Drawing the Lines
The Berlin Conference established these types of boundaries in North Africa, which typically consist of straight lines that disregard physical or cultural features.
Geometric boundaries
This political entity consists of a single government and a singular ethnic culture, with Iceland and Japan serving as classic examples.
Nation-state
In this form of governance, a strong central government holds most of the power and gives little to no power to regional units.
Unitary state
This term describes a country’s ability to govern itself and make its own political and economic decisions without outside interference.
Sovereignty
This is the term for redrawing voting district boundaries to create a political advantage for a specific party.
This type of map uses various colors or shading to represent different intensities of data, such as population density or literacy rates.
Choropleth map
According to Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration, most long-distance migrants tend to settle in these types of locations.
Large cities / urban areas
This type of culture is traditionally practiced by small, homogeneous groups living in isolated rural areas.
Folk culture
The former border between East and West Germany, which no longer functions but is still visible on the landscape, is an example of this.
Relic boundary
This group, which includes the Kurds, has a common heritage and desire for a homeland but does not have a sovereign territory of its own.
Stateless nation
These forces, such as a common religion or a charismatic leader, work to unify a population and strengthen a state.
Centripetal forces
Regions like Korea and Vietnam were known as these during the Cold War because they were caught in conflicts between global powers.
Shatterbelts
Redistricting determines local representation in this national-scale legislature.
House of Representatives
This map projection is often criticized for distorting the size of landmasses near the poles (making Greenland look as large as Africa) but is useful for marine navigation.
This stage of the Demographic Transition Model is characterized by a rapidly declining death rate and a high birth rate, leading to high natural increase.
Stage 2
This term refers to a language that is mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages.
Lingua france
These boundaries, such as those drawn in Africa by colonial powers, are placed on an area by an outside force without regard to existing cultural patterns.
Superimposed boundaries
The United Kingdom, containing distinct nations like England, Scotland, and Wales under one government, is categorized as this type of state.
Multinational state
These forces, such as linguistic or religious diversity, tend to divide a country and can lead to devolution.
Centrifugal forces
This practice, common in former colonies, occurs when wealthier nations indirectly control a state through economic leases or commercial farming.
Neocolonialism
This process, which occurs every ten years in the U.S. after the census, determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives.
Reapportionment
This scale of analysis is used when comparing data—such as life expectancy or literacy rates—between different countries.
National scale
This migration term describes factors like war, famine, or lack of jobs that cause people to leave their current location.
Push factors
The physical "human imprint" on the environment, such as architecture or sacred sites, is known by this two-word term.
Cultural landscape
Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal states have economic sovereignty over resources up to this many nautical miles from their coast.
200 nautical miles (the Exclusive Economic Zone - EEZ)
This term describes a state whose territory is physically separated into two or more parts, such as the Philippines or Indonesia.
Fragmented state
Russia’s "autonomous republics" are a strategy used to manage this pressure by giving ethnic groups limited self-control.
Devolution
These are the four main shatterbelt regions of the world
Eastern Europe, Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia
The two most common techniques of gerrymandering are known by these two terms.
Packing and Cracking
When data is grouped by large areas like "Sub-Saharan Africa" or "Southeast Asia" to show broad trends, it is using this scale of analysis.
Regional scale
This theory, named after an 18th-century economist, argues that the world’s population will eventually outpace our ability to produce enough food.
Malthusian Theory
This type of religion, such as Christianity or Islam, attempts to appeal to all people regardless of location or culture.
This type of boundary dispute occurs when neighboring states disagree over the interpretation of the legal documents that defined the boundary.
Definitional boundary dispute
This term refers to the process where a state breaks down due to ethnic or cultural conflict, such as what happened to the former Yugoslavia.
Balkanization
Federal states are typically characterized by these two physical and demographic traits.
Large land area and multiple ethnic groups
This organization is one of the most famous example of supranationalism, where member states give up some sovereignty for economic and political benefits.
European Union (EU)
This policy, used historically in South Africa to segregate races, is an example of the extreme political division of a population.
Apartheid
If a geographer is studying the impact of a new zoning law on a specific city neighborhood, they are working at this scale of analysis.
Local scale
This is the name for the number of people who are too young or too old to work (under 15 or over 64) compared to the number of people in their productive years.
Dependency ratio
This process occurs when an idea or innovation spreads from a person of authority or power down to other people or places.
Hierarchical diffusion