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Chapter Seven

Political Geography: Definition, History, and Basic Concepts

Cletus Famous Nwankwo
Introduction

From the primordial time, humans have organised their political activities in spatial context
and have laid claim to territories within which they organise themselves and manage their
affairs. Political organisations 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 organisation of space. The structures produced are expressions of
some relations between political actions and geographic character of places. 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.

Political Geography Defined

Political geography has been defined in several ways. Some definition traces the
essence of the field while others draw on the diversity of the discipline but more importantly,
political geography considers the geography as an illumination of the politics and vice versa.
Essentialist definitions contend that political geography should focus on its primary concepts,
which the advocates of this method commonly recognise as the state and territory (Cox,
2002). Also, political geography is conceived as the study of political, territorial entities,
boundaries, and organisational subdivisions (Alexander 1963; Goblet 1955). Definitions of
political geography from the essentialists’ perspective visualise politics in very customary
conditions, as being about the state, elections and international relations (Jones et al., 2004).
Bradshaw et al. (2007, p 29) defined political geography as “the study of how
governments and political movements (such as nongovernmental organisations, labour unions
and political parties) influence the human and physical geography of the world and its
regions. Some cultural features such as religion, and physical features such as the distribution
of freshwater resources, influence government and political movements. Self-governing
countries are the basic political units: within its borders, a country’s government is assumed
to have political control, or sovereignty, over the country’s inhabitants and resources”. In the
same vein, but more elaborately Jones et al. (2004) defined political geography as that aspect
of geography that connects myriads of works in the social sciences with the different
crossroads of politics and geography in a triangular configurations fashion.