TRENDS IN POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT

The sub-discipline of Political Geography has been a small but vibrant section of geographical research in South Africa in the last thirty years. In large measure this reflects the turbulent history of the country as apartheid era planning involved the spatial ordering of society, while the post-apartheid era has witnessed the beginning of the readjustment of that society to a different political philosophy. Thus the broad themes of state partition, government reorganisation, rural resettlement, urban removals and restructuring, segregation, land restitution and international relations have been investigated, amongst others, by local researchers to better understand the complexities of the geography of the country.