Power & Politics

One common misconception people have about geography is that it’s all about states and capitals. Geographers certainly do care about place, but memorizing a list of states and capitals is not at all what geographers do, nor how geography is taught, particularly in a world where this information is much more readily accessible than times past due to technology.

Political geography is a subfield of human geography that examines how politics influences place and how place and its distinctiveness shapes the kind of politics that operate there. Geographers always have an eye open towards noticing and evaluating the spatial distribution of phenomenon and possible resulting unevenness. In the case of political geography, this translates to examining how political structures are distributed across the world, understanding the context of why political structures operate where they do, and the impact this has on peoples’ everyday lives and the global world order, or how power is distributed internationally.

Politics is first and foremost about power.

Check out the video below to learn about two key types of power: hard power, which operates by force and coercion and soft power, which operates by fostering consent and attraction.

Politics can be understood in three senses:

• High Politics: essential to state survival (examples: elections, war and peace, diplomacy)
• Low Politics: non-essential to state survival; mundane; about welfare of the state (examples: department of education, environmental protection agency)
• politics with a lower case p: challenging existing structures of power (examples: Black Lives Matter movement, gun right’s advocacy groups)

Political geography examines how all three aspects of politics intersect in place and impact peoples’ livelihoods.

States, Nations, & Borders

Challenges to State Sovereignty

Sovereignty in Maritime Spaces

The world is about 70% water and you may have wondered at some point: who owns the oceans? It’s a fair question, but not an entirely easy one to answer.

UNCLOS, which stands for the United Nations (an international organization) Convention for the Law of the Sea, is the current governing agreement by which the majority of countries in theory abide. Below is a chart explaining how sovereignty extends from a territory’s land borders into the sea. Of special note are the powers afforded to countries within territorial sea, which include air, surface, and subsurface rights, and exclusive economic zones (EEZ), which include surface and subsurface rights.

The videos below profile two hotspot maritime battlegrounds: the Arctic, where waterways are opening up because of the retreat of sea ice due to climate change, and the South China Sea, where countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia are vying for rights and human-made islands are being constructed to help assert sovereignty. Note how UNCLOS does and does not guide the actions of countries in these areas.

Closer to Home: Electoral Geography

A substantial branch of political geography is devoted to electoral geography, which examines how geography influences political representation and even prescribe best practices to ensure fairness.

If you’ve ever heard of gerrymandering, or wonder why the census becomes a hot-button political issue every ten years, you already know a thing or two about electoral geography.

Check out the video below for a crash course on how geometry and geography intersect with politics, and can affect the weight of your vote in state and national elections.