In Brussels, the academic publishing house Peter Lang published a textbook on political geography by Igor Okunev, head of the Youth Club of the Russian Geographical Society at MGIMO.
The book in Russian has already gone through two reprints. It was approved as a textbook by the MGIMO Editorial and Publishing Council. The book was highly praised in the professional community and was chosen as the main literature for studying the discipline in a number of leading universities in Russia and neighboring countries.
"Political geography is the science of the spatial organization of the political sphere in the society’s life. The discipline is an introductory one in the study of international relations, since it gives a systematic understanding of the spatial structure of all levels of political processes and their basic elements: states, supranational unions, geopolitical systems, regions, borders, capitals, dependent and international territories. Political and geographical knowledge forms the basis of theories explaining the specifics of the foreign and domestic political activities of the states of the world. Knowledge of the methods of spatial analysis allows you to identify patterns of political phenomena both at the global, and at the regional and local levels," Igor Okunev said.
The Russian International Affairs Council included the book in the 2019 reading list for International Affairs students and experts. The textbook was translated into English by the MGIMO teachers Maria Ananyeva, Natalya Panich and Nikolai Simakov. The prefaces to the English edition were written by Professors Sharyl Cross and Mikhail Ilyin.
Peter Lang is one of the largest academic publishing houses in the world in the field of social sciences and humanities. The publishing house has offices in Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Oxford, New York, Warsaw, Vienna, Dublin and Istanbul.
In the near future, the MGIMO English-language course on political geography based on the published textbook will be available on the Coursera platform. The Russian-language course is available here.