Vocabulary from pages 342-359

Federal state

A federal state allocates power to units of local government within the country. The United States is a federal state with its system of state, county, and city/town government.

Unitary state

A federal state can be contrasted with a unitary state, in which power is concentrated in the central government. The Russian state under the czar was a unitary state but a federated state as the USSR.

Theocracy

A form of government in which a god or deity is recognized as the civil ruler and religious leaders administer policy and interpret laws based on a divine commission.

Democracy

A form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally—either directly or indirectly through elected representatives—in the proposal, development, and creation of laws. The term comes from the Greek and means 'rule of the people.

Oligarchy

A form of government where power is concentrated in the hands of a few people (and this can be based on wealth, royalty, family, education, religious, corporate or military control).

Republic

A system in which power resides in the people who elect leaders to run the government.

Autocracy

A system of government in which supreme power is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are not subject to external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control.

Monarchy

A system of government where authority is embodied in one individual. In governments where the monarch has no or few legal restraints, it is an absolute monarchy and is a form of autocracy. Monarchs usually have hereditary rights to the throne.

Michel Foucault and discourse

A theorist who has also been a significant influence on political geography is Michel Foucault who pushed Althusser's ideas further by exploring just how the various institutions of the state operate to do the work of shaping citizens. Foucault examined how power, knowledge, and discourse operate in concert to produce particular kinds of subjects: citizens, women, soldiers, terrorists. For Foucault, discourse is made through the rules, identities, practices, exclusions, and a range of other elements that form a way of thinking about something. For example, an army turns civilians into soldiers through the combination of power (in the form of both force and cooperation) and knowledge (accumulated insights about training, discipline, and warfare). The result is an institutional way of thinking that make large numbers of individuals function as an effective group.

Uni-national

A very limited number of nation-states are uni-national; Iceland is one of the few that are. Since World War I, it has become increasingly common for groups of people sharing an identity different from the majority, yet living within the same political unit with the majority, to agitate to form their own state. This has been the case with the Québecois in Canada and the Basques in Spain.

Land vs. water

According to the political geography that underpins international law, land can be developed and policed, and therefore may be claimed by individual states. Water is different. It can't be adequately developed or policed by any single state; it is designated as a global commons where ships of any state can navigate freely.

Administrative/governmental territories

Administrative and governmental territories are often "nested," with one set of territories fitting within the larger framework of another, as in this example of region, department, arrondissement, canton, and commune in France.

Colonial penetration

Although colonial penetration often results in political dominance by the colonizer, such is not always the case. For example, Britain may have succeeded in setting up British colonial communities in China, but it never succeeded in imposing British administrative or legal structures in any widespread way. And at the end of the colonial era, a few former colonies, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, became core states themselves. Others, such as Rwanda, Bolivia, and Cambodia, remain firmly within the periphery. Some former colonies, such as Mexico, India and Brazil, have come close to the core but have not fully attained core status and are categorized as being within the semiperiphery.

Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC)

Although the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, that ocean and land are frozen for much of the year. And for the indigenous inhabitants of the area as well as other people living in the region, this makes a world of difference. Indigenous peoples in the Arctic make their homes on both land and water. Their "home" is not the territory of one of the five states with Arctic land (Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States). Rather, it is a complex, continually freezing and thawing mosaic of land, water, and ice that cannot be represented by a typical Western map that defines land as territory and water as beyond territory's limits. The largest political grouping of northern indigenous people, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), recognizes this disjuncture between the geography of the world map and the geography of their own lives. The ICC acknowledges the sovereignty of the five states that control pieces of Arctic land. However, it maintains that these states' sovereignty should legally recognize that the home-space of the Inuit includes ice, water, and land that exist across and outside—as well as within—the borders of individual states. For the ICC, the Arctic presents a new political geography that requires a new kind of map.

Louis Althusser

An especially influential state theorist whose work has inspired a large number of political geographers is Louis Althusser who developed an approach that identifies the operations of the state in two ways: 1. Recognizing the state as an ideological force operating through the institutions of the schools, the media, the family, and religion to produce citizens who conform to state expectations 2. Viewing the state as repressive through different institutions like the courts, army, and the police, to compel citizens to comply with its rules These two related aspects of a model for understanding the state have been employed by political geographers in a number of ways, but perhaps the most common is to explore how the spaces of these various institutions, such as the school or the family, are produced and operate to shape citizens.

The extension of British rule in India

An example of colonialism is the extension of British rule in India, which began with the establishment of the East India Trading Company in the mid-eighteenth century. The British government gave the company the power to establish forts and settlements, as well as to maintain an army. The company soon established settlements—including factories—in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Chennai (formerly Madras), and Calcutta. What began as a small trading and manufacturing operation burgeoned over time into a major military, administrative, and economic presence by the British government and did not end until Indian independence in 1947. During that 200-year period, Indians were brutalized and killed and their society transformed by British influence. That influence permeated all aspects of daily life and institutions from language and judicial procedure to cultural identity.

The revolutionary fervor that spread across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011

An illustration of geopolitics and the relationship of a national population to its state.

Giles Deleuze

Another state theorist important to geographers is Giles Deleuze. Different from Althusser and Foucault but building on their work, he recognizes that: 1. The state is not just a set of institutions—the courts, the legislature, the military, and so on—but a force and 2. The force is greater than formal institutions at the same time that it works through them For Deleuze, the state is not a thing but a principle that works by way of authority. Deleuze rejects the commonly held view that the state was "created" during a particular period of human history and then expanded its power over time. He contends that the state has always existed in different forms, even before the emergence of the institutions by which we most clearly recognize it now. Deleuze believes that the state is best thought of as a machine, with its purpose being to regulate and dominate. This machine of the state operates through mundane practices that produce a population willing to submit to authority whether a police officer, a forest ranger, a teacher, or a president.

Antarctic Treaty of 1961

Antarctica is a continent with no indigenous inhabitants. It is almost impossible to reach for long portions of the year due to weather conditions; agriculture is out of the question; no military could police its vast distances; and if resource extraction were ever attempted it would prove exceptionally challenging. Antarctica is probably more remote and hostile to human habitation than most of the ocean. Nonetheless, when national governments began to recognize that there was a mass of land beneath the Antarctic ice cap, they sent scientists and explorers to claim it. By the middle of the twentieth century, Antarctica was beginning to emerge as a site of geopolitical competition. Recognizing that the impact of an all out war for Antarctica could be catastrophic while the benefits of "winning" the war would be few, treaty negotiations commenced. Negotiators quickly came to terms with the fact that although Antarctica was land and thus hypothetically parts of it could be claimed by individual states, the continent as a whole was well suited for a collective governance system. That collective governance put a limit on individual claims so that all states could continue non-exclusive use, much like the governance system that prevails in the ocean. The resulting Antarctic Treaty of 1961 established Antarctica as a scientific preserve where military activities are banned and the rights of scientists from all nations are guaranteed.

Biopolitics

Biopolitics is the extension of state power over the physical and political bodies of a population. Most often attributed to Foucault, biopolitics or biopower is also associated with political theorists who preceded him as well as those who wrote simultaneously with and after him. The key objective of biopolitics is to regulate the national population—the social body—by shaping the individuals that constitute it. Biopolitics operates through monitoring, recording, categorizing and policing to optimize the vitality of the population and ensure a healthy workforce. As a result, the population is sorted according to differences such as age, gender, ethnicity, race, health status, income, household size, and so on. The census is a massive undertaking meant to produce statistical data on these differences. A contemporary extension of demographic monitoring might be seen in the increasing ability to manipulate life at the molecular level through recombinant genetics or the ability to select for particular traits through assisted reproductive technology.

Inclusionary [boundaries]

Boundaries are normally inclusionary. That is, they are constructed to regulate and control specific sets of people and resources within them.

Exclusionary [boundaries]

Boundaries can also be exclusionary. They are designed to control people and resources outside them.

Boundaries

Boundaries enable territoriality to be defined and enforced and allow conflict and competition to be managed and channeled. The creation of boundaries is, therefore, an important element in making political territories. Once established, boundaries tend to reinforce spatial exclusion as well as differentiation. The outcomes result partly from different sets of rules, both formal and informal, that apply within different territories, and partly because boundaries often restrict contact between people and foster the development of stereotypes about "others." This restricted contact, in turn, reinforces the role of boundaries in regulating and controlling conflict and competition between territorial groups. Boundaries can be established in many ways and with differing degrees of permeability.

Citizenship

Citizenship is a category of belonging to a state that includes civil, political, and social rights. Citizenship is bound up with a complex legal apparatus that determines who can and who cannot join the nation.

Colonialism

Colonialism is a form of imperialism. It involves the formal establishment and maintenance of rule by a sovereign power over a foreign population through the establishment of settlements. From the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries, colonialism constituted an important component of core expansion. Between 1500 and 1900, the primary colonizing states were Britain, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and France. Important states more recently involved in colonization and imperialist wars include the United States and Japan.

Governance

Different from government, governance refers to the norms, rules and laws that are invoked to regulate a people or a state. Governance is also thought by scholars to exceed explicit regulations and include strategies, tactics, and processes for controlling the population of a nation or some other organization of individuals. Governance includes a wide range of public and private entities from states to NGOs.

Territory

Encompassed within a clearly defined territory, all sorts of activity can be controlled and regulated—from birth to death. The delimited area—which may include both land and water, and even airspace—over which a state exercises control and which is recognized by other states is territory. The space over which a state rules should not be confused with a non-sovereign geographic unit that possesses rights and protections through its relationship with a state. This entity is identified by the word territory as well. The rules by which territories are able to participate in the government of their respective states differ from one state to another.

Formal boundaries

Established in international law, delimited on maps, demarcated on the ground, fortified, and aggressively defended against the movement not only of people but also of goods, money, and even ideas. An example of this sort of boundary is the ones between the United States and Mexico and the United States and Canada. Generally speaking, formal boundaries tend first to follow natural barriers, such as rivers, mountain ranges, and oceans. Good examples of countries with important mountain-range boundaries include France and Spain (the Pyrenees); Italy and France, Switzerland, and Austria (the Alps); and India and Nepal and China (the Himalayas). Chile, though, provides the ultimate example: a cartographic freak, restricted by the Andes to a very long and relatively thin strip along the Pacific coast. Examples of countries with boundaries formed by rivers include China and North Korea (the Yalu and Tumen), Laos and Thailand (the Mekong), and Zambia and Zimbabwe (the Zambezi). Similarly, major lakes divide Canada and the eastern United States (along the Great Lakes), France and Switzerland (Lake Geneva), and Kenya and Uganda (Lake Victoria). Formal boundaries often detour from straight lines and natural barriers to accommodate special needs and claims. Colombia's border, for instance, was established to contain the source of the Orinoco River; the Democratic Republic of Congo's border was established to provide a corridor of access to the Atlantic Ocean.

The last frontier - Antarctica

Even the uninhabitable terrain of Antarctica has become a site for competition among states. The radial lines delineating the various claims bear no relationship to the physical geography of Antarctica; rather, they are cartographic devices designed to formalize and legitimate colonial designs on the region. The overlay—the radiating lines from the center of the landmass—reflect claims by those states to have exclusive access to the mineral wealth the mineral wealth of the continent and the drive behind much of the territorial claims.

Field boundaries

Field boundaries can regulate access to pasture

Frontier region

Frontier regions occur where boundaries are very weakly developed. They involve zones of underdeveloped territoriality, areas that are distinctive for their marginality rather than for their belonging. In the nineteenth century, vast frontier regions still existed—major geographic realms that had not yet been conquered, explored, and settled (such as Australia, the American West, the Canadian North, and sub-Saharan Africa). All of these are now largely settled, with boundaries set at a range of jurisdictional levels from individual land ownership to local and national governmental borders. Only Antarctica, virtually absent of permanent human settlement, exists today as a frontier region in this strict sense of the term.

Multinational states

Given that nations were created out of very diverse populations, it is not surprising that almost no entirely pure nation-states exist today. Rather, multinational states—states composed of more than one regional or ethnic group—are the norm. Spain is such a multinational state (composed of Catalans, Basques, Gallegos, and Castilians), as are France, Kenya, the United States, and Bolivia.

Government

Government is the body or group of persons who run the administration of a country. There are various forms of government that differ according to where the decision-making power is held, who elects the decision-making power, and how power is distributed

Citizenship

Having citizenship status is your access to a whole set of rights. Without citizenship you'd live in an identity limbo unable to register for a new semester, get a job, drive legally, travel by air or open a checking account, just to name the most obvious limits.

Nation

In contrast to a state, a nation is a group of people sharing certain elements of culture, such as religion, language, history, or political identity. Members of a nation recognize a common identity, but they need not reside within a common geographical area.

Totalitarian

In this system, the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever possible. Totalitarianism differs from dictatorships in that totalitarianism concerns the scope of the governing power, whereas dictatorships are defined by the source of the governing power.

Informal, implied boundaries

Informal, implied boundaries are set by markers and symbols but never delineated on maps or in legal documents. Good examples are the "turf" of a city gang, the "territory" of an organized crime "family," or the range of a pastoral tribe.

Geopolitics

It was also during the late nineteenth century that foreign policy as a focus of state activity began to be studied. This new field came to be called geopolitics. Geopolitics is the state's power to control space or territory and shape international political relations. Within the discipline of geography, geopolitical theory originated with Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). Ratzel was greatly influenced by the theories embodied in social Darwinism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. His model portrays the state as behaving like a biological organism, with its growth and change seen as natural and inevitable. Ratzel's views continue to influence theorizing about the state today through the conviction that geopolitics stems from the interactions of power and territory. Although it has evolved since Ratzel first introduced the concept, geopolitical theory has become one of the cornerstones of contemporary political geography and state foreign policy more generally. And, although the organic view of the state has been abandoned, the twin features of power and territory still lie at the heart of political geography. Geopolitics may involve the extension of power by one group over another. Two ways this may occur are through the related processes of imperialism and colonialism.

The Kurds

Kurds are another widely known as a population that lacks their own state, though their case is an encouraging one as it seems that Kurdistan, "the land of the Kurds" a geo-cultural region where Kurdish people form a prominent minority, will be able to establish an independent nation state in the near future.

Land-use zoning boundaries

Land-use zoning boundaries can regulate access to upscale neighborhoods

Citizen

Modern citizenship as a political category was a product of the popular revolutions—from the English Civil War to the American War of Independence—that transformed monarchies into republics. In the process, these revolutions produced the need to reimagine the socially and culturally diverse population occupying the territory of the state. Where once they were considered subjects with no need for a unified identity, nationhood required of these same people a sense of an "imagined community," one that rose above divisions of class, culture, and ethnicity. This new identity was called citizen, and citizenship came to be based on a framework of civil, political, and social rights and responsibilities.

Monarchial political power

Monarchical political power is derived from force and subjugation; republican political power derives from the support of the governed.

Bedoon

More than 100,000 Bedoon in Kuwait live without a nationality despite the fact that they constitute ten percent of the country's population. In Kuwait, the term Bedoon means "without a state." Some Bedoon were originally nomadic people who lived and prospered in the deserts for centuries but have since been settled into villages and cities. The government is concerned that such people don't legally belong in Kuwait and should be returned to Iran or Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. Whatever the case, Kuwait's Bedoon live there without any legal rights despite the fact that they made up over 80 percent of the Kuwaiti Army during the 1990s, the period in which Kuwait was at war with Iraq.

Municipal boundaries

Municipal boundaries may separate different tax structures or even access to alcohol

National boundaries

National boundaries can control the flow of immigrants or imported goods

Nationalism

Nationalism emerges out of a desire for autonomy. Nationalism is the feeling of belonging to a nation, as well as the belief that a nation has a natural right to determine its own affairs. Nationalism can accommodate itself to very different social and cultural movements, from the white supremacy movements in the United States and Europe to the movements for independence in China such as Tibet. The impact of minority nationalism on the world map was especially pronounced during the twentieth century.

Imperialism

Over the last 500 years, imperialism has resulted in the political or economic domination of strong core states over the weaker states of the periphery. Imperialism does not necessarily imply formal governmental control over the dominated area; it may also involve a process by which some countries pressure the independent governments of other countries to behave in certain ways. This pressure can take many forms, such as military threat, economic sanctions, or cultural domination. Imperialism always involves some form of authoritative control of one state by another. The process of imperialism begins with exploration, often prompted by the state's perception that there is a scarcity or lack of a critical natural resource. It culminates in development via colonization or the exploitation of indigenous people and resources, or both. In the first phases of imperialism, the core exploits the periphery for raw materials. As the periphery becomes developed, colonization may occur and economies based on money transactions—or "cash economies"—may be introduced where none previously existed. The periphery may also become a market for the manufactured goods of the core. Eventually, though not always, the periphery—because of the availability of cheap labor, land, and other inputs to production—can become a new arena for large-scale capital investment. Some peripheral countries improve their status and become semiperipheral or even core countries.

Political geography

Political geography is not just about global or international relationships. It is also about the many other geographic and political divisions that stretch from the globe to the neighborhood and to the individual body. Political geography is a long-established subfield of geography. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is often considered the first political geographer. His model of the state is based upon factors such as climate, terrain, and the relationship between population and territory. Other important political geographers have, over the years, promoted theories of the state that incorporate elements of the landscape and the physical environment as well as the population characteristics of regions. They believed that states consolidated and fragmented based on complex relationships among and between factors such as population size and composition, agricultural productivity, land area, and the role of the city. The factors were deemed important to state growth and change. Why these factors were identified as central undoubtedly had much to do with the widespread influence of Charles Darwin on intellectual and social life. His theory of competition inspired political geographers to conceptualize the state as a kind of biological organism that grew and contracted in response to external factors and forces.

Republican government

Republican government, as distinct from monarchy, requires the democratic participation and support of its population.

Virtual (technologically generated) boundaries that fortify the territorial ones

Since 9/11, the relevance of policing national borders with respect to international travel has grown dramatically. States across the world, led by front-runners like Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have been instituting a wide range of practices to secure borders by electronic screening. By way of passports that contain RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, as well as retinal scanning and related biometrics (electronic technologies for recognizing an individual based on one or more physical or behavioral elements), state agencies are increasingly able to know more and more personal information about travelers. These practices have the effect of creating virtual (technologically generated) boundaries that fortify the territorial ones.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is the exercise of state power over people and territory; that power is recognized by other states and codified by international law.

The solution to Russia's national problem

Such was the legacy that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks inherited from the Russian Empire following the overthrow of the aristocracy in 1917. The solution to the "national problem" orchestrated by Lenin was recognition of the many nationalities through the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin believed that a federal system, with federal units delimited according to the geographic extent of ethnonational communities, would ensure political equality among at least the major nations in the new state. This political arrangement recognized the different nationalities and provided them a measure of independence. Federation was also a way of bringing reluctant areas of the former Russian Empire into the Soviet fold.

De jure spaces/regions

Territories delimited by formal boundaries—national states, states, counties, municipalities, special districts, and so on—are known as de jure spaces or regions. De jure means "legally recognized." Historically, the word referred to a loose patchwork of territories (with few formally defined or delimited boundaries). More recently it has evolved to describe nested hierarchies and overlapping systems of legally recognized territories. De jure territories are constructed at various spatial scales. These de jure territories are often used as the basic units of analysis in human geography, largely because they are both convenient and significant units of analysis. They are often, in fact, the only areal units for which reliable data are available. They are also important in their own right because of their status as units of governance or administration. A lot of regional analysis and nearly all attempts at regionalization, therefore, are based on a framework of de jure spaces.

Statelessness

The 1954 UN Convention defines statelessness as "a person who is not considered a national by any state under the operation of its laws." Unfortunately, few signatories to the convention ever formulated policies to enable stateless people within their territories to establish legal nationality. This lack of legislative action—mostly deliberate—leaves millions without rights.

Confederation

The CIS is a confederation, a group of states united for a common purpose. The newly independent states that chose confederation did so mostly for economic (and to a lesser extent, for military) purposes.

The American Civil War

The Confederate States of America - the 11 southern states that seceded from the United States between 1860 and 1861 to achieve economic and political solidarity. This secession led ultimately to the Civil War, a bloody conflict that caused a massive loss of American lives for both the Union and the Confederacy.

The Roma

The Roma are a European stateless population of between roughly 70,000-80,000 who live or have lived in Czechia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Italy. They originated in India and were brought by Muslims as slaves between the 6th and 11th centuries. As people without citizenship, the Roma (also known pejoratively as Gypsies) are discriminated against with the average Roma far behind a European counterpart on social indicators like level of education and quality of employment and housing. The life expectancy of the Roma people is ten years lower than European Union citizens.

The colony

The colony does not have any independent standing within the world system and instead is considered an adjunct of the colonizing power.

Late 1990's Kosovo conflict

The most extreme conflict in the region occurred during the late 1990s in Kosovo, a region within Serbia that lost its autonomy in 1989 when Serbian nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic placed it under military occupation. A year later Kosovo's parliament was abolished and its political leaders fled. Milosevic orchestrated numerous attempts to rid the region of ethnic Albanians, and in 1995 Serb refugees from Croatia began flooding into Kosovo. Fueled by the racist rhetoric and military support of Milosevic, a civil war between Serbs and ethnic Albanians eventually erupted. By late 1999, 800,000 ethnic Albanians had fled Kosovo and tens of thousands had been massacred. An 11-week air war by NATO helped to bring the conflict to a halt, although atrocities continued as ethnic Albanians retaliated against Serbs. Kosovo became an independent state in 2008.

The Balkans

The mountainous isthmus of land between the Danube River and the plains of northern Greece that includes Albania, Bulgaria, continental Greece, southeast Romania, European Turkey, and most of the territories formerly organized as Yugoslavia. The redrawing of national boundaries in the Balkans resulted in bitter and widespread ethnic conflict. The region is situated at a geopolitical crossroads where East meets West, Islam meets Christendom, the Ottoman Empire met the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and communism once confronted capitalist democracy.

State

The state is an independent political unit with recognized boundaries, although some of these boundaries may be in dispute. The state, through its institutions—such as the military or the educational system—can act to protect national territory and harmonize the interests of its people. Therefore, the state stands behind a set of institutions for the protection and maintenance of society. A state is not only a place, a bounded territory, it is also an active entity that operates through the rules and regulations of its various institutions, from social-service agencies to governing bodies to the courts, to shape a country's populations.

Ukranian Revolution

The tensions within the former Soviet Union are especially high as new republics such as Ukraine voted to move politically closer to Europe and the United States and further away from Russia. But in February of 2014, a series of violent events consolidated into the "Ukrainian Revolution" and resulted in Ukraine's then president fleeing the country for Russia. Soon after the revolution, Russia invaded and seized control of the Crimean Peninsula and has declared it part of the Russian territory.

Nation-state

The term nation-state refers to an ideal form consisting of a homogeneous group of people governed by their own state. In a true nation-state, no significant group exists that is not part of the nation. and no significant portion of the nation is left outside of its territorial boundaries.

Permeable formal boundaries

There are also formal boundaries that have some degree of permeability. The boundaries between the states of the European Union, for example, have become quite permeable, and people and goods from member states can now move freely between them with no customs or passport controls.

Marginal regions

There remain, nevertheless, many regions that are still somewhat marginal in that they have not been fully settled or do not have a recognized economic potential, even though their national political boundaries and sovereignty are clear-cut. Such regions—the Sahara Desert, for example—often span national boundaries simply because they are inhospitable, inaccessible, and (at the moment) economically unimportant. Political boundaries are drawn through them because they represent the line of least resistance for the nations involved. Of course, these frontier are most contentions at the local level. An example is the boundary between wealthy and poorer sections of a city or town where a train track or a river may divide them.

Authoritarian government

This form is characterized by absolute obedience to a formal authority, opposed to individual freedom and related to an expectation of unquestioning obedience.

Regime

This is a system with a set of rules, cultural or social norms that regulate the operation of the government with society.

Dictatorship

This type of government is based on political authority that is monopolized by a single person or a political party, and exercised through various oppressive mechanisms.

Straight line boundaries

Where no natural features occur, formal boundaries tend to be fixed along the easiest and most practical cartographic device: a straight line. Examples include the boundaries among Egypt, Sudan, and Libya, between Syria and Iraq, and between the western United States and Canada. Straight-line boundaries are also characteristic of formal boundaries established through colonization, which is the outcome of a particular form of territoriality. The reason, once again, is practicality. Straight lines are easy to survey and even easier to delimit on maps of territory that remain to be fully charted, claimed, and settled. Straight-line boundaries were established in many parts of Africa during European colonization in the nineteenth century.