At Political Geography, our previous aims and scope served us well for many years, but after discussion among the editorial team, we felt it was time for an update.
The new aims and scope are now available here https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/political-geography/about/aims-and-scope, and you will also find them below.
This revision reflects how the field has evolved, while reaffirming the journal’s commitment to theoretically, empirically, and methodologically rigorous scholarship on the spatial dimensions of politics and the political.
Aims and scope
Political Geography welcomes theoretically, empirically, and methodologically rigorous scholarship that advances understanding of the spatial dimensions of politics and the political. The journal is concerned with political processes in which space is a central object of conceptual, analytical, and empirical inquiry. We welcome work that demonstrates how power is constituted, contested, governed, represented, and transformed through spatial relations, spatial practices, and spatial imaginaries.
The journal publishes contributions from across political geography and related fields, which engage meaningfully with political-geographical debates and show how their arguments contribute to spatial concepts, spatial analysis, or political-geographical explanation. We welcome diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, work at all scales of inquiry, and encourage scholarship from all parts of the world. We also encourage submissions from scholars working in different intellectual traditions, institutional settings, and career stages. Topics may include but are not limited to: bordering and boundary-making; territory, territoriality, and territorialization; sovereignty and state spatiality; scale and scalar politics; place, landscape, and spatial identity; mobility, circulation, and containment; infrastructure and spatial governance; spatial imaginaries and geopolitical representations; the spatialities of environmental and resource politics; urban and regional political formations; the spatialities of feminist, queer, and postcolonial engagements with the political; citizenship, statelessness, and the spatial politics of belonging; elections and spatial analysis of voting patterns; and the spatialities of violence, security, conflict, and resistance.
Interdisciplinary submissions are encouraged, including work in international relations, political science, sociology, history, development studies, political ecology, environmental governance, cultural studies, and related fields, where they engage with political-geographical concepts and make a clear contribution to political-geographical debates. Strong submissions will typically show how spatiality shapes the framing of the research problem, the development of the argument, and the paper’s broader conceptual contribution.
We encourage the submission of full-length, innovative high-quality papers (11,000 words max), in addition to shorter, responsive, and topical editorials and interventions, as well as book review essays and forums.
Filippo Menga 