In the post-World War II era, the emergence of 'area studies' marked a signal development in the social sciences. As the social sciences evolved methodologically, however, many dismissed area studies as favoring narrow description over general theory. Still, area studies continues to plays a key, if unacknowledged, role in bringing new data, new theories, and valuable policy-relevant insights to social sciences. In Comparative Area Studies, three leading figures in the field have gathered an international group of scholars in a volume that promises to be a landmark in a resurgent field. The book upholds two basic convictions: that intensive regional research remains indispensable to the social sciences and that this research needs to employ comparative referents from other regions to demonstrate its broader relevance. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) combines the context-specific insights from traditional area studies and the logic of cross- and inter-regional empirical research. This first book devoted to CAS explores methodological rationales and illustrative applications showing how area-based expertise can link into cutting-edge comparative analytical frameworks.

In the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that Taiwan has witnessed since the 1980s, the focal point in contesting narratives and the key battlefield in the political debates are primarily spatial and place-based. The major fault line appears to be a split between an imposed identity emphasizing cultural origin (China) and an emphasis on the recovery of place identity of 'the local' (Taiwan). Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan explores the ever-present issue of identity in Taiwan from a spatial perspective, and focuses on the importance of, and the relationship between, state spatiality and identity formation. Taking postwar Taiwan as a case study, the book examines the ways in which the Kuomintang regime naturalized its political control, territorialized the island and created a nationalist geography. In so doing, it examines how, why and to what extent power is exercised through the place-making process and considers the relationship between official versions of 'ROC geography' and the islanders' shifting perceptions of the 'nation'. In turn, by addressing the relationship between the state and the imagined community, Bi-yu Chang establishes a dialogue between place and cultural identity to analyse the constant changing and shaping of Chinese and Taiwanese identity. With a diverse selection of case studies including cartographical development, geography education, territorial declaration and urban planning, this interdisciplinary book will have a broad appeal across Taiwan studies, geography, cultural studies, history and politics.

Shedding light on the recent mutations of the Israeli separation policy, whose institutional and spatial configurations are increasingly complex, this book argues that this policy has actually reinforced the interconnectedness of Israelis and Palestinian lives and their spaces. Instead of focusing on the over-mediatized separation wall, this book deals with what it hides: its shadows. Based on fieldwork studies carried out by French, Italian, Israeli, Palestinian and Swiss researchers on the many sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, it highlights a new geography of occupation, specific forms of interconnectedness and power relations between Israeli and Palestinian spaces. It offers a better understanding of the transformation of people's interactions, their experiences and the ongoing economy of exchanges created by the separation regime. This heterogeneous regime increasingly involves the participation of Palestinian and international actors. Grounded in refined decryptions of territorial realities and of experiences of social actors' daily lives this book goes beyond usual political, media and security representations and discourses on conflict to understand its contemporary stakes on the ground.

This book surveys the development of geo-political thought in the twentieth century and relates it to international political developments, as well as examining how sound geopolitical theories are. It considers the work of Mackinder, Hartshorne, and Haushofer and his disciples in Germany who influenced the Nazis; and of more recent developments including Marxist geographical writing.

The LEADER programme, initiated in 1991, aims to improve the development potential of rural areas in the European Union by drawing on local initiatives and skills. Highlighting this unique policy approach, this book presents up-to-date research results on LEADER's achievements and restrictions at the local level in a comparative way in order to discuss its merits and problems. What makes LEADER important is not only that it has a major role in rural development efforts, but also that it has a pioneering role in the new type of governance, participatory democracy. Asking whether LEADER strengthens local democracy or not, this book also looks at how it affects the power balance among stakeholders, between national and local actors and between genders. It questions whether LEADER projects are genuinely grass-root level activities, reflecting local needs and ideals; and if the approach brings local know-how back onto the development agenda in innovations and development activities. Finally, the authors examine the success of dissemination of knowledge within the LEADER programme to other regions.

Is the election result in a constituency affected by the amount of campaign spending there? This book, originally published in 1987 was the first major study of this important question. Based on extensive original research, it addresses two main issues: the impact of constituency campaign spending on election results in Britain: and the question of how that impact changes with the level of spending. The author develops a framework for analysing spending and its impact based upon American analyses of campaign expenditures, and focusses on general election results from 1950-83. Consideration is also given to minor parties and to both local and European elections.

The essays in this collection show how electoral geography has shifted from empiricist activity towards a closer involvement with the wider issues addressed by social scientists. They illustrate the potential contributions that electoral geographers can make towards the understanding of global, national and local societies.

This book, originally published in 1986, shows the importance of geography in international power politics and shows how geopolitical thought influences policy-making and action. It considers the various elements within international power politics such as ideologies, territorial competition and spheres of influences, and shows how geographical considerations are crucial to each element. It considers the effects of distance on global power politics and explores how the geography of international communication and contact and the geography of economic and social patterns change over time and affect international power balances.

The first part of the book is concerned with developing the place perspective. Three dimensions of place are put forward: locale and sense of place describe the objective and subjective dimensions of local social arrangements within which political behaviour is realized; location refers to the impact of the macro-order, to the fact that a single place is one among many and that the social life of a place is embedded in theworkings of the state and the world economy.

The second part of the book provides detailed examinations of American and Scottish politics, using the place perspective. Contrary to the view that place or locality is important only in traditional societies, this book argues that place is of continuing significance in even the most advanced societies. "

The major themes explored in this book, originally published in 1986, are the political resonances of social stratification and change; the growing distance between the working class and the providers of social services; and the role of locality in social reproduction.

The relationship between society and space is the subject of a major debate in developed countries. The key questions are about just how far spatial patterns and local conditions affect social relations and stratification and how far they shape collective action, electoral responses and class.

This classic work is a comprehensive treatment of the world s political frontiers and boundaries, and includes sections on boundaries in the air as well as chapters treating the subject in a regional manner, covering the continets in terms of the evolution of boundaries. "

Within an international framework, this work provides a fully comprehensive approach to the geographical coverage of elections. Numerous applications of ides and concepts from human geography are incorporated into a new political context, illustrating the manner in which electoral patterns reflect and help produce the overall geography of a region or state. Discussions of various topics are well supported by numerous maps and diagrams which help clarify arguemnts and serve to define elections within their basic geographical context.

This volume os about border landscapes, with emphasis on the varying impact that political decision-making and ideological differences can have on the environment at border locations, for example. This volume by political-geography experts from across the globe provides important insights specficially into border landscapes and so serves to further our understanding of aspects of cultural landscapes.

This volume is timely in that it explores key issues which are currently at the forefront of the EU's relations with its eastern neighbours. It considers the impact of a more assertive Russia, the significance of Turkey, the limitations of the Eastern Partnership with Belarus and Moldova, the position of a Ukraine in crisis and pulled between Russia and the EU, security and democracy in the South Caucasus. It looks at the contested nature of European identity in areas such as the Balkans. In addition it looks at ways in which the EU's interests and values can be tested in sectors such as trade and migration. The interplay between values, identity and interests and their effect on the interpretation of europeanisation between the EU and its neighbours is a core theme of the volume. -- .

This book examines federalism and functionalism - two fundamental, yet largely forgotten, theories of international integration. Following the recent outbreak of the war in Ukraine, policy practitioners and scholars have been in search of a deeper understanding of the likely causes of the conflict and its consequences for the European security architecture. Various theories have been deployed to this end, but international and European integration theory remains conspicuously absent. The author shows how the core tenets of integration theories developed after World War I, particularly how they viewed territoriality and geopolitical boundaries, remain as relevant today as they were almost 100 years ago.

Imagined Regional Communities provides an original approach to thinking about the processes of regional integration. Focusing mostly on communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, it develops detailed case studies based on archives, interviews and critical readings of existing texts. These case-studies are related to each other and the overall themes of the book, so that a set of narratives and theoretical elaborations emerge, that critically reformulate understandings of regional communities, statehold and sovereignty.

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. In recent years, the 'city region' has seen a renaissance as the de facto spatial centre of governance for economic and social development. Rich in case study insights, this book provides a critique of city-region building and considers how governance restructuring shapes the political, economic, social and cultural geographies of devolution. Reviewing the Greater Manchester, Sheffield, Swansea Bay City Regions, Cardiff Capital Region and the North Wales Growth Deal, the authors address the tensions and opportunities for local elites and civil society actors. Based on original empirical material, situated within cutting edge academic and policy debates, this book is a timely and lively engagement with the shifting geographies of economic and social development in Britain.

It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term. Arising from a conference under the same title held at Texas Tech University, Carnivalizing Difference seeks to explore the actual and possible relationships between Bakhtinian theory and cultural practice. The introduction explores the changing configurations of our understanding of Bakhtin's work in the context of recent theory and outlines how that understanding can inform, and be informed by, culture both ancient and modern. Eleven articles, spanning a wide range of periods and cultural forms, then address these issues in detail, revealing the ways in which Bakhtinian thought illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but always challenges.

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands explores everyday life and senses of identity and belonging along a contested border whose official functions and local impacts have shifted across the twentieth century. It does so through the accounts of contemporary borderland residents in Ireland and Northern Ireland who shared with us their reflections on and experiences of the border from the 1950s to the present day. Since the border is the product of the partition of the island and the creation of Northern Ireland, its meaning has been deeply entangled with the radically and often violently opposed perspectives on the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and the political reunification of the island. Yet the intensely political symbolism of the border has meant that relatively little attention has been paid to the lived experience of the border, its material presence in the landscape and in people's lives, and its materialisation through the practices and policies of the states on either side. Drawing on recent approaches within historical, political and cultural geography and the cross-disciplinary field of border studies, this book redresses this neglect by exploring the Irish border in terms of its meanings (from the political to the personal) but also, and importantly, through the objects (from tables of custom regulations and travel permits to road blocks and military watch towers) and practices (from official efforts to regulate the movement of people and objects across it to the strategies and experiences of those subject to those state policies) through which it was effectively constituted. The focus is on the Irish border as practised, experienced and materially present in the borderlands.

This book draws together the work of a new community of scholars with a growing interest in carceral geography: the geographical study of practices of imprisonment and detention. It combines work by geographers on 'mainstream' penal establishments where people are incarcerated by the prevailing legal system, with geographers' recent work on migrant detention centres, where irregular migrants and 'refused' asylum seekers are detained, ostensibly pending decisions on admittance or repatriation. Working in these contexts, the book's contributors investigate the geographical location and spatialities of institutions, the nature of spaces of incarceration and detention and experiences inside them, governmentality and prisoner agency, cultural geographies of penal spaces, and mobility in the carceral context. In dialogue with emergent and topical agendas in geography around mobility, space and agency, and in relation to international policy challenges such as the (dis)functionality of imprisonment and the search for alternatives to detention, this book presents a timely addition to emergent interdisciplinary scholarship that will prompt dialogue among those working in geography, criminology and prison sociology.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of water resource management in the Omo-Turkana Basin, linking together biophysical, socioeconomic, policy, institutional and governance issues in a solutions-oriented manner. The Omo-Turkana Basin is one of the most important lake basins in Africa, and despite the likely transboundary impacts associated with the management of dams, it is the largest lake basin in Africa without a cooperative water agreement. This volume provides a foundation for integrated decision-making in the management of development in the Lake Turkana Basin. Chapters cover water-related conditions, hydropower, agriculture, ecosystems, resilience and transboundary governance. The final chapter proposes ways forward in light of the potential benefits that can be achieved through cooperation, and practical realities that cooperation is slow and may take time to achieve. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of water and natural resource management, environmental policy, sustainable development and African studies. It will also be relevant to water management professionals.

Boundaries are inherently artificial - they interpose barriers between people which do not exist by any fundamental law of human organization. The contrast between the intentions of those who police boundaries and those who are affected by them is part of the paradoxical nature of boundaries throughout the world. In Africa the paradoxes were accentuated, as colonial powers constructed new boundaries for their own purposes, altering the pre-colonial perceptions of the boundary and its functions.;This study discusses the development and function of African boundaries from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Beginning with the historical perspective, the book then considers the impact of boundaries on pastoralists, the use of borders as "cordons sanitaire" against diseases, the perception of political space and the role of borders as places of residence and refuge. The book examines borders in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia and Zaire.;Finally, European comparisons are drawn in order to assess the extent to which African boundaries are unusual, and to make an assessment of their future development.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Condominium and comparable legal architectures make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way? Geographer and architect Megan Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents' accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardize residents' experience of home and stigmatize renters. As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development's overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium's prospects.