics and Geography --- too simple.

• Sum of its two parts.

• “Geography” is drawn on in selective ways: in ways which

illumine the political.

• “Politics” is drawn on in ways which shed light on the

geographic.

• Focuses on the twin ideas of territory and territoriality.

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Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)

Territory
Bounded geographic space.

Territoriality
Attempt to control that space.

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Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)

• Branch of Human Geography.

• Concerned with the interface between politics and

geography.

• Focuses on the spatial dimensions of power and with

political phenomena.

• Relationships at a range of spatial scales from the global

down to the local.
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 Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)
Human Geography

• Deals with world, its people,

their communities, culture,
economies, and interaction with
the environment.

• Emphasizing their relations with

and across space and place.

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Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)

• Intersections of key geographical concerns of

space, place, and territory on the one hand and
issues of politics, power, and policy on the
other.

• The diversity of issues and approaches--- more

meaningful to talk of political geographies
rather than a single unidimensional political
geography.
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 Understanding Political Geography
(Contd.)
Approaches to defining Political Geography
First:
• Political territorial units, borders and administrative
subdivisions.

Second:
• Political processes, differing from political science only in the
emphasis given to geographical influences and outcomes and
in the application of spatial analysis techniques.

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→ Influence of wider theoretical approaches within
geography as a whole.
Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)

Third:
• Political geography should be defined in terms
of its key concepts.
• Territory and the state.

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Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)
Fourth:
• ‘The study of how politics is informed by geography’.

• Joe Painter (1995) describes political geography as a ‘discourse’.

• A body of knowledge that produces particular understandings about

the world.

• Characterised by internal debate.

• The evolutionary adoption of new ideas.

• Dynamic boundaries.
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Understanding Political Geography (Contd.)

• Political geography recognises the six

entities – power, politics and policy,
space, place and territory – are
intrinsically linked, but a piece of political
geographical research does not need to
explicitly address them all.

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 Understanding Political Geography
(Contd.)

Figure: Political Geography as the interaction of ‘politics’ and ‘geography’

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 Nature, Scope and Objectives
• Intended for the provision of security,
freedom and justice.

• Affect the status, ranks and hierarchies of

persons, groups and institutions.

• Concern the access to the biological bases of

social life.
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 Nature, Scope and Objectives
• Give to some people or groups a right of use
on the bodies of other persons.
• Access to economic resources, activities or
employment.
• Have an impact on the redistribution of
income of wealth.
• Access to information.

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Phase One: 1900
Political Geography = Human Geography
States as Organisms competing, growing, and dying
Land and power at global scale
Redrawing the world political map after First World War
Geopolitik - German geopolitics

Phase Two: 1930

Political Geography as the geography of nation states
States as regions
Physical infrastructure

Phase Three: 1960

Political Geography as a (minor) part of human geography
People and governance
Achieving social justice
Individual rights Vs corporate responsibility

Phase Four: 1980

Political geography resurgent
World system theory
Globalisation
The reinvention of geopolitics
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Evolution
• Late nineteenth century:
synonymous with human geography.

• Late nineteenth to Early-twentieth century:

social and economic geography.

• Mid-twentieth century:
State was the main focus.

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Evolution (Contd.)
• Late Twentieth century:
more radical and politically engaged
perspective.

• Recent:
‘big’ politics (states, governments, etc.)+‘small’
politics (local issues, gender, ethnicity, social
identities).
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Ideas and Developments
• Friedrich Ratzel: Idea of Lebensraum

• Halford Mackinder: Heartland theory

• Spykman: Rimland theory

• Immanuel Wallerstein: World system theory

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Brief History
1. Era of Ascendancy:
- State is Focus of Attention

2. The Era of Marginalisation

- Functional Approach
- Missed out theories
- Marginalised within geography and began
to disappear as a university subject

3. The Era of Revival

- Reintroduction of theory into political geography
- Political Turn
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Era of Ascendency
Ideas of Friedrich Ratzel

• The organic theory of Ratzel: Lebensraum.

• Late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century.

- Two main characteristics:

 Derived from biology and other physical sciences and applied these to
politics and society.

 Geography and other branches of academia should be put into the

service of the state.

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Lebensraum
• State - Living organism.

• Like every living organism the state ‘required a specific

amount of territory from which to draw sustenance’.

• States followed the same laws of development as

biological.

• When a state’s Lebensraum became insufficient – for

example, because of population growth – the state
needed to annex new territory to establish new, larger,
Lebensraum. 22
Era of Ascendency (contd.)
Ideas of Rudolf Kjellen

• Attempted to identify the ‘world powers’.

• Predicted a future dominated by large continental

imperialist states.

• In 1899 he coined the term geopolitisk which –

translated into German as Geopolitik and by 1924
into English as geopolitics.
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Geopolitik
• To describe that part of political geography that is
essentially concerned with

- the external relations

- strategy and politics of the state
- seeks to employ such knowledge to political
ends.

• Geopolitik provided the intellectual justification for Nazi

Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia and Poland, for
the Hitler–Stalin pact and, later, for Germany’s ill-fated
invasion of the Soviet Union. 24
Era of Ascendency (contd.)
Ideas of Halford Mackinder (1904)
• Founding father of modern Geography.

• ‘The geographical pivot of history’.

• Three political regions

- an ‘outer crescent’ across the Americas, Africa and the

oceans
- an ‘inner crescent’ across Europe and southern Asia
- the ‘pivot area’ located at the heart of the Eurasian
land mass 25
Era of Ascendency (contd.)
• Shift from sea power to land power.

• Recast his map of the world’s seats of power to suit

the new post-war order.

• Renamed the ‘pivot area’ the ‘heartland’.

• Centred on the Eurasian land mass labelled as the

‘world island’.
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Era of Ascendency (contd.)
Ideas of Nicholas Spykmen (1942)

• Rimland theory countered Mackinder’s Heartland theory.

• Eurasia’s Rimland; the coastal areas; is the key to controlling

World Island.

• Whoever would control the rimland would control the World

Island.

• Who would control the World Island would control the world.

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Era of Ascendency (contd.)
• Influential during the
cold war period.

• Soviet Union wanted

to control the
Rimland.

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Era of Ascendency (contd.)
Ideas of Karl Haushofer
• Utilized and developed Ratzel’s idea of
Lebensraum.
• New expansionist policy—interest in
geopolitics.
• Densely populated Germany needed to annex
additional territory from more sparsely
populated countries like Poland and
Czechoslovakia.
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Era of Ascendency (contd.)
• From Mackinder it took the idea that control of
Eastern Europe and the heartland would lead to
global dominance.

• Construction of a continental bloc comprising

Germany, Russia and Japan which would control
the heartland.

• Form a counterweight to the British Empire.

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Era of Marginalization
Ideas of Heartshorne (1950)

• Functional Approach

- The distribution of different ethnic populations in a state,

- The match between a state’s boundaries and

physical geographical features,

- The structure of a state’s local government areas, as well as

with mapping patterns of communication networks within
states and of trade routes between states.
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Era of Marginalization (Contd.)
• Political geography largely missed out on
theoretical developments taking place
elsewhere in geography.

• Political geography became marginalised

within geography and began to disappear as a
university subject.

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Era of Revival
• Rise of ‘quantitative electoral geography’ from the
late 60s onwards.

• World System Theory- Immanuel Wallerstein.

• Introducing Post Structuralist thoughts: ‘Discourse’

and ‘Governmentality’.
- incorporation of space itself as a tool in the
exercise of power
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Era of Revival (Contd.)
• Critical Geopolitics.

• Feminist Geography.

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Conclusion
• The challenge for political geography is how to
retain coherence in the face of demands.

• Revolution in communications.

• Reshaping the structures of political power at

all levels.

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Conclusion
• Political Geography is a diverse and ever-
changing field of geographic entity.

• Traditional Political Geography – state-

centeredness.

• State is now seen as only one of a number of

actors.
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Suggested Readings
• Jones et. al (2004) An Introduction to Political
Geography: Space, Place and Politics, 1st edition,
Routledge, New York.

• Blacksell, M. (2006) Political Geography, 1st

edition, Routledge, London.

• Storey, D. (2009) Political Geography, University

of Worcester, UK.
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