| Term | Definition |
| Stateless nation | a national group that aspires to become an independent state but lacks the territorial means to do so (an example would be Palestine) |
| Relocation diffusion | sequential diffusion process in which the items being diffused are transmitted by their carrier agents as they relocate to new areas |
| Culture hearth | heartland, source area, or innovation center; place of origin of a major culture |
| Spatial diffusion | the spatial spreading or dissemination of a culture element (technological innovation) or some other phenomenon (disease outbreak) |
| Cultural landscape | the forms and artifacts sequentially placed on the natural landscape by the activities of various human occupants |
| Jihad | a doctrine within Islam that is commonly translated as holy war and entails a personal or collective struggle on the part of Muslims to live up to the religious standards prescribed by the Quran |
| Islamic front | the southern border of the African Transition Zone that marks the religious frontier of the Muslim faith in its southward penetration of Subsaharan Africa |
| Hydraulic civilization theory | the theory that cities which managed to control irrigated farming over large hinterlands held political power over other cities |
| Failed state | a country whose institutions have collapsed and in which anarchy prevails (an example would be Syria) |
| Rain shadow effect | the relative dryness in areas downwind of mountain ranges resulting from orographic precipitation, where moist air masses are forced to deposit most of their water content as they cross the highlands |
| Caliphate | an imperial-scale Islamic government led by a caliph, considered a direct successor to the Prophet Muhammad, who rules and exerts moral authority over Muslims worldwide |
| Insurgent state | the establishment by antigovernment insurgents of a territorial base in which they exercise full control; thus a state within a state (an example would be Iraq) |
| Fragmented modernization | a checkerboard-like spatial pattern of modernization in an emerging-market economy where a few localized regions of a country experience most of the development while the rest are largely unaffected |
| Cultural diffusion | the process of spreading and adopting a cultural element from its place of origin across a wider area |
| Religious revivalism | religious movement whose objectives are to return to the foundations of that faith and to influence state policy |
| Desalination | the process of removing dissolved salts from water, thereby producing fresh (drinking) water from seawater or brackish water |
| Domino effect | the belief that political destabilization in one state can result in the collapse of order in a neighboring state, triggering a chain of events that, in turn, can affect a series of contiguous states |
| Turkish model | a multi-party democracy that has a place for, but is not dominated by, Islamic political parties |
| Cultural geography | the wide-ranging and comprehensive field of geography that studies spatial aspects of human cultures |
