APHG Unit 4 Terms

Political geography: The study of the ways in which the world is organized as a reflection of the power that different groups hold over territory.

State: A politically organized independent territory with a government, defined borders, and a permanent population – in short, a country.

Sovereignty: The right of a government to control and defend its territory and determine what happens within its borders.

Nations: Cultural entities, meaning that they are made up of individuals who have forged a common identity through a shared language, religion, ethnicity, or heritage – often all four of these three.

Nation-state: The territory occupied by a group who think of themselves as a nation is the same as the politically recognized boundaries of the state they call their own

Multistate nation: People who share a cultural or ethnic background but live in more than one country.

Irredentism: Attempting to acquire territories in neighboring states inhabited by people of the same nation.

Multinational state: A country with various ethnicities and cultures living inside its borders.

Autonomous/Semiautonomous: Hold some authority to govern their own territories independently from the national government.

Stateless nation: A people united by culture, language, history, and tradition but not possessing 

a state.

Territoriality: A concept that has multiple dimensions. The “attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.”

Colonialism: The practice of claiming and dominating overseas territories.

Neocolonialism: The use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies.

Choke point: A narrow, strategic passageway to another place through which it is difficult to pass.

Shatterbelts: States form, join, and break up because of ongoing, sometimes violent, conflicts among parties and because they are caught between the interests of more powerful outside states.

Self-determination: The right of all people to choose their own political status.

Imperialism: The push to create an empire by exercising force or influence to control other nations or peoples.

Devolution: Occurs when the central power in a state is broken up among regional authorities within its borders.

Defining: Countries explicitly state in legally binding documentation such as a treaty where their borders are located, using reference points such as natural features or lines of latitude and longitude.

Delimit: The process of mapmakers placing the boundary on the map.

Demarcated: The process of physically representing a boundary on the landscape.

Antecedent boundaries: Established before many people settle into an area.

Subsequent boundaries: Drawn in areas that have been settled by people and where cultural landscapes already exist or are in the process of being established.

Consequent boundaries: A type of subsequent boundary; that takes into account the differences that exist within a cultural landscape, separating groups that have distinct languages, religions, ethnicities, or other traits.

Superimposed boundaries: Drawn over existing accepted borders, by an outside or conquering force.

Geometric boundaries: Mathematical and typically follow lines of latitude and longitude, or are straight-line arcs between two points, instead of following physical and cultural features.

Relic boundaries: Former boundaries that once existed but no longer have an official function.

UNCLOS: Established the structure of maritime boundaries, stating that a country’s territorial seas extend 12 nautical miles off its coast, that being the exclusive economic zone(EEZ). 

Exclusive economic zone(EEZ): Extends 200 nautical miles from its coast. 

Federal state: Power is held by regional units, such as the United States or the Provinces of Canada.

Unitary state: A form of government that follows a top-down approach in which policies are conveyed by the central government and funneled down to regional units to be carried out.

Reapportionment: This occurs when a state loses people and another gains or a state doesn’t grow as fast as another. The process in which the seats in the House of Representatives are reallocated to different states.

Electoral college:  A set of people – called electors – who are chosen to elect the president.

Redistricting: Occurs after each census; a state’s internal political boundaries that determine voting districts for the US House of Representatives and the state’s legislature are redrawn to reflect the census data accurately.

Gerrymandering: When the party that holds the most seats in the state legislature draws the district to benefit their own party. It was named after Governor Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who did this to help his party in 1812.

Majority-minority districts: Gerrymandered districts in which minorities made up the majority of voters, were designed to ensure.

Ethnic separatism: Occurs when people of a particular ethnicity in a multinational state identify more strongly as members of their ethnic group than as citizens of the state.

Ethnic cleansing: The state government may attack the ethnic group, of stateless nations, and try to eliminate it through expulsion, imprisonment, or killing.

Supranational organization: An alliance of three or more states that work together in pursuit of common goals or to address an issue or challenge that these countries share.

Economies of scale: Where more goods and services can be produced for less money on average.

Ethnonationalism/Ethnic nationalism: When the people of a country identify as having one common ethnicity, religion, and language, this makes assimilating into the culture difficult due to the barriers set by the people.