| Term | Definition |
|---|
| capital city | The center of national life. |
| centrifugal force | A term employed to designate forces that tend to divide a country - such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic, or ideological differences. |
| centripetal force | Forces that unite and bind a country together - such as widespread commitment to a national culture, shared ideological objectives, and a common faith. |
| colonialism | Rule by an autonomous power over a subordinate and alien people and place. |
| core area | The largest population cluster in a nation-state. |
| electoral geography | Subfield of geography that deals with various spatial aspects of voting systems, voting behavior, and voter representation. |
| federal state | A political-territorial system wherein a central government represents the various entities within a nation-state where they have common interests yet allow these various entities to retain their own identities and to have their own laws, policies and customs in certain spheres. |
| forward capital | Capital city positioned in actually or potentially contested territory, usually near an international border. |
| geopolitics | the study of the interplay between international political relations and the territorial/environmental context in which they occur. |
| gerrymander | Redistricting for advantage, or the practice of dividing areas into electoral districts to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in as few districts as possible. |
| heartland theory | A geopolitical hypothesis, proposed by British geographer Halford Mackinder during the first two decades of the twentieth century, that any political power based in the heart of Eurasia could gain sufficient strength to eventually dominate the world. |
| multicore state | A state that possesses more than one core or dominant region, be it economic, political, or cultural. |
| organic theory | Friedrich Ratzel said that the state resembles a biological organism whose life cycle extends from birth through maturity and decline and death. |
| primate city | A country's largest city - ranking atop the urban hierarchy - most expressive of the national culture and usually the capital city as well. |
| rimland | Term coined by Nicholas Spykman referring to the coastal rim of Eurasia, which Spykman maintained held the key to global power. |
| tribalism | A thing the has threatened Africa's "national" unity. |
| unitary state | A nation-state that has a centralized government and administration that exercises power equally over all parts of the state. |
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