This special section builds on recent scholarship on territory and borders to call for attention to the ways that bodies are central in their constitution. Through a wide range of case studies from the delivery room to Tahrir Square, the six contributors find territory and borders in unlikely places, and reveal new lines of inquiry through their explorations of the ways that bodies both are marked by territory and borders and take an active role in their making. The contributors bring together recent work on territory with literatures from a divergent set of literatures, including feminist geopolitics, queer theory and actor network theory, to build a case for an embodied and material understanding of the intersections of bodies, territory and borders. We argue that territory is made, in part, through bodies – an intimate geopolitics. Bodies challenge and subvert state control of territory, become vulnerable to violence due to state bordering practices, and experience and produce smaller‐scale forms of territory in the refugee camp or hospital. Borders can limit our epistemological vision or expand it. Seeking to expand embodied nationalism and build on scholarship on globalisation that cuts across scale, we approach the body as an active, territorial agent in processes of border and territory‐making. Here, territory becomes a versatile, but grounded and material, focal point, allowing for the embodied experiences of border‐crossers, but also for other racialised, gendered and sexualised bodies as they give birth or seek to build neighbourhoods.
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