Quiz 7 - Political A - Iro

Annexation - legally adding land area to a city in the United States.

Antarctica - What is the political situation for Antarctica? Who if anyone owns / claims it or part of it?

Apartheid - means “apartness;” racial segregation in South Africa.

Balkanization - process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities.

Border landscape - Three types of borders: 1. geometric, 2. physical, and 3. cultural

Boundary disputes or functional dispute - a disagreement between neighboring states over policies to be applied to their common border; often induced by differing customs regulations, movement of nomadic groups, or illegal immigration or emigration.

Boundary Types

antecedent - one drawn across an area before it is well populated, that is, before most of the cultural landscape features were put in place. 

       subsequent - boundary drawn after the development of the cultural landscape.

consequent - a type of a subsequent boundary , also called an ethnographic, where the border drawn is to accommodate existing religious, linguistic, ethnic, or economic differences between countries.

superimposed - a boundary forced on existing cultural landscapes, a country, or a people by a conquering or colonizing power that is unconcerned about preexisting cultural patterns.

relic - a former boundary line that no longer functions as such is still marked by some landscape features or differences on the two sides.

Boundary Definitions

Delimitation - the translation of the written terms of a boundary treaty (the definition) into an official cartographic representation.

Demarcation - the actual placing of a political boundary on the landscape by means of barriers, fences, walls, or other markers.

Boundary Types

natural / physical - those boundaries based on recognizable physiologic features, such as mountains, rivers, and lakes.

       ethnographic / cultural - when the boundary coincides with differences in ethnicity, especially language and religion.

geometric - political boundary defined and delimited as a straight line or an arc.

Buffer state - an independent but small and weak country lying between two powerful countries.

Centrifugal - forces within a state that divide people.

Centripetal - forces within a state that unify people

City-state - a sovereign state comprising a city and its immediate hinterland.

Colonialism - attempt by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles in another territory.

Confederation - a group of states united for a common purpose.

Conference of Berlin, 1884 - What were the consequences of the conference for the continent of Africa?

Core Regions - regions that dominate trade, control the most advanced technologies, and have high levels of productivity within diversified economies.

Periphery Regions - regions with undeveloped or narrowly specialized economies with low levels of productivity.

Decolonization - the acquisition, by colonized peoples, of control over their own territory.

Devolution - the transfer of certain powers from the state central government to separate political subdivisions within the state’s territory.

Domino Theory - if one country in a region chose or was forced to accept a communist political and economic system, then neighboring countries would be irresistibly susceptible to falling to communism.

DMZ - the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

EEZ - exclusive economic zone, as established in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a zone of exploration extending 200 nautical miles (370 km) seaward from a coastal state that has exclusive mineral and fishing rights over it.

Electoral geography - the study of the interactions among space, place, and region and the conduct and results of elections.

Enclave - a piece of territory surrounded by, but not par of, country.

Exclave - a piece of national territory separated from the main body of a country by the territory of another country.

Ethnic enclave - a small area occupied by a distinctive minority culture.

European Union - an economic association established in 1957 by a number of Western European countries to promote free trade among members; often called the Common Market.

Federal State - an internal organization of a state that allocated most powers to units of local government.

Forward-Thrust Capital - a capital city deliberately sited in a state’s frontier zone.

Geopolitics - the branch of political geography treating national power, foreign policy, and international relations as influences by geographic considerations of location, space, resources, and demography.

Gerrymandering - to redraw voting district boundaries in such a way as to give one political party maximum electoral advantage and to reduce that of another party, to fragment voting blocks, or to achieve other non democratic objectives.

Heartland Theory - The belief of Halford MacKinder that the interior of Eurasia provided a likely base for world conquest.

Rimland Theory - The belief of Nicholas Spykman that domination of coastal fringes of Eurasia would provide a base for world

conquest.

International organization - group that includes tow or more states seeking political and /or economic cooperation with each other.

Iron Curtain - Who coined the phrase and which area is included within the iron curtain?