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Political.Geography
Terms to be used by Mrs. Robinson's AP Human Geo Classes
Term | Definition |
---|---|
State | A politically organized territory that is administered by a sovereign government and and is recognized by a significant portion of the international community. A state has territory, permanent population, a government, and is recognized by other states. |
Territoriality | A country's or more local community's sense of property and attachment toward its territory, as expressed by its determination to keep it inviolable and strongly defended. |
Sovereignty | A principle of international relations that holds that final authority over social, economic, and political matters should rest with the legitimate rulers of independent states. |
Nation-state | Theoretically, a recognized member of the modern state system possessing formal sovereignty and occupied by a people who see themselves as a single united nation. |
multinational state | State with more than one nation within its borders |
centrifugal | Forces that tend to divide a country - such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic or ideological differences. |
centripetal | Forces that tend to unify a country - such as wide spread commitment to a national culture, shared ideological objectives and a common faith. |
Core | Processes that incorporate higher levels of education, higher salaries, and more technology; generate more wealth than periphery processes in the world economy. Core nations are our most developed nations. |
periphery | Processes that incorporate lower levels of education, lower salaries, and less technology; and generate less wealth than core processes in the world economy. Periphery nations are our least developed nations. |
Semi-periphery | Places where core and periphery processes are both occurring; places that are exploited by the core but in turn exploit the periphery |
heartland theory | a geopolitical hypothesis that any political power based in the heart of Eurasia could gain sufficient strength to eventually dominate the world. |
stateless nation | nation of people that does not have a state |
supranational organization | A venture involving three or more nation-states involving formal political, economic and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives. |
devolution | The process whereby regions within a state demand and gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the central government. |
critical geopolitics | Process by which geopoliticians deconstruct and focus on explaining the underlying spatial assumptions and territorial perspectives of politicians. |
multistate nation | A nation of people that expands over the borders of multiple states |
Unilateralism | World order in which one state is in a position of dominance with allies following rather than joining the political decision making process. |
Nation | Legally, a term encompassing all the citizens of a state. Most definitions now tend to refer to a tightly knit group of people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. Such homogeneity exists in few states. |
gerrymandering | redistricting for advantage, or the practice of dividing areas into electoral districts to give one political party an electoral majority in the large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in only a few districts. |
reapportionment | Process by which representative districts are switched according to population shifts, so that each district encompasses approximately the same number of people. |
shatterbelt | a region caught between powerful forces whose boundaries are continually redefined. |
irredentism | A movement to reunite a nation's homeland when part of it is contained within another state. The piece of homeland that is ruled by the other state is known as irredenta |
Enclave | A residential cluster that results from voluntary segregation |
Demarcation | The process of showing the physical representation of a boundary on the landscape. |
Exclave | A territory belonging to a state but separated from that state by another state. |
Secession | Complete Break-off of a region into an autonomous, independent state. This occurs when a separatist movement achieves its goals. |
super-imposed boundary | boundary forcibly put on a landscape by outsiders |
Federal State | System of government in which power is distributed among certain geographical territories rather than concentrated within a central government. |
Unitary State | States governed constitutionally as a unit, without internal divisions or a federalist delegation of powers. |
Theocracy | Governments controlled through divine guidance or religious leadership |
Neo-colonialism | Idea that even independent colonies are still reliant on their colonizers for trade and support |
Rimland Theory | Idea that the domination of the coastal fringes of Eurasia would provide the base for world conquest. |
Domino Theory | Idea that political destabilization in one country can lead to collapse of political stability in neighboring countries, starting a chain reaction of collapse |