L2. Traditional Political Geography Flashcards
What are the two divisions of power?
Formal and informal
- contemporary political geography interested in power in all its forms, opposed to traditional which mostly focussed on formal power
What is sovereignty?
The sole right to regulate or administer a set of activities in an area
ex. States exert control over their area
What are some spheres of sovereignty?
- formal politics (ex. diplomacy, military, policy, justice system)
- Commerce and economics (taxation and trade)
- belief and religion
- family and personal relationships
What are the two types of forms of sovereignty that states exert?
Absolutist state: asserts control over all spheres
Liberal state: asserts control only formal politics and other spheres are mostly unregulated
Describe the emergence of political geography
- Came around in the late 19th century
- Was initially only interested in formal politics
- Scholars divided society into 3 spheres: state, family, civil society (everything else, regarded as non-political so left to other disciplines)
What were the two basic concerns of traditional political geography?
States: exertion of control
Votes: electoral behaviour, political preferences
What was the focus of classic geopolitics and international relations?
- states (unit of study)
- Basis of state power
- Relationships between states (war)
- territory and location of states
What is the Organic state theory
- Developed by Frederic Ratzel (Scholar in late 19th century Germany)
- Idea that states need to continuously expand their territory (naturally grow)
- metaphor that states are like organisms that die when they stop growing
- territory as the body of the state (head of body = government, etc.)
What is the Heartland theory
- Developed by Halford MacKinder (British scholar in early 20th century)
- idea that land and sea powers have been fighting for the last 2000 years (dominant land power: Germany, dominant sea power: Britain)
- advantage switches depending on advancements in technology
- Believed Ukraine was the key to global power due to location relative to Asia (Putin may be following this advice)
What is the Geostrategy theory?
- Developed by Alfred Mahan (American, Naval historian, Admiral)
- Idea that sea power is the basis of power for states (state power = sea power)
- 6 factors of sea power: geographic location (better if not landlocked, no long land boundary, control of trade routes), nature of coastline (rivers and bays are good), length of coastline (not to short or to long), population size (bigger is better), national character, government character (how does gov use the natural advantages of geography)
What is contemporary electoral geography concerned with?
- spatial patterns (where do votes come from and change over time)
- Geographic influence (looking at social patterns)
- geography of representation (representation and symbolic politics, vote-seat ratio)
What did Andre Siegfried study?
- French, pioneer in the field
- Looked for correlations between votes and physical features of land (ex. people by the sea are more likely to change their party each election because they are used to changing weather patterns)
What is the neighbourhood effect?
Idea that people vote similarly to the people around them, even if it goes against what their identity suggests they would vote
What does contemporary political geography do differently than traditional? (In terms of focus and approach)
- shift from natural and to social explanations
- more attention to informal power (ex. status of identity, role of civil society)
- less focus on borders more on border processes
- beyond national identities (gender, ethnicity, class, etc.)
