Political Geography: A New Introduction

Political Geography A New Introduction Richard Muir As the twentieth century draws to a close the apparent political certainties of preceding decades are being seriously challenged by global forms of economic organisation, changing patterns of political identification and looming ecological crisis. Written from a humanistic perspective, Political Geography: A New Introduction explores the effects of the economic globalisation process, showing how it challenges the survival of the sovereign nation-state and how it may be encouraging the development of new political associations at a localised as well as at a transnational level. The unexpected eruption of separatist movements among national minorities is examined, as well as the more intimate identifications associated with the politics of place. The failure of attempts to transplant the European nation-state system to parts of the colonial world is discussed in a chapter which focuses on the current plight of the ‘collapsed’ states of Africa. The recent revival of interest in geopolitics is described, with a review of the history of the approach and an exploration of the new ‘critical geopolitics’. Special emphasis is given to the politics of the environment and the ways in which the environmental movement has been poorly served by the political structures and division of political power in the twentieth-century world. The book concludes with an overview of the ‘New Political Order’ and the changes engendered by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Published twenty years after the same author’s highly successful Modern Political Geography, this completely new text will be welcomed by a new generation of students for applying the same clarity of thought and exposition to a new agenda of issues and problems.