Trends and Developments in Political Geography – UGC NET Geography – Notes

Introduction

• The term “political geography” has been used at least since the eighteenth century, when it was understood as a set of information on the political organization of countries, new territories, and markets involved in the world or the national economy.
• The essential feature of political geography is to determine whether the life of political societies, in part at least, is affected by the natural frame in which they develop. Political geography as a systematic branch of human geography has a long, but not always distinguished history.

Definition

• According to Vladimir Kolossov, Political geography is an academic discipline studying the interaction between political activity of people and integral geographical space, which includes physical, economic, social, cultural, and political spaces.
• From primordial time, humans have organized their political activities in spatial context and have laid claim to territories within which they organize themselves and manage their affairs. Political organizations of societies are rooted in culture and cultural difference as are forms of economy and religious beliefs. This produces some set of structures that are an expression of the human organization of space. The structures produced are expressions of some relations between political actions and geographic character of places.
• As stated above, Political geography emphasizes humans’ territorial nature. We claim and hold territory-as individuals and as societies for reasons of security, need for natural resources, and fundamentally, as space in which to reside. We administer those territories according to rules that are written and enforced in different ways depending on what types of governments we have.
• Geographers say that people organize space. This means we establish boundaries between different types of territories, define the rules of each territory (domestic politics and government), and define how we interact with people who aren’t members of our territories (geopolitics, international relations).
• Political geography takes a critical approach to how we organize space and how this relates to the state and to the individual. It considers different types of territories that are fashioned by people of all ethnicities, races, genders, and cultures, and how these territories are governed and defended. Political geographers are keenly interested in understanding these structures, especially how they vary from one place to another and the relationships that exist among them.

Nature of Political Geography

• Different leading authorities in the field of political geography have defined the nature and the scope of this subject in different terms. Political geography personified has a nature, just as any human being has a peculiar nature or the psychological tendency. As says H.J.Mackinder, geography is a science, the arts and the philosophy by nature. So, it follows that political geography is a science, arts, and philosophy, too.
• It is a science because it follows the scientific methods of the observation, the collection of the data, the hypothesis, the theory, and the model building ever open to the scientific scrutiny in terms of the relationship among variables under the study and the validity of such a relationship.
• It is an art, since it involves quite a subjective approach, too in terms of the skillful organization of the field studies, the collection of the data, the map drawing, and the interpretation of the results.
• It’s a philosophy, too, in terms of ever trying to philosophize the questions of the human beings and the environment relationship in the political terms. It tries to frame the postulations as to what, why, how and where a political activity takes place in a particular corner of the globe or the spatial point in the universe.
• Finally, it of course inter alia is interdisciplinary, flexible, dynamic, friendly, and far-reaching, too. Political geography is a diverse and ever-changing field of geographic enquiry. Political geography is a science, arts and philosophy, too.
• It is a science because it follows the scientific methods of the observation, the collection of the data, the hypothesis, the theory, and the model building ever open to the scientific scrutiny in terms of the relationship among variables under the study and the validity of such a relationship.
  • Influential of political power on spatial region
  • Arguing states are organized into formal and informal regional groupings.