"A very good overview. Covers the key topics well and in an accessible and engaging style."
- Dr Daniel Hammett, Department of Geography, Sheffield University

This is a revised and updated edition of a core undergraduate resource for political geography. Focusing on the social and cultural while systematically overviewing the entire discipline, Joe Painter and Alex Jeffrey explain:

• Politics, geography, and 'political' geography: power, resources, institutions, and the history of the field
• State formation: classical views alongside recent work on governance and governmentality
• Welfare to workfare state: the restructuring of present state strategies
• Democracy, citizenship and law: different models of democracy in European and global contexts
• Identity and social movements: the relation between identity and political action
• Nationalism and regionalism: ethnicity, national identity and "otherness"
• Imperialism and post-colonialism: from world systems theory to post-structuralist accounts
• Geopolitics: the political, economic, and strategic significance of geography.

Comprehensive, accessible and illustrated with real world examples, Political Geography provides undergraduates with a thorough understanding of the relationship between geography and politics.

Professor Joe Painter focuses mainly on the prosaic geographies of the state.