Cultural Geography

The common-sense meaning of political

geography is the study of how politics is

informed by geography. For a long time this

meant trying to show how the physical

features of the earth – the distribution of the

continents and oceans, mountain ranges and

rivers – affected the ways in which humanity

divided the world up into political units such

as states and empires and how these units

competed with one another for global power

and influence.Today the dominant meaning has

changed considerably (Agnew et al., 2002). On

one side, geography is now understood as

including social and economic differences

between places without necessarily ascribing

these to physical differences. On the other,

politics has been broadened to include ques-

tions of political identity (how social groups

define themselves and their political objec-

tives) and political movements (why did this

movement or political party start here and

why does it have this or that geographical

pattern of support?). Even more fundamen-

tally,‘geography’ is itself now thought of as the

selection and ranking of certain themes and

issues – from the naming of the continents

and the division of the world into regions to

the identification of certain regions as more

or less ‘strategically’ important – rather than a

set of objective facts beyond dispute (Lewis

and Wigen, 1997). In this understanding,

knowledge cannot be readily separated from

power. Those with power, the ability to com-

mand others, are able to define what counts

as geography. From this point of view, the

meaning of political geography is completely

reversed: it now becomes the study of how

geography is informed by politics.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

AND CULTURE

The famous American cultural geographer

Carl Sauer once described political geography

as the ‘wayward child’ of geography. Political

geography in the interwar years of the

twentieth century was certainly controversial,

dominated in many countries like Germany,

Italy and Japan by militaristic and nationali-

stic geopolitical thought devoted to each

country’s imperial ambitions (Parker, 1998).

Whereas cultural geography achieved a cer-

tain degree of respectability and intellectual

status in the United States from the scholarly

output of Sauer and his ‘Berkeley School’,

political geography suffered from the stigma of

Section 8

GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES Edited by Gerard Toal

and John Agnew

Introduction: Political Geographies, Geopolitics

and Culture

Gerard Toal and John Agnew

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