Political Geography and its Problems

Political geography has no separate standing in the Soviet Union as a research or teaching discipline. An advocate of political geography calls for acceptance of this subject as a full-fledged member of the geographical sciences by outlining some of the problems with which such a discipline might deal in the Soviet Union. It would be concerned with the historical evolution and current changes in the political map of the world and the factors that give rise to both quantitative changes (in territory and boundaries) and qualitative changes (in political systems). Wars, diplomatic actions, dynastic alliances and territorial purchases are listed as some of the factors that result in boundary changes of national states. Revolutions and national liberation movements account for changes in political systems. Heavy emphasis is given to the study of internal political developments that may ultimately result in changes on the political map of the world. Political events throughout the world are analyzed in the light of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and political and social processes in the capitalist and socialist (communist) parts of the world are sharply differentiated.     

One continent,two federalisms: rediscovering the original meanings of Australian federal ideas

Federalism is usually described in political science as a single body of ideas—in Australia's case arriving in the 1840s–50s and moving to constitutional reality in the 1890s. This article re‐examines the origins and diversity of federal ideas in Australia. It suggests that federal thought began influencing Australia's constitutional development significantly earlier than previously described. This first Australian federalism had a previously unappreciated level of support in British colonial policy and drew on Benjamin Franklin's American model of territorial change as a ‘commonwealth for increase’. The revised picture entrenches the notion of federalism's logic but also reveals a dynamic, decentralist style of federalism quite different from Australia's orthodox ‘classic’ or compact federal theory. In fact, Australian political thought contains two often‐conflicting ideas of federalism. The presence of these approaches helps explain longstanding dissent over the regional foundations of Australian constitutionalism.     

Contesting uneven development: The political geography of natural gas rents in Peru and Bolivia

Political and academic debates about the distribution of resource rents to producing areas have addressed the issue of whether or not the transfers unleash conflicts. While this kind of debate is valid, the present paper argues that such a discussion is missing the point regarding the processes behind said types of conflicts, as well as how such conflicts are framed at the sub-national political geography of the state. By more deeply exploring these dimensions, the argument of this paper is that the production of uneven development within sub-national areas is crucial for understanding the above-mentioned conflicts and how the central state internalises those conflicts, producing new political geographies of rent distribution. As such, different territorial discourses of autonomy emerge along with uneven development, but their capacity to reach institutional autonomy is grounded on the spatial politics of each state. Empirically, this paper analyses how natural gas rents are distributed to sub-national producing areas in Peru and Bolivia, and how the production of uneven development through natural gas rents at sub-national level re-activated previous territorial demands for autonomy, which were internalised by central states in different ways.     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

Deducing rationales and political tactics in the partitioning of Ireland, 1912–1925

Partition is an intrinsically abstract and simplistic blunt instrument applied on a complex mosaic of peculiarities that constitute reality. There are very few modern states that are ethnically or culturally homogenous. In this context, partition is a subjective territorial tactic that can treat or exacerbate symptoms of historical, political, and geographical difficulties. While exhibiting comparative scope, especially to the role of the British State and the dynamics of national majorities and minorities, the circumstances concerning the partitioning of Ireland deviate from patterns gleaned from other examples as the evolving bases of its partition between 1912 and 1925 mutated at various stages with regard to geography, political status, and function. However, Ireland served as an important historical precedent in illustrating the disparity between the original intent and eventual result of its partition. Indeed, one can extrapolate from the Irish example that partition is better understood as a catalytic tactical process that radically reconfigures the political and geographical dimensions of conflict rather than as a decisive political instrument solving it.     

SOCIALIST FEDERALISM AND SPATIAL EQUITY: REVIEW OF A DISCUSSION

The proceedings of a wide-ranging discussion at the Institute of Geography, Moscow on current political and territorial issues in the USSR are summarized by one of its participants. The key thrust of the discussion centered on the need to find ways of increasing the involvement of Soviet political and other geographers in the analysis of critical questions of Soviet federalism: the incongruence of political-administrative boundaries with ethnic and economic regions; the search for a viable division of authority among Moscow, the republics, and local soviets; mitigation of growing regional inequality engendered by perestroyka and regional khozraschet (translated by Jay K. Mitchell, PlanEcon, Inc., Washington, DC 20005).     

Promised Land: Settlement Schemes in Kenya, 1962 to 2016

Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to state-defined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962–2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these “geopolitics” of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels on-going contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of power-consolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below.     

政治地理学中的领域概念辨析

领域是政治地理学的重要概念，但是目前国内对领域的内涵缺乏深入的解读和整理。本文在梳理西方对领域概念的理论探讨的基础上，归纳了理解领域概念的三个主要视角，并基于西方相关理论讨论，提出了领域概念的四个基本属性，即多尺度性、多维性、关系性和生成性。继而，通过对西方领域理论的研究，提出未来中国政治地理学的领域研究应该加强的几个方向。本文对于深化政治地理学领域概念的理解，避免传统认识中的偏见和局限，以及更好地制定领域策略、展开领域研究将起到积极的推动作用。     

Cartographic conflicts within a union: Finding land for Nagaland in India

Colonial-era borders continue to be sites of intra- and inter-national territorial conflicts across the Indian Sub-continent. The State of Nagaland in North East India has been witness to one of the oldest armed struggles in the region to redraw colonial borders. The Nagaland government finds itself sandwiched between an irredentist insurgency and the union government. This paper examines the cartographic-statistical fallout of the Nagaland government's balancing act that is reflected in, among other things, the diversity of conflicting maps published by different tiers and wings of the government. The paper suggests that the cartographic/territorial conflicts between Nagaland and its neighbouring states are driven by the use of political-geographic arguments to advance political-economic interests along contested borders. These conflicts are not amenable to a technical resolution as they are rooted in the as yet inconclusive search for a stable basis for Naga identity and the ongoing dispute over Nagaland's place within the Union of India. Nagaland's borders are, in fact, sites of collision of different conceptions of nationhood (Indian and Naga) and understandings of constitutional federalism. The union government tolerates Nagaland's parchment transgressions and occasional physical “encroachments.” Its cartographic laxity is motivated by the need to avoid a strictly legalistic approach that would necessitate the use of force to implement a singular, exclusive solution to protracted territorial disputes involving several states.     

Halford Mackinder's “new” political geography and the geographical tradition

This article re-examines Halford Mackinder's conception of geography in general and his practise as a political geographer in particular by placing his work in the context of the history of geography. The nature and politicisation of early modern (c.1600–1850) geography are depicted, and used as a contextual standard against which to assess Mackinder's claims to have propounded a “new” geography and a “new” form of political geography. Mackinder's conception of geography is found to have been a substantial departure from the early modern one, in terms of its definition of geography, its textual format and its placing of geography in a broader educative structure. By contrast, Mackinder's political geography is shown to effect a far less radical break, for whilst Mackinder's rhetoric suggests that geography will drive his political analysis, it is in fact his pre-existent politics as a tariff-reforming conservative which drove his political geography. To the extent that geography acted as a container for politics, Mackinder was still in the tradition of the early modern period, although he did change the form of that argument.     

The Implications of Immigration Federalism for Non-citizens’ Rights and Immigration Opportunities: Canada and Australia Compared

This article explores the development of immigration federalism in Australia and Canada (expressed through the establishment of state/provincial/territorial immigrant selection programs) and its implications for immigrants’ rights and immigration opportunities. Given the very limited scholarship on the issue, and the lack of previous comparative studies on immigration federalism in Australia and Canada, our research is exploratory by nature. Our finding is that provincial/state/territorial programs offer some advantages to prospective applicants (such as increased immigration opportunities), but, at the same time, raise a number of concerns (such as an increased dependence on employers). As our study reveals, the costs and benefits of immigration opportunities under state/provincial/territorial programs differ for skilled and low-skilled workers, whereby the latter are given only limited access to permanent residence, and on more onerous conditions than skilled workers. Drawing on these findings, we identify areas in need of further research and policy response.     

Consuming geopolitics and feeling maritime territoriality: The case of China's patriotic tourism in the South China Sea

This paper develops the concept of territorial socialisation and explores the process and effect of tourism in China's maritime territorialisation of the South China Sea. The research demonstrates the mutual constitution of tourism and territorialisation and suggests that tourism is playing an increasingly important role in everyday contexts to socialise individuals into national-territorial thinking. However, tourism alone does not decidedly stoke strong territorial nationalism, instead it produces uneven bordering or territorialisation effects at the personal level. Tourism practices, tourist agency, and the distinct wet ontology of the sea complicate the state maritime territorialisation process. The research also shows that the Chinese tourists are pragmatic, calculative geopolitical actors. Their geopolitical experiences through tourism are connected to, and embedded in, the broad geopolitical realities of China's rising and unjust international orders, while informed by official territorial rhetoric and traditional political culture.     

Ecosystemic politics: Analyzing the consequences of speaking for adjacent nature on the global stage

This article introduces a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the broader or unintended effects of cooperation anchored in border-crossing ecosystems. The importance of addressing this lacuna in our scholarship on such sub-global cooperation is underscored by research in political geography that has demonstrated how the creation of scale is an important expression of power relations and how interaction with the materiality of different kinds of spaces necessitates distinct political technologies (and thus may have distinct effects). The article introduces three key analytical angles central to policy field studies in international sociology and demonstrates their utility through a case of the Arctic/Arctic Council. These analytical angles – networks (what are the relationships shaping the field?), hierarchies (who leads and how does leadership work?), and norms for political behavior – capture key consequences and dynamics of ecosystemic politics in a concise fashion that lends itself to cross-case comparison. The Arctic case focuses on the changing network positions and roles of non-Arctic actors over time, as an initial exploration of the broader ordering effects of such forms of cooperation. The findings suggest that most non-Arctic actors have experienced a decline in their centrality in Arctic cooperation, even as the Arctic has received intensified global interest and the number of participants in Arctic Council work has increased. Further comparative work along these lines would leave us better equipped to assess whether states speaking for their own immediate environs is better – and if so, in which ways – than seeking common solutions to global challenges.     

Africa after the Cold War: New Patterns of Government and Politics

The state-system of Africa is still essentially the one created by the colonial powers and passed on intact at independence. But the political economy of these states — the substance of political life within fixed territorial boundaries — is changing very profoundly as a result of the breakdown of the style of government of recent decades and the decline of economies based on the export of primary commodities. The political economy which is emerging, still within the same territorial boundaries, is best understood by reference to Africa's history over a long period.     

How Capitalism Was Built. The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe,Russia, and Central Asia. Anders Åslund

An American political geographer and noted specialist in the electoral geography of the post-Soviet states explores the extent to which underlying social, political, and economic conditions in North African countries experiencing regime change prompted by mass political unrest (Egypt, Tunisia) resemble those prevailing in the five Central Asian states. The author compares the countries' rankings on a number of relevant indicators (e.g., Human Development Index, Corruption Perceptions Index, Freedom House indices of political rights and civil liberties) before undertaking a more qualitative assessment of human rights, institutional control, and external support for current Central Asian regimes. Although Uzbekistan, the most populous state with the most repressive regime in the region, is a focus of attention, the same abuses and challenges are evident, albeit in varying degrees, in other vulnerable post-Soviet countries of Central Asia.     

Young people,place and devolved politics: perceived scale(s) of political concerns among under 18s living in Wales

Despite clear linkages between conceptualisations and perceptions of politics, society, culture and territorial rescaling, research into young people’s political engagement, participation and representation is underrepresented in the field of social and cultural geography. Here the gap is addressed using perceptions of devolved politics, as a form of territorial rescaling, among young people living in Wales. Specifically, it shows the geographical scales at which young people locate their political concerns and where responsibility for these concerns is perceived to lie, with a focus on the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Government. This is a key contribution to our understanding of the role devolution plays in youth political engagement in the light of the following: the relative infancy of the devolved U.K. institutions; their asymmetrical development and increasing divergences; the growing variation in turnout among young people for different types of election and referenda; and the lack of research examining the youth engagement dimension of Welsh devolution as a political, social and cultural process of territorial rescaling in the U.K. The paper concludes with a critique of the notion that devolution poses a ‘politics of hope’ for youth political engagement in Wales, a very different picture to Scotland.     

Italian regionalism or ‘Padanian’ nationalism — the political project of the Lega Nord in Italian politics

The resurgence of regionalist political parties has had a considerable, though variable, impact on contemporary European politics in recent decades and there are numerous examples of such parties across Europe. In Italy, there are several regionalist parties, however, it is the emergence in the last 15 years or so, of the Northern League (Lega Nord) (LN) political party, in the North of Italy, which has given a new impetus to debates about the significance of regionalism in Italy as well as across Europe. This paper discusses the different approaches to defining regionalism as well as the common features and driving forces of contemporary political regionalist projects. It then focuses upon the political discourses of the LN in order to discuss the ways in which the party resembles other regionalist projects, while having certain key, distinct and rather unique differences. This is because the LN's political project is not based in an area that has historic claims to nationhood. Instead, the LN has attempted to invent an ethnicity for the North of Italy (or ‘Padania’) in order to justify its political claims for the protection of the economic interests of the region. ‘Padania’ (which is the Latin term which refers to the basin of the River Po), has never ‘existed’ as an administrative or political unit but the LN has attempted to construct (and invent) a geography and a history in order to justify its territorial and political claims.     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

Brussels: division in unity or unity in division?

Even though Brussels is not a city divided into clearly demarcated ethnolinguistic zones, internal territorial issues help to define the city’s cultural and political geography. On the one hand, the tendency to associate different parts of the city with one group or the other helps to sustain the idea of the city as a culturally divided place. On the other hand, the formal status of the city as a single political-territorial unit within the larger Belgian polity promotes a sense of unity in the face of division. An examination of the functional and perceptual attributes of territory in Brussels shows the socio-political significance of territorial arrangements and understanding even when groups are not separated into discrete spatial units.     

Italy's political system since 1989

This essay follows the development of the Italian political system over the last twenty-five years, starting from the collapse of the principal political parties that had previously dominated the history of the Republic. In institutional terms, it seems legitimate to describe this as a transition, since the outcomes of initiatives to reform the electoral system, to abolish the previous system of ‘perfect bicameralism’, and reshape relations between the State and the regions are still unknown. But I argue that many fundamental changes in the relationship between the country and its political system were already evident in the 1980s.