An Introduction to Political Geography (PDF)

The text explores the full breadth of contemporary political geography, covering not only traditional concerns such as the state, geopolitics, electoral geography and nationalism; but also increasing important areas at the cutting-edge of political geography research including globalization, the geographies of regulation and governance, geographies of policy formulation and delivery, and themes at the intersection of political and cultural geography, including the politics of place consumption, landscapes of power, citizenship, identity politics and geographies of mobilization and resistance.

This second edition builds on the strengths of the first. The main changes and enhancements are:

• four new chapters on: political geographies of globalization, geographies of empire, political geography and the environment and geopolitics and critical geopolitics
• significant updating and revision of the existing chapters to discuss key developments, drawing on recent academic contributions and political events
• new case studies, drawing on an increasing number of international and global examples
• additional boxes for key concepts and an enlarged glossary.

As with the first edition, extensive use is made of case study examples, illustrations, explanatory boxes, guides to further reading and a glossary of key terms to present the material in an easily accessible manner. Through employment of these techniques this book introduces students to contributions from a range of social and political theories in the context of empirical case study examples. By providing a basic introduction to such concepts and pointing to pathways into more specialist material, this book serves, both as a core text for first and second year courses in political geography, and as a resource alongside supplementary textbooks for more specialist third year courses.