Physical geography is one of the three main branches of geography. Physical geography is the branch of natural science which deals with the processes and patterns in the natural environment such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. This focus is in contrast with the branch of human geography, which focuses on the built environment, and technical geography, which focuses on using, studying, and creating tools to obtain, analyze, interpret, and understand spatial information. The three branches have significant overlap, however.
A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" and the Greek suffix, "graphy", meaning "description", so a geographer is someone who studies the earth. The word "geography" is a Middle French word that is believed to have been first used in 1540.
Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation, or a quasi-federal system.
Sir Halford John Mackinder was a British geographer, academic and politician, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy. He was the first Principal of University Extension College, Reading from 1892 to 1903, and Director of the London School of Economics from 1903 to 1908. While continuing his academic career part-time, he was also the Conservative and Unionist Member of Parliament for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 to 1922. From 1923, he was Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics.
Geostrategy, a subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategies, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends Strategy is as intertwined with geography as geography is with nationhood, or as Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan state it, "[geography is] the mother of strategy."
Robert David Kaplan is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
In the humanities discipline of critical theory, critical geopolitics is an academic school of thought centered on the idea that intellectuals of statecraft construct ideas about places, that these ideas have influence and reinforce their political behaviors and policy choices, and that these ideas affect how people process their own notions of places and politics.
Timothy John Marshall is a British journalist, author, and broadcaster, specialising in foreign affairs and international diplomacy. Marshall is a guest commentator on world events for the BBC, Sky News and a guest presenter on LBC, and was formerly the diplomatic and also foreign affairs editor for Sky News.
John A. Agnew, FBA is a prominent British-American political geographer. Agnew was educated at the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool in England and Ohio State in the United States.
Geoeconomics is the study of the spatial, temporal, and political aspects of economies and resources. Although there is no widely accepted singular definition, the distinction of geoeconomics separately from geopolitics is often attributed to Edward Luttwak, an American strategist and military consultant, and Pascal Lorot, a French economist and political scientist.
Mohammad Reza Hafeznia is a full professor of political geography in Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran. He obtained his Ph.D in political geography from Tarbiat Modares University in 1990.
The sociology of space is a sub-discipline of sociology that mostly borrows from theories developed within the discipline of geography, including the sub fields of human geography, economic geography, and feminist geography. The "sociology" of space examines the social and material constitution of spaces. It is concerned with understanding the social practices, institutional forces, and material complexity of how humans and spaces interact. The sociology of space is an inter-disciplinary area of study, drawing on various theoretical traditions including Marxism, postcolonialism, and Science and Technology Studies, and overlaps and encompasses theorists with various academic disciplines such as geography and architecture. Edward T. Hall developed the study of Proxemics which concentrates on the empirical analysis of space in psychology.
The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. Its publication in 1997 was well received in Russia; it has had significant influence within the Russian military, police forces, and foreign policy elites, and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. Powerful Russian political figures subsequently took an interest in Dugin, a Russian political analyst who espouses an ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist ideology based on his idea of neo-Eurasianism, who has developed a close relationship with Russia's Academy of the General Staff.
Professor Aage Gudmund Hatt was a Danish archaeologist and cultural geographer. He was a professor of cultural geography at the University of Copenhagen from 1929 through 1947. Also an ethnologist, he was the first person to systematically inventory cultural similarities and differences amongst northern peoples.
Cognitive geography is an interdisciplinary study of cognitive science and geography. It aims to understand how humans view space, place, and environment. It involves formalizing factors that influence our spatial cognition to create a more effective representation of space. These improved models assist in a variety of issues, for example, developing maps that communicate better, providing navigation instructions that are easier to follow, utilizing space more practically, accounting for the cultural differences on spatial thinking for more effective cross-cultural information exchange, and an overall increased understanding of our environment.
Geopolitical imaginations are constructed views of the world that reflect the vision of a place's, a country's or a society's role within world politics. Geopolitical imaginations are constituted by shared assumptions and representations of power relations and conflicts in world politics within a certain geographical territory. By critically analyzing how and why these imaginations are constructed, it is possible to reveal underlying power relations and to get a better understanding of various conflicts. Therefore, geopolitical imaginations are closely connected to the academic field of critical geopolitics.
Arctic geopolitics is the area study of geopolitics on the Arctic region. The study of geopolitics deals with the "inalienable relationship between geography and politics", as it investigates the effects of the Earth's geography on politics and international relations. Arctic geopolitics focuses on the inter-state relations in the Arctic, which is the northernmost polar region. It is composed of the Arctic Ocean and its adjacent seas, and is home to around four million people. The states in or bordering the Arctic are commonly referred to as the Arctic Eight, and are the United States, Canada, Russia, Finland, the Kingdom of Denmark (Greenland), Norway, Iceland and Sweden.
The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World is a book on geopolitics by the British author and journalist Tim Marshall. It was published by Elliott & Thompson in 2021 and is the sequel to his 2015 book Prisoners of Geography.
Elaine Stratford is an Australian cultural and political geographer, academic, and author. She is a professor of geography in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences in the College of Sciences and Engineering at the University of Tasmania.
Revaz Gachechiladze is a Georgian academician and professor of Geography at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, recognized for his extensive contributions to the fields of socio-economic and political geography, as well as the geography and geopolitics of the Middle East and the Caucasus.
