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 was to show how much the conventional wisdom in the field of International Relations misses examining what I took to be one of its most crucial assumptions: that the quintessential state of International Relations is simply and straightforwardly a territorial entity” (2010, 779). Agnew says he wanted to upset the notion of inter-national relations from its privileged place of emphasis in the politics of global affairs, while suggesting more attention to different spatial configurations and scales as important “sites” of analysis. The territorial trap had actually frozen geography.

The “Territorial Trap” involves the following:

The first assumption, and the one that is most fundamental theoretically, is the reification of state territorial spaces as fixed units of secure sovereign space. The second is the division of the domestic from the foreign. The third geographical assumption is of the territorial state as existing prior to and as a container of society. (76-77)

Put more simply in the abstract: “Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions – states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity, and states as ‘containers’ of societies – that have led into the ‘territorial trap’.” The first assumption has fed into the reification of state territories as fixed bonded space in a way that dehistorizes and naturalizes process of state formation (59). Agnew notes how it was Lefebvre who traced “this ‘timeless’ conception of state-centred space to the influence of Hegelian idealism. He notes (Lefebvre, 1991: 279): ‘For Hegel space brought historical time to an end, and the master of space was the state’” (71).

I know that he’s pointing out how states are not necessarily bound to timeless and neatly defined territorial forms, but I still think he’s making an argument similar to Brenner and Elden’s that territory is always-already something of the state—in however complex and/or contingent a form.

I liked this use of quotes:

That an impersonal structure of domination called the state is the core of politics is an idea so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking that any other conception of it appears counter-intuitive and implausible’ (Viroli, 1992: 284). Yet this was not always the case. In early Renaissance Italy the term ‘political’ was intimately associated with society. Politics was ‘the art of preserving the respublica, in the sense of a community of individuals living together in justice’ (Viroli, 1992: 2-3).

Agnew, John. 2010. “Still Trapped in Territory?” Geopolitics 15(4): 779-784.