The Radical Urban Lab is delighted to co-host (together with GOSSIP) Prof Joe Painter (Durham). November 13th, 1-2pm, George Cumming Room (and online).
Rethinking territory (again)
Since the turn of the century, the view of territory as the straightforward geographical foundation of political life has been challenged by new and more sophisticated thinking by political geographers and others. At the same time, global political changes and events seem to have reinforced the importance of territory. Terrorist attacks, warfare, migration, climate breakdown, trade conflicts, state-repression, demands for regional secession, nationalism and disease have all drawn increased attention to territory and are often credited with strengthening territorial divisions and ‘hardening’ territorial boundaries. Despite its sophistication, much of the recent geographical interest in territory and its apparent resurgence entails a set of binary distinctions between ‘territory’ or ‘territorial’ on the one hand and their various others or opposites on the other. Sometimes this is expressed in terms of a twenty-first century ‘territorial backlash’ against the notion of a ‘borderless world’ that was popularised in the 1990s. Territory and the territorial are similarly counter-posed to their purported binary opposites of globalisation, space of flows, networks, and relational space. The supposed re-emergence of territory as a fundamental ordering principle of political life is sometimes presented as vindicating theoretical and conceptual critiques of ‘relational’ and ‘networked’ ways of understanding the world. It is almost as if we are being invited to pick a side: do you believe in territories or networks? Are you a territorial or a relational thinker? Come along! You have to choose you know. You can’t be both! But what if we can be both? Indeed, what if we need to be both? What if we can only really understand territory – what it is, where it comes from, and how it works – if we see territory not as the antithesis of networks and relational space, but as something that is itself a relational phenomenon. Rethinking territory, I will argue, means considering how relations give rise to territory in the first place, sustain it, strengthen or weaken it, transform its effects, and shape its futures. This paper seeks to challenge the binary thinking that assumes there is a fundamental dichotomy between territorial phenomena (such the nation-state) and relational or networked phenomena (such as the internet). I question this separation and argue that territory should itself be understood in relational terms. In this view territory is a practical as much as a philosophical matter: territory is actively produced through human practices – and those practices both form and arise from networked socio-technical relations.
