Territory Beyond Terra

Kimberley Peters, Philip Steinberg, Elaine Stratford

• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786600134
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoria: Geopolitica

At the root of our understanding of territory is the concept of terra —land—a surface of fixed points with stable features that can be calculated, categorised, and controlled. But what of the many spaces on Earth that defy this simplistic characterisation: Oceans in which ‘places’ are continuously re-formed? Air that can never be fully contained? Watercourses that obtain their value by transcending boundaries? This book examines the politics of these spaces to shed light on the challenges of our increasingly dynamic world. Through a focus on the planet’s elements, environments, and edges, the contributors to Territory beyond Terra extend our understanding of territory to the dynamic, contentious spaces of contemporary politics.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Kimberley Peters, Philip Steinberg and Elaine Stratford

As Stuart Elden (2013a, 3) writes in The Birth of Territory, ‘it is generally assumed that territory is self-evident in meaning’. Because territories are typically understood as the bounded units that result from efforts by humans and their institutions to control space, most academic inquiry has failed to approach the concept directly. Instead, scholars have tended to focus either on the borders that define the limits of territories or on the processes of territoriality by which territories are constructed. Literatures in both areas have advanced considerably over the past few decades. The field of border studies, for instance, has advanced from the empirical study of why borders are where they are to the development of conceptual work on how enforcing and crossing borders intersect with identity, citizenship, and governmentality (Jones 2016; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Newman and Paasi 1998; Paasi 1998). Studies of territoriality, similarly, have expanded from work that roots territorial behaviour in animal instincts to claim space (Ardrey 1966; Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978), to research that associates changes in territorial practice with social change (Sack 1986; Soja 1971), to scholarship that conceptualises territorialisation as a social construct, a discursive strategy, or a process that is continually articulated amid competing tendencies of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (Agnew 1994; Albert 1998; Gottman 1973; Kratochwil 1986; Ruggie 1993). However, in these literatures, whether one focuses on the borders that define territories or on the territorial behaviours and institutions that create them, attention is diverted from understanding how space is transformed into territory, a specifically modern innovation that, according to Elden (2013a), must occur prior to its bounding.

Delving further, Elden identifies territory as a “political technology”. Territory, for Elden (2013a), is a complex bundle of political, geographical, economic, strategic, legal, and technical relations that joins a particular perspective on land – wherein one conceives of land as a series of points whose difference and distance can be calculated with another on terrain – wherein Earth’s substance is understood as a material resource that can provide value, whether by providing a surface for mobility or elevations for surveillance, or as a source of soil or minerals. Elden’s formulation is provocative. Indeed, the political materialism that lies at the heart of his approach is taken up throughout this book. However, his choice of terms for the two fundamental aspects of territory – land and terrain – suggests limits to his perspective. In everyday usage, land is often understood as a synonym for solid earth, and terrain is frequently used solely to refer to that earth’s surface and its morphology. These assumed meanings pervade Elden’s text, as Elden himself has subsequently acknowledged (Elden 2013b, 2017c). This collection seeks to advance an understanding of territory beyond the geophysical limits implied by conventional understandings of land and terrain.

THINKING BEYOND SOLID LAND

In some respects, the landward (or terrestrial) bias underpinning histories of territory is not surprising, whether these histories focus on the development of territorialising practices (Sack 1986) or on the development of a political technology that links notions of land with those of terrain (Elden 2013a). In writing of the seas, Steinberg (1999, 368) notes that the land bias of the social sciences can be credited to the fact that watery spaces are not ‘permanent spaces of sedentary habitation’. Much the same could be said of the skies, the underground, or marginal intersectional spaces such as tidal flats and swamps. In other words, we focus our attention on the land because this is where most of us reside. Land’s assumed stability, as well as the ways in which it is amenable to visible striation by humans, has led to its elevation as the paradigmatic space of partition and control (Schmitt 2006). Here, on solid earth, we can erect walls, build fences, insert checkpoints (Weizmann 2002). This assumed correspondence of territory with land is countered by anthropological research on cultures that have different systems for inserting the social into non-terrestrial matter – for instance, island societies that integrate water into their daily livelihoods and, in the process, produce more fluid notions of territory (Anderson and Peters 2014; Hastrup and Hastrup 2015). However, the use of these societies to support calls for alternative notions of spatial order illustrates that these are outside the modern world’s terracentric normative ideal (Hau’ofa 2008; Stratford, Baldacchino et al. 2011).

Challenging the land bias of our understanding of territory means asking questions that cut to the core of received assumptions about both geopolitics and geophysics: Is territory always a process related to the classic element of “earth”? What other elements or geophysical manifestations might territory and territorialising processes function through? Where might these processes of territory occur? Are they always landed or – as Elden (2013b) notes in alerting us to “volumes” of territory – might the making and contestation of territory occur at height and depth: in the skies or under the seas; in environments as varied as mudflats or ice islands, coasts or boats; and at edges or interfaces between spaces? And most crucially, if the concept of territory can be thought of beyond land, what might we learn of the concept applied to these settings; and of a process of territory that is (re)worked through elements other than earthly, solid matter? These questions are central to this book.

Modern social institutions are increasingly extending their geopolitical reach to what we might think of as “ungrounded” spaces whose properties differ from that of solid land. We need only think of recent instances of chemical warfare played out through the air; of contestation over deep-sea mining in our oceans; of debates concerned with the creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea. Indeed, these spaces “beyond terra” might include (but are not limited to) airspace, the underground, the ocean, the seabed, swamps, deserts, islands, and the polar regions: spaces notable for their indeterminacy, dynamism, and fluidity (Steinberg and Peters 2015). They have height and depth, are often difficult to apprehend, and frequently change form (Elden 2017c; Gordillo 2014; Lash 2012). These properties challenge territorial norms that have been developed with reference to an idealised world of solid, static land masses, controlled at surface level. Put another way, if territory is realised through the qualities of terrain – the geophysical properties of territory – it is prudent to ask if territory may work not just through terrains of earthly matter but also through liquid, aeriated, and “hybrid” matters (mud, swamps, or ice, for example). Investigations that explore the “ungrounded” workings of territory are needed to interpret the spatial politics of our changing world. Building upon a rich legacy of historical and anthropological work on the topic, as well as on more recent theoretical explorations, this book seeks to advance understandings of a key principle of political geography and international relations, adding a critical new dimension to conceptual thinking about territory.

This opening chapter sets the scene for this project of investigating, writing about, and developing ways of thinking territory beyond terra. To be clear, by highlighting the term “beyond” we are not arguing for a theory or practice of territory that positions land as irrelevant to discussions of geopolitical power. Territory in relation to land remains relevant. Indeed, the chapter that follows is specifically about land, broken down into its constitutive grains of sand. However land, like the other three elements (air, water and fire) and the environments and intersections in which they occur, is never static and never exists only at the surface (even if it is experienced that way). If terra implies static points arrayed on an abstract surface, then earth too – an assemblage of shifting plates, lively molecules, and constitutive elements – is also, always, “beyond terra”.

As our explorations take us to conceptions of land beyond terra, it also takes us to surfaces and spaces beyond land: oceans in which “places” are continuously re-formed; air that can never be fully contained; watercourses that obtain their value by transcending boundaries; wetlands, estuaries, and archipelagos that (in very different ways) challenge received fundamental divisions between land and water; frozen environments that undergo dramatic seasonal transformations of physical state. In approaching these environments, we ask how a consideration of politics in these spaces can inform our understanding of the challenges that are emerging in an increasingly dynamic world that renders contestable all of these spatial categories, as well as the ideal of solid, stable, surficial land against which they are each counterpoised.

For three reasons it is imperative that understandings of territory be extended beyond the facile surface of an earthly plane. First, a land-based perspective on territory limits our understanding of both power and nature. Increasingly, economic activity and political power are exercised in spaces that are neither static nor “grounded” surficial units of land. The extension of mechanisms of production, trade, and governance into the atmosphere, outer space, the ocean, and the underground, as well as on to the indeterminate spaces where these elements meet and change form, requires us to engage new ways of understanding the territorial practices by which power is constructed and contested.

Second, we now live in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic change that is altering the environment (Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Whitehead 2014). The rise of geoengineering technologies, for example, allows for intentional manipulation of planetary and extra-planetary matter to create new territories (for example, land reclamation to create new, inhabitable islands, most notably in the South China Sea). Such developments are combined with unintentional geophysical transformation resulting from human-induced climate change (for instance, other islands disappearing into the ocean, most notably in the Pacific). Together, these changes are opening up new frontiers for capital investment and state power, and mandate new ways of thinking of nature as always emergent, in creative tension with the human activities that turn landscapes and seascapes into resources and environments. Increasingly, the frontiers of human activity are beyond, or on the edge of, or cut across, continental land masses. Today’s political technologies of territory, which emerged in the context of continental (and specifically European) land masses, are inadequate for the spaces that increasingly are subjected to modern forms of governance. As a result, these spaces – of sea, air, or ice, for example – are frequent venues of intense political struggle. In some cases, they are seized upon for their alterity in offering possibilities for alternate social futures; in others, they are normalised through creative adaptation. In all cases, however, they present challenges for both theorising and implementing the practice of territory as they remind us that territory can no longer be understood as occurring solely in an environment of static, surficial points on land.

Third, as scholarly attention has turned to territory, this literature has engaged with others the central concern of which is the material foundation of political power. Alternately called “geo-politics” by political geographers (Dittmer 2014; Dodds 2009) and “new materialism” by political theorists and international relations scholars (Coole and Frost 2010; Millennium 2013), advocates of this movement acknowledge that political institutions are not purely of human extent but rather emerge through continual engagements with the non-human and the more-than-human. Scholars who have merged such perspectives with the study of territory have typically focused on the land forms that constitute Earth’s surface, as well as on the vectors of verticality that bring the Earth’s surface in contact with the skies above and the sub-surface beneath (Bridge 2013; Elden 2013b). However, some of the most recent writings on territory have noted that to appreciate fully the ways in which territory is constructed and exercised attention must be directed to the complex, dynamic environment of a changing planet (Lehman 2013a; Steinberg and Peters 2015). Thus, the terrains of territory need to be understood as voluminous, elemental, fluid, and indeterminate: as spaces that challenge the “grounded”, static world of solid surface (terra) that typically has informed political thought (Elden 2013b, 2017c; Squire 2016b; Steinberg and Peters 2015). This conceptual shift directs attention to the material elements, environments, and edges that constitute the planet’s surfaces, volumes, and atmospheres.

MAPPING THE WAY AHEAD

To extend thinking about territory beyond the limits of land, this book is divided into three parts. In Part I, the focus is on the four elements that classically are seen as constituting the planet’s matter: earth, air, water, and fire. In each of the four chapters that constitute this part, authors discuss how efforts to construct territory out of one of these elements are alternately confounded and enabled by ontological perspectives that assume both determinate boundaries (within and between elements) and containable surfaces. In chapter 2, Marijn Nieuwenhuis examines the materiality of sand to show that the territory of earthly terra is not fixed and static but fluid and dynamic. The chapter analyses the relationship between sand and territory by considering two different ways in which sand is imagined, used, and experienced, drawing on case study examples from China: the Silk Road project, which is intended to reimagine and reinvent the old trade route between China and Europe, and the country’s infamous dust storms, sometimes called “yellow winds”. By investigating these examples, Nieuwenhuis demonstrates both how territorial representations, experiences, and geo-politics relate to sand, and how the specific material make-up of sand opens up new spatial understandings that unhinge notions of territory from their association with properties of timelessness and immobility.

In chapter 3 Weiqiang Lin examines air as both a tool and object of governance. This chapter unpacks the ways in which state actors have attempted to create specific territorial knowledges about the air in civil aviation. The chapter frames this discussion in an in-depth analysis of the various specialised laws governing navigation for air sovereignty, air traffic management, and air traffic services oversight. Lin demonstrates the unequal nature of air territory, and shows how elemental forces, idiosyncrasies, and recalcitrant natures of air interfere with and inform each of these endeavours in territory-making.

From the air to the seas, Jon Phillips takes on the task of thinking through the workings of territory in relation to water. In chapter 4, he explores territorialising, de-territorialising, and re-territorialising processes that have occurred in relation to the control and use of resources located in waters adjacent to Ghana. The chapter analyses the establishment of two offshore zones for the protection of oil industry assets: the West Africa Gas Pipeline and an oil production vessel. These infrastructures, Phillips argues, rely on a historically contingent set of political relations that are shaped by human activity, non-human life, and the biophysical characteristics of the oceans, all of which complicate the exercise of control over space that is beyond terra.

Chapter 5 is the last in Part I, and there Nigel Clark engages in a novel analysis of fire. Blazing fire and its environmental effects, Clark contends, have little respect for the ordering devices and securing measures through which the logic of territory is performed. Drawing on the example of Indonesia and the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the chapter explores the work of the ten ASEAN countries and the Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (2002), which came into being following the effects of land and forest fires. This chapter addresses the complex issues associated with fire as a force that simultaneously plays across the surficial boundaries between nation-states and the sub-surface junctures between geological epochs. The chapter unearths the complex ways in which fire can be conceived as both a deterritorialising and “destratifying” force, and this poses profound challenges to conventional understandings of territory.

Part II takes up where Part I leaves off, working from the recognition that territory is not so much accomplished through control of individual elements but in environments where different elements interact with and transform each other. In a sense, it is posited that the space of territory is more-than-elemental. To this end, the four chapters of Part II investigate environments – mudflats, floodplains, cities, and ice islands – where elements come together and are separated in surprising ways that confound commonplace understandings of territory as surficial land. Earth as an element is ever-present in all of these environments, but narratives about the ways in which territory is being constructed simultaneously force us to think beyond the limits of an earth-informed understanding of territory.

In chapter 6, Clayton Whitt shows how earth-based territory can be challenged by the material properties of specific environmental terrains: in this case the terrain of mud, where water and earth mix. Whitt draws on thirteen months of fieldwork conducted in 2013 and 2014 in an agricultural village in the Bolivian highlands to explore how climate change is experienced as a fluid materiality and how this materiality translates into political disputes that challenge the perceived stability of territory. The chapter investigates these disputes in terms of the presence of mud, the absence of roads, and the removal of mud/earth for national road building projects elsewhere. It also considers the entanglements between the body and mud in these contestations, where resistance is instigated because of the impacts of mud (on the ability to move or work, for example). Expanding on Elden’s conceptualisation of territory as a political technology, the chapter draws attention to the subtle political effects of climate change that are mediated through material transformations of territorial terrains.

In chapter 7, Stephanie C. Kane explores how the well-being and safety of inhabitants of Winnipeg, Canada depends upon the infrastructural logistics that govern the unstable boundaries between water and land at the confluence of two major flood-prone rivers. Employing the concept of the “technozone”, a space of intersection spanning technology, culture, and nature, the chapter weaves together a series of threads to tell a richly critical story of how state power is extended and challenged by logistical and infrastructural projects that are, in turn, a consequence of territorial attempts to constrain, constrict, reshape, and challenge the forces of nature over the landscape.

Also exploring the specificity of environments for challenging territorial knowledge, Ross Exo Adams focuses on the city. In chapter 8, Adams argues that the conventional territorial norm of the landed state has always been beyond terra, due to the long-standing influence of the sea on the land – or, what he calls the “maritimisation” of the land. Turning to the writings of nineteenth-century engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, Adams locates the city within maritime conceptions of network (réseau) and circulation. Adams thus uses his exploration of Cerdá’s imaginative urban futures to open up new questions about the status of the city vis-à-vis both land and ocean.

In the final chapter of Part II, Johanne Bruun and Philip Steinberg turn to T-3, an Arctic ice island that was occupied by the US military during the Cold War. C...

Indice dei contenuti

• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Elements Preface Kimberley Peters
• Part II: Environments Preface Philip Steinberg
• Part III: Edges Preface Elaine Stratford
• References
• Index
• About the Authors