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STATES & NATIONS
BOUNDARIES
THE SHAPE OF STATES
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
FORCES & DEVOLUTION
100
A politically organized territory with defined borders, a permanent population, and a sovereign government.
What is a state? MC TIP — State = the political container. Nation = the people. Country is the everyday word for state. AP uses the technical meanings.
100
A boundary drawn along a river, mountain range, or other natural feature.
What is a physical (natural) boundary? MC TIP — Physical boundaries look permanent but rivers move and mountain passes get contested. Expect that as the wrinkle.
100
A state that is roughly round with a capital near the center, minimizing internal distance.
What is a compact state? MC TIP — Compact is the most efficient shape for communication and defense. Poland and Uruguay are the go-to examples.
100
A government where power is concentrated in a single central authority.
What is a unitary state? MC TIP — Unitary works best in small, culturally homogeneous states. France is the classic. It struggles in large multinational ones.
100
Forces that pull a state together — a shared language, a national holiday, a unifying infrastructure network.
What are centripetal forces? MC TIP — Centripetal pulls to the CENTER. Centrifugal flings apart. Every Unit 4 FRQ wants examples of each, not definitions.
200
A group of people with a shared culture, history, and attachment to a territory.
What is a nation? MC TIP — A nation does not require a government or a border. The Kurds and the Palestinians are nations without states.
200
A boundary following a line of latitude or longitude, common in Africa and the western United States.
What is a geometric boundary? MC TIP — Geometric boundaries ignore culture, which is why colonial-era straight lines in Africa produced so many multinational states.
200
A state with a long, narrow extension of territory — Namibia's Caprivi Strip or Thailand's southern arm.
What is a prorupted state? MC TIP — Proruptions exist for a reason: resource access, coastline access, or to separate two neighbors. Name the PURPOSE.
200
A government where power is shared between a central authority and regional subdivisions.
What is a federal state? MC TIP — Federalism is the standard answer for accommodating regional diversity — and the standard fix proposed for devolutionary pressure.
200
Forces that divide a state — ethnolinguistic division, uneven development, or a separatist movement.
What are centrifugal forces? MC TIP — The strongest centrifugal force in the CED is uneven economic development between regions. Catalonia and northern Italy both fit.
300
A state whose population is overwhelmingly one nation — Iceland, Japan, and Denmark are the standard examples.
What is a nation-state? MC TIP — True nation-states are RARE. Any answer claiming a large diverse country is a nation-state is almost always wrong.
300
A boundary drawn to separate speakers of different languages or members of different religions.
What is a cultural (ethnographic) boundary? MC TIP — The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines is the standard example — and the standard illustration of what goes wrong.
300
A state that is long and narrow, like Chile or Vietnam, making national governance difficult.
What is an elongated state? MC TIP — Elongated states suffer communication and transportation costs and often show strong regional identities — a centrifugal force.
300
The transfer of power from a central government to regional or local governments.
What is devolution? MC TIP — Scotland's Parliament, Catalonia, and Quebec are the examples. Devolution can defuse separatism or feed it — AP asks which.
300
A movement by a cultural group to gain independence or autonomy from the state it belongs to.
What is a separatist (autonomist) movement? MC TIP — Separatism plus a stateless nation plus uneven development is the standard causal chain AP wants written out.
400
The right of a state to govern its territory without outside interference.
What is sovereignty? MC TIP — Sovereignty is what supranational organizations, terrorism, and devolution all challenge — the through-line of the whole unit.
400
A boundary drawn before an area is populated — the U.S.-Canada border west of the Great Lakes.
What is an antecedent boundary? MC TIP — The four evolution types: antecedent (before settlement), subsequent (drawn as culture develops), superimposed (forced on top, ignoring culture), relict (no longer functions but still visible).
400
A state completely surrounded by another state, like Lesotho inside South Africa.
What is an enclave? MC TIP — South Africa is PERFORATED by Lesotho. Lesotho itself is an enclave and also landlocked — an economic disadvantage AP asks about.
400
Drawing electoral district boundaries to give one group an unfair advantage.
What is gerrymandering? MC TIP — Three flavors: cracking (split a bloc), packing (concentrate a bloc), and stacking. Redistricting follows the census; gerrymandering is the abuse of it.
400
A state's claim to territory in a neighboring state occupied by its own ethnic kin.
What is irredentism? MC TIP — Irredentism is the aggressive cousin of separatism — the claim comes from OUTSIDE the territory looking in.
500
A nation spread across more than one state, like the Kurds across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
What is a stateless nation? MC TIP — Stateless nations generate irredentism and separatist movements — the causes behind half the unit's conflict examples.
500
The four-step process of creating a boundary: define it in a treaty, draw it on a map, mark it on the ground, and enforce it.
What are definition, delimitation, demarcation, and administration? MC TIP — Know the order. A boundary can be delimited without ever being demarcated — which is exactly how disputes start.
500
A state composed of several discontinuous pieces of territory separated by water or another country — Indonesia or the Philippines.
What is a fragmented state? MC TIP — Fragmentation raises the cost of unity and makes separatism easier. Indonesia and East Timor is the worked example.
500
Redrawing congressional district boundaries after each census so districts have roughly equal population.
What is redistricting? MC TIP — Apportionment assigns SEATS to states; redistricting draws the LINES. AP distinguishes them.
500
The European Union, NATO, and the United Nations are all examples of this kind of organization.
What is a supranational organization? MC TIP — Supranationalism trades some sovereignty for economic or security benefits. Brexit is the CED's example of the backlash.