Political Geography Exam Study Guide (Weeks 1-7)

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, theoretical frameworks, historical eras, and political concepts from Weeks 1 through 7 of Political Geography.

Political Geography

The study of how power is distributed (and contested) across space and through spatial relations.

Production of Space

The concept that space is not a neutral backdrop, but is defined by human relations and power structures, continuously created, reinforced, and contested.

Theory

A set of interrelated ideas that explain why things are the way they are and predict how they might change.

Social Theory

A body of interrelated ideas that tries to explain how societies are organized, why they take shape, and how people make sense of their place within them.

Paradigm

A broad framework or way of thinking that shapes how political events, power, and space are understood and explained.

Structure vs. Agency

The tension between external factors that shape people (structure) and people's individual capacity to act and choose (agency).

Discourse

A system of language and categories that shapes what can be thought, said, or treated as true.

Power (Social Theory)

Not just the action of physical force or law, but the capacity to shape norms, knowledge, and what feels 'natural.'

Ontology

The branch of philosophy concerned with what is real and true; the nature of truth and existence.

Critical Theory (Approach)

An approach that examines power, inequality, and social structures to understand how they create injustice and how society can change.

Positionality

An individual's or group's specific position within existing power structures.

Situated Knowledge

The understanding that to comprehend where knowledge comes from, one must understand where the person producing it is situated.

Positivism

The idea, argued by Auguste Comte, that knowledge comes from scientific proof, where society is governed by discoverable laws and empirical facts.

Mode of Production

All the ways in which society, the economy, and the state reproduce themselves daily; argued to be driven by material conditions and class conflict.

Base and Superstructure

The Marxist concept of how a society organizes labor and production (base) and how that economic foundation shapes its politics, laws, and ideas (superstructure).

Enlightenment Era

A period in social theory (1600s–1700s) associated with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that replaced unquestioned tradition with human reason as the basis for knowledge, morality, and government.

Classical Theory Era

A period in political geography (1890–1945) associated with Ratzel, Mackinder, Kjellen, Mahan, Spykman, and Haushofer, asserting that geographical and territorial expansion are natural and inevitable for state power.

Critical Theory Era

A theoretical period (1930s–1960s) associated with Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse that focused on ideology, culture, and power under capitalism.

Poststructuralism

A theoretical era from the 1960s to the present (associated with Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and Deleuze) that challenges fixed meanings and established structures, focusing on how language, power, and culture shape reality.

Feminist and Postcolonial Theory

A theoretical movement from the 1980s to today (associated with figures like Audre Lorde) that questions whose knowledge counts, from where it originates, who is speaking, and who is left out.

Thomas Hobbes

Enlightenment thinker who argued that humans require strong government because life without it is a violent war of every man against every man, requiring people to surrender freedoms in a social contract for security.

John Locke

Enlightenment thinker who argued that people possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, that government exists only by consent of the governed, and that people have the right to rebel if those rights are violated.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Enlightenment thinker who argued that society itself can corrupt and that the social contract must protect people by binding them to collective rules and laws.

Auguste Comte

French philosopher who coined the term 'sociology' and advocated for positivism, asserting that society is governed by discoverable laws similar to physics or biology.

Karl Marx

Theorist who argued that history advances through socioeconomic class struggle (historical materialism) and critiqued capitalism as an alienating and exploitative system extracting surplus from wage labor.

Émile Durkheim

Sociologist who argued that societies are held together by shared norms and collective belief, taking 'social facts' as the primary object of empirical study.

Max Weber

Sociologist who argued that meaning matters and that social action must be interpreted from the subjective point of view of the actor rather than solely through external causes.

Structuralism

A method of analysis that attempted to classify humanity and the world through numerical, logical, and all-encompassing systems.

Space

A geographic realm that is not merely physical, but actively organized, controlled, and transformed by governments, societies, and borders.

Place

Specific geographical sites that have been endowed with cultural meaning by the people who inhabit them.

Spatial Relations

Relationships between different spaces that are produced and maintained through political and social practices.

Environmental Determinism

The theory that climate and physical geography are the primary causal forces shaping human behavior, culture, and societal development.

Scale

A descriptive device and conceptual category capturing the relationship between local/micro expressions of processes and larger national or global processes.

Nesting Dolls Model

A model of geographic scale or hierarchical nesting defining how political territories and administrative units are contained inside one another.

Scalar Primacy of the Nation-State

The structural arrangement where the national scale operates as the dominant, privileged tier of political power, governance, and identity.

Co-constitutive

A term describing two or more forces, elements, or entities that work together to shape, define, and bring each other into existence.

Anti-Scale

The theoretical position proposed by Marston, Jones, and Woodward rejecting scale as an ontologically given category, arguing instead that it is epistemological and embedded in social relations and experience.

Taylor's Three Scales

Peter Taylor's framework comprising the scale of reality (global economy), the scale of ideology (the state), and the scale of experience (the city or local).

Power as Substance

The conceptualization of power as a tangible resource that can be possessed, gained, or lost in a zero-sum, winner-take-all political system.

Inscribed Power

Power viewed in relation to other entities as a resource to make things happen, such as an executive utilizing military force or knowledge production to persuade.

Power as Coercion

The exercise of power through violence, military intervention, or compulsory force to make people comply.

Power as Capacity

The understanding of power as 'power to' produce intended effects, control processes, and expand capability.

Spatial Fix

David Harvey's concept explaining how capitalism resolves its crises of overaccumulation through geographical and spatial expansion.

Dialectical Materialism

The view that history is driven by conflict when two opposing sides, rooted in material concerns, clash and produce change.

Hegemony

Leadership, dominance, or rule exerted by one country or social group over others.

Political Society vs. Civil Society

The Gramscian division where political society rules through direct force (military, police, legal government) and civil society rules through consent (culture, media, education, religion, family).

Power in Concert

The collaborative formation of joint commitments among states or groups to address a shared problem and get things done.

Ontological Power and Ontological Violence

Ontological power is the capacity to shape how people understand reality; ontological violence is the negation of someone's humanity, existence, worldviews, or culture.

Epistemological Power and Epistemological Violence

Epistemological power is the ability to determine what people know and believe; epistemological violence is the harm done through knowledge erasure, suppression, or whitewashing of history.

Coloniality of Power

The enduring dominance of European systems of knowledge and authority over colonized territories and peoples.

Sovereign Power (Foucault)

A form of power operating through centralized top-down command, prohibitions, and the absolute right over life and death enforced through physical coercion, borders, and visible punishment.

Disciplinary Power (Foucault)

A form of power that shapes, trains, and standardizes individual bodies using surveillance, schedules, and spatial organization to instill self-monitoring habits.

Biopower (Foucault)

A form of power focused on managing and optimizing the biological life, health, and survival of an entire population as a whole.

State (Weber's Definition)

An institution claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force and violence within a specific given territory.

Territory

Spaces under the legal jurisdiction of a state, representing the spatial extent of state authority.

Territorialization

The process of linking a phenomenon or entity to a bounded space, creating inside versus outside or 'us' versus 'them' distinctions.

De-territorialization

The loosening, dissolving, or redefinition of spatial boundaries and territorial linkages where boundary significance fades.

Re-territorialization

The process whereby a new spatial configuration emerges to replace an old territorial arrangement.

Sovereignty

A monopoly on governance and political authority that allows a sovereign power to determine affairs within a designated territory.

Governmentality

The merging of government and rationality, examining how the state shapes citizens' conduct to make society governable and align with state policies.

State Effects

The ontological normalization of the state that causes its presence and authority to feel natural or necessary.

State (Week 6 Definition)

A formal political unit possessing a defined territory, a centralized government, and a system of laws.

Nation

A collective community of belonging based on language, religion, ethnicity, place, or shared history.

Nation-State

A political structure that combines a shared human national community with state sovereignty and bounded territory.

Civic Nationalism vs. Ethnic Nationalism

Civic nationalism defines belonging by state citizenship and shared political values; ethnic nationalism defines belonging through shared ancestry, culture, or descent.

Demos vs. Ethnos

Demos refers to the nation as a community of citizens defined by the state; Ethnos refers to the nation as a people sharing ancestry, language, and culture.

Primordialism

The perspective that nations are natural, ancient entities rooted in cultural differences, and that contemporary conflicts are continuations of ancient ones.

Jus Soli

Birthright citizenship granted based on the territory or place of birth, regardless of parents' nationality or legal status.

Jus Sanguinis

Citizenship determined by bloodline or descent through parents' or ancestors' community membership rather than geography.

Aporia

A philosophical problem or impasse that cannot be easily resolved, exemplified by Hannah Arendt's concept of 'the right to have rights.'

Insurgent Citizenship

Citizenship and political belonging won by marginalized groups through struggles waged outside of or against the formal state apparatus.

Anderson's Features of the Nation

Benedict Anderson's characterization of the nation as an imagined political community that is limited (finite borders), sovereign, and a community.

Patrice Lumumba

The first democratically elected leader of the independent Congo (1960) who led a decolonial movement advocating national sovereignty and economic independence before being ousted.

Mobutu Sese Seko

Dictator who ruled the Congo/Zaire from 1965 to 1997 after replacing Lumumba, serving Western colonial interests and personally enriching himself like King Leopold II.

Cobalt (in the DRC)

A critical natural resource extracted in the DRC essential for rechargeable batteries, predominantly owned by Chinese corporations while local miners bear severe health and safety risks.