Politics Flashcards
A subdivision of human geography focused on the nature and implications of the evolving spatial organization of political governance and formal political practice on the Earth’s surface. It is concerned with why political spaces emerge in the places that they do and with how the character of those spaces affects social, political, economic, and environmental understandings and practices.
Political Geography
A politically organized territory that is administered by a sovereign government and is recognized by a significant portion of the international community. A state has a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and is recognized by other states.
State
In political Geography, a country’s or more local community’s sense of property and attachment toward its territory, as expressed by its determination to keep it inviolable and strongly defended.
Territoriality
A principle of international relations that holds that final authority over social, economic, and political matters should rest with the legitimate rulers of independent states.
Sovereignty
The right of a state to defend sovereign territory against incursion from other states.
Territorial Integrity
In a general sense, associated with the promotion of commercialism and trade. More specifically, a protectionist policy of European states during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries that promoted a state’s economic position in the contest with other countries. The aquisition of gold and silver and the maintenance of a favorable trade balance (more exports than imported) were central to the policy
Mercantilism
Peace negotiated in 1648 to end the Thirty Years’ War, Europe’s most destructive internal struggle over religion. The treaties contained new language recognizing statehood and nationhood, clearly defined borders, and guarantees of security.
Peace of Westphalia
Legally, a term encompasses all the citizens of a state. Most definitions now tend to refer to a tightly knit group of people possessing a bond of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. Such homogeneity actually prevails within very few states.
Nation
Theoretically, a recognized member of a modern state system possessing formal sovereignty and occupied by a people who see themselves as a single, United Nation.
Nation-state
Government based on the principle that the people are the ultimate sobering and have the final say over what happens within the state.
Democracy
State with more than one nation within it borders
Multinational state
Nation that stretches across borders and across states
Multistate Nation
Nation that does not have a state
Stateless Nation
Rule by an autonomous power over a subordinate and alien people and place.
Colonialism
representation of a real world phenomenon at a certain level of reduction or generalization.
Scale
Theory organized by Immanuel Wallerstein and illuminated by his three-tier structure, promising that social change in the developing world is inextricably linked to the economic activities of the developed world.
World-System theory
Economic model wherein people, corporations, and states produce goods and exchange them on the world market, with the goal of achieving profit.
Capitalism
The process through which something is given monetary value.
Commodification
Processes that incorporate higher levels of education, higher salaries, and more technology; generate more wealth than periphery processes in the world economy.
Core
Processes that incorporate lower levels of education, lower salaries, and less technology; and generate less wealth than coe processes in the world-economy.
Periphery
Places where core and periphery processes are both occurring; places that are exploited by the core but in exploit the periphery.
Semiperiphery
In the context of political power, the capacity of a state to influence other states or achieve its goals through diplomatic, economic, and militaristic means.
Ability
Forces that tend to divide a country-such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic, or ideological differences.
Centrifugal
A nation-state that has a centralized government and administration that exercises power equality over all parts of the state
Unitary
A political-territorial system wherein a central government represents the various entities within a nation-state where they have common interests-defense, foreign affairs, and the like yet allows their own laws, policies, and customs in certain spheres.
Federal
The process whereby regions within a state demand and gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the central government
Devolution
System wherein each representation is elected from a territorially defined district.
Territorial representation
Process by which representative districts are switched according to population shifts, so that each district encompasses approximately the same number of people.
reapportionment
In the context of determining representative districts, the process by which the majority and minority populations are spread evenly across each of the districts to be created therein ensuring control by the majority of each of the districts; as opposed to the result of majority-minority districts.
Splitting
In the context of determining representative districts, the process by which a majority of the population is from the minority.
Majority-Minority Districts
Redistricting for advantage, or the practice of dividing areas into electoral districts to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in as few districts as possible.
Gerrymandering
Vertical plane between states that cuts through the rocks below, and the airspace above the surface.
Boundary
Political boundary defined and delimited (and occasionally demarcated) as a straight line or a arc
Geometric boundary
Political boundary defined and delimited (and occasionally demarcated) by a prominent physical feature in the natural landscape- such as a river or the crest ridges of a mountain range
Physical-Political boundary
A geopolitical hypothesis, proposed by British geographer Halfode Mackinder during the first two decades of the twentieth century, that any political power based in the heart of Eurasia could gain sufficient strength to eventually dominate the world.
Heartland theory
Process by which geopoliticians deconstruct and focus on explaining the underlying spatial assumptions and territorial perspectives of politicians.
Critical Geopolitics
World order in which one state is in a position of dominance with allies following rather than joining the political decision making process
Unilateralism
A venture involving three or more nation-states involving formal political, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promotes shared objectives.
Supranational Organization
The movement of economic, social and cultural processes out of the hands of states
Deterritorialization
With respect to popular culture, when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own.
Reterritorialization
Forces that tend to unify a country-such as widespread commitment to a national culture, shared ideological objectives, and a common faith.
Centripetal
