Political Geography

The author explores the reasons for the failure of a plan for population exchanges that took place between Jews and Arabs in Palestine in the 1930s. Special focus is given to the success of previous exchanges between Greece and Turkey that took place during the 1920s and why this model failed in Palestine. The author concludes that "the Zionist plans which assumed that one could encourage voluntary transfer by creating attractive economic conditions in the target areas, did not take into account the factors of nationalism, ties to place of residence, religion, etc. These factors carried no less weight than the economic factor and they could effectively prevent any voluntary transfer of the Arab population."

"Although nation-states assume territorial, political and cultural boundedness, their boundaries are not uniform barriers, but rather are characterized by varying degrees of openness and closure to international migrants. The manipulation of the permeability of these boundaries constitutes the politics of admission and exclusion.... This paper provides a discussion of the complex economic, political and social forces impinging on the politics of admission and exclusion and an analysis of how these forces have been operating in a particular historical and geographical context to determine the admission of international migrants into national territory and community.... There are signs that the integration of nation-states into regional blocs such as the EC is shifting the politics of admission and exclusion practised by the dominant member countries to the supra-national scale."

This paper argues for the continued significance of the text as a source and focus in critical geopolitical inquiry. It establishes the utility of the military memoir in explorations of popular contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, and considers the memoir as a vector of militarism. The paper examines the memoirs written by military personnel about service in Afghanistan with the British armed forces, specifically about deployments to Helmand province between 2006 and 2012. The paper explores how Afghanistan is scripted through these texts, focussing on the explanations for deployment articulated by their authors, on the representations they contain and promote about other combatants and about civilian non-combatants, and the constitution and expression of danger in the spaces and places of military action which these texts construct and convey. The paper then turns to consider how a reading of the military memoir with reference to the genre of testimonio might extend and inform our understanding and use of these texts as a source for exploring popular geopolitics and militarism.

"Here we discuss, firstly, the limits of Census-based empiricism [in Northern Ireland] and the usually unacknowledged problems of data and interpretation which have resulted in a seriously misleading ¿conventional wisdom'. Secondly, we question its sectarian terms of reference, the over-identification of religion and politics, and misconceptions of ethnicity.... Thirdly, we focus on some of the flawed policy ¿solutions' associated with empiricism and sectarianism, including ¿internal' power-sharing and ¿consociational' strategies for political development."

Public opinion polls from before and after 2001 in Quebec (Canada) reveal a marked shift during that year in attitudes about the US. Québécois opinions of the US fell to the least favorable rating they had had in 15 years. A “fair weather friend” phenomenon based on fear of association with a target state does not fully explain Quebec’s reaction. Consideration of Quebec’s historical geographical situation as a small nation without a sovereign state suggests deeper reasons for the shift in perspective, which are confirmed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of letters to the editor of daily newspapers. Québécois letters about the attacks of September 11 were inclined to frame these attacks in terms of a battle between a large and powerful state and various small and weak nations, and subsequently to find common cause with the small nations. This particular framing of the 9-11 events according to a “small-nation” code reflected fundamental elements of the historical–geographical situation of Quebec as constructed in Québécois discourses. The activation of a set of key associations from the national past to understand international relations in the present is an example of what Gertjan Dijkink calls the “national reflex”. The activation of the reflex by an attack on the US points out how a hegemonic state can be vulnerable, paradoxically, as a result of its own supremacy.

We examine the sources of variability in Arab American voter registration in the months following September 11, 2001. Several comparisons suggest that the policy aftermath of 9/11 has acted as an accelerant to Arab American political incorporation. Specifically, we evaluate raised incidences of Arab American voter registration across locations relative to two populations: the Arab American population that registered to vote prior to 9/11, and the non-Arab American population that registered after 9/11. New Arab American voters, while dispersed, are not randomly distributed across space. The period between September 11, 2001, and the 2004 presidential election witnessed considerable change in the geographic distribution of the Arab American electorate, as well as its partisan and demographic composition.

The Israeli political system has recently undergone dramatic and significant structural changes, including the introduction of a new method of candidate selection known as primaries. This article focuses on this new method of candidate selection, which drastically reshaped the connection between the parties and their members, their voters and their representatives, and as a result completely undermined the organizational infrastructure of the parties that adopted primaries. This article describes the reforms that were enacted, assesses their ramifications and focuses on the geographical significance of the innovative aspect of constituency representation by individual parliamentarians, which the primaries injected into the unitary political parties, electoral system and political infrastructure in Israel during the 14th Knesset, 1996–99. In doing so, this article points to a lacuna in the political science literature concerning the relevance and consequences of candidate selection—i.e. intra-party elections—on political geography. The article argues that intra-party electoral reform is not only significant, but, from a political geography perspective, can prove to be as meaningful and consequential as systemic electoral reform.

Increases in violent crime have renewed interest in the broader application of capital punishment, a controversial issue owing in part to its uneven application, historically, in both time and space, and in terms of offender and offense characteristics. In the course of American history, nearly 15000 people have been executed under civil authority. Public attitudes toward execution have evolved over time, and capital punishment has tended to diminish in scope in concert with trends in developed countries toward its application in response to only the most serious crimes. Five issues are examined here: the attributes of persons executed and the historical geography of capital punishment, by eras; the relationship between race and execution: recent trends in the geography of capital punishment; the relationship between rates of homicide and rates of execution: and inter-state variation in the application of capital punishment.

The rival claims over Macedonia by the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Turks prompted the so-called ‘map mania’ in the 1870s as national antagonisms were played out in conflicting cartographic representations of the southern Balkans. With the establishment of Greece in the early 1830s the majority of the Greek population had been left in Ottoman lands beyond the sovereign state's frontiers. This gave rise to a militant irredentist ideology, known as the ‘Great Idea’, which pressed for the aggrandisement of the fledgling state to encompass all the Eastern lands inhabited by Greeks in a reconstituted Byzantine Empire. The present paper begins with a discussion of the meanings that accumulated around the concept of the ‘frontier’ in Greek nationalist thought and focuses on the debates in Greece about the imperative to redefine the Greek Kingdom's boundaries in the Balkans and Asia Minor. An analysis of these debates sheds light on a wider process: the naturalisation of boundaries in late 19th century Europe. In the course of the paper an examination is made of the ways in which geographical discourse served to legitimate claims to, and consolidate, territories. The emphasis on an imperialist geography co-existed with a celebration of local, regional geographies, and a key word of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Greek nationalist discourse was ‘place’ (topos). The argument is put that the particularities of ‘place’ were construed both as underpinning a territorial expansion and as a resistance to the homogenising drive of a state sponsored nationalism.

This paper introduces and encourages the use of technogeopolitics, the recursive relationship between technology and geopolitics, as a lens for analysis. Through this lens the paper examines the role of Britain, the United States, Germany and France at three international aerial conferences held in 1910, 1919 and 1928. At these conferences, the four nations' geopolitical positions are strongly influenced by each nation's current level of aviation technology. Similarly, the level of technology each nation has developed at each conference is representative of the nation's choice to invest, or not invest, in aviation technology, creating a technogeopolitical relationship. Key issues at each conference revolve around the concepts of aerial sovereignty and freedom of the air, the inclusion and exclusion of nations from aerial trading blocs, cross-Atlantic aerial relationships and the rise of US commercial air power in the Western Hemisphere reflecting each nation's attempt to assume control of the air in particular geographical regions around the world, usually at the expense of other nations.

Partition is an intrinsically abstract and simplistic blunt instrument applied on a complex mosaic of peculiarities that constitute reality. There are very few modern states that are ethnically or culturally homogenous. In this context, partition is a subjective territorial tactic that can treat or exacerbate symptoms of historical, political, and geographical difficulties. While exhibiting comparative scope, especially to the role of the British State and the dynamics of national majorities and minorities, the circumstances concerning the partitioning of Ireland deviate from patterns gleaned from other examples as the evolving bases of its partition between 1912 and 1925 mutated at various stages with regard to geography, political status, and function. However, Ireland served as an important historical precedent in illustrating the disparity between the original intent and eventual result of its partition. Indeed, one can extrapolate from the Irish example that partition is better understood as a catalytic tactical process that radically reconfigures the political and geographical dimensions of conflict rather than as a decisive political instrument solving it.

This paper examines the role of social cleavages in creating spatial associations between major pre-Revolutionary and post-Soviet political parties at the guberniya-level statistical aggregates. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion of social cleavages and a literature review of cleavage theory research applied to various Russian elections. The analysis of spatial associations between the pre-Revolutionary/post-Soviet parties involved elaborating a new measurement framework, creating a spatial database using GIS, transformation of thematic social–economic–geographic attributes, calculating the strength of the linear relationship among regional spatial units and utilizing probit statistical models. This research empirically supports the hypothesis that contemporary Russian parties are expressions of rediscovered cleavages as well as of conflicts engendered by the Tsarist and Soviet and post-Soviet periods of development. It appeared that the constituent assembly election of 1917 and parliamentary election of 1995 tend to be “maintaining” elections for the liberals. The situation appeared different for the communitarian parties. A critical realignment – significant changes in the left electorate and a split in this electorate did occur. The 1995 election results indicate that only parties with developed networks and local and regional organizations faired well in the election and that nationalization of Russian political life was still weak in 1995.

In this essay I interpret land-access strategies on the mid-twentieth-century Brazilian frontier as the result of local usufruct-based labour relations that manipulated regionally-interpreted land law. Political ecology, New Institutional Economics and bureaucratic institutions literatures inform my labour-law approach to examine how land-tenure regimes are created, controlled and maintained. The microeconomics of two labour systems, contractual claim-staking (the preposto system) and share-tenant farming, reduced the transaction costs involved in land claiming, while capitalising on information asymmetries between workers and land claimants. In several instances coercion was a key element in mobilising labour to create judicially relevant evidence of possession and generate significant rent streams. Land law did not demand such labour relations, but its contradictions encouraged claimants to use prepostos and share-tenant farmers to produce secure land access. This argument supports the notion, developed within political ecology, that local conditions (labour relations and uneven geographical information) mediate the influence of regional factors (interpretation and enforcement of land law). While adopting some concepts from the New Institutional Economics, the argument rejects the claim that land title determines land use and other economic behaviour.

The achievement of Irish independence in 1921 raised the question of the definition of a national cultural identity. Although this identity had been debated in a pre-independence context and an effective counter-hegemony to the dominant cultural values of the British state had been established, once independence was achieved it was necessary to put into practice many of the cultural ideals expressed earlier. This paper examines how the Irish language emerged as one of the foundations of Irish identity and how the education system became the cornerstone of the state's language policy. Using the concepts of hegemony and ‘organic’ intellectual as developed by Gramsci, I argue that there was a clear geographical bias in the implementation of a scheme of language revival through the primary schools. This bias favoured the Irish-speaking (Gaeltacht) regions of the country. The teachers recruited from these areas formed a stratum of ‘organic’ intellectuals and acted as mediators between the state and the society that constituted it. In this context, nation-building is treated as a dynamic process where views of national identity are contested and debated before particular state policies are adopted.

This article examines Sinhalese and Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka in the period from independence in 1948 to the rise of militant Tamil separatist nationalism in the early 1980s. Inspired by recent developments in political geography, the core of the argument is that Sinhalese and Tamil nationalism represent post-colonial political projects where nationalist material and discursive practices have been initiated by segments of the dominant class for the purpose of mobilization within political alliances. More specifically, it is argued that Sri Lankan post-colonial politics has been characterized by three kinds of political alliances; ethnic class alliances, political patron-client networks and strategic government alliances. The emergence and radicalization of Sinhalese and Tamil nationalist politics should be understood as a matter of continuities and changes in the material and discursive practices within these alliances. In the early post-colonial period, this politics of alliances ensured a degree of political participation and social redistribution, and as such served to defuse ethnic and class tensions. In the late post-colonial period, the neglect of the material and discursive practices of the ethnic class alliances and particularly the strategic government alliances undermined the legitimacy of the political system and led to a radicalization of Tamil nationalist demands in the 1970s and the emergence of militant Tamil nationalism from below in the 1980s.

The concept of the ‘nation-state’ is too often deployed both as a generic term for central state apparatuses and as a reference to the distinct spalial scales on which nation-state power is organized. One problematic consequence of this conceptual slippage among state theorists has been a failure to distinguish adequately shifts in the regulatory capacities of the central state from more general reconfigurations of state territorial organization on divergent spatial scales. This essay argues that currently unfolding transformations of state form are associated above all with shifts along the latter axis, that of the socio-spatial organization of state power. After a brief theoretical discussion of the spatial dimensions of the modern nation-state based on Henri Lefebvre's theory of ‘state space’ (l'espace étatique). this argument is developed through an examination of post-war regional and urban planning policies in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). A major concern of this study is to explore and concretize Lefebvre's thesis that the capitalist state is constantly engaged in the ‘production of space’. Shifts in regional and urban planning policy in the FRG since the mid-1970s, it is argued, are systematically linked to a reconfiguration of the spatial form of the nation-state under global capitalism, embodied above all in a transformation of the spatial scale on which state power is deployed. The growing importance of regional and local states as both agents and sites of capitalist restructuring is linked to structural shifts in the spatial scale of stale territorial organization. This approach to the production of spatial scale entails a critique of ‘phase models’ of capitalist development (such as regulation theory and world-system analysis) which fail to specify the spatial scale to which each periodization corresponds. The territorial scale ot capitalist socio-spatial organization has been reconfigured at various junctures during the history of global capitalist development: spatial scale is socially produced.

In large-N investigations, civil conflicts – like any significant political event – tend to be studied and understood at the country level. Popular explanations of why and where civil wars occur, however, refer to such factors as ethnic discrimination, wealth inequalities, access to contrabands, and peripheral havens. The intensity of such factors varies geographically within states. Therefore, any statistical study of civil war that uses country-level approximations of local phenomena is potentially flawed. In this paper, we disaggregate the country and let 100 × 100 km grid cells be the units of observation. Having developed geo-referenced conflict data from Uppsala/PRIO's conflict database, we use GIS to identify regions of peace and conflict and as a tool to generate sub-national measures of key explanatory variables. The results from an empirical analysis of African civil wars, 1970–2001, demonstrate spatial clustering of conflict that co-varies with the spatial distribution of several exogenous factors. Territorial conflict is more likely in sparsely populated regions near the state border, at a distance from the capital, and without significant rough terrain. Conflict over state governance is more likely in regions that are densely populated, near diamond fields, and near the capital city. These promising findings show the value of the innovative research design and offer nuanced explanations of the correlates of civil war.

This paper argues that recent signs of a hesitant convergence between discourses on sovereignty and territory and discourses on power/knowledge point to ways in which both discourse of power are linked to calculable territory. Both sovereignty and power/knowledge are based upon intervention, and intervention in turn presupposes these two general forms of power. But intervention is also inherently territorial. The historical context for these claims is set through a brief account of the general sciences of order emerging in the early modern period. The theoretical argument is then given a platform by means of a heuristic model of calculable territory, which, while incomplete and partly counter-factual, provides an overarching framework for understanding a range of recent studies of spatial power relations as contributions to a collective genealogy of calculable territory. An important recent change in the genealogy of calculable territory was brought on by the widespread adoption of electronic information and communications technologies in state institutions and other large organizations over the past quarter century. Both the continued relevance of calculable territory and recent changes in its composition and significance for power relations are illustrated by chronicling one important early set of controversies in the emergence of the ‘information age’: the mass boycott movements in West Germany in 1983 and 1987 aimed at blocking the federal census in that country. These boycotts clearly show the links between sovereignty, power/knowledge, intervention and calculable territory.

With the disappearance of the two largest political parties and the emergence of several new ones over the last decade, a new electoral map of Italy has emerged. We explore how these ongoing changes to party politics in Italy were manifest spatially between 1987 and 1996. In particular, the geographical aspects of party replacement are examined in central and northern Italy. First, the parties that have succeeded the Italian Communist Party (PCI) are examined in Tuscany, where the Italian left has historically enjoyed high levels of electoral support. Second, we look at how the regionalist Northern League has replaced the Christian Democratic Party (DC) in the Veneto. Exploratory spatial data analyses (ESDA), and in particular, local indicators of spatial autocorrelation (LISA), indicate that the processes and patterns of replacement are more complex than the simple substitution of one party with another in both of these regions, and illustrate the need to frame geographically electoral change in Italy.

The changes in eastern and central Europe in 1989 and 1990 are pivotal in modern history. The emerging democratic systems in this region provide unique opportunities for the study of the geography of European-style national parliamentary elections in countries after a hiatus of over four decades. One of the best examples of the immediate emergence of a competitive multi-party electoral system in central and eastern Europe is Hungary. The 1989 Hungarian parliamentary election law calls for the election of a 386-member single-chamber parliament by way of both single-member districts and proportional allocation. Numerous political parties, groups, and independent candidates participated in the spring 1990 parliamentary elections. Ten electoral maps illustrate the significant geographical variation in both voter participation and political party support in these elections. The electoral maps serve as the centerpiece in an initial exploration of the geographical differences of the Hungarian electorate and in the possible explanations of the voting results. For example, voter turn-out was highest along the western border with Austria and in urban areas and lowest in rural eastern Hungary, especially along the border with the Soviet Union. This variation and the differences in political party support are partially explained not only by Hungary's geographical position, but also by its present human geography and a number of social-economic variables. In the end the largest party to emerge, the conservative, anti-Communist, nationalist, and populist Hungarian Democratic Forum, gained 43 percent of the total seats and formed a coalition government with two small center-right parties.

Bulgaria was the first country in Eastern Europe where a former Communist Party won free and democratic Parliamentary elections. This political response of the Bulgarian electorate, rather unexpected at that time, could be linked to—among other factors—the geographic position of the country in relation to the place of origin of the political transformation processes. The comparative analysis of the geographic patterns of Bulgaria's major political parties displayed a deep social split, primarily along ideological lines. However, the configuration and performance of the main political actors on the eve of elections proved to be of relatively little importance for the Bulgarian political transformation. Bulgarian society was once again compelled to adapt to external influences, this time coming predominantly from the core of the Soviet-led international system, rather than to an urgent need to solve internal political economic contradictions. The term ‘superimposition of peripheries’ was introduced to describe the political geography and suggest an explanation of the 1990 election results.

A case study of the Turkish political arena provides a window into processes of democratic consolidation at the margins of Europe. This study focuses on socio-political cleavages and aims to map the space of political competition in Turkey. This discussion is based on an analysis of the discourses that defined the 1995 national election campaign, in which the Islamist Party, the Welfare Party (RP), won a plurality of the votes nation-wide. Turkish media are used to identify four issue continua that defined the arena of competition in the campaign, and five political parties are placed at points along these continua. This study finds that, because Turkish political parties do not link economic and political issues in ‘typical’ right–left packages, a three-dimensional cleavage model that includes economic, political and ‘identity’-based dimensions best represents the coordinates of political competition in Turkey. In addition to creating a cleavage model for Turkish politics, this research explores the possibilities and limitations of applying social-cleavage models beyond the borders of Western Europe and the advanced industrial societies.

The 1990s round of redistricting in the United States has produced an historic level of controversy and litigation. What are the origins of this controversy and confusion? Are there means by which the next round of redistricting might avoid some of these problems? The purpose of this paper is to examine these questions. Examples are employed from the redistricting experience of Alabama, a state not known for resolving political disputes in a timely and diplomatic fashion. Among those issues considered are racial equity, equal population, and compactness concerns. It is concluded that more explicit redistricting guidelines in tandem with a system of region-based cumulative voting would significantly reduce the controversy in the next round of redistricting.

This paper is a sympathetic critique of the current view of the state and state restructuring in the literature on geographical political economy. We contend that although this literature has developed a view of the state that is far more complex than a crudely determinist or economistic reading, it nevertheless remains limited. The literature analyzes the imperatives that shape state restructuring in a way that ultimately always refers back to the need to preserve capitalist accumulation and maintain the legitimacy of capitalist social relations. We suggest that an effective strategy for moving beyond these limits is a more explicit methodological focus on imperatives beyond capitalist accumulation. To illustrate this strategy, we focus on one such imperative: the need to reproduce a relationship of political legitimacy between state and citizens. We present a case study that examines the significant build-up of U.S.–Mexico boundary enforcement in the 1990s. The case highlights the importance of the political–geographical relation between state and citizen for shaping state policy choices. We find that a critical impetus for the boundary build-up in the 1990s was a complex set of concerns about security that grew dialectically out of interactions between particular state actors and particular groups of citizens. While the build-up could be analyzed insofar as it helped reproduce the relations of capital, such an approach cannot capture the whole story. We conclude the paper by calling for an analysis of the state and state restructuring that extends the current focus on accumulation and capitalist social relations to include a much wider range of imperatives.

Most studies of the neighbourhood effect and voting behaviour have to rely on ecological data, usually at inappropriate scales for the assumed processes being investigated. Analyses of party support over an 11-year period in Great Britain are reported using census data on ‘bespoke neighbourhoods’—small areas centred on survey respondents’ homes—integrated with individual level data. These show not only that patterns consistent with neighbourhood effects were present throughout the 1990s but also that their intensity varied according to the political situation, that neighbourhood effects were among the strongest influences on party choice, and that there were substantial differences between groups defined by their individual characteristics according to the type of neighbourhood lived in.

Change in the partisan vote for Congress between 1992 and 1996 is examined for four congressional districts in the greater Seattle, WA area, where a marked shift from Democratic representation occurred in 1994. The analysis attempts to disaggregate the change into four components: that due to a pervasive shift in partisan sentiment; that due to differential change across districts, because of their contextual character; that due to identity with the district and its incumbents, a place effect; and that due to normal midterm drop in turnout. Support was found for all four propositions. A general sentiment shift and turnout effect occurred 1992–1994, influenced as well by differential change among social groups and across districts, while from 1994–1996, a partial Democratic recovery took place, but only among some groups and in some districts. Loss in Democratic support was greatest in suburban areas dominated by families with children. Thus context and place both matter.

Some researchers believe that voting behavior is spatially clustered and varies across places because of the different local political and economic conditions where voters reside (local contextual effects). Others have also argued that the spread of support for political parties is affected by geographical proximity of one place to another (contagious diffusion). This study tests these two propositions. This study analyzes the results of the 1994 and 2000 federal representative elections in the 89 largest cities in Mexico. Aggregate data about voting behavior were analyzed, using Moran spatial autocorrelation coefficients and a spatial lag regression model with diagnostics for spatial effects. Dependent variables were the percentage of the vote for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), and Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (PRD). To test for local contextual effects, regional dummy variables were used in combination with socioeconomic covariates of voting behavior. To test for contagious diffusion, this study used a temporal–spatial lag. Moran coefficients show a pattern of spatial clustering of votes for the PRI and dispersion for the PAN and the PRD. Results from the regression analysis show evidence of significant local contextual effects operating in several regions of the country. Results also show the temporal–spatial lag variable to be non-significant for all political parties. This finding suggests that the spread of the PAN and the PRD and the retrenchment of the PRI in the period of study were independent of physical proximity to areas of previous electoral support. In summary, the findings in this study suggest (1) the acceptance of the local contextual effects proposition for explaining spatial clustering in voting behavior and (2) the rejection of the contagious diffusion proposition.

Drawing on substantive work on Ecuadorian national identities, an examination is made of the multiple geographies of identities which were articulated and negotiated during the border dispute between Ecuador and Pern in January and February 1995, an incident which became known as Tiwintza. While territorial claims and border protocols (particularly the 1942 Rio Protocol) form a significant geography of identity through which state-initiated nation-building imaginative geographies are articulated, these are not the only geographies imagined and expressed by citizens during and around the time of the dispute. Material from survey questionnaires about national identities before the recent dispute provide contextual information for the analysis of varied responses to the 1995 incident, and allow for a theoretical consideration of relations between dominant and popular imaginative geographies and national identities. The particular situation of the Shuar-Achuar indigenous groups, and of a Peruvian and Ecuadorian women's statement, provide illustrations of these popular ‘re-drawings’ of borders.

Most study of British voting behaviour focuses on class and other compositional influences on party choice, paying relatively little attention to contextual influences — spatial variations in patterns of party choice. Recent work stresses the interdependence of social and spatial locations as influences on how people vote, which this paper analyses using the large British Household Panel Study data set. By locating respondents in their local social milieux as well as their class and other contexts, it shows that how people voted at the 1997 British general election reflected just as much on where they lived and who they lived among as to what social categories they belonged to.

The Kosovo war of 1999 brought the checkered legacies of Russian and Western geopolitics back to the forefront of international relations. Central to the discussions of the Balkans is its century-old legacy as a Shatterbelt or Crush Zone. Though not identified by Saul Cohen as a Shatterbelt during the Cold War, the region is now located where the maritime (Western) and land power (Russian) geostrategic realms come into contact. NATO expansion and Russian insecurities about the region’s future have revised interest in geopolitical linkages and historical antecedents. The tradition of pan-Slavism, linking Russia to the Balkans cultural and political networks, has been uneven and is now subject to intensive debate within Russian political circles. In 1999, public opinion surveys showed consistent support in NATO countries for the bombing of Yugoslavia but strong opposition in Russia and other Slavic states. The surveys also question many stereotypes, especially the geopolitical visions of Russian citizens. Modern geopolitics is differentiated from classical geopolitics by the insertion of public opinion into the formation of geopolitical codes and foreign policy, in both the western countries and in Russia. In such an environment, the Balkans will remain central to the strategies of the great powers but public opinion, modifying geopolitical cultures, will ameliorate confrontations.

The 1999 and 2002 national parliamentary elections in Turkey display similar patterns of regional political affiliation. Integrating theories of political cleavages with the techniques of electoral geography, this article examines the overlapping cultural and economic constitution of these patterns. Cleavage theories have lacked an explicitly spatial connection between the divisions investigated and the populations these divisions are supposed to represent. Adding this connection and a more significant consideration of the impacts of state administration on these divisions expands cleavage theory's usefulness for electoral geography. In the case of Turkey, cluster analyses of the provincial results from each election display a strong tri-partite regionalization within the electoral geography of the country. By comparing the levels of support for different parties in each region with their respective political platforms, it is found that four major divisions are shaping the electoral geography: religion, ethnicity, regional economic prosperity, and previous state association. This phenomenon is explained in part by the repressive surveillance of a military apparatus that is both secular and Turkish nationalist in orientation and the dependent position of Turkey as a non-core state within the global economic system.

In 1999 the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary became a brutal reality in the lives of borderland inhabitants, when it became the key issue in a crisis of inter-state relations. Mainstream explanations have suggested that the Soviet boundary legacy and convergent post-Soviet macro-economic policies made conflict inevitable. Drawing on critical geopolitics theory, this paper questions the implicit determinism in these accounts, and seeks to augment them by a political analysis. It suggests that ‘the border crisis’ was the product of the interaction of complex domestic power struggles in both countries, the boundary itself acting as a material and discursive site where elites struggled for the power to inscribe conflicting gendered, nationalistic visions of geopolitical identity. It concludes by insisting upon a moral imperative to expose and challenge the geographical underpinnings of state violence.

In the context of the publication of Agenda 2000 and the accelerated progress of the Irish economy from 1993, the Republic of Ireland's1 position in relation to Structural Fund transfers generally, and qualification for Objective 1 status specifically, has undergone substantial revision since 1997. Against this backdrop, Ireland lodged a formal application with Eurostat in November 1998 to divide the country into two regions, one which would continue to qualify for Objective 1 funds, the other qualifying only for “Objective 1 in transition” status. This “regionalisation” strategy proved to generate substantial controversy both within and between the European Union (EU), the Irish government, and existing regional and local authorities and development agencies. These controversies were rooted in the need to transform the highly centralist scale division of the Irish state. At one level, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the significance of these conflicts in the light of recent debate in political geography regarding the conditions which serve to ground the EU's broader philosophy of a Europe of the Regions in particular ways, in particular places, at particular times. More generally, however, in respect to both its chosen methodology and findings, the paper hopes to contribute to the development of a process based approach to the contemporary (re)scaling of governance.

This essay examines the county-level pattern of Florida’s residual votes in the 2000 presidential election, focusing on voting problems in optical scan ballot counties. Differing methods for counting optical scan ballots had a considerable impact on county-level residual vote rates. Differences in residual vote rates were also associated with race and poverty

The United States is one of few contemporary democracies that does not choose its chief executive officer through direct popular vote. Rather, the President of the United States is formally chosen by the Electoral College, and a majority of votes in the Electoral College is required to secure election to the Presidency. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush won a 271–266 majority in the Electoral College despite the fact that his opponent, Al Gore, won about half a million more popular votes.The Electoral College system can be conceptualized as a mechanism by which the results of separate elections in each state and, since 1964, the District of Columbia, can be aggregated to produce a nationwide outcome. It has not experienced major reform since 1804, despite the fact that many critics have regarded the system as archaic, outmoded, and essentially undemocratic. Since the early nineteenth century, more than 600 proposed constitutional amendments concerning the Electoral College system have been proposed and debated in Congress. Some would eliminate the Electoral College system altogether and replace it with direct popular vote. Others would retain the Electoral College system but change the way electors are selected or affect the relationships between popular and electoral votes in each state.Because the popular vote in Florida was very close, and because the remaining states were so closely divided, Florida proved to be the pivotal state in the 2000 presidential election. The closeness and controversy surrounding the Florida outcome has renewed efforts on the part of critics to eliminate or reform the system. However, analysis of the 2000 campaign underscores the fact that both sides based decisions concerning their campaign strategies and allocations of human financial resources in an effort to win an electoral college majority, within the constraints of the present system. It is unlikely that there will be sufficient support to overturn or reform the system through constitutional agreement in the foreseeable future.

Republican Bush trailed Democrat Gore by over 500,000 popular votes in the 2000 presidential election. But Bush narrowly edged Gore in the Electoral College to win the U.S. presidency. Several states, including Florida, were decided by less than 2.5% of popular votes. Maps of popular votes at county level and electoral votes at state level show greater support for Bush in the South and West, and greater support for Gore in metropolitan centres.

Given the social and spatial dynamics of the electoral college, small groups of voters can profoundly shape national outcomes. This paper examines the 2000 election in Florida in three ways. First, it offers historical depth by comparing and contrasting the 2000 and 1876 presidential elections. Second, it portrays the spatial distribution of votes across the state. Third, it applies a combinatorial analysis of the power of small groups of Florida voters to influence the 2000 presidential election to demonstrate the discrepancy between their influence compared to those of voters nationwide.

The ‘perverse’ outcome of the 2000 US Presidential election, whereby the candidate with most ‘popular votes’ was defeated in the Electoral College, has stimulated renewed interest in electoral reform in the United States. One option discussed is the Maine/Nebraska system (sometimes termed the Mundt–Coudert scheme) which changes the geography of the contest somewhat. One-fifth of the Electoral College votes are retained for the winner of the popular vote contest in each of the States, with the remainder being allocated to candidates who win in each of the separate Congressional District contests. This paper evaluates the likely outcome of the 2000 and 2004 Electoral College contests if this scheme had been in place. It shows that the 2000 result would not have been changed, but the 2004 outcome would have been even more favourable to the Republican candidate, because his vote total was much more efficiently distributed than his opponent's.

This paper explores the Holy Year (Jubilee) held in Rome in 2000 in the context of debates about the global nature of cities. It argues that the event clarified the importance of ‘Rome’ to powerful political actors, which crudely correspond to the left-right division of post-war Italian politics, with the Vatican an important player in negotiating this divide. However, it is suggested that the spatial reach of these actors is uneven, yet that both exploit the ‘global’ event as a means of expanding their scalar power. Through a discussion of four aspects of the event—the nature of Rome as a capital city, the role of the mayor, Francesco Rutelli, the Gay Pride march that took place during the Holy Year, and the urban planning debates that surrounded its staging—the politicisation and scalar politics of Rome are elaborated.

Constituency campaigning is an important—though till recently relatively understudied—aspect of electioneering in Great Britain. The paper analyses new evidence of constituency campaigning at the 2001 British General Election. Not only are parties shown to be (on the whole) rational in how they utilise local campaign resources, but those local campaign efforts are also shown to have an impact on actual election outcomes. The more a party campaigns locally, the better it tends to do at an election, other things being equal. Furthermore, survey evidence demonstrates that, over the course of a campaign, whether individual voters are likely to change their electoral choices depends on the extent to which they have been contacted by the parties via constituency campaigns. Voters who are contacted in their constituency by a party are more likely to switch support to that party than are voters who are not contacted.

Urban politics have been reshaped by large-scale immigration. What coalition patterns are likely to arise in an urban environment that has experienced dramatic demographic and political change?This study examines the 2001 and 2005 Los Angeles mayoral primary elections. Such non-partisan primary elections provide effective vehicles to measure core coalitions of citywide candidates. Our dependent variable is voting for Antonio Villaraigosa, a liberal Latino candidate associated with the rise of immigrant communities, running against James Hahn, a white candidate with roots in the African American community. Three core coalitions appeared in the primaries. In both 2001 and 2005, Villaraigosa benefited from a stable coalition that combined Latino mobilization with some white liberal support. Hahn's core was among African Americans although that base had eroded for him by 2005. There was little evidence of a coalition of color in either primary election. A third alliance, a white-led moderate coalition drawing support from neither African Americans nor Hispanics, emerged unexpectedly as having great stability over both elections. If Los Angeles had partisan elections like New York City, candidates riding that coalition would have had a clear path into the general election by winning the Republican primary.A significant spatial dimension emerged in the vote in both primary elections. Racial and ethnic bloc voting was reinforced by the residential concentrations of ethnic groups in Los Angeles. We conclude that space and time are related to each other in the construction and maintenance of political coalitions surrounding immigration.

This article explores the assumptions and practices, especially the role of naming, involved in the geopolitical rhetoric promoting a spatial reordering of the European continent using the idea of Central Europe and its German counterpart, Mitteleuropa, during the 1980s and 1990s. Central to this discussion is the role of ideas, such as East and West or the ‘return to Europe,’ in forming an imagined geopolitical map of Europe’s regions. During this period of transition and realignment, the geopolitics of naming played an important role in discussions surrounding military strategies, national identity, political economy, and diplomacy in Europe. Although often framed as a means to overcome Europe’s East–West dichotomy, the idea of a central space in Europe has served primarily to facilitate movement from one region and identity, the East, to another, the West, by challenging the established imagined regional geography of Cold War Europe. In this respect, the idea of Central Europe has proven to be a powerful rhetorical devise in ultimately helping Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians redefine themselves as Western, and ultimately European, and therefore the leading candidates for membership in Western institutions.

This paper argues for a broadened vision of political agency to consider age as a relevant influence on individuals' political interests and actions and to recognise young people as engaged in the making, negotiation and contestation of global politics. It is not a call to dispense with critical analyses of state power and other structures which circumscribe the potential of social actors to become politically engaged. Yet, it joins feminist theorists in challenging the state-centeredness of (critical) geopolitics' notion of the political and asks that young people's positioning in relation to international politics be acknowledged and understood as geographically and historically situated.

In this article, I analyze the transcripts of Congressional hearings held in 1999, 2001 and 2004 on an Overseas Enumeration Test conducted by the United States Census Bureau in order to evaluate the prospect of including American citizens living abroad in the decennial census. As both citizen groups and state actors attempted to define the proper role of the census as a right (and a rite) of citizenship for Americans living abroad, the debate was framed by two distinct discourses of the function of the census in American society. First, some described participation in the census as an affective practice that is rich in symbolic meaning, one which both affirms individual identity and signifies belonging to the national community. On the other hand, the census was also portrayed as a technical process that must above all be accurate and efficient, with meaning derived from the application of accepted procedures in order to generate statistically valid data. I argue that, although the nation-building and data-generating functions of the census are not inherently contradictory, in this case they could not be reconciled because the population in question does not align with the national territorial borders that guide and delimit census procedures. The difficulty of balancing inclusion and accuracy to expand enumeration beyond territorial borders thus raises questions about the mutually constitutive relationship between territory and techniques of governance.

This paper uses the changing landscape of the addiction treatment system as a way to understand broader trends in welfare state restructuring. Based on a case study of six detoxes in Winnipeg, Hamilton and Toronto (Canada), we seek to understand the degree to which the detox constitutes a space of care that reflects therapeutic aims of facility operators, a space of abeyance, control and containment for larger society, and a space of sustenance for individual clients. Further, we investigate how the shifting relationships between these roles provide insight into broader trends in the structuring and restructuring of the welfare state. Our empirical findings point to a multiple and reworked configuration within detox programs, while conceptually, our tripartite understanding of spaces of treatment serves to caution against totalizing accounts of current welfare state restructuring.

In June 1992, the Australian High Court handed down its judgement in the landmark case of Mabo v Queensland No. 2). Much to the consternation of powerful mining capital, pastoral and state government interests, the majority of the Justices overturned legal precedent and declared that under certain circumstances common law indigenous title to land had survived European conquest. This determination was enthusiastically received by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia on the grounds that it paved the way for a renewed phase of indigenous empowerment and self-determination. The paper places the Mabo judgement in context and, three years on, discusses the question of whether the earlier euphoria was justified.

In considering the complex relationship between science and politics, the article focuses upon the career of the eminent Russian scholar, Lev Semenovich Berg (1876–1950), one of the leading geographers of the Stalin period. Already before the Russian Revolution, Berg had developed a naturalistic notion of landscape geography which later appeared to contradict some aspects of Marxist–Leninist ideology. Based partly upon Berg's personal archive, the article discusses the effects of the 1917 revolution, the radical changes which Stalin's cultural revolution (from the late 1920s) brought upon Soviet science, and the attacks made upon Berg and his concept of landscape geography thereafter. The ways in which Berg managed to defend his notion of geography (sometimes in surprisingly bold ways) are considered. It is argued that geography's position under Stalin was different from that of certain other disciplines in that its ideological disputes may have been regarded as of little significance by the party leaders, certainly by comparison with its practical importance, thus providing a degree of ‘freedom’ for some geographers at least analogous to that which has been described by Weiner (1999. A little corner of freedom: Russian nature protection from Stalin to Gorbachev. Berkeley: University of California Press) for conservationists. It is concluded that Berg and others successfully upheld a concept of scientific integrity and limited autonomy even under Stalinism, and that, in an era of ‘Big Science’, no modernizing state could or can afford to emasculate these things entirely.

Commuting to and from precinct locations can be burdensome, particularly on a busy weekday in congested metropolitan areas when many voters are pressed by the demands of everyday living: work, family and school. Some precinct locations are more accessible than others, and for the less accessible ones, at least some people will feel that the cost to get there outweighs any benefit they may reap in terms of personal satisfaction from having fulfilled a civic obligation. Even after controlling for variables that account for the motivation, information and resource levels of local precinct populations, we find that accessibility does make a significant difference to turnout. The evidence points to a non-linear relationship. Distance imposes its heaviest burden on turnout in suburban precincts in the middle ranges of distance (2–5 miles). In the most rural precincts, where in spite of the distance (6–10 miles), travel routes are direct and relatively unimpeded, turnout rates are higher. We conclude with some policy recommendations that would ease the burden of getting to and from precinct sites on election day.

In this paper, I draw on the politics of scale literature in order to discuss the strategic use of scale as a framing device. I argue that scale-based framings can gain effectiveness through capitalizing on longstanding social inequalities and thus deserve careful consideration for their abilities to reinforce those inequalities and obscure ongoing illness. I discuss the ways in which actors in the present conflict over agricultural pesticide drift in California discursively engage scale in order to reframe the issue and justify (or, in other cases, contest) minimal regulatory response. I argue that the predominant scale-based framing of pesticide drift as a series of particularized, local ‘accidents’ gains its effectiveness through multiple intersections with long-standing social invisibilities and injustices endured by California's farmworkers, with the problematic results of rendering pollution invisible and naturalizing regulatory neglect. I also introduce the efforts of pesticide drift activists to ‘push up’ the framing of the issue, improve their political traction at the statewide level, and justify their demands for precautionary, health-based restrictions on the use of agricultural pesticides. Finally, I conclude by applying this analysis to recent debates for devolved environmental governance and problematizing the tendency to associate local governance and social justice.

In the study of deeply divided societies much emphasis is placed upon the role of the state in generating, controlling and supressing social and political conflict. An alternative emphasis is found in the view that politics in states with divided societies must be concerned with community building, accommodation and the removal of the roots of conflict. In developing this view the theories and structures of consociational democracy have been much discussed since they were outlined by Arendt Lijphart in 1968.Application of the principles of consociationalism to conflict ridden Northern Ireland serves only to highlight its limitations as a means of conflict resolution. Yet the study of the politics of accommodation in Northern Ireland since 1972 through a growing range of consociational policies in local government, education, employment and the voluntary sector points to significant social change. Cross community interaction prioritising non-political and non-constitutional issues set in a variety of non-sectarian contexts has burgeoned and created a social and cultural diversity rarely acknowledged in writings on Northern Ireland.While it can be demonstrated that fundamental social change has occurred the significance of such change for the resolution of conflict and overarching constitutional reform is more difficult to assess. It is concluded that the importance of social change in Northern Ireland lies not so much in the arena of constitutional reform as in its effect upon the para-military groups to sustain successfully violent conflict over a protracted period of time in the future.