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The particularities of territory

The sequence of the words that make up the title of this journal is deliberate. Territory comes first. A central idea underlying this journal project is that “territory and related spatial terms (place, space, and territoriality) offer a profitable theoretical lens through which to analyze the workings of governance and politics” (AGNEW 2013, p. 2). By making territory central to our theoretical enterprise, we hope to address crucial dimensions of politics and governance. Demarcating a bounded space is a foundational move as it prepares the ground for the exercise of governmental control. Sassen’s recent work offers one illustration as it charts the mutual imbrication of new types of territory and new modes of governance. Global firms and financial networks actively work to construct their own cross-national jurisdictions in which they are shielded from state authority and profit from regulatory invisibility. Private global trading networks called “dark pools” are one example (SASSEN, 2013). Traders in these networks are anonymous and can effectively evade regulations that governments impose on public stock exchanges. Examples like dark pools are testimony to the dynamic and complex territorialities of today’s financial-political governance. The importance of the construction of territorial shells for exercising power often escapes analysts of politics and governance because they implicitly assume that nationstates are naturally the players and containers of politics and governance. Some tenets of International Relations, notably realism, have elevated these common sense assumptions to the level of foundational theoretical premises. Other approaches, like game theory, do not have explicit assumptions about the spatiality of politics but make the problem disappear by abstracting away from geography. These approaches generate elegant models by only considering a limited set variables and specific types of motivations. Their generality is obtained by virtue of their abstraction from geography. There is thus something unsettling to territoriality – it mitigates against elegant abstraction and forces analysts to consider the geographical foundations of politics as well as the particulars of governance. While grounding analysis in geography brings to light crucial issues in governance and politics, it also raises vexing questions. Two of these questions run through the articles in this journal and this issue. The first question is how to define