Shattered Spaces of Political Geography
Shattered Spaces of Political Geography

Summary/Abstract: Political geography is a field located at the frontier between geography and political science. Considering this, one could expect that cross-fertilization occurs across the two fields. Unfortunately, what we see is rather a different picture – that of mutual neglect, or worse implicit antipathy. This paper aims to discuss deeper cleavages that separate the field and to suggest some possible remedies. The key cleavages we analyse are: the broader goals of the social science; epistemological preferences; preferences for nomothetic vs. idiographic knowledge and preferences for description and interpretation vs. explanation; and attitudes towards methodologies. The paper illustrates these cleavages via a short comparative analysis of two papers (one written by a geographer, the other by a political scientist) that have similar research goals and general research designs. Greater attention to counterfactuals on the side of geographers, and greater willingness to consider more ideographic and descriptive pieces on the side of political scientists, are among the suggested ways to overcome this unproductive separation of political geography and political science.

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