State boundaries have constituted a major topic in the tradition of political geography. Boundary analysis has focused on the international scale, since international boundaries provide perhaps the...

Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the...

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Land, terrain, territory

I propose a concept of effective sovereignty to argue that states participate in sovereignty regimes that exhibit distinctive combinations of central state authority and political territoriality. Two basic conclusions, drawing from recent research in political geography and other fields, are that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis. This matters because so much political energy has been invested in organizing politics in general and democracy in particular in relation to states. Typically, writing about sovereignty regards sovereignty as providing a norm that legitimizes central state authority. Unfortunately, little or no attention is given as to why this should always entail a territorial definition of political authority and to why states are thereby its sole proprietors. The dominant approach continues to privilege the state as the singular font of authority even when a state's sovereignty may be decried as hypocrisy and seen...

Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics

(1998). Boundaries as social processes: Territoriality in the world of flows. Geopolitics: Vol. 3, Boundaries Territory and Postmodernity, pp. 69-88.

Boundaries as social processes: Territoriality in the world of flows

This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage’s elements. This has implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change. The article concludes by highlighting the methodological and ethical challenges that such a project would face.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0309132513501405

Geopolitical assemblages and complexity

A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both of these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat. Michel Foucault From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the territorial structure of the international state system appears to be one of the great constants in human affairs. Faith in the stability of the system has been shaken somewhat by the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but few observers seriously question the system itself. People generally accept the assumption that the land surface of the earth should be divided up into discrete territorial units, each with a government that exercises substantial authority within its own territory. There may be disagreement over how much authority state leaders should have, but it is generally assumed that the political map of the future will look much like that of today, aside from some adjustments in certain unstable areas. Assumptions about the constancy of the dominant political-territorial order are not the sole province of more casual analysts of the political world; they pervade the academic literature on politics and government as well. It is true that some scholars are raising questions about the implications for the sovereign authority of state leaders of growing economic interdependence and the internationalization of environmental protection and human rights.

Alexander B. Murphy

Papers

State sovereignty as social construct: The sovereign state system as political-territorial ideal: historical and contemporary considerations