ABSTRACT
Introduction Following a period of quiescence there has been a revival of interest on the part of geographers in the questions and issues of political geography. An important source of this revival was the new literature on state theory published in the 1970s (Miliband 1969, Poulantzas 1973, 1978, Holloway & Picciotto 1978). This literature typically did not refer to space in its analyses for the most part, despite being rooted in a macrotheoretic discourse which professed to explain the economic development process under capitalism, deploying neo-Marxist insights to do so. An exception to the general rule that polities as well as economies are often perceived by their analysts to inhabit a dimensionless universe, is found in the work of Poulantzas (see, in particular, Poulantzas 1975, 1978). More will be said about this political theorist’s analytical contribution later in this chapter; suffice it to say for now that his awareness of space as a theoretical construct deepened and broadened the perceptiveness of his theory of the state and, separately, the nation. In the process his work largely neglected by contemporary political geographers, speaks to the centrality of geopolitical thinking in furthering understanding of the modern world.
