ABSTRACT
Political geography is on the ascendance in part because traditional approaches to understanding and tackling a broad range of current problems have failed. Political geography focuses on how groups interact—particularly the ways they manipulate each other—in the pursuit of controlling resources. Political geography uses an integrative, regional, and spatial framework that pulls together contributions by both physical and social sciences—it is the one traditional discipline that explicitly bridges the two realms of research. Significantly, many of the most pressing political geographic issues are not simply abstract academic concerns. They concern a very fractious world facing the next millennium with such serious and persistent dilemmas as competition among "independent" states within an "interdependent" global economy. Frequent crises, occurring mostly in developing countries, may not lead to nuclear holocaust or send the global economy into a crisis, but they will clearly dominate the UN's agenda and may burst an already strained budget.
