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 and the relationship of this process “to the allocation and realization of resource access rights” in addition to control over the people who use such resources (387).

We argue … that a territorialized local administration and market system are only one aspect of a much broader process of territorialization. Thus in this article we systematize and generalize the analysis of territorialization. We then illustrate the process through a discussion of the establishment of territorial civil administrative units, and the state’s attempts to take over the administration of rights to land and “forest” in Thailand. (386)

The authors employ Robert Sacks’ definition of territory in which territory is “territoriality is the “attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area” (387-388). It’s about inclusion and exclusion of people and activities within a circumscribed, delimited area, and that of the state is further defined as abstract space (equivalent, grid-like, undifferentiated in abstraction). Meanwhile, “We contend that the lack of fit between lived space and abstract space has contributed to the instability of the territorial strategies of the modern state. States often have had to rely on open coercion against rural residents to implement territorial control” (389). This incommensurability between lived space and abstract space is the root of instability, so by implication the creation of abstract implies the pulverization of lived space.

State territorialization, for these authors, implies the making of claim over a space, whether to operationalize the exclusion of particular groups (foreign and domestic) or monopolize the economic benefits that such a claim entails (i.e. taxation, resource control). Contrary to many accounts, the authors argue that global forces did not disarticulate this state-based claims-making onto space, but rather reinforced it.

To illustrate these arguments, we focus on the territorialization of resources and people in rural areas, specifically: (1) The territorialization of civil administration in rural Siam/Thailand; (2) State attempts to take over the administration of fights to land through mandatory registration of land titles based on surveys; (3) State attempts to control the use of major portions of national territory by demarcating it and defining it as forest. (391)

In Southeast Asia, distant rulers had rather durable overlapping claims to particular spaces and populations. Boundaries were more frontier interfaces than strict lines of demarcation; rulers tried to control people more than territory itself. The authors call this “property rights over people” more than over land (394). Echoing points later made in Siam Mapped, Vandergeest and Peluso note that territorial threats from imperial powers changed this scenario, with local rulers seeking a more secure hold over land in light of the looming imperialist expropriation.

Commercial competition also made territorial control and clearer lines of demarcation and decentralized subsidiary authority an imperative. The monarchy in Siam made local nobles and lords into salaried officials. Scale was being produced in concrete ways with villages and even households now becoming explicit components of territorial governance. People were increasingly counted and spaces were increasingly mapped. This is reminiscent of Lefebvre’s claims about the “homogenization, fragmentation, and hierarchization” of space by the twin forces of capitalism and state formation. Land codes and the codification of private property formed another important part of the state’s territorialization against prior regimes of rule and production. Nonetheless, the fact that only five percent of areas outside the central region were properly surveyed by 1970 shows that “this and other aspects of the land registration practice illustrate the incomplete hegemony of state strategies to claim, control, map, and territorialize resources and people” (404). Moreover, any distinction between state land and private land remained utterly blurred in practice.

Although land commodification and state territorialization occurred in tandem, the author point out that there is not a necessary connection. They use the creation of forestry lands, reserves, etc. as a counter-example. No commodification, but state power is still being territorialized. Forced villigization is another clear example, particularly of nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, especially in sensitive border areas (cf. Jim Scott’s work). Land classification is another clear example of how control over people and resources is being dictated by particular territorial claims.

“In the context of the way that some theorists believe that increased global integration is weakening the capacity of national states, we should note that direct military aid from foreign sources has been central to the increased capacity of the Forestry Department to enforce territorial controls” (413). But the authors also close by noting that these projects are always incomplete and contested in practice on the ground.

A question that remains for me with this article is the supposition of the state itself as in some ways an “instance” before or outside of territory itself. That is, they clearly see territorialization as a process of state formation, but it seems much less of a constitutive relationship as in the Brenner and Elden article. I see territory and state being formed in a necessary internally related process, rather than one acting on the other. I think Peluso and Vandergeest would agree with me, but that’s not the way it’s presented in this article. I look forward to reading their new piece in the new Global Political Ecology book edited by Watts and Peet.