Former student Pieter Good published in Journal of Geography The
way you learned geography in school may have been wrong.
Countries, defined by often arbitrary borders, and regions
comprised of these countries are not always an accurate
representation of the similarities and relationships between
groups of people, says new research from Pieter Good, a former
York College student. This is especially true in Africa, where
the history of European colonialism has carved the continent
into a jigsaw puzzle, with little attention paid to the
cultural, linguistic, and economic relationships within the
population. Good and colleagues from Ghent University of Belgium
have proposed a new model for examining Africa through a
regional lens. What is unique about their research is that the
regions they proposed are radically different than those defined
by predecessors. Good’s research asserts that countries should
not be grouped into regions based on proximity alone, but that
regions should be defined by relationships betw