PoliticalGeography Vocabulary
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49 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 antecedant boundary | A political boundary that existed before the cultural landscape emerged and stayed in place while people moved in to occupy the surrounding area |
| balance of power | Condition of roughly equal strength between opposing coutnries or alliances of countries |
| boundary | Invisible line that marks the extent of a stat'es territory |
| centrifugal force | A term employed to designate a force that tends to divide a country, such as internal religions, liguistic, ehtnic, or ideological differences |
| centripetal force | An attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state. |
| city-state | A sovereign state comprising a city and its immediate hinterland |
| colonialism | Attempt by one coutnry to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles to another territory |
| colony | A territory that is legally tied to a soverieign state rather than completely independent |
| compact state | A state in which the distance from the center to any boundary does not vary significantly |
| cultural-political boundary | Political boundary that coincides with cultural breaks in the landscape, such a slanguage, religion, and ethnicity |
| electoral geography | A subcategory of human geography which seeks to understand how the spatial configuration of electoral districts and voting patterns that emerge in particular elections reflect and influence social and political affairs |
| elongated state | A state with a long, narrow shape |
| enclave | A piece of territy that is surrounded by by another political unit of which it is not a part |
| exclave | A bounded (non-island) piece of territory that is part of a particular state but lies separated form it by the territory of another state |
| federal state | An internal organization of a state tha allocates most powers to units of local government |
| forward capital | A capital city that has replaced a previous capital city in order to achieve specific national objectives |
| fragmented state | A state than includes several discontinuous pieces of territory |
| frontier | A zone separating two states in which neither state exercises political control |
| geometric boundary | Political boundary defined and delimited (and occasionally demarcated) as straight lines or arcs |
| gerrymandering | Process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the party in power |
| heartland theory | A geopolitical hypothesis that any political power based in the heart of Eurasia could gain sufficient strength to eventually dominate the world. Additionally, a ruler of Eastern Europe would command the "heartland" to the east. |
| human territoriality | A term associated with the work of robert Sack that describes the efforts o human societies to influence events and achieve social goals by exerting, and attempting to enforce, control over specific geographical areas |
| imperialism | Control of territory already occupied and organized by an indigenous society |
| landlocked state | A state that does not have a direct outlet to the sea |
| microstate | A state that encompasses a very small area |
| multicore state | A state that possesses more than one core or dominant region, be it economic, political, or cultural |
| nation | Legally, a term encompassing all the citizens of a state. Most definitions now tend to refer to a tightly knit group of people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. |
| nationalism | Loyalty and devotion to a particular nationality. |
| nation-state | A state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity that has been transformed into a nationality. |
| natural-political boundary | Also physical-political boundary |
| organic theory | Theory that a state would function and behave as an organism, requiring nourishment from the acquisition of less powerful competitors territories and their cultural contents. |
| perforated state | A state that completely surrounds another one |
| physical-political boundary | A political boundary that condicides the prominent physical featrues in the natural landscape, such as rivers and the ridges of mountain tops |
| political culture | What people believe and feel about government |
| political geography | A subdivision of human geography focused on the nature and implications of the evolving spatial organization of political governance and formal political practice on the Earth's surface |
| primate city | A country's largest city most expressive of the national culture and which is usually the capital city as well |
| prorupted state | An otherwise compact state with a large projecting extension |
| relict boundary | A boundary that has ceased to function but the imprint of which can still be detected on the cultural landscape |
| Renaissance | A cultural movement in Europe spanning from the 14th to the the 17th centuries where there was renewed interest in Greek and Roman achievements, in politics as well as in the sciences and arts |
| rimland theory | Theory that the Eurasian rim (not its heart) held the key to its power |
| sovereignty | Ability of a state to govern its territory free fro control of its internal affairs by other states |
| state | An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government with control over its internal and foreign affairs |
| subsequent boundary | A political boundary that developed contemporaneously with the evolution of the major elements of the cultural landscape through which it passes |
| superimposed boundary | A political boundary placed by powerful outsiders on a developed human landscape that usually ignores existing cultural-spatial patterns. |
| supranational | A venture invovling three or more national states involving formal policital, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives |
| territorial morphology | A state's geographical shape, which can affect its spatial cohesion and political viability |
| theocracy | A state whose government is under the control of a ruler who is deemed to be divinely guided or under the control of a group of religious leaders. |
| tribalism | When people feel greater allegiance to their own ethnic group than to the state as a whole |
| unitary state | An internal organization of a state that places most power in the hands of central government officials |
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