The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Second World War, and specifically whether

regional geography was an atheoreticalgeog-

raphy (see Holmen, 1995). For now, debate

seems to have settled down. ghe

Suggested reading

Gregory (1982); Grigg (1965); Hart (1982);

Pudup (1988).

regional alliance An agreement between a

group of neighbouring political units facili-

tating cross-borderco-operation. The term

is particularly identified withsecurityco-

operation betweenstates. NATO is the stron-

gest such alliance, with the commitment that

an attack on any one of the member states by

an external aggressor is deemed as an attack

against all of them. During thecold war, the

USA (NATO, SEATO, CENTO) and the

Soviet Union (Warsaw Pact) created rival

regional alliances. Since the terrorist attacks

of 11 September 2001 (seeterrorism), the

USA has attempted to forge alliances with

many countries, but none of the recent efforts

have the intensity and breadth of the Cold War

era. Post-Cold War changes and the break-up

of the Soviet Union have catalysed new

regional initiatives to facilitatetradeand eco-

nomicdevelopment(Pinnick, 2005) as states

balance the promotion of economic inter-

action with cross-border security concerns,

and manage security concerns no longer

viewed as part of the Cold War conflict

(McNulty, 1999). The increased pressure

upon localities to be attractive to global

investmenthas also fostered local regional

alliances to build transport and other forms

of economicinfrastructurethat can not only

enhance economic growth but also facilitate

peace across international borders (Newman,

2005). The current geopolitical context shows

that regional security alliances are in flux as

NATO expands its border eastwards to

include former Warsaw Pact members (Oas,

2005), but at the same time the European

Union builds its own security apparatus that

at the moment is deemed to complement

NATO, but could succeed it. cf

regional cycles Fluctuations or cyclical

waves in the level of a variable in aregion.

Techniques andmodelsfor analysing regional

cycles have been applied to both regional eco-

nomic activity and toepidemicsand the mod-

elling ofdisease. Cycles in economic activity,

usually measured by industrial output or

unemployment rates, can be very long-term,

as withkondratieff cycles, or shorter-term,

reflecting both seasonal variations in the

demand for labour and the regional impact of

national business cycles of expansion and

recession. Some descriptive studies of regional

cycles were undertaken in the early years of

regional science, but more recent work has

focused on modelling the cycles. Economists

have built regional (e.g. the State of California)

and multi-regional (e.g. all the regions of

France) econometric models. These relate

macroeconomic variables of output, expend-

iture and employment at the regional level to

each other, and to national economic and policy

variables. Such models now exist for many

countries and regions. A second approach,

mainly by geographers, has studied the spatial

diffusionof regional cycles, tracing the timing

and cyclical amplitude for different cities and

regions. lwh

Suggested reading

Glickman (1997); King and Clark (1978).

regional geography The study of the vari-

able character of places in the world, usually

with an emphasis on theirhuman geography.

Knowledge of world regional geography is

often seen as essential to general education

and a specifically ‘geographical literacy’,

which is why it forms a mainstay of introduc-

tory survey courses in many universities.

Critics frequently complain that such courses

are little more than a fact-driven whirlwind

tour, but regional geography has a long intel-

lectual history and, like the larger discipline,

its role, objectives and methods have changed

over time. The authors of the better textbooks

are very well aware of these considerations,

and sensitive to the pedagogical possibilities

they allow and the responsibilities they impose

(e.g. Bradshaw, Dymond, White and Chacko,

2005; de Blij and Muller, 2007).

Regional geography is usually traced back to

Strabo’s conception ofchorologyas the dis-

ciplined description of the parts of the Earth.

As late as the seventeenth century, this con-

tinued to provide the model for what in early

modern Europe was calledSpecial Geography,

founded – as Bernard Varenius (1622–50) put

it – ‘upon the experience and observations of

those who have described the several coun-

tries’. Studies such as these may have contrib-

uted to a privileged, civic education, but they

had larger purposes too. Just as Strabo’s

chorography informed the administration of

the Roman Empire, so did Varenius recognize

that Special Geography had a particular sig-

nificance for both ‘statecraft’ and the world-

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REGIONAL ALLIANCE