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Chapter 5
Question | Answer |
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Monocentric geographic realm | A world geographic realm dominated— territorially and/or demographically—by a single country. Russia in Russia/Central Asia is a prime example; others are the United States (North America), India (South Asia), and China (East Asia). |
Exclave | A bounded (non-island) piece of territory that is part of a particular state but lies separated from it by the territory of another state. |
Irredentism | A policy of cultural extension and potential political expansion by a state aimed at a community of its nationals living in a neighboring state. |
Geopolitics | Political relations among states or regions that are strongly influenced by their geographical setting, including proximity, accessibility, sovereign boundaries, natural resources, population distribution, and the like. |
Continentality | Variation of the continental effect on temperatures in the interior of the world’s land. Greater the distance from the influence of an ocean, the greater the extreme in summer/ winter. Interiors are dry when the distance from oceanic becomes considerable. |
Permafrost | Permanently frozen water in the near-surface soil and bedrock of cold environments, producing the effect of completely frozen ground. Surface can thaw during brief warm season. |
Tundra | The treeless plain that lies along the Arctic shore in northernmost Russia and Canada, whose vegetation consists of mosses, lichens, and certain hardy grasses. |
Taiga | The subarctic, mostly coniferous snowforest that blankets northern Russia and Canada south of the tundra that lines the Arctic shore. Known as the boreal forest in North America. |
Northeast passage | Arctic Ocean sea route around North Amer. from Alaska’s Bering Strait in W to the Davis Strait between Canada/ Greenland in east. melting Arctic ice cap increased the likelihood of shipping between Asia’s Pacific Rim, Atlantic seaboard of the Americas. |
Forward capital | Capital city positioned in actually or potentially contested territory, usually near an international border; it confirms the state’s determination to maintain its presence in the area of contention. |
Federation | A country adhering to a political framework wherein a central government represents the various subnational entities within a nation-state where they have common interests—defense, foreign affairs, and the like—yet allows these various entities to retain |
Russification | Demographic resettlement policies pursued by the central planners of the Soviet Empire (1922–1991), whereby ethnic Russians were encouraged to emigrate from the Russian Republic to the 14 non-Russian republics of the USSR. |
Command economy | The tightly controlled economic system of the former Soviet Union, whereby central planners in Moscow assigned the production of particular goods to particular places, often guided more by socialist ideology than the principles of economic geography. |
Satellite state | The countries of eastern Europe under Soviet hegemony between 1945 and 1989. This tier of countries—the “satellites” captured in Moscow’s “orbit” following World War II—was bordered on the west by the Iron Curtain and on the east by the USSR. Using the na |
Near Abroad | The 14 former Soviet republics that, in combination with the dominant Russian Republic, constituted the USSR. |
NATO | in 1950 at the height of the Cold War as a U.S.-led supranational defense pact to shield postwar Europe against the Soviet military threat. NATO is now in transition, expanding its membership while modifying its objectives in the post-Soviet era. |
Distance decay | The various degenerative effects of distance on human spatial structures and interactions. |
Unitary state system | A nation-state that has a centralized government and administration that exercises power equally over all parts of the state. |
Population implosion | The opposite of population explosion; refers to the declining populations of many European countries and Russia in which the death rate exceeds the birth rate and immigration rate. |
BRICs | Acronym for the four biggest emerging national markets in the world today—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. |
Centrality | The strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities; a city’s “reach” into the surrounding region. |
Shi’ite Islam | The smaller of the two main Islamic sects, comprising about 10 percent of Muslims overall, but in the majority in both Iran and Iraq. |
Sunni Islam | The larger of Islam’s two main sects (encompassing) roughly 90 percent of all Muslims) who adhere to the conviction that any devout follower of the Prophet Muhammad is eligible to be his legitimate successor. |
New Silk Road | China’s ongoing ambitious project to forge an overland routeway of high-speed railroads to link East Asia to Europe via Central Asia. |
Eurasian customs union | A supranational organization created by Russia in 2010 to maintain economic ties with the friendliest countries in the Near Abroad. |
Geopolitical revanchism | Retaliatory policies pursued by a state aimed at recovering lost territory. Russia’s forcible annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 is a good example. |