This introductory chapter illustrates how the book serves as both a text on political geography and an example of practising it. By focusing on ‘practice’, it offers an alternative entry into the discipline, emphasizing the embodied, embedded, and place-based activities of political geographers. Traditional definitions of political geography often overlook how topics, theories, and methods are adopted and accepted within the field. This practice-oriented approach highlights political geography as a contingent accomplishment involving subjects, material artefacts, institutions, discourses, and knowledge forms that stabilize into a coherent definition. It underscores that theories and methods are mobilized by geographers whose commitments shape the discipline's boundaries and inclusion criteria. The book also explores the practice of political geography through publishing, revealing how it is integral to the discipline and shaped by geopolitical contexts, power dynamics, and inequalities. Publishing, as an act of “doing” political geography, encapsulates the tensions and complexities inherent in the field.
