A General Overview Political Geography: 

The area of geography known as human geography is focused on comprehending global culture and how it links to physical location. Political geography is a subfield of geography that focuses on the geographical distribution of political processes and how one's location affects these activities.

 

It often investigates regional political structures based on geography, international ties, and municipal and federal elections.

 

Human geography's emergence as a field distinct from physical geography marked the beginning of political geography.

 

Early human geographers often examined the political evolution of a country or particular region using the characteristics of the physical terrain. In many places, people believed that the terrain might either assist or hurt a country's ability to advance economically and politically and, therefore, as a whole.

 

Friedrich Ratzel was one of the first geographers to investigate this connection. Ratzel explored the concept that countries expanded politically and geographically along with their cultures in his 1897 book Politische Geographie. Ratzel also argued that nations must continue to grow in order for cultures to have enough area to flourish.

 

Another early political geography theory was the by Halford Mackinder.

 

This hypothesis was introduced in 1904 by British geographer Mackinder in his paper "The Geographical Pivot of History." According to Mackinder, the globe would be split into a New World, a World Island made up of Eurasia and Africa, Peripheral Islands, and a Heartland made up of Eastern Europe. According to his idea, the sea power era was coming to an end, and whoever had control over the heartland would rule the whole planet.

 

The ideas of Ratzel and Mackinder were significant both before and during World War II. For instance, the establishment of buffer nations between Germany and the Soviet Union after the war was over, which was inspired by the Heartland Theory.

 

By the Cold War, new areas of human geography had started to emerge, and their ideas and the significance of political geography had started to wane.

 

However, political geography started to expand once again in the late 1970s. Many geographers study a number of subjects related to political processes and geography, with political geography being one of the most significant disciplines of human geography today.

 

Today's political geography encompasses, but is not limited to, the following areas:

 

•    The study and charting of elections and their outcomes

 

•    The interaction between the people and the federal, state, and municipal governments

 

•    Political borders marking

 

•    The interactions between countries that are members of supranational political organizations like the European Union

 

Political geography is impacted by contemporary political developments, and in recent years, sub-topics within political geography have emerged with an emphasis on these trends. This kind of political geography, which is often referred to as critical political geography, focuses on themes relating to feminist organizations, gay and lesbian problems, and youth communities.

 

John A. Agnew, Richard Hartshorne, Halford Mackinder, Friedrich Ratzel, and Ellen Churchill Semple are a few of the most well-known geographers who studied political geography.

 

There is now a scholarly publication named Political Geography as well as a specialty organization for political geography within the Association of American Geographers. Redistricting and the Elusive Ideals of Representation, Climate Triggers: Rainfall Anomalies, Vulnerability, and Communal Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Normative Goals and Demographic Realities are some of the names of papers in this publication.

 

Within the more general disciplines of geography and economics, economic geography is a subfield. This field's researchers look at the global distribution, organization, and location of economic activity. In industrialized countries like the United States, economic geography is crucial because it enables academics to comprehend an area's economic structure and its connections to other regions of the globe. It is crucial in emerging countries as well because it makes the causes and processes of development—or lack thereof—more understandable.

 

Economic geography is a huge area of study since economics is. Agritourism, the economic growth of different nations, and gross domestic and gross national products are a few examples of issues that fall under the category of economic geography. Given that it has connected much of the world's economy, globalization is also crucial to economic geographers today.

 

As European countries subsequently started to explore and occupy other locations across the globe, the study of economic geography continued to expand. At the period, economic resources like tea, gold, silver, and spices were shown on maps by European explorers as being located in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. These maps served as the foundation for their excursions, which led to the introduction of new economic activity to those areas. Explorers not only noted the existence of these riches but also the trade practices used by the locals in these areas.

 

Johann Heinrich von Thünen, a farmer and economist, created his model of agricultural land usage in the middle of the nineteenth century. Because it predicated its explanation of the economic growth of cities on land use, this was a pioneering instance of contemporary economic geography. In 1933, geographer Walter Christaller developed his Central Place Theory, which combined geography and economics to explain how cities are distributed, sized, and numerous globally.

 

The widespread understanding of geography has significantly grown by the conclusion of World War II. Geographers and economists were interested in how and why economic activity and development was happening and where it was occurring around the globe after the war, which led to the creation of economic geography as an established field within geography. The 1950s and 1960s saw an increase in interest in economic geography as geographers worked to make the field more quantitative. 

 

Economic geography is still mostly a quantitative discipline today, with particular emphasis on issues like corporate distribution, market research, and regional and worldwide growth. Additionally, the subject is studied by economists and geographers. Geographic information systems (GIS) are heavily used in economic geography nowadays to undertake market research, company location analysis, and supply and demand analysis for specific products in a certain region.

 

The widest discipline of geography is ‘’theoretical economic geography’’, and within that category, geographers primarily concentrate on developing new ideas for how the global economy is organized. The study of regional economies throughout the globe is known as ‘’regional economic geography’’. These geographers examine regional interactions as well as local development on a local level. To comprehend an area's economy, historical economic geographers examine the region's historical evolution. Geographers that specialize in behavioral economics concentrate on the inhabitants of a region and their economic choices.

 

The last subject of study is ‘’critical economic geography’’. Geographicians in this discipline try to research economic geography without utilizing the conventional techniques mentioned above since it emerged from critical geography. For instance, critical economic geographers often examine economic disparities, regional supremacy, and how these factors affect the growth of economies.

 

Economic geographers often research highly particular economic concerns in addition to these other areas. These themes include corporate geography as well as subjects like the geography of agriculture, transportation, natural resources, and commerce.

 

Each of these papers is intriguing because, despite their stark differences, they all center on a distinct facet of the functioning of the global economy.