International Political Sociology has just put together an open access virtual theme issue on Territorialities, Spaces, Geographies – including papers by Nisha Shah, John Agnew, Neil Brenner and me, and Nick Vaughan-Williams:

This special issue presents a selection of work at the interstices between international relations and geography. It is an invitation for intensifying debates in International Political Sociology on transformations of space and scales, the use of geographical methods and concepts, and the nature and limits of geographical thought in international and global relations.
‘The international is a spatial category and has been invested by variable geographies. The world of the international is flat; a two-dimensional world of relations between sovereign states claiming exclusive power over their territory and people. The international also persistently and often violently draws lines between itself and its outside: worlds of colonies, the uncivilised, transnational networks, and others. Recently, topographic categories are increasingly challenged by topological modes of enacting spatial relations and by analyses foregrounding the importance of temporal practices and narratives.
This special issue samples an international political sociology that deploys and critically engages territorial, spatial, geographical modes of thinking and politics. What are the limits and transformations of spatial practices in contemporary politics? How are territorialities, borders, and lines invested in methods of governing and conceptions of order? What is the impact of foregrounding temporality and mobility on spatial categorizing of the international? How are geopolitics and territoriality produced?

Table of contents

The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global  Transformation and the Problem of the State’s Two Territories
Nisha Shah

Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory
Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden

Know-where: Geographies of Knowledge of World Politics
John Agnew

Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory
Jan Helmig, Oliver Kessler

Borders, Territory, Law
Nick Vaughan-Williams

Rethinking Community: Translation Space as a Departure from  Political Community
Reiko Shindo

Education and the Formation of Geopolitical  Subjects
Martin Muller

Think Locally, Act Globally
Terrence Lyons and Peter Mandaville