Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty

Abstract

Political theorists tend to prioritize the temporal over the spatial. We tend to imagine states of nature before the social contract and the triumph of utopian societies after our contemporary political struggles. But politics does not simply occur between past and future, it also occurs in and over space. And recent work in political geography by scholars such as John Agnew, David Harvey, Bruce Braun and Gearoid O’Tuathail has developed sophisticated theoretical analyses of political space. I am happy to report that Stuart Elden’s Terror and Territory is an important addition to this literature, and a work that political theorists working on the concept of sovereignty must read because of its timely analysis of how spatial practices shape contemporary political logics. Elden’s work analyzes the various spatial practices enacted by both the US Government and its various rivals in the Global War on Terror. Although much recent literature on the relationship between territory and terrorism has argued that terrorism represents a de-territorialization of warfare, Elden offers us a more nuanced reading of the War on Terror as simultaneously being involved in practices of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. He looks at the territorial strategies of Islamic groups, and considers the significance of the US Government’s insistence on maintaining the territorial integrity of countries such as Iraq and Somalia. The book begins with the observation that the Latin root of the word territory is unsettled. It could be either terra – referring to land – or terr% ere – referring to frighten. Elden uses this ambiguity in the etymology of territory to explore how contemporary logics of territory are intertwined with logics of fear. As Elden suggests, if territory does have its root in terr% ere then territory could mean a place where people are frightened away from, or a space over which fear is exercised. And this definition reflects how – harking back to Weber’s definition

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