John Agnew ed. The Confines of Territory – Routledge, November 2020

A collection of papers from Territory, Politics, Governance, edited by John Agnew, the former editor of the journal. Pleased to have one of my articles in here (original available here). Only an expensive hardback at present, unfortunately.

The word ‘territory’ has taken on renewed significance in a world where its close association with state sovereignty has made a serious comeback, invoked alike by proponents of Brexit in the UK, ‘Making America Great Again’ in the USA, and myriad populists from India to Brazil by way of Italy and Hungary. The word has had a contentious history in social science and political theory. In its first seven years, the journal Territory, Politics, Governance has published numerous articles examining the ways in which territory figures into contemporary political debates and its limits as a concept when applied to a world in which sovereignty never has simply pooled up within self-evidently distinctive blocs of space named as ‘territories.’ Among other things, the limits of territory are apparent in terms of the history of a global capitalism that always bursts beyond established boundaries, the fact that some states are much more powerful and exercise much more spatial reach than do others, and that the political uses of territory in its current usage date back predominantly to seventeenth century Europe rather than being historically transcendental or worldwide.

The articles in this book are selected from Territory, Politics, Governance to survey many of the dilemmas and questions that haunt the concept of territory even as its current efflorescence in political discourse ignores them.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction

John Agnew

Section 1: Territorial Perspectives

2. The territorialization of property in land: space, power and practice

Nicholas Blomley

3. Territory, Scale and Why Capitalism Matters

Kevin R. Cox

4. Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance

Bob Jessop

5. On the ecological blindspot in the territorial rights debate

Omar Dahbour

Section 2: Interrogating Territory

6. When Territory Deborders Territoriality

Saskia Sassen

7. Taking back control? The myth of territorial sovereignty and the Brexit fiasco

John Agnew

8. How Should We Do the History of Territory?

Stuart Elden

Section 3: Confines of Territory

9. Revisiting politicide: state annihilation in Israel/Palestine

Merav Amir

10. The intertwined geopolitics and geoeconomics of hopes/fears: China’s triple economic bubbles and the ‘One Belt One Road’ imaginary

Ngai-Ling Sum

11. Territories in contestation: relational power in Latin America

Nick Clare, Victoria Habermehl and Liz Mason-Deese