| A | B |
|---|
| Capital | A town or city that is the official seat of government in a political entity. |
| City-state | A sovereign state comprising a city and its immediately surrounding countryside. |
| Colonialism | An attempt by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles in another country. |
| Colony | A territory that is legally tied to a sovereign state rather than completely independent. |
| Conference of Berlin 1884 | Regulated European colonization and trade in Africa, resulting in the "scramble for Africa," and the subjugation of African nations. |
| Core | Areas that incorporate higher levels of education, higher salaries, and more technology. |
| Decolonization | The action of changing from colonial to independent status. |
| Ethnic conflict | Disagreement between groups of people of common backgrounds as they struggle to achieve certain political or economic goals at each other's expense. |
| Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) | An area, usually 370 km from the shore, in which a state has rights to explore, exploit, and manage natural resources in the seas. |
| Forward capital | Symbolically relocated capital city, usually for either economic or strategic reasons; sometimes used to integrate outlying parts of a country into the state. |
| Geopolitics | The study of the interplay between political relations and the territorial context in which they occur. |
| Global commons | Those parts of our environment available tot everyone but no one owns (the atmosphere, fresh water, forests, wildlife, and ocean fisheries) |
| Immigrant states | A type of receiving state which is the target of many immigrants; popular because of their economy, political freedom, and opportunity. |
| Imperialism | Control of territory already occupied and organized by an indigenous society. |
| Manifest destiny | The belief that the United States was destined to stretch across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. |
| Microstate | A state that encompasses a very small land area. |
| Ministate | An imprecise term for a territory, extremely small in both area and population. |
| Nation | Referring to tightly-knit group of people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other cultural attributes. |
| National iconography | Figural representations, either individual or symbolic, religious or secular. |
| Periphery | Regions that incorporate lower levels of education, lower salaries, and less technology. |
| Sovereignty | Ability of a state to govern its territory free from control of its internal affairs by other states. |
| State | An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its internal and foreign affairs |
| Stateless ethnic groups/stateless nations | A nationality without a state to call its own. |
| Territoriality | A state's sense of property and attachment to that particular land, expressed by its desire to keep it strongly defended. |
| United Nations | The world's pre-eminent supranational organization, a world governing body enforcing the upkeep of peace and basic human rights worldwide. |
