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The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap:

Global Transformation and the Problemof the State’s Two Territories 1

Nisha Shah

University of Ottawa.

This paper argues that attempts by theories of globalization to over-come the ‘‘territorial trap’’ have failed. Describing how the modernstate emerged with two interrelated territories—a political concept

about bounded jurisdiction and public good that over time is effacedbut reinforced as territory is dened as brute, physical terrain—it showsthat the assumption in globalization theories that territory is the state’sphysical area entrenches the normative defense of the territorial state asthe framework of political order. The consequence is that overcomingthe territorial trap not only requires uncovering how and why territory becomes an assumed political ideal, but also how and why this trapproduces the subsequent trap of understanding territory primarily asthe ‘‘physical substratum’’ of the sovereign state. Globalization theories’analysis of political transformation must therefore focus not only on the‘‘permeability’’ of territorial borders, but whether and how evolvingnotions of global space might be providing a different political theory. A preliminary discussion of efforts to uncover how an alternative globalspatial principle is reassembling political authority suggests a possiblemeans of escape and way forward.

Almost 15 years ago John Agnew (1994) diagnosed International Relations the-ory as caught within a ‘‘territorial trap.’’ The assumption that the territorial state was an immutable spatial framework of political order, rather than a historically unique political geographical formation, he argued, prevented both the imagina-tion and appreciation of novel, ‘‘non-territorial’’ dynamics. Although part of Agnew’s analysis, especially as it has been more recently developed (see Agnew 2005, 2009), is to show that the state itself works in non-territorial ways, thenecessity of developing new concepts and methods has been directly taken up by scholars wanting to provide adequate analyses of contemporary globalization.

Reframing political analysis through the lens of ‘‘global governance’’ and‘‘global society,’’ this expanding body of globalization theories claims to havemitigated—indeed, escaped—the territorial trap (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992;Ruggie 1993; Ferguson and Mansbach 2004; Beck 2006; Albert 2007; Avant,Finnemore, and Sell 2010). Pointing to palpable changes in the worldwidecirculation of goods and services, the sites and sources of authority, and the

1 The author is grateful to Jens Bartelson, Nathaniel Berman, Philippe Bonditti, Simon Dalby, James Der Derian,Stuart Elden, Fiona McConnell, Jan Aart Scholte, and Phil Steinberg for conversations that strengthened thepaper’s argument. She would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructivecomments.

Shah, Nisha. (2011) The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global Transformation and the Problem of the State’s TwoTerritories. International Political Sociology , doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00144.xÓ 2011 International Studies Association

International Political Sociology (2012), 6, 57–76



number of salient political actors (both noble and nefarious), globalizationtheories have argued that a change in the quantitative and qualitative scope andhistorical impact of planetary ows has created a radical incommensurability between modes of political thought and practice that privilege the territorialstate as the central unit of analysis and authority and new political realities (Held1995; Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton 1999; Scholte 2000, 2005; Hall andBiersteker 2002). If sovereignty requires effective control over territorial borders,these borders are increasingly ‘‘porous,’’ ‘‘leaky’’ and ‘‘perforated’’ (Brenner, Jessop, Jones and Macleod 2003a:3; Ohmae 1990; Sassen 1996). Politics, in short,is becoming deterritorialization . The state, of course, has not disappeared; it remainssalient, often as a site of ‘‘global’’ activities (Brenner 1999a; Sassen 2006), but assuming that it is the exclusive site and framework of political power is anachro-nistic. 2

In this paper, I argue that most attempts by globalization theories to overcomethe territorial trap have failed. Instead, understanding sovereignty as the‘‘impermeability’’ of borders, the trap is reproduced through the assumptionthat territory is the physical substratum of the state. I contend that by adoptingthis physical understanding of territory, globalization theories reinforce ratherthan remove territory as the presumed framework of political order.

My objective in this paper, drawing from and extending Agnew’s analysis, is toshow how and why the territorial trap remains an intractable problem in conven-tional political thinking and, consequently, in analyses of globalization. I explorehow the state has emerged with two interrelated territories—a normative ormetaphysical concept about bounded jurisdiction and public good that over timeis effaced but reinforced as territory is dened as brute, physical terrain. Recast-ing the history of the modern state and its sovereignty in this way, I delineatehow and why the commonplace description of state territory as a set of physical

features not only overlooks but actually extends the normative defense of the ter-ritorial state.Evidently, then, even in light of supposedly ‘‘deterritorializing’’ trends, under-

standing the requirements for global transformation requires more—not less—attention to territory (Elden 2010b). Overcoming the territorial trap not only requires uncovering how and why the territorial state becomes an assumedpolitical ideal, but also how and why this trap produces the subsequent trap of understanding territory primarily as the ‘‘physical substratum’’ of sovereignstates. Without understanding how the territorial trap is entrenched—doubly so—prevailing analyses of both the requirements and the ramications of con-temporary globalizing processes remain caught within territorial ontologies and

epistemologies. I conclude by arguing that to break free of the dual territorialtrap, globalization theories must not only focus whether goods, people, andinformation move through—permeate—territorial borders, but also focus on whether and how notions of global space are providing a new political theory that stands in contradistinction to territory. A brief and preliminary survey of effortsto identify novel global spatial principles, and the ways they may be reassemblingpolitical order according to new legitimating principles, suggests a potentialmeans of escape and a possible way forward.

Why Territory?

Politically, territory has a very specic meaning: the area over which the state hasexclusive jurisdiction. Territory, in fact, is cited as the modern state’s distinctivefeature (Agnew 1994, 2009; Brenner, Jessop, Jones, and MacLeod 2003b; Larkins2010; Ruggie 1993; Spruyt 1994). As one commentator evocatively put it, ‘‘No

2 See also Beck’s (1999, 2006) argument against ‘‘methodological nationalism’’ (cf. Scholte 2005).

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state, no territory’’ (Wendt 1999:221). According to another, ‘‘[a]ll other ele-ments of [the state] are dependent on, and inconceivable without, such a basicterritorial substratum’’ (Verizjl quoted in Gottmann 1975:30). That territory isassumed to be a physical attribute of the state is evident in its usual denition as‘‘a material object, a portion of the earth’s surface’’ (Larkins 2010:35). In Inter-national Relations scholarship, where the state is the central object of study,understanding territory as the state’s physical extent is not only found in classicalrealist accounts, which dene territory as ‘‘a fragment of the earth’s crust’’(Aron quoted in Larkins 2010:19–20), or neorealist and neoliberal theories, which see territory as an important material variable in the accumulation of power. Even Wendt’s (1999) constructivist social theory of international politicspresents territory as part of the state’s ‘‘rump materialism.’’ Perhaps most sur-prising, poststructuralist investigations about the role of discourse, particularly sovereignty and its power to ‘‘[centre] … power ⁄ authority within a given terri-tory,’’ take territory for granted as the physical space upon which sovereignty dis-courses are exercised, evident in the view that territory is the sovereign state’s‘‘geographical frontier’’ (Walker 1993:169).

Geographer Jean Gottmann, however, cautioned that

...it would be illusory to consider territory as a purely physical phenomenon. Thenatural components of any given territory have been delimited by human action,and they are used by a certain number of people for specic purposes, all suchuses and purposes being determined by and belonging to a political process. Ter-ritory is a concept generated by people organizing space for their ownaims. (Gottmann 1975:29; my emphasis)

This is not a behavioralist argument, with the specication of claims andboundaries over a given area understood as an innate animal instinct (Wagner1960; Ardrey 1967; Malmberg 1980). Gottmann’s (1973:17) argument is that ter-ritory, as a feature of modern political order, which admittedly does manifest with a somatic quality, must be explored historically in the context of ‘‘complexsoul searching by states-men and philosophers as to where … public good was tobe found and where the best interest of … peoples lay.’’

Gottmann’s work has been directly and indirectly taken up by a number of scholars. Agnew (2009) draws on Gottmann to outline how territory emerges asa normative ideal through the lasting effect of various ‘‘territorializing myths’’(the body politic metaphor, the grafting of nation and state, and the principleof territorial integrity). Likewise, Elden’s (2011) conceptual history of territory refers to Gottmann, exploring how we might better understand the state when we consider its development through the perspective of its territory (cf. Bishai2004). Although not citing Gottmann directly, Larkins (2010) demonstrates how and why territory must be seen as new political imaginary that has a normativefunction in the gradual shift from feudal hierarchies to the anarchical states-sys-tem in early modern Europe. Taken together, these studies suggest that territory must be explored as a political theory.

Territory as Political Theory

Understood as the state’s space (Brenner et al. 2003b), exploring territory as apolitical theory entails delineating how a specic territorial spatial logic has

shaped the legitimate framework of political order, specically that of the mod-ern sovereign state. Uncovering the spatial logics in any given political formationrequires what Elden (2001) has described as a spatialized history. Drawing onFoucault, this is more than a history of spaces, but rather an investigation that ‘‘injects an awareness of space into all historical studies, to critically examine the

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power relations at play in the way space is effected and effects’’ (Elden 2001:7).‘‘Space,’’ Foucault (2000:361) argued, ‘‘is fundamental in any form of commu-nal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power.’’ On this view, space isnot a product of other activities. Neither is it a static platform upon which theseactivities take place. Following Foucault’s theory of productive power (1977,1978), space is a mechanism embedded in a variety of other discourses andmaterial practices that organize, arrange, or assemble political and social orderin particular congurations (see also Driver 1985). The quintessential exampleof this, of course, is Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon. More than a blue-print of an actual prison, he refers to an idealized principle—panopticonism.Distributing bodies using specic routines and architectural features, panoptic-onism expresses the spatial sensibility at work in a disciplinary society. In short, if power works to create and enforce systems of authority by sanctioning certainperspectives as ‘‘appropriate’’ and ‘‘factual’’—as knowledge—space is one of thetactics by which power legitimates—makes normal—certain social and politicalorders over others. The spatial logics of a given society thus relate to and incor-porate both its systems of reasoning and courses of action. Hence, Foucault’sconclusion is that it is impossible to understand the social and political practicesof a society without also attending to its spatial categories (Foucault 2000:356).

Territory, on this account, is not simply the state’s physical presence in spacebut a category that provides a normative principle animating and animated by arange of events and routines. Highlighting this normative dimension is impor-tant, as arguments about the deterritorialization of political order point to the ways in which power is exercised in all sorts of ways that cross over or ‘‘exceed’’territorial borders. Although Foucault’s theories of productive power demonstratethat (state) power is diffuse and decentralized, this does not necessarily imply that power is deterritorialized. Foucault’s rich empirical descriptions of the diffused

mechanisms of power (even those of sovereignty) map functional networks toshow how they sanction certain values and objectives as the legitimate basis of social and political order. Important insights into the objectives of state power arethus gained by attending to its varied operations both inside and outside of itsborders (Agnew 2009; McConnell 2009). As one commentator puts it, ‘‘[t]heempirical world is always untidy, messy, always in excess of itself’’ (Walker2006:59). The question is how, despite this, territory remains a legitimating factorand a concrete way to organize political order? In short, even if power operates inall sorts of incongruent ways, territory can remain a central regulative ideal.

Understood as a regulative ideal, we can consider the important ways in whichterritory as a concept innovates assumptions about the appropriate scope, sites,

and sources of authority. Despite attention to the modern state’s territoriality asits distinctive feature, territory is usually studied indirectly, treated as a side effect of other socioeconomic processes (Brenner and Elden 2009:355). Take forinstance Ruggie’s (1993) incisive analysis: territoriality emerges as the conse-quence of other changes in material environments, strategic behaviors, andsocial epistemes. Of course, the formation of the modern states-system is a multi-faceted and complex development, involving the near simultaneous development of the mercantilist economy and its evolution into industrial capitalism, changesin transportation and communications technologies, developments in philosophy and science, and, of course, wars (Skinner 1978; Tilly 1990; Walker 1993; Eliasand Jephcott 1994; Spruyt 1994; Deibert 1997). But to the extent that territory isfoundational in understandings of the modern state, a complete understandingof the state requires showing not only how territory is shaped by, but equally how territory shapes the forging of the modern state’s power (cf. Brenner andElden 2009; Murphy 1996).

Studying territory in this way runs counter to assessments that see territory as aperennial feature, or perpetual concern, of politics, whose morphology and




policing change over time (Sack 1986; Delany 2005). 3 Certainly modern territory does not emerge de novo . But, even when considered in light of its precursors,territory as a term and concept is peculiar to the politics of early modern period(Elden 2010a,b, 2011). Putting the language of territory in historical context cantherefore shed some light on the conditions surrounding its rise as a uniqueconcept with a constitutive function in modern politics.

The State as a Territory

Four dimensions are worth highlighting for understanding territory’s emergenceas a political concept. Each undoubtedly overlaps with other patterns and pro-cesses identied as being decisive in the emergence of the modern state. How-ever, uncovering how territory operates as a normative category ⁄ spatial logic that works with (and within) these other conditions illuminates not only how territo-rial principles and practices enable the legitimation of the modern state, but equally important how and why territory and state have come to be so closely tied that it is hard to imagine one without the other.

The rst and most through-going dimension involved the abstraction of authority —a shift in the understanding of political power as derived from the per-sonal qualities of princes ( status ) to the impersonal authority of the state (distinct from and irreducible to individual rulers and ruled) (Skinner 1989; Osiander2007). This revolution is usually explained as change in temporal princi-ples—that is, the doctrine of the ‘‘King’s Two Bodies’’ (the king may die, but the body politic lives on innitely) and the separation of spiritual and worldly spheres institutionalized in the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (Kantorowicz1957; Nederman and Langdon 1993). This change, however, also had notablespatial repercussions, which were more than subsidiary by-products but integral

to how modern political power was understood and organized.Ruggie (1983:274) argues that political epochs can in part be differentiated onthe basis of how ‘‘constituent units are separated from each other.’’ In thefeudal period, constituent units and their separation were embodied in the ef.More than a tract of land granted by a superior, efs were a spatial frameworkembodying a system of hierarchical lord–vassal relationships based on ‘‘fealty’’and reciprocal remunerations (Bloch 1961; Anderson 1974). As has been wellstudied, in this system of personal loyalties, where one lord could be the vassalof another and thus have multiple obligations, power extended in non-contigu-ous and overlapping ways. This is not to deny that there was a sense of ‘‘fron-tiers.’’ As Bloch (1961:382) has described, ‘‘for a piece of land, as for a man, to

have several lords was almost a normal thing; to have several kings was impossi-ble’’—thus if kings or queens held land in other realms, it was almost always as asubordinate vassal of another monarch. Still, limits between loosely dened king-doms were rarely demarcated. In many instances, the outer extents of kingdoms were too sparsely populated to provide an impetus to dene boundaries ‘‘withrigorous exactitude’’ (Bloch 1961:382; see also Biggs 1999:385–386; Ruggie1993:150). The denition of boundaries was also less of a priority as monarchicalrealms, perceived as the arm of God in the dispensation of earthly justice, were understood as microcosms of and municipalities within a broader Christiansociety (Gierke 1996:18; Bartelson 2010).

The need for more clearly delimiting authority did eventually arise. The powerof the Church over monarchs was never unequivocal, especially in areas outsidethe Holy Roman Empire, such as England and France (Elden 2010a). Therediscovery of Roman law and its reinterpretation—not in the context of the

3 As a consequence of similar assumptions, analyses made by Ruggie (1993) and Larkins (2010) often focusmore on the novel discourses and practices of sovereignty than territory as such.

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comprehensive power of an empire but claims for plural independen-cies—provided a solution to this debate. But it also put feudal authority intocrisis. Elden (2010a) points to Bartolus’s notion of ‘‘territorium’’ as important. Although not territory lexically or semantically as it would come to be dened, it specied the geographical area as the object of administration. Bartolus’reections are thus suggestive of a set of discussions that would eventually deneauthority as a lateral ‘‘exhaustive multiplicity’’ rather than the unity expressed inthe organic hierarchy of the feudal system’s ‘‘Great Chain of Being’’ (Taylor1994).

Coupled with this, as early as William the Conqueror in England and Philip Augustus in France, efs were systematically gathered under more centralizedauthority. Followed by many wars, particularly the Hundred Years’ War, com-plex feudal and familial webs were disentangled and stricter spatial divisionsresulted (Gottmann 1973:33–37). Also, the effect of the Renaissance, Reforma-tion, and overseas exploration and discoveries ‘‘combined to create a situationin which kingdoms had enough centralized authority to provide their subjects with essential protection,’’ dismantling fealty obligations ‘‘below’’ the level of monarchs (Gottmann 1973:125). Thus, when Richelieu described a policy of protecting France’s ‘‘frontiers’’ in the seventeenth century, he was alluding tosomething that is more closely associated with an understanding of a country’spolitical borders (Gottmann 1973:37; cf. Buisseret 1992). For this reason, com-mentators have argued that by the time of the Peace of Westphalia, the idea of discretely dened and relatively autonomous jurisdictions as the constituent units of political order, if not inscribed in political theory, was at least well-established practice (Osiander 2003). Whether the treaties of Osnabru ¨ ck andMunster can be said to have dened, or even used the language of, territorialsovereignty is disputed (Osiander 2003; Elden 2005). However, stressing the

‘‘free exercise of territorial right’’ (Treaty of Munster Article 64; Treaty of Osnabru ck Article VIIII, 1) and ‘‘territorial right and superiority’’ (Treaty of Osnabru ck Article V, 30), what is clear is that autonomous jurisdiction wasdened as over territory (Elden 2005, 2009b). Consequently, territory came torepresent more than land (as its Latin etymology [ terra ] would suggest). Morespecically, territory connoted the idea of spatially distinct forms of political jurisdiction and rule.

By the time then that the concept of the state takes center stage in politi-cal discourse discrete territorial polities were effectively taken for granted. Although the most systematic and enduring formulation of the modern state,Hobbes’s Leviathan (1996[1651]), makes little explicit use of the term terri-

tory, the emerging territorial political geography is evident in Hobbes’sassumption that state authority is divided between clearly demarcated (fronti-ered) and contiguous (neighboring) communities (see also Osiander2007:445):

… Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency,are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; havingtheir weapons pointing, and their eyes xed on one another; that is, their Forts,Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuallSpyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War. (Hobbes 1996[1651]:90)

Territory, of course, did not have determinative power to shape the state. Therelationship between the two was mutually constitutive: as much as territory informed the modern state’s spatial arrangement, the consolidation of politicalpower in state sovereignty increased territory’s political signicance. As withmany of his contemporaries, Hobbes’s state was understood ‘‘ … an Articiall




Person’’ that ‘‘personated’’ the single will of multitude forged through the socialcontract (Hobbes 1996[1651]: chs. 16, 17, 18; see also Skinner 1999; Neocleous2003). 4 Depersonalized from individual princes but personied in the state, sov-ereignty was dened as a corporate property—it was the state’s ‘‘soul … givinglife and motion to the whole body’’ (Hobbes 1996[1651]:9), rather than embod-ied in the individual person of the prince. This new corporate vision of sover-eignty made the territorial principle of separate and discrete jurisdictions all themore relevant: territory provided the spatial extent (and limit) to state sover-eignty (Gottmann 1973:49). Once dissociating the state’s ‘‘body’’ from its territo-rial extent became inconceivable, sovereignty became a norm inherently about territorial rule. In other words, if territory was reshaping political geography,once conjoined to the state, it was incorporated as a requirement of legitimateof political authority. The political purchase of the state-sovereignty-territory nexus perhaps reached its apogee in the nationalist movements that followedsome two hundred years later (an inuence that continues in the present day):grafting the nation onto the state, territory became a primordial feature of thebody politic and an essential component in the demand for and creation of new sovereign states (Anderson 1991; Thongchai 1994; Agnew 2009).

A second dimension can be located in the concept of international sovereignty. Justications of modern states’ authority were premised on a temporal argu-ment—life within states was preferable to the vagaries of the pre -modern ‘‘stateof nature’’ that existed in their absence. By the eighteenth century, however,‘‘within and without’’ referred less to a historical discourse about the state’s for-mation (factual or not) and more to a spatial dualism. Increasingly seeing them-selves as existing in an equivalent state of nature with other states, the inside of the state was distinguished from the violent international system that existedoutside it: order, security and safety were found inside the state, where as disor-

der, danger, and insecurity lurked outside (Walker 1993; Bartelson 1995). To thedegree that states were concurrently being understood as territories and contem-poraneously emerging as part of an international state of nature (the states-system), the territorial limits of jurisdiction were inscribed with a calculus of violence, estrangement, and fear. The necessity of the state for the possibility of political life thus became manifest in the familiar story of territorial defense.

The new sphere of international affairs, however, left ‘‘no space … within which to conduct [the] task [of] diplomatic representation without fear of relentless disturbance, arbitrary interference, and severed lines of communica-tion’’ (Ruggie 1993:164). The solution, and the third element, which stillpersists, was the practice of extraterritoriality —the designation of embassies as

‘‘alien islands’’ of sovereign authority, ones not only immune to, but also sitesthat would not infringe on, the sovereignty of their host states.If sovereign territoriality was a norm developed through mutual recognition of

exclusive jurisdiction, based on the extension of state power outside its territory, with a reciprocal limitation within, Ruggie (1993:164) concludes that extraterrito-riality actually resulted in the ‘‘institutional negation of exclusive territoriality,’’and thus the ‘‘unbundling’’ of sovereignty and territory. Benton (2010) argues asimilar point, illustrating that as the search for imperial power played out over winding and overlapping corridors and enclaves, situated in riverine regions,sea-lanes, hill regions, and islands, sovereignty was extended in a set of fracturedand disjointed spaces, rather than discretely delimited territorial spheres of authority. Both interpretations provide nuance by highlighting the variegatedspaces of state power. But they do not immediately suggest an unsettling of the

4 For more discussion of the ‘‘body politic’’ metaphor, see Agnew (2009), Hale (1971), Nederman and Langdon(1993), Neocleous (2003), Olwig (2002), Rasmussen and Brown (2005), Ringmar (1996), and Sims and Walker(2003).

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territorial basis of state power. Extraterritoriality, in Ruggie’s (1993:169) own words, was a ‘‘doctrinal contrivance … on which the society of territorial state for-mations came to rest (Ruggie 1993:169, my emphasis). Or, as Benton’s(2010:129) study of the law of the seas reveals, Gentili species that ‘‘the wordterritory … applied equally to land and to water.’’ Likewise, in conceding that the sea might be divided into different legal spheres Grotius argued that ‘‘Juris-diction over a Part of the Sea is acquired … as all other Sorts of Jurisdiction,’’including territory (in Benton 2010:135–136). Territory in other words related tomore than the physical expression of power but a jurisdictional category that strengthened recognition of territorial states as the basis of legitimate authority.The ‘‘uneven’’ geographies of diplomacy and empire were accordingly the result of, not an anomaly to, territorial principles, with the concept of territory legally modied and applied in different settings to carve out spheres of sovereignauthority (Shah 2010).

Finally, a world that required accommodating ‘‘alien islands’’ of sovereignty,hinging on a distinct sphere of ‘‘foreign’’ affairs, required that the administrativearea of the modern state be clearly demarcated (Buisseret 1992). Central amongthe diverse methods used was modern cartography. Prevailing accounts suggest that cartography produced territory:

[Cartography] came to dene the shape of power and to constitute the object of state formation. As lands were surveyed and mapped, they were reshaped into aterritory: a homogenous and uniform space, demarcated by linear boundaries,the old dynastic realm was transformed into a new shape, the territorial state.(Biggs 1999:385)

This view, however, says little about how and why it was possible even to assume,

as Hobbes did, that political authority is territorial in the sense of clearly delim-ited jurisdictions. Medieval cartography’s ornate mappaemundi, for instance,depicted the world as the body of Christ, providing a graphic representationof the understanding that villages, cities, and kingdoms were subsidiary to anoverarching, universal, and boundless Christian cosmos (Harvey 1987; Woodward1987; Sca 1999). To the degree then that modern cartography provides a differ-ent image of authority, it does so in the context of territory’s evolution as a nor-mative foundation of political order. In short, without disputing the complexoverlap of material and ideological changes, it is also important to recognize that new visual representations were tied to changing understandings of political space(Agnew 2009:64).

This is not to deny cartography’s own contribution. Its application of Euclidiancoordinate geometry and an abstract concept of space as at, homogenous, andbounded through which things move, developed during Europe’s scienticrevolution, allowed loosely dened frontier regions to be understood andrepresented as discrete border lines (Elden 2005; Biggs 1999:387; Febvre 1973). As state authority expanded across the surface of the planet—rst as a matter of imperial occupation and then later in the decolonized world of equally sovereignstates—modern cartography shaped the division of authority according to a geo-metric grid of contiguous, but mutually exclusive boxes (Buisseret 1992; Elden2005). Of course, this grid, with its system of borderlines, was not somethingobjectively observed within the terrain and mirrored in maps. Cartography’simportant function then, as now, was akin to Foucault’s Panopticon: a diagramof the variegated practices of territorial power reduced to its ideal form—disjointed, bounded, mutually exclusive spheres authority (cf. Jacob 2006).

To summarize, through various political mechanisms, interventions, and repre-sentations, the principle of ‘‘differentiation’’ shifts from overlapping spheres of authority to bordered communities. Both shaping and shaped by the emergence




of the modern sovereign state, territory becomes more than a ‘‘portion of theearth’s surface’’—a physical space onto which meaning is inscribed—but a nor-mative convention about distinct jurisdictions as the basis of legitimate politicalauthority. Through this, territory and state become inseparable not because thestate occupies a (pre-given) territory, but because the state ‘‘ is a territory’’ (Poggi1990:22). Made explicitly evident in Weber’s (1994:310–311) denition of thestate, where territory is not just the area within which the state exercises itsmonopoly on legitimate power and violence, but one of the state’s ‘‘deningcharacteristics,’’ it is further reinforced in legal denitions of the state: without aterritory, there is no sovereign jurisdiction and without territory, the state is not a (international) person. Territory, in other words, is part of the state’s existen-tial identity: ‘‘the state is a territorial organization such that a violation of its frontiers is inseparable from the idea of aggression against the state itself’’(Vissher quoted in Gottmann 1973:3). Put differently, if the state and sovereignty are necessary for the possibility of political life, the territorial trap is that without the concept of territory neither would be conceivable.

Territory’s ‘‘Calculated’’ Logic

Despite understanding territory’s normative purchase through a Foucauldianlens, it is worth noting that in Foucault’s (2007) own discussion of the modernstate, not only sovereignty but also territory wane as the primary focus of power,giving way to ‘‘governmentality’’ and the problem of the ‘‘population.’’ With thestate’s governmentalization, the spatial logic changes from territory to thestatistical normal distribution, propagated through the government’s attempt toincrease security by managing risk.

Foucault, however, does not dismiss territory entirely: population, he claims,

must be studied in connection to other things, including ‘‘the territory with itsborders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on’’ (Foucault 2007:96). Thisrecovery of territory assumes two things. First, that territory is ‘‘bordered.’’Second that the features or ‘‘qualities’’ of territory can be identied as elementsof the physical landscape—climate, dryness, and fertility. With this specication,O Tuathail (1996:8–9) observes that Foucault (perhaps unintentionally)distinguishes between a ‘‘narrow juridical concept of territory’’ and a ‘‘broadly materialist and resourcist’’ one.

But how does this distinction become possible, and why does the latterbecome the assumed understanding of state territory? If, as described above, ter-ritory is a spatial logic that transforms the normative justication of power to

require clearly delimited and bounded ⁄

bordered political communities—the juridical concept of territory—what accounts for the prevailing understanding of territory as a physical feature of the modern state?

Similarly emphasizing the generative and creative processes through whichspace is actively produced through theoretical and symbolic practices, HenriLefebvre (1991) also suggested that a given society’s ‘‘spatial codes’’ manifest inmaterial ways (i.e., buildings, roads, and monuments). On the specic questionof the state, Lefebvre’s analysis examines how space is used as a strategy to reify its authority. Although not providing a theory of territory as such, Brenner andElden (2009) argue that the emergence of territory as state-space is central inLefebvre’s reections. Masking interventions that produce space, state powermanifests through a ‘‘territory effect’’: that is, how ‘‘states … present the impactsof their manifold spatial interventions as pregiven features of the physical land-scape or as purely technical dimensions of the built environment rather than aspolitically mediated manipulations’’ (Brenner and Elden 2009:373). Not only isterritory a peculiar feature of the state, it is presented as a permanent ‘‘material-natural-space’’ (Lefebvre quoted in Brenner and Elden 2009:362).

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In other words, the territory effect appears to be how territory becomes athing of government and how this reinforces territory’s normative power withinthe production and legitimation of the modern state (c.f. Elden 2007). WhenFoucault says that population must be considered in relation to territory, heconsiders territory to be only ‘‘ … a variable’’ in the ‘‘complex of men andthings’’ (Foucault 2007:97). This has two particular effects. First, with govern-mentality a set of regulative strategies premised on and executed throughenhancing and representing knowledge through empirical metrics, knowledgeof territory also becomes an empirical question. This becomes particularly evi-dent in the use of modern cartography, which was exercised as a formal scienceof measurement (Gregory 1994; Cosgrove 1999; Kagan and Schmidt 2007;Pickles 2003). In addition to delineating borders for internal and colonialadministration, state power was rationalized by cataloging the ‘‘internal con-tents’’ of territorial zones (Livingstone 1992:ch.4; Pratt 1992). That Foucault listssuch things as climate, dryness, and fertility among territory’s specic features istherefore not surprising considering that states conducted extensive land andgeological surveys to detail cropland, forests, ora, fauna, etc., an exercise that became increasingly important as ‘‘natural resources’’ became a measure of acountry’s wealth (Harvey 1974; Smith and O’Keefe 1980; Braun 2000). 5

Through this, territory was not just a site that contained resources; it emergedas the aggregate set of resources. In sum, modern political maps not only dis-seminated the abstraction of authority that embodied the premise that the stateliterally was a person (cf. Skinner 1999). They equally became ‘‘metaphors foraccumulating empirical data’’ (Woodward 2007:23).

Second, known through empirical metrics, territory took on a semblanceof inevitability. On the one hand, this was the result of dening resources as com-ing from the ‘‘natural’’ world. Territory, once a cultural, social, and moral con-

cept, was thus redescribed as a pre-cultural, pre-social, and pre-moral condition.On the other hand, once natural resources were also seen as national resources,maximizing control of the earth’s physical geography was assumed to beincontrovertibly linked to—indeed necessary for—states’ security and prosperity.Territory became a material variable for power, reected in core doctrines of inuential political geographers such as Mackinder, Mahan, Ratzel, Kjellen,and Spykeman. 6 This perspective continued well into mid-twentieth century, where territory was still understood as ‘‘ … the main factor that determined thesecurity and wealth of states, and thus protection and acquisition of territory wereprime motivations of foreign policy. Most wars … concerned the acquisition of ter-ritory, and most of these wars led to exchanges of territory’’ (Zacher 2001:217).

In short, once the state was given a physical basis that was natural, the territorialstate was rendered an inevitable and eternal feature of political life (Allies 1980).The ahistorical view of territory, and thus the state, partly ingrained through

territory’s gradual denition as a physical terrain, did not simply distinguish itself from juridical territory. With the state understood as a territory, they becameone and the same. This was more than a sense that territory had to be defended,but how the bordered principle became understood as a physical condition.Both mundane and grand fortications (Duffy 1979) expressed the view that state borders were literally understood as physical barriers. Coupled with states’responsibilities for protecting citizens from the security dilemmas of the interna-tional state of nature, the state eventually was understood as a ‘‘shelter, a portionof inhabited space protected by a Great Wall’’ (Gottmann 1973:53). As

5 Classical economic theories, for instance, identied resources under the title of ‘‘land’’ (referring to suchthings as water, soil, minerals, ora, and fauna) and deemed them as important factors in the production process.

6 See Hartshorne (1935a,b) for a cogent survey and summary of key principles in the earliest theories of politicalgeography. See also O´ Tuathail’s (1996) evaluation of the systems of power legitimated by these principles.




‘‘Globalization’’ … emerged as a radical, decentralized and multidisciplinary chal-lenge to conventional thinking. It had framed a questioning of key distinctionsincluding the great divides between inside ⁄ outside, local ⁄ global, public ⁄ private,and market ⁄ state on which most social sciences rest.

To the extent that such distinctions are inscribed in territorial borders, pre-senting globalization as challenging the territorial state as the unquestionedframework of politics is radical. However, although rejecting the immutability of the territorial state, formulating the escape of these entrenched categories anddichotomies on the basis of claims that ‘‘physical’’ borders are being overcome(implying that state power is effective only when its borders literally ‘‘seal’’ thestate) is possible only by ascribing to and naturalizing the normative concept of the bordered territory.

This naturalization is evident in the way that global space is simply understoodas territorial space writ-large. Read through the lens of ‘‘permeability,’’ prevailingaccounts view globalization as a spatial transformation—toward globality—

ushered in by the diverse ways in which ‘‘human activities are distributed on theearth … [with] a disregard for any of the divisions which human beings might establish between themselves on that surface’’—a view potentially produced andreinforced through the images of the earth from outer space (Albrow 1996:4,164, 91; my emphasis; Cosgrove 1994). This formulation is interestingly inspiredby phenomenological and cultural accounts of the ‘‘global age’’ (Robertson1992; Albrow 1996; Appadurai 1996), which emphasize the role of consciousnessand imagery, understanding that the state has ‘‘physical and conceptual,’’‘‘territorial and categorical’’ boundaries. However, describing their ‘‘breach’’ as afunction of the expansion of human activities across the ‘‘earth’s surface,’’ that borders are ‘‘disregarded’’ simply by the extension of human activities across the

earth, implies that conceptual and categorical boundaries are violated becausephysical and territorial borders are overrun. In short, to the degree that territory is understood as physical terrain, and territorial borders are understood princi-pally as physical borders, the focus is placed on how far various empirically observed trends move, and makes the ‘‘earth’s surface’’ the counterpoint to terri-toriality.

One might see this as neglecting territoriality’s normative dimension: as stated,the world has always been a messy place—non-territorial processes can be territo-rializing in their objectives and effects. Global transformation therefore requiresmore than the fact that borders are empirically overrun. Yet consider the degreeto which efforts to develop political solutions to the functional challenges posedby cross-boundary processes and events to conventional institutional structures of liberal democracy, citizenship, and distributive justice, among others, by (largely cosmopolitan) theories of global governance, have involved expanding thedomestic sphere, with some modication, to cover the entire planet (see Held1995, 2004; for criticisms see Bartelson 2010:chapter 2; Walker 1993; Shah 2006).Unwittingly, this perhaps reects assumptions in Western philosophy that mean-ingful human thought and action are terrestrial and ‘‘earthbound’’ (Turnbull2006), a potential corollary of making physical terrain the denitive feature of the state’s political identity. In short, despite efforts to move beyond territorially based politics, territory is normatively enhanced as it is physically enlarged: theterrestrial earth becomes the physical substratum of human societies with itspolitical borders now referring to the planet’s geological limits.

Others have been more reexive about their claims. Agnew’s (2009) illustra-tion of how both sovereignty and globalization operate non-territorially forcesboth globalization’s proponents and critics to move beyond simple enumerationsof cross-border ows or the continuing presence and power of the state as evi-dence for or against global transformations (see also Sassen 2006). Equally




insightful is Brenner’s (1999a,b) argument that that globalization’s deterritorial-izing effects must not only examine how global space is produced (not pre-given) through the reconguration of territory—a process of ‘‘reterritorializa-tion’’ (O Tuathail and Luke 1994; Brenner 1999b; O ´ Tuathail 1999). Premisedon the view that ‘‘territory is a polysemic category and not all of its meaningsrefer to [a] statist … geography,’’ reterritorialization provocatively suggests anevolution in territorial genealogies.

But even the nuance reected by reterritorialization remains trapped. Present-ing globalization’s diverse scales as operating ‘‘at once above, below, and aroundthe national scale’’ entrenches the national state as the central platform of politi-cal power, idealizing it as a spatial container xed by its territorial borders (localand global scales are spaces located ‘‘inside’’ or ‘‘outside’’ states) (Brenner1999a,b:53). In other words, identifying new territories that depart from thenational-state framework, ‘‘reterritorialization’’ reies the national territorialscale as the fulcrum of spatial transformations. Among International Relationsscholars, this effect is evident as Realists and Constructivists alike conceptualizeglobalization as new logic of anarchy to which states seemingly adapt (Clark1999; Rosamond 2001; Kissinger 2008). Effectively, the specic rationality of modern (state) territory is reproduced and implemented through different anddiverse scales (Elden 2005). Although Brenner does take us some way away fromunderstanding territory in a strict physical sense, ultimately reterritorialization isanother example of how global space is conceptualized as a normative extensionof territorial space.

Conclusion: The Global Corollary

Where does this leave the study of globalization? My objective in highlighting

the territorial trap of the territorial trap is not to foreclose the possibility of transformation, to suggest, as others have, that globalization is nothing but myth and therefore politically inconsequential (see especially Hirst and Thomp-son 2001; Krasner 2001; Weiss 1998). Rather it is to demonstrate that to thedegree that transformation might indeed be occurring, prevailing globalizationtheories provide only cursory insight into both its political possibilities anddangers. Directing attention to territory as a spatial logic with related normativeand material dimensions, for globalization to generate novel forms of authority,community, etc., more than the permeability of physical borders is required.Instead, ‘‘global’’ must be emerging as an alternative framework, one that dis-places the territorializing impulses entwined in the legitimation of the sovereign

states-system. In short, what is needed is an exploration of global as politicaltheory.Efforts in this direction have been made, with Held’s (1995) Democracy and the

Global Order and Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire being seminal examples. Whileeach provides a way to see globalization as a normative challenge, rather than sim-ply a set of empirical ows, global space in both is taken as a pre-given planetary space—implicitly as the terrestrial earth. To explore whether and if global is analternative normative horizon what is needed is a categorical analysis, one that examines global not as the outcome of various border-busting activities and systemsof power, but as constitutive of them. Thus, the corollary to my investigation of thedual territorial trap is that globalization must be investigated by redeploying aspatialized history that contextualizes global modes of political thought.

It is worth noting that despite being framed as opposing terms, historicizingglobal space reveals a deep interconnection with territorial political imperatives.The rst systematic understandings and representations of global space duringsixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, for instance, were shaped by thesame mathematical and cartographic assumptions of space that shaped territory.

69Nisha Shah



Indeed, the industry of producing globes was initially tied to efforts to consoli-date territorial power at home and, though colonization, abroad (Brotton 1999). Along these lines, various commentators (Elden 2005; Strandsbjerg 2010; Walker2010) argue that the conceptual and normative ination between territorial andglobal space should be unsurprising—indeed, framing globalization as disruptiveof territorial logics of power is a logical impossibility. Globalization, by thisaccount, only reects the continuing salience of the modern territorial politicalsolution.

But, as Bartelson (2011:290) notes, ‘‘denying the existence of somethingdistinctively global on grounds of its ontological impossibility is not very helpfulif we want to understand how present relocations of political authority have been justied with reference to various global imaginaries’’ (cf. Steger 2008). To theextent that such justications have been posed against territory, might it not sug-gest that the political meaning and signicance of ‘‘global,’’ at least in Westernpolitical thought, might be morphing? For instance, what are we to make of con-temporary scholarly, popular, and policy discussions that articulate global spaceas eld of non-linear networked cosmologies, possibly reecting an epistemologi-cal shift in the concept of space itself (November, Camacho-Hu bner, and Latour 2010; Featherstone 2006; Castells 2001)? Or, what of the view that ‘‘global’’ worlds today are principally virtual, not terrestrial, realms(Brotton 1999; Holmes 2001)?

This set of developments can be described as a possible ‘‘global governmental-ity,’’ which uncovers ‘‘the conditions of truth and practice under which the phe-nomena of globalization acquired its positivity’’ (Larner and Williams 2004b:499;Larner and Williams 2004a). Notwithstanding the criticism that Foucault’s state-centric framing of power precludes a global governmentality, or, in the context of this paper, that it reinscribes the modern state’s bordered and brute territory, this

theoretical reformulation provides an opening for exploring how ‘‘global’’invokes new kinds of regulative strategies, practices, and infrastructures that possi-bly restructure the exercise of political power (see also Bartelson 2006).

The methods to undertake this task are varied. But at their core they requireundertaking a genealogy of global space in the history of political thought. Nar-rowing the focus to the present context, analysis turns on whether novel politicalprinciples and practices are produced, embedded and inscribed - reied - within and through the observed volume and speed of circulations of people,goods and information. As a conclusion, and a brief and preliminary illustrationof a possible way forward, consider the following.

Under the inuence of neoliberalism, globalization is propelled by the view

that ‘‘the self-regulating market is the normative basis of political order’’ (Steger2005:33; cf. Hardt and Negri 2000). The conventional authority of the state toprotect a national economy is undercut as it is seen as a barrier to competitive-ness. Instead, states are situated as nodes in a new corporate complex to createthe conditions to facilitate a new global economy (Fairclough 2001:130; see alsoCastells 2000; Gill 1995; Hardt and Negri 2000; Harvey 2005; Sassen 2006; Sparke2006b). With ‘‘market share rather than … territory’’ signifying power (Barney 2004:22), the sovereign authority of states over economic policy is considered tostymie competitiveness. The territorial grid of jurisdictional authority is replaced with a series of private authorities (Cutler, Hauer, and Porter 1999; Hall andBiersteker 2002; Porter 2005). Global space becomes intelligible as a marketplace.

In a different formulation, under a cosmopolitan emancipatory ethos,globalization is presented as the unication of humanity as a global civil society (Kaldor 2000; Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2001; Amoore and Langley 2004;Bartelson 2006). A salient preliminary development, of course, was the mid-twen-tieth-century photographic representation of ‘‘planet earth’’ from outer space, whose link to the idea of a ‘‘global village’’ (McLuhan 1962) affected a sense




that territorial borders were trivial. At rst articulated in movements condemningnationalistic wars, it has since emerged as a response to the perceived deleteriouseffects associated with neoliberal economic policies. Global civil society is athorny concept including opposed and even contradictory interests. But a nor-mative locus can be gleaned through the idea of an alternative globalizationdeployed through a ‘‘radicalisation of democracy and the redistribution of politi-cal power’’ based on universal-human rather than territorial distributions of authority and identity (Anheier et al. 2001:11; see also Amoore and Langley 2004; Doucet 2005; Held 1995).

Finally, although the attention to national security is paramount, the challengeof the ‘‘war on terror,’’ as former US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge(2004) put it, is how to ‘‘design border security to enhance homeland security and facilitate global commerce and travel.’’ Border control, in other words, not only strives to secure the state, an effort to shore up territorial borders to pre- vent the spill over effects of disorder from ‘‘failed states’’ (Elden 2009a). It isalso redirected and redeployed in ways that differentiate between ‘‘two worlds of globalization’’—the legitimate globalization of commerce and capital and theillegitimate globalization of crime and terror (Amoore and De Goede 2005:167;see also Amoore 2006; Andreas 2003; Sparke 2006a). In short, new kinds of objectives and boundaries intersect with the logic of conventional borders as aconfrontational war mentality articulates global space as a battleeld.

Clearly important work is being undertaken to reect on ways in which politi-cal order is being rearticulated, in terms of the intersection of new projects of solidarity and policies of prosperity, security, and warfare. Taking a more pro-grammatic re-reading ‘‘global’’ as constitutive spatial logic of these trends—apolitical category shaping these developments—could resituate globalization lessas a process of progressive permeability, but instead the circulation of normative

categories striving to redene legitimate authority. Uncovering this might betteridenties how globalization might in fact be executing the normative, empirical,and political escape from the dual territorial trap.

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