Geography and International Relations

Abstract

The world we live in happens to be a diversified, highly partitioned space. The surface of the earth is partitioned in a great many ways: politically and physically, economically and culturally. The political divisions are the raison d'être of international relations; the variety of thedifferent parts of the earth's surface is the raison d'être of geography. If the earth were uniform—well polished, like a billiard ball—there probably would not be any such science as geography, and international relations would be much simpler. Because the general principles of geology, geophysics, botany, or economics do not apply in the same way throughout the different compartments existing on the earth, geographical studies appeared and were useful, cutting across the abstraction of the topical disciplines and attempting a scientific analysis of regions and their interrelations.