Category Archives: Territory

Human Territoriality

Sack, Robert D. 1986. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro and Ch. 1] Sack describes human territoriality as a specifically strategic process, departing instantly from the notion of territoriality as a biological human drive. He … Continue reading

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Paasi on Boundaries as Processes

Paasi, Ansi. 1999. “Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows.” Geopolitics 3(1): 669-680. Paasi attempts to think the changing strategies, meanings, and identities produced by boundaries (by which he mainly means national borders) in the context of … Continue reading

Posted in Boundaries, Nation/Nationalism, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territorial Trap

Agnew, John. 1994. “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy 1(1): 53-80. In a more recent piece, here’s how John Agnew described his influential 1994 article on the Territorial Trap: “The purpose … Continue reading

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Scale, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territorialization of State Power

Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 1995. “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.” Theory and Society 24: 385-426. Vandergeest and Peluso’s landmark article concerns the way in which state power is territorialized within the borders of a politically defined space … Continue reading

Posted in Forests, Historical-Geographies, Law, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Production of Territory

Brenner, Neil, and Stuart Elden. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space and Territory.” International Political Sociology 3(4): 353-377. I have read this incredibly important article enough times that I hardly need to be writing notes on it. It’s pretty engrained … Continue reading

Posted in Boundaries, Henri Lefebvre, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Suffering for Territory

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Hollow Land and the Politics of ‘Archupation’

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. All military occupations are spatial operations and strategies. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and government have managed to make space the continuation of war by other means. New … Continue reading

Posted in City, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Place, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Foucault and Geography

Crampton, Jeremy W. and Stuart Elden, eds. Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. [Selections] The introduction to this collection lays out plainly the importance of spatiality in Foucault’s work. As early as 1967, when the Heteroropias … Continue reading

Posted in City, David Harvey, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territory, Place, Scale, Network

Jessop, Bob, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones. 2008. “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(3): 389-401. This is an important article—short and to the point. The authors claim that thinking around sociospatial relations has tended to … Continue reading

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