ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on geographic scale. Geographic scale is a key component in all political struggles. Geographic scale is the scope of economic, social, and political interactions within different and nested structural layers. The history of political geography is a story of the changing emphasis on various geographic scales over time. Instead, political geography became increasingly irrelevant as economic growth at home and the rise of a superpower standoff and relative international peace took conflict off of geography's agenda for a while. The initial interest of political geography was the political organization of space under the rubric of geopolitics. In the late 1960s political geographers began to define themselves in a way that would allow them to engage in contemporary political conflicts and, over time, reinsert political geography as an integral component of social science. These are exciting times for political geography not only because of changes in the world but also because we view them differently.
