At various points over the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve debated writing different books on territory. Many of the articles I’ve written on this topic were early versions of parts of the books I did write on territory, but not all. I began to work seriously on territory around 2000, initially thinking I would write a history of the concept of territory in Western political thought. That book was eventually published as The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), but I put it aside for a couple of years to write a much more contemporary study, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). After I completed The Birth of Territory, I began to write a book on Shakespeare, but the beginning of the Foucault project delayed the completion of that study, which was published as Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Terror and Territory and The Birth of Territory were career-changing books for me, helping with promotions at Durham and a move to Warwick. Both won prizes and were quite widely reviewed, generally positively though of course with some exceptions. I still think The Birth of Territory is the best book I’ve written. Shakespearean Territories is the least read of these three books, but it’s one I was pleased to have completed. It was intended both to be an examination of territory and more broadly geographical questions in Shakespeare, but also to use Shakespeare to develop my theorisation of territory, and to push me to address some of the things I’d neglected in previous work, as some reviewers pointed out. In particular, that book looks at corporeal, colonial and material aspects of territory, as well as the political, geographical, economic, legal, technical aspects I’d stressed before.
In my earliest writings on territory, I was developing a conceptualisation of territory in relation to contemporary issues – such as debates about globalisation, the European Union’s constitution (with Luiza Bialasiewicz and Joe Painter), and the ‘war on terror’, which all fed into Terror and Territory. A lot of this work was done while I was working with the International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University, with Martin Pratt, John Donaldson and Alison Williams, among others. Some of the work I edited with Jeremy Crampton around calculation was important in my thinking too. My 2010 article “Land, Terrain, Territory” was an early version of the introduction to The Birth of Territory, but elaborates on some points more than the book version. In particular, I challenged the relation between territory and territoriality in that piece, as I did in some detail in a piece that discussed Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri: “The State of Territory Under Globalization”.
Shortly after I’d completed The Birth of Territory, I gave a lecture in Kentucky and later in Edinburgh which has received a lot of attention compared to my other articles. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power” was the beginning of my attempt to take the dimensionality and materiality of territory much more seriously. In that piece I was building on work by Eyal Weizman and Stephen Graham, and urban exploration work such as that by Bradley Garrett, and trying to link this together through the architectural work of Paul Virilio and others. This developed into my work on terrain, particularly in two articles “Legal Terrain: The Political Materiality of Territory” and “Terrain, Politics, History”. There have been some other related pieces, but those three articles have most of the key claims I’ve made. Some of this work was in dialogue with Phil Steinberg and others connected to the ICE-LAW project he directed, and with Gastón Gordillo and the contributors to conference sessions we organised. I debated for a long time about writing a book about “the political materiality of territory”, and applied for a fellowship for that project. I was shortlisted but ultimately unsuccessful, and a couple of planned talks on the idea were cancelled in the early days of the pandemic. The Foucault work developed a lot more, I began thinking about other things, and I never returned to that project. Although these circumstances were part of the reason, I felt I was running out of new things to say, in part because work in that register was being done well by so many other people.
Alongside these pieces, there had been occasional articles or chapters which thought about territory in relation to some of the theorists I had an interest in but generally in other registers. At one point I considered doing something more systematic on territory’s theorists, but what I did write covered only some of the key names. “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory” and, a while later, “How Should We Do the History of Territory?” addressed these questions in relation to Michel Foucault, as did a book chapter on “Foucault and Geometrics”, which particularly relates to the terrain interest. Neil Brenner and I wrote a piece on “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory” which developed from our editorial work for the State, Space, World collection of Lefebvre’s writings. If I was to do more on Lefebvre, it might be to develop some ideas around land, which relate to the On the Rural collection I co-edited with Adam David Morton. I wrote a piece on Carl Schmitt too, in part because I was fed up with the continual references to Nomos of the Earth after its English translation. In my reading Schmitt is not very insightful and politically dangerous. I also wrote shorter pieces on Jean Gottmann and Grégoire Chamayou. Some of the editorial introductions I wrote for collections to essays on Peter Sloterdijk, one of which was with Eduardo Mendieta, talked about his spatial work, but were less directly on territory.
Some of these pieces were written in response to particular invitations, either to speak or contribute to something, but there was also a piece on Boko Haram which was written about some of what I learned in visits to Nigeria. A piece on “Territory/Territoriality” situated these issues in relation to debates in urban theory. There are a couple of review essays, some book reviews, prefaces or other shorter contributions which are not listed here, and themes cross between different pieces.
Not all of this work would be worth revisiting, but there are some arguments in these which are not in the books on territory I wrote. A loose grouping of some of these articles and chapters might look something like this.
(I’ve linked to the publisher sites below, since some pieces are open access. Many of these pieces are available elsewhere on this site or Researchgate. But if something isn’t accessible to you, email me.)
Political and Conceptual
“The Constitution of EU Territory”, with Luiza Bialasiewicz and Joe Painter, Comparative European Politics 3 (3), 2005, pp. 333-63.
“Missing the Point: Globalisation, Deterritorialisation and the Space of the World”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (1), March 2005, pp. 8-19.
“The State of Territory Under Globalization: Empire and the Politics of Reterritorialization”, in Maria Margaroni and Effie Yiannopoulou eds. Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 47-66, reprinted with new afterword in Mattias Kärrholm and Andrea Mubi Brighenti eds. Territories, Environments, Governance: Explorations in Territoriology, London: Routledge, 2022, 15-36.
“Land, Terrain, Territory”, Progress in Human Geography 34 (6), 2010, 799-817 (although, as noted above, most of this is in The Birth of Territory).
“Territory/Territoriality” in Anthony Orum (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019.
“The Geopolitics of Boko Haram and Nigeria’s War on Terror”, The Geographical Journal 180 (4), 2014, 414-25.
Volume and Terrain
“Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power”, Political Geography 32 (2), 2013, 35-51, with responses by Peter Adey and Gavin Bridge, and my reply, “Bodies, Books, Beneath”, 58-59.
“Legal Terrain: The Political Materiality of Territory”, London Review of International Law, 5 (2), 2017, 199-224.
“The Instability of Terrain”, in Andrea Bagnato, Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual (eds.), A Moving Border – Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, New York and Karlsruhe: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City/ZKM, 2019, 51-61.
“Terrain, Politics, History”, Dialogues in Human Geography 11 (2), 2021, 170-89, with responses by Gastón Gordillo, Kimberley Peters, Bruno Latour, Deborah P. Dixon and Rachael Squire, and my reply, “The Limits of Territory and Terrain”, 213-17.
Territory’s Theorists (Chamayou, Foucault, Gottmann, Lefebvre, Leibniz, Schmitt, Shakespeare)
“Governmentality, Calculation, Territory”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (3), 2007, 562-80.
“Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory”, with Neil Brenner, International Political Sociology 3 (4), 2009, 353–77.
“How Should we Do the History of Territory?” Territory, Politics, Governance 1 (1), 2013, 5-20.
“Jean Gottmann, The Significance of Territory”, Geographica Helvetica 68 (1), 2013, 65-68.
“Leibniz and Geography: Geologist, Paleontologist, Biologist, Historian, Political Theorist and Geopolitician”, Geographica Helvetica 68 (2), 2013, 81-93.
“Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos, Territory and Großraum”, Radical Philosophy 161, May/June 2010, 18-26.
“Grégoire Chamayou’s Manhunts: From Territory to Space?” in Léopold Lambert (ed.), The Funambulist Papers 2, Punctum Books, 2015, 46-53.
“Terricide: Lefebvre, Geopolitics and the Killing of the Earth”, unpublished (destined for an edited book which was abandoned).
“Foucault and Geometrics”, in Philippe Bonditti, Didier Bigo and Frédéric Gros (eds.), Foucault and the Modern International: Silences and Legacies for the Study of World Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 295-311.
“Why Should People Interested in Territory read William Shakespeare?”, Territory, Politics, Governance 7 (3), 2019, 289-96.
This is the 63rd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and now entering a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
