Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   Geographers are fascinated with the ways in which political identities are constituted in and through space and place. Early interest in this area mirrored conventional geopolitical analyses of territory, states, and nations, while more recently geographers have begun to explore a variety of issues such as public space, mobility, and war. Geographical research thus has moved away from an analysis that presumes the centrality of the nation state to examine the theoretical and substantive politics of grounded research that is also attuned to global issues. Significant among these contributions has been the examination of the co-constitutive production and reproduction of spaces across a range of scales ( Massey 2005 ). How identities take shape and crystallize is always a political project, and geographers have been concerned with both the power and the marginalization associated with identity making and their implications for social justice (e.g., Smith 1994 ; Sibley 1995 ; Harvey 1997 ). This essay begins with a broad overview of the work on geographies of political identity and draws attention to significant theoretical influences. It then turns to highlight four prominent and inherently political themes of analysis: nation states and nationalism; global identities; citizenship and the public sphere; and war and security. This thematic approach is ... log in or subscribe to read full text