My piece ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’, forthcoming in Progress in Human Geography in early 2011, but already available online, will be the focus of a discussion in the journal. Marco Antonsich has kindly written a response, to which I’ve written a reply. These are due out sometime later in 2011.

I won’t say much about this here, to be fair to Marco, but some of the key points at stake revolve around the kind of approach to be taken in understanding territory; the weighting to be put on the different elements that make it up; and the way to understand what Marco calls ‘territorial formations before territory’.

My key argument – which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read my work on this topic – is that any adequate political theory of territory has to be historical in execution.