Political Geography ( track in Human Geography) detailed description of the track
Political Geography at the UvA means: - geopolitics, globalisation and governance (G3) - a comparative perspective on places in the global North & South - small-scale education - great diversity of students
Geopolitics, globalisation and governance The Master programme Political Geography focusses on three core notions, Geopolitics, Globalization, and Governance, to explore the political geographies of our globalizing world. These pertain to the dynamics of the spatialities of politics, both domestic politics, international relations and transnational politics, as they can be understood through key geographical concepts such as territory, place, scale and network. Key political geographical themes include territorial conflicts, war and peace, polarizing mobilizations such as nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and pacification arrangements such as federalism, consocionalism and supranational integration, identities and languages, natural resources and population, finance and media.
Drawing on case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, students will develop a nuanced and critical understanding of the literature on these political geographical themes. The programme will assess theories and methods in these dynamic fields of scholarship and students will be familiarized with the state-of-the-art of political geography and geopolitics before they start working on their thesis project in the field.
Geopolitics
The programme will examine the origins, trajectory and contemporary significance of geopolitics, and the varieties of geopolitical approaches of the material and representational aspects of geopolitical agency. Special attention will be devoted to Othering processes and to the constraining and empowering character of geopolitical representations and geographical imaginations of risks and opportunities in the age of Anthropocene as well as to attempts to account for the role of new technologies such as the internet and the interconnection between virtual and physical world.
Globalisation Second, Political Geography will explore the complex geographies of territory, territorial claims, borders and sovereignty and the way they are transformed through the ongoing economic, financial, political, and cultural processes of globalization and interconnectiveness. The focus will be on specific places and specific flows. Borderlands and cross-border interactions as well as “super diverse” sites such as capital cities and global cities are places particularly affected by these globalization processes. Financial and migration flows are particularly disrupting for territorial political systems. Displaced peoples (within countries or across borders) will be conceived both as security issue and potential agents of change. As a result of these globalization processes, relations between places, between states, and between world regions are renegotiated affecting the relative position of specific countries such as the Netherlands and continents such as Europe.
Governance Finally the track will study efforts and to develop new systems of multiscalar governance and to combine different types of political and legal systems to address local national macro-regional and global challenges of the 21st century. Besides states and international governmental organisations, non-governmental organisations and social movements are important actors, and (transnational) citizenship, grassroots mobilisations and forms of resistance counterbalance political mobilization from above. This leads to different multiscalar configurations of topographical and topological orders.
Studying in Amsterdam Studying Political Geography at the Graduate School of Social Sciences means studying at the University of Amsterdam, the only university in the Netherlands offering Political Geography as specialization. The Graduate School of Social Sciences offers both the connection to other Human Geography disciplines urban, economic and environmental geography, as well as the connection to the master programmes of political science. Amsterdam is great place to conduct research in Political Geography, with a dense network of NGOs and close to major sites of international governance (The Hague and Brussels). On top of that the Graduate School of Social Sciences, teaches the highest ranked master programs geography in continental Europe and offers a vibrant international academic community: roughly 1/3 of the master programme is non-Dutch.
Academic Staff Dr Virginie Mamadouh, Dr. Inge van der Welle and Dr Yves van Leynseele.