This critical commentary engages, both methodologically and theoretically, the notion of territory as discussed by Stuart Elden (2010). Methodologically, I suggest that Elden's philological concern with the term 'territory' rather than with the idea of 'bounded political space' risks producing a partial historical account. As a way to enlarge the scope of analysis and include also forms of 'bounded political spaces' which existed before, during, and after the emergence of modern territory, I propose a new theoretical category, 'territorial'. This category reinstates the importance of 'b-ordering' practices, downgraded as second-order problem by Elden. Theoretically, the commentary also suggests the importance of 'peopling' territory, in order to bring social agency back in and avoiding treating modern territory as a mere terror(izing) tool. Prompted by Elden's account, this piece aims to stimulate a 'territory debate'.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Geography and Environment
Published in
Progress in Human Geography
Volume
35
Issue
3
Pages
422 - 425
Citation
ANTONSICH, M., 2011. Rethinking territory. Progress in Human Geography, 35 (3), pp.422-425.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2011
Notes
This is the submitted version of an article published in the journal Progress in Human Geography. The final published version is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132510385619