Recommended Books on Political Geography
Agnew, John. 1998. Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics. London: Routledge. A leading political geographer critically examines the historical European perspective on world politics and shows how that vision of world order continues to influence geopolitical thinking.
Agnew, John. 2002. Making Political Geography. London: Arnold. This book provides an excellent overview of the field of political geography, highlighting the contributions of key thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present.
Brauer, Jurgen. 2009. War and Nature: The Environmental Consequences of War in a Globalized World. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. This volume explores the hidden costs of violent conflict on the environment by drawing on examples from Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Central Africa, and Afghanistan.
Cohen, Saul Bernard. 2003. Geopolitics of the World System. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. A leading political geographer of the twentieth century looks at the post-cold war world system of the early twenty-first century to explain its political geography.
Herb, Guntram H., and David H. Kaplan (eds.). 1999. Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale. Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield. This collection of essays by 14 leading political geographers focuses on the geographical issue of territoriality using case studies of troubled countries and regions at different scales.
O’Loughlin, John (ed.). 1994. Dictionary of Geopolitics. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. This is a basic reference book on political geography.
Olwig, Kenneth. 2002. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. This is an impressively researched historical study of the importance of landscape in shaping the ideas of nation and national identity in England and the United States.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This collection of Wallerstein’s essays links the collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of U.S. hegemony around the world.