Is territory a trap? Nearly a decade ago John Agnew described the prevalent territorial paradigm in international relations – which asserts the ‘geographical division of the world into mutually exclusive territorial states’ (Agnew Reference Agnew1994, 53), coupled with the propositions that political power and society overlap with the geographical boundaries of the territorial units – as a twofold trap. At the descriptive and analytical levels, the territorial paradigm distorts our understanding of trans-border economic and political processes and power; at the normative level it informs realist visions of a world composed of self-interested, competing, conflicting, and mutually exclusive states (Agnew Reference Agnew1994; Agnew and Corbridge Reference Agnew and Corbridge1995). Is territory indeed at the root of these theoretical predicaments? Stuart Elden (Reference Elden2010a, Reference Elden2010b, Reference Elden2013) argues persuasively that ‘… territory itself is not a trap. Rather it is certain ways of thinking about territory… that is the problem’. So long as ‘those largely uncritical assumptions’ about territory remain dominant in international relations and international political economy ‘more, not less, work on territory’ is required (Elden Reference Elden2010a, 757).

We agree. Territory is one of the most under-theorized concepts that we rely on both in political theory and international relations. It is only in recent years that this foundational concept began to receive sustained attention from political theorists (e.g. Steiner Reference Steiner1998; Kolers Reference Kolers2009; Stilz Reference Stilz2011; Miller Reference Miller2012; Nine Reference Nine2012). In this symposium we aim to take forward this welcomed theoretical development. It is important to develop the theories of territory further for two purposes in particular. First, analysts and theorists of international politics have grappled with the question of whether the territorial, sovereign nation-state is or is not in decline (Mann Reference Mann1997; Weiss Reference Weiss1998; Krasner Reference Krasner2001a; Agnew Reference Agnew2005; Bierstecker Reference Biersteker2013). To move beyond the yes–no framework of this debate, we ought to have a grasp of various conceptions of territory and of the diversity of political, legal, and institutional orders of which it may be a part.Footnote ¹

While the scope of the state’s authority has changed over the past two decades, with increased economic interconnectedness and movement of goods and money, it does not follow that territory has simply lost its significance. The geographical borders of states and the parcels of territorial jurisdictions and authorities that they demarcate continue to have, for better and worse, clear impacts on the lives of many millions of people – their personal security, access to recourses, wealth and opportunity, individual rights, and well-being.Footnote ² Agnew (Reference Agnew2005) classifies forms of transnational authority as ‘sovereignty regimes’ to illustrate that ‘sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis’ (Agnew Reference Agnew2005, 437). However, supposing for the sake of argument that no lexical error is involved in describing these forms of authority as sovereign, it remains the case that transnational structures and authorities have a territorial dimension. Territory is not rendered irrelevant within trans-border power structures.Footnote ³ As the contributions to this symposium suggest, we need not be committed to a single territorial model (the Earth parcelled into mutually exclusive and self-contained state units), to observe that territory continues to be an important dimension of politics, law, power, and authority.

Second, as political theorists, we cannot help worrying about the normative questions: is territory good or bad, right or wrong? That is: how does territory and the various conceptions thereof affect rights, freedom, justice, and equality? Territory, and the territorial state, is often depicted by critics as an inherently violent institution that – even if it promises equality among citizens – does so at the cost of exclusion and oppression of outsiders (e.g. Connolly Reference Connolly1994; Elden Reference Elden2010b; Badiou Reference Badiou2011, 6–15). ‘Creating a bounded space’ writes Elden (Reference Elden2009, xxx) ‘is already a violent act of exclusion and inclusion; maintaining it as such requires constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat’.Footnote ⁴ While uncovering oppression and exclusion is no doubt important, this line of objection to territory is too quick to dismiss it as a dimension of political organization that bears potential to uphold freedom, rights, and equality. It is far from clear that non-territorial, trans-territorial or territorially non-fixed forms of political power – for example, empires, multinational corporations, or feudal loyalties – can do any better in respect to rights, equality, or freedom. Thus, a much more careful analysis of the relationship between, specifically, the territorial dimension of forms of political organizations and their potential to uphold rights, freedoms, equality, or justice is required.

The symposium brings together five original contributions on concepts and conceptions of territory in political theory. Whereas Elden takes a historical–philosophical approach – which sheds lights on the particularity of our current understanding of territory by historicizing it and by uncovering its origins in a specific period, philosophy, and technology – the contributions in this symposium take conceptual–analytical approaches. Hence, they develop nuanced understandings of the multiple conceptions of territory and subsequently of the many institutional and political possibilities that it allows for. Taken together, the contributions provide indications that before abandoning or discrediting the territorial paradigm there is much to explore and discover within it. From a normative perspective, they suggest that elements of territoriality as aspects of political organization are worth retaining. In other words, the prevalent territorial paradigm, as sketched by Agnew, is indeed far from exhausting the conceptual and political realms of territory; there is (much) more to the territorial paradigm beyond what has been commonly thought about it, and it is not all bad. In particular, the articles rethink the nexus between territory and the traditional sovereign state model. Consequently, the contributions to the symposium open new ways to understand the relationship between territory and sovereignty. They indicate that the Westphalian sovereign state model (to the extent that it has existed) is only one way in which a sovereign political authority can be territorial. They provide the conceptual tools to formulate (and subsequently test) the hypothesis that the transformations in statehood, which rightly receive much attention in international relations scholarship, may not be best described in terms of rise and decline of territorial sovereignty, but as moves from one model of territorially bounded political authority to another, and simultaneous coexistence of different models.

As pointed out by Agnew and, in his studies on sovereignty, by Krasner, one of the major problems with the accepted territorial paradigm and the specific model of state sovereignty commonly attached to is that they muddle in a single theoretical construct a bundle of observations, propositions, constellations, and phenomena that do not necessarily rise and fall together (Krasner Reference Krasner1999: Ch. 1; Krasner Reference Krasner2001b). The archetype of the territorial-sovereign nation-state includes a nation, centralized state power that is hierarchical from within and exclusive from without, fixed geographical borders with which the nation and the state’s power overlap. The articles in the symposium engage in conceptual unbundling of the various elements of this territorial-sovereign nation-state model. At the same time, it is not suggested that, as such, the territorial dimension of politics, law, and power is in demise; rather, by exploring and developing the variety of conceptions of territory, of grounds for and justifications of territorial rights, the contributions indicate that territory may well constitute an important aspect of rights and power across various state and sovereignty models and across diverse international (transnational, or global) orders. Together they provide a nuanced analytical–conceptual framework for future empirical study of the various ways and contexts in which territory manifests itself (beyond the prevalent territorial-sovereign state model).

From a conceptual–analytical perspective, any theory of territory will involve a particular understanding of the constellation of relationships between three elements: (1) a piece of land; (2) a group of people residing on the land; and (3) a set of political institutions that govern the people within the geographical domain (the territory). There are many different possible relationships between people, land, and the state, and correspondingly different ideas of what territory is for, which suggest different conceptions of the appropriate territorial right-holder. Each of the contributions to the symposium explores one aspect or another of this relationship; further, each addresses the question of what territorial rights ought to amount to – how exclusive these rights are and in what ways? David Miller develops important adaptations of the nationalist approach to territorial rights. On this view, nations – culturally and historically defined – gain territorial jurisdiction over their homelands through mixing their culture in the land. Without discarding the national premise, the article moves beyond the traditional nation-state paradigm, applying it to ‘debatable lands’: to territories in which nations coexist and to conditions of fluid identities. With this contribution, Miller addresses two of the long-standing objections to liberal-nationalism as a theory of territorial rights – namely the inability to incorporate the multiple and changing characters of nationalities and national identities. Still those rejecting the nation as a normative, analytical, or explanatory tool may wish to raise new questions.

Margaret Moore takes a broadly democratic perspective in which the people is the primary holder of territorial rights and addresses one of the most challenging tasks for political theories of territory – the particularity or attachment problem: how to account for the attachment of specific peoples to specific pieces of land; and subsequently to which scope of rights to the territory is the people entitled? She argues that the people-based account of attachment to specific territory is superior to the two main alternatives – the nation-centred and state-centred accounts. The former falls short of explaining why shared culture justifies self-government, while the latter is unsuccessful in attaching particular states to particular territories and neglects that it is the value of self-determination, not the implementation of justice, that justifies collective territorial–jurisdictional rights. Ayelet Banai begins with an internal critique of statist view on territorial rights – according to which states, being legal–political entities, are the primary holders thereof. A major objection to state-centred approaches emphasizes their overly homogenous notion of state and statehood: the unwarranted privileged position that they give to a Westphalian conception of statehood. The privileging of a particular model of statehood is especially problematic in that it reiterates colonial legacies that international law seeks to overcome and undermines the international standing of already deprived and weaker societies. Addressing these important objections from a statist perspective, Banai’s contribution seeks to illustrate the compatibility of a state-centred view with a diversity of state forms and models of statehood, by developing a pluralist interpretation thereof. Addressing from different perspectives the question of who should have territorial rights, all three contributions reach beyond the traditional nation-state paradigm, without by this abandoning the importance of territory and territorial rights as such.

The disaggregation of the different elements that are commonly bundled together as part of ‘territorial sovereignty’ is explicit in Cara Nine’s contribution, which asks: what is the object of territorial rights? What is it that peoples or states possess when they have rights over a territory? She argues that under current conditions of interdependence, the traditional notion of the object of territorial right as a geo-stationary region is too narrow. For an adequate notion of the object of territorial rights she suggests that we take the cue from territorial and property rights over rivers that flow and are not stationary – these are based on the model of rights to fare use not exclusive ownership. Here, too, it is argued that the purpose and value of the division of the world to territorial jurisdiction is self-determination. The fair use model helps fulfilling the value of self-determination as absence of arbitrary interference under conditions of deep global interconnectedness. Finally, Frank Dietrich begins from the perspective of global justice theory, asking whether small groups of people can justifiably claim large swathes of the Earth’s surface, while excluding millions of others, a problem which is very pressing in this world of rapid and uneven demographic change. He suggests that the solution to this problem rests in ‘unbundling’ rights over territory, and making control over immigration sensitive to global demographic pressure.