Contemporary Political Theory review of Terror and Territory

Terror and territory: The spatial extent of sovereignty is reviewed by Jonathan Havercroft here. (It appears to require a subscription; though the journal has announced book reviews are now open access.) It is an overall positive review, though it is critical of the analysis of camps. The opening and closing paragraphs:

Political theorists tend to prioritize the temporal over the spatial. We tend to imagine states of nature before the social contract and the triumph of utopian societies after our contemporary political struggles. But politics does not simply occur between past and future, it also occurs in and over space. And recent work in political geography by scholars such as John Agnew, David Harvey, Bruce Braun and Gearoid O’Tuathail has developed sophisticated theoretical analyses of political space. I am happy to report that Stuart Elden’s Terror and Territory is an important addition to this literature, and a work that political theorists working on the concept of sovereignty must read because of its timely analysis of how spatial practices shape contemporary political logics…

Elden demonstrates convincingly that political theorists – and political scientists more generally – need to spend more time focusing on the role of territory in contemporary politics. He also shows that commonplace claims that Al-Qaeda is a de-territorialized network, or that failed states are sources for terrorism and civil conflict, are not only platitudes, but that they gloss over the complex interaction between sovereignty and territory. As Elden’s Terror and Territory shows, sovereignty and territory are not coincident, sovereign power must be exercised spatially. Therefore, political theorists interested in sovereignty can find in Elden’s work an analysis of how contemporary spatial practices affect the exercise of sovereign power.   


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