impossible to interpret the actions of the Okinawan high school
teacher without taking
into consideration the island, its position within Japan, and the US’s global military pres-
ence. It is to geographic scale that we now turn.
The politics of scale
The actions of individuals and groups of individuals range in their geographic scope or
reach. It is this scope or reach that is known as geographic scale. Place is one geographic
scale, defined as the setting of our everyday lives. But place
is just one scale in a hier-
archy that stretches from the individual to the global (Taylor and Flint, 2000, pp. 40–6).
(Perhaps even these boundaries are too narrow; genetic material and outer-space could
arguably be seen as the geographical limits upon human behavior.) As a simple example,
let’s talk about economics. Well, do you mean ones own personal financial situation,
the “family fortune” or lack of it,
the local economy, national economic growth or reces-
sion, the economic health of the European Union or the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) region, or the global economy? Each of these scales represents a
different level of economic activity, or transactions that define local economic health or
the trade and investment that spans the globe.
But in a hierarchy scales are “nested” or connected (Herb and Kaplan, 1999; Herod
and Wright, 2002).
To illustrate the point, if all businesses were thriving, then all local
economies would be booming, every national economy growing, and the global economy
healthy. But, of course this is never the case; the viability
of a business is partially
defined by the opportunities within its scope. The family-owned hardware store or photo-
copying franchise is dependent upon enough wealthy customers nearby. A global
company, such as Honda or Nike negotiates the differential opportunities for sales in
different countries. In turn, the relative prosperity of individuals is related to the
economic health of the businesses they work in and those businesses’ national and global
markets.
Political acts also negotiate scale. Protest can be enacted at the individual scale, by
breaking laws seen by the individual as unjust or by wearing
clothes or tattoos that make
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A F R A M E W O R K F O R U N D E R S T A N D I N G G E O P O L I T I C S
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