Hocbigg - Political Geography
Path to a free self-taught education in Political Geography!
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Introduction
Political geography examines how space, place, and physical environments shape political power — and conversely, how political decisions, laws, and conflicts actively construct geography. Modern politics is never placeless: it unfolds within bounded territories, across contested borders, and through spatial arrangements that dictate who belongs, who exercises rights, and who controls vital resources. Studying this discipline teaches you to look past the surface of maps, recognizing that state borders, electoral districts, and global spheres of influence are not permanent natural facts, but historical technologies of power and governance.
This curriculum is built for independent learners starting with no prior formal background in geography, political science, or international relations. It covers the core conceptual models, analytical vocabulary, and foundational debates that every student of the discipline needs before branching into specialized subfields.
Because this is a foundational curriculum, it intentionally sets aside technical GIS software training, quantitative spatial statistics, and academic research-design methods. The priority is conceptual literacy: understanding how political power operates spatially in the real world, rather than learning the technical mechanics of producing academic research.
How to Navigate This Curriculum
While each subject can be reviewed independently, the curriculum is structured as a deliberate progression from basic spatial concepts to global power dynamics:
- Foundational Concepts: You will begin with spatial thinking and political theory, followed by critical cartography. This opening phase teaches you to evaluate maps as persuasive, rhetorical instruments of state power rather than neutral records of physical reality.
- Disciplinary Foundations: The curriculum introduces the core frameworks, intellectual histories, and central questions that define political geography as an academic field.
- Thematic Core: The middle sequence addresses the structural building blocks of political space: the sovereign territorial state and its assumptions, the social practice of bordering, the spatial imagination of nationalism and citizenship, and the localized geography of voting and gerrymandering.
- Geopolitics: The final subjects scale up to the international arena, examining classical imperial models of global strategy alongside modern critical and feminist perspectives that analyze how geopolitical discourse is produced and how it affects everyday lives.
Once you have worked through these foundational subjects, you can branch out into the companion pages across this series:
- Explore specialized subfields — such as carceral geography, critical border regimes, and political ecology — in Advanced Topics.
- Engage with milestone monographs and field-shaping essays in Readings.
- Follow structured university video lectures and deep-dive audio series in Courses.
Communities
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- You can also interact through GitHub issues. If there is a problem with a course, or a change needs to be made to the curriculum, this is the place to start the conversation. Read more here.
Curriculum
Spatial Thinking and Human Geography
Introduces the fundamental spatial concepts—such as space, place, scale, and human-environment interaction—that form the foundation of all geographical inquiry.
Introduction to Human Geography - 2nd Edition (David Dorrell & Joseph Henderson, University of North Georgia Press / Open Textbook Library) - A comprehensive open-access textbook serving as a primary introductory option to establish foundational knowledge of spatial distribution and regional organization.
Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context (Paul L. Knox & Sallie A. Marston, Pearson) - An encyclopedic commercial alternative to Dorrell & Henderson, covering globalization and uneven spatial development for learners who prefer a traditional textbook structure.
Place: An Introduction (Tim Cresswell, Wiley-Blackwell) - A complementary conceptual study to read alongside either introductory textbook, exploring how culture, power, and human practice turn abstract space into meaningful "place."
Core Political Concepts
Examines the core political theories, mechanisms of authority, governance structures, and power dynamics required to analyze political spaces.
Introduction to Political Science (OpenStax) - A free open textbook providing a broad, institutional grounding in comparative political systems, regime types, and constitutional structures.
Political Theory: An Introduction (Andrew Heywood, Bloomsbury Academic) - An alternative, more philosophically oriented primer to OpenStax that focuses specifically on defining normative concepts like sovereignty, power, legitimacy, and the state.
Map Literacy and Critical Cartography
Explores how maps are constructed, how cartographic conventions embody political authority, and how visual spatial representations shape political realities.
Mapping, Society, and Technology (Steven Manson, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing) - The core open textbook for this section, providing systematic instruction on map projections, spatial data structures, and the social role of mapping.
How to Lie with Maps (Mark Monmonier, University of Chicago Press) - A practical, highly engaging companion to Manson that uses real-world case studies to demonstrate how cartographers deliberately persuade, distort, and omit.
"Deconstructing the Map" (J. Brian Harley, Cartographica, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1989) - A sequential theoretical milestone to read after mastering map mechanics, establishing the foundational post-structuralist argument that maps function as rhetorical expressions of state power.
Foundations of Political Geography
Surveys political geography as a distinct academic field, examining how space, place, and politics interact across multiple scales.
Introduction to Political Geography: Four Questions (Dr. Gerard Toal / Virginia Tech) - Start with this recorded university lecture for an accessible spoken orientation to the core definitions, intellectual history, and guiding questions of modern political geography.
An Introduction to Political Geography: Space, Place and Politics (Martin Jones et al., Routledge) - A primary textbook choice focusing on spatial theory, state institutions, and contemporary social movements from a post-structuralist perspective.
Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (Colin Flint & Peter J. Taylor, Routledge) - An alternative primary textbook to Jones et al., organizing the discipline around Wallerstein's world-systems analysis and political economy across local, national, and global scales.
Key Concepts in Political Geography (Carolyn Gallaher et al., SAGE Publications) - A complementary reference reader designed to be consulted alongside either Jones et al. or Flint & Taylor for concise, expert dissections of key disciplinary debates.
The State, Territory, and Sovereignty
Investigates how modern states claim, organize, and enforce exclusive power over bounded geographic areas.
Sovereignty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - A foundational philosophical overview to read first, clarifying the evolving legal definitions, historical origins, and core paradoxes of sovereign state authority.
Territory: A Short Introduction (David Delaney, Wiley-Blackwell) - An accessible conceptual primer explaining how human territoriality operates as a social, legal, and political ordering mechanism.
Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Robert David Sack, Cambridge University Press) - A seminal monograph offering deeper theoretical depth than Delaney, analyzing territoriality as an intentional spatial strategy to affect and control phenomena.
"The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory" (John Agnew, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1994) - A landmark essay that synthesizes the concepts in this section to critique three flawed geographical assumptions regarding borders and states in mainstream social science.
Borders and Borderlands
Analyzes the physical, legal, and social construction of boundaries, as well as the lived experiences and conflicts of borderland communities.
Borders: A Very Short Introduction (Alexander C. Diener & Joshua Hagen, Oxford University Press) - The primary introductory primer, offering an accessible survey of how borders are established, maintained, and challenged worldwide.
Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Hastings Donnan & Thomas M. Wilson, Routledge) - A complementary anthropological and political study exploring how borderland populations experience, negotiate, and subvert state boundaries in daily life.
"Boundaries as Social Practice and Discourse: The Finnish-Russian Border" (Anssi Paasi, Regional Studies, Vol. 33, No. 7, 1999) - A foundational paper to read alongside the books above, showing that borders are dynamic social practices and institutionalized discourses rather than static lines on a map.
Nations, Nationalism, and Citizenship
Examines how national identities are spatialized, how boundaries define inclusion, and how geography dictates the rights and exclusions of citizenship.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Benedict Anderson, Verso) - The canonical cultural-spatial theory of nationalism, arguing that modern nations are socially imagined through the interactions of language, print-capitalism, and maps.
Nations and Nationalism (Ernest Gellner, Cornell University Press) - An alternative foundational theory to Anderson, presenting modernization, industrialization, and centralized cultural education as the primary drivers of national identity.
Political Geography: An Introduction to Space and Power (Joe Painter & Alex Jeffrey, SAGE Publications) - A complementary spatial textbook that connects macro-theories of nationalism to the everyday administrative practices, spaces, and exclusions of modern citizenship.
Electoral Geography and Local Spatial Politics
Studies how political voting behaviors, district map-drawing, and local governance are structured by spatial arrangements and geographic segregation.
Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections (Mark Monmonier, University of Chicago Press) - An applied, highly readable entry point that demystifies the geometric mechanics, algorithmic tools, and political effects of partisan and racial gerrymandering.
Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society (John Agnew, Routledge) - A complementary theoretical framework that broadens the topic beyond districting, demonstrating how local geographical contexts actively structure voter behavior.
Classical Geopolitics and Geopolitical Traditions
Traces the historical emergence of strategic geopolitical thinking, imperial expansion models, and state competition over geographic space.
Introduction to Geopolitics (Colin Flint, Routledge) - The recommended primary textbook, systematically introducing classical geopolitical theories, agency-structure frameworks, and historical world orders.
Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations (Saul Bernard Cohen, Rowman & Littlefield) - A traditional, regional alternative to Flint that emphasizes regional balance-of-power dynamics, gateway states, and geostrategic realms.
"The Geographical Pivot of History" (Halford J. Mackinder, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1904) - The seminal primary source to read alongside either textbook, articulating the "Heartland Theory" of Eurasian land power versus maritime dominance.
Critical and Feminist Geopolitics
Critiques conventional, state-centric strategies of global power by examining how geopolitical representations are constructed and how power affects everyday lives.
Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (Klaus Dodds, Oxford University Press) - The most accessible entry point for this subfield, introducing how popular media, cinema, and political rhetoric construct geopolitical worldviews.
Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Gearóid Ó Tuathail, University of Minnesota Press) - The landmark academic monograph establishing the subdiscipline, recommended for learners seeking the foundational post-structuralist critique of geopolitical statecraft.
"Critically Feminist Geopolitics" (Mary Gilmartin & Eleonore Kofman, in Mapping Women, Making Politics, Routledge) - A complementary theoretical essay that expands the critique by demonstrating how global geopolitical struggles operate on embodied, gendered, and intimate scales.