Human Geography - Political Geography University of Amsterdam

Overview

The Master's in Political Geography focuses on three core concepts (geopolitics, globalisation and governance) to explore the political geographies of our globalising world. These pertain to the dynamics of the spatialities of politics, including domestic politics, international relations and transnational politics, and how they can be understood through key geographical concepts such as territory, place, scale and network.

Political Geography: Geopolitics, Globalisation and Governance

The Human Geography - Political Geography programme of the University of Amsterdam will assess theories and methods in these dynamic fields of scholarship and students will be familiarised with political geography and geopolitics before working on their thesis project in the field.

Political Geography will examine the origins, trajectory and contemporary significance of geopolitics, and the varieties of geopolitical approaches to the material and representational aspects of geopolitical agency. Special attention will be devoted to othering processes and the constraining and empowering character of geopolitical representations and geographical imaginations of risks and opportunities. The programme also attempts to account for the role of new technologies such as the internet and the interconnection between the virtual and physical world.

The programme will explore the complex geographies of territory, territorial claims, borders and sovereignty and the way that they are transformed through the ongoing economic, financial, political and cultural processes of globalisation and interconnectivity. The focus will be on specific places and flows.

The programme will also study efforts to develop new systems of multiscalar governance and to combine different types of political and legal systems that address local, national, macro-regional and global challenges of the 21st century