69 8.1 INTRODUCTION

When most people think of geography, they think about memorizing the states, state capitals, and perhaps learning the location of various countries around the world. These facts deal with the subdiscipline of political geography because they show how politics is reflected on the surface of the Earth, but political geography is much more than a “trivial pursuit” of such information. Although having knowledge about the locations of countries and states is fundamental and an important foundation for the study of political geography, the subject matter deals with many other topics such as military and economic alliances, boundaries between countries, terrorism and other civil-military conflicts, and the geography of the electoral process.