Some reviews of my book Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty are beginning to be published…

Nisha Shah has a review essay entitled ‘Terra Infirma’ forthcoming in Political Geography which discusses the book in relation to John Agnew’s Globalization and Sovereignty and Lauren Benton’s A Search for Sovereignty. It’s a nuanced and complicated review, but it says some positive things about the book…

Following much of his recent work on territory’s evolution and operation as a technology of power, Elden moves beyond a physicalist understanding of territory, stressing that it is a ‘constitutive dimension’ rather than the ‘static background structure’ of modern politics… Elden’s interesting twist is to relate the preservation of borders to terrorism… The important nuance and implicit critique that Elden puts forward is that territorial integrity – especially its interpretation exclusively as territorial preservation – at once implicates and immunizes the state in and from acts of terrorism.

It’s also reviewed in the new issue of Radical Philosophy by Peter Hitchcock, alongside David Chandler’s Hollow Hegemony and R.B.J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World. Some of the nice comments include

The novelty of the text is not necessarily its spirited defence of conceptions of territoriality but the test case it brings to bear on the polemic: an analysis of the spatiality of sovereignty through the recent histories of terror and terrorism… This is a refreshing take on territory because it shows via concrete examples how concepts of territoriality and sovereignty are woven through the most prominent scene of contemporary global politics: the war on terror itself… Elden’s consummate ability to take global politics as itself a dynamic interrogation of his geographic zeal.

Because part of its aim is to set the books in context together, Hitchcock is interested in what they have to say about globality. He ends with the suggestion that “the philosophical disposition of world must be actively contested”. I completely agree, and when the history of territory book is finally done that’s close to what I want to work on next: how thinking the notion of the world changes how we think about spatial categories; and vice versa.

There have also been brief reports on the book in Choice and booknews.com, but these are the first full accounts to be published. James Sidaway has also just sent me his review which is forthcoming in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, but since that isn’t published yet I probably shouldn’t post excerpts. There are also reviews coming in out in Geografiska Annaler B and Geopolitics.