Progressive Geographies

I shared the German version of this last week, but the English version is now available online.

Pod Save Austria – ‘Terror and the State of Territory’

It begins with a 15 minute talk by me, and then a discussion with Gudrun Harrer and Saskia Stachowitsch. The rest of the series is here – English and German. The pieces are also available on SoundCloud and iTunes

We think of the relation between a state and its territory as fixed, with the world divided up by boundaries that are clear and unmovable. Those state boundaries seemingly mark a clear line between domestic and foreign politics. After World War II the international community tried to fix those boundaries, and outlaw intervention within the territory of a sovereign state. The post-Cold War world has seen a progressive weakening of the links between these ideas – among others the intervention in Kosovo, and then a sequence of interventions following George W. Bush’s declaration of a ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and most recently in Syria. These interventions challenge the sovereignty of states within their boundaries, within their territory, though most are attempts to preserve their territorial status. This talk will provide some historical background, and open up the question of whether the state-territory relation is being challenge more fundamentally by these interventions.

Speaker STUART ELDEN, professor for political theory and geography at the University of Warwick
Respondents GUDRUN HARRER, journalist and Middle East expert and SASKIA STACHOWITSCH, professor for international politics at the University of Vienna

STUART ELDEN is Professor of Political Theory and Geography, Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick (GB). He published the award-winning books Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty in 2009 and The Birth of Territory in 2013. His new book Shakespearean Territories is forthcoming in late 2018.

GUDRUN HARRER is leading editor for the daily newspaper ‘Der Standard’, where she headed the Foreign Policy editorial department for years. She studied Arabian and Islamic Culture as well as Political Sciences ant teaches Modern Arabic History at the University of Vienna and at the Diplomatic Academy Vienna.

SASKIA STACHOWITSCH is Professor of International Policy at University Vienna und head of Austrian Institute of International Affairs (oiip). She works on critical security and military studies, feminst and post-colonial theories of International Relations and transnational actors (eg. ‚Frontex’).