1st Edition

Politics Critical Essays in Human Geography

By Virginie Mamadouh, John Agnew Copyright 2008

    Depending on the breadth or narrowness of the understanding of politics and the political, "politics" in human geography is defined as either the operation of power in all social relations or the workings of power directed to or by the state. This volume avoids the two extremes by acknowledging the transformation of approaches to the political in human geography over the past few decades but also by highlighting the continued importance of the more traditional state-based conception of politics. The selected articles are clustered around six themes: new agendas in political geography, state territoriality, international relations and globalization, internal territorial organisation and geographical scale, social movements and electoral participation, and identities and citizenship.

    Contents: Introduction; Part I Agendas for Political Geography: Human territoriality: a theory, Robert D. Sack; A materialist framework for political geography, Peter J. Taylor; Critical geopolitics: discourse, difference, and dissent, S. Dalby; Into the 1990s: a gendered agenda for political geography, Eleonore Kofman and Linda Peake. Part II State Territoriality: The evolution of the concept of territory, Jean Gottmann; The state as container: territoriality in the modern world-system, Peter J. Taylor; Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography, David Newman and Anssi Paasi; Refiguring the geopolitical landscape: nation, 'transition' and gendered subjects in post-Cold War Germany, Fiona M. Smith. Part III International Relations and Globalization: The diffusion of democracy, 1946-1994, John O'Loughlin, Michael D. Ward, Corey L. Lofdahl, Jordin S. Cohen, David S. Brown, David Reilly. Kristian S. Gleditsch and Michael Shin; Disputing the nature of the international in political geography: the Hettner-lecture in human geography, John A. Agnew; Geopolitics and discourse: practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy, Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew; Feminist geopolitics revisited: body counts in Iraq, Jennifer Hyndman. Part IV Internal Territorial Organization and Geographical Scales: Form, process and the political organization of space, Rex Honey; Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or; looking for local politics, Kevin R. Cox; The invention of regions: political restructuring and territorial government in Western Europe, M. Keating; The social construction of scale, Sallie A. Marston. Part V Social Movements and Electoral Participation: People, places and regions: exploring the use of multilevel modelling in the analysis of electoral data, K. Jones, R.J. Johnston and C.J. Pattie; Collective action and rational choice: place, community, and the limits to individual s

    Biography

    John Agnew, UCLA, USA and Virginie Mamadouh, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands