I’ll be giving a talk at the Hong Kong Baptist University on 18th May. Because the audience will be mixed between faculty and students, I’ve been asked to be more general and so this will give me a chance to revisit some of the more contemporary political themes of my territory work. I may try to offer some thoughts on Libya and the death of Osama bin Laden. There will be a bit on The Birth of Territory but not so much focus on that as in other recent talks.
This talk outlines the work I have been doing on territory over the past several years. It discusses how territory needs to be taken much more seriously as a concept, which cannot be straight-forwardly understood as a ‘bounded space’ or as an outcome of ‘territoriality’. Instead, territory needs to be understood as a political question, but political in a broad sense: as economic, strategic, legal and technical. The bulk of the paper concentrates on the contemporary political situation of the ongoing ‘war on terror’, as outlined in the book Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, and also makes some claims concerning the broader conceptual and historical themes of my ongoing work.
