Jeppe Strandsbjerg

Cartopolitics, Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic

Critical Border Studies emphasise how distinct political spaces are produced by borders. In this article I suggest that the order of this relationship should be reversed. I argue that space precedes and conditions the manifestation of borders. The argument is based on an understanding of cartography as a practice that mediates the relationship between space and borders. Drawing on Bruno Latour, I introduce the notion of cartopolitics to describe the process where questions pertaining to sovereign control over space are decided through cartography and law. In analysing current border practices in the Arctic, the term cartopolitics captures how the relationship between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and cartography is shaping the attempts by Arctic states to expand sovereign rights into the sea. The key is the continental shelf and how it is defined in law. In this process cartographic practices work to establish a particular spatial reality that subsequently serve as a basis for border making.

The Cartographic Production of Territorial Space: Mapping and State Formation in Early Modern Denmark

Contemporary transformations in global politics have called into question the spatiality of the sovereign territorial state. In light of such claims to change, this article argues that in order to understand the spatial underpinnings of the sovereign territorial state we have to understand how sovereign territoriality was historically based on a cartographic reality of space. The article demonstrates how an epistemic change in cartographic practice from the 15th to the 17th centuries transformed the reality of space and hereby conditioned the possibility of defining the state in territorial terms. The article presents a historical exposition of the mapping of Danish territory and state formation from ca. 1450–1650. This serves to illustrate how the state strived to achieve ‘authorship’ of its territory in order to unify knowledge of the territory. This process was completed 10 years prior to Denmark turning into a ‘role-model’ of absolutist governance in Europe. In conclusion, the article highlights the implications of the cartographic foundation of territorial space for current discussions of globalisation and change.

The spatial practice of state formation: territorial space in Denmark and Israel

In this article, we investigate the relationship between space and the state. We argue that this relationship is largely ignored by writings on the state and state formation within Sociology and International Relations. To analyse the space–state relationship, we focus on spatial practice which configures space in a particular historical context. We suggest that political organisation is always conditioned by a particular configuration of space specific to its historical context, while at the same time, space can serve as a medium of power to reconfigure these very relationships. In turn, the state territory is both conditioned by a spatial reality, and at the same time, a conscious effort to shape space as a means of power for the state. Illustrating this historically, we present two different examples where we investigate the spatial practice of state formation. First, the case of state formation in early modern Denmark illustrates the territorialisation of European states in early modern Europe. Second, the formation of an Israeli state after WWII illustrates how a state was created within an international system already based on a sovereign territorial order, and also, suggests the development of new territorial practices.

Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic: A Research Agenda

The concept of sustainability has become central in arctic politics. However, there is little agreement on what ‘sustainable’ means. For different actors (governments, indigenous people, NGOs, etc.) the concept implies different sets of opportunities and precautions. Sustainability, therefore, is a much more fundamental idea to be further elaborated depending on contexts than a definable term with a specific meaning. This paper suggests a set of theoretical questions, which can provide the first steps toward a research agenda on the politics of sustainability. The approach aims to map and analyze the role of sustainability in political and economic strategies in the Arctic. Sustainability has become a fundamental concept that orders the relationship between the environment (nature) and development (economy), however, in the process rearticulating other concepts such as identity (society). Hence, we discuss, first, how, when meeting the Arctic, sustainability changes its meaning and application from the global ecosphere to a regional environment, and, second, how sustainability is again conceptually transformed when meeting Greenlandic ambitions for postcoloniality. This discussion leads us to outline an agenda for how to study the way in which sustainability works as a political concept.

How Tilly's State Formation Paradigm is Revolutionizing the Study of Chinese State-making

Charles Tilly’s state formation paradigm is often criticized as Eurocentric and inapplicable to non-European contexts. Recent generations of social scientists, whether in political science or sociology, have been trained to challenge the Eurocentrism prevalent in putatively universal theories. Thus, critics often argue that there is no “automatic . . . relationship between war and increased state strength” and that one should not graft “mainstream social science onto comparative historical studies.” Critics overlook that Tilly’s approach eschews universal laws and advocates causal mechanisms; it would be a mistake to liken Tilly’s paradigm with, for instance, Kenneth Waltz’s balance-of-power theory. Moreover, Tilly’s paradigm examines the interaction of “coercion” and “capital” and so there are multiple state formation pathways even in Europe. This chapter suggests that a more fruitful way to understand various criticisms is to see them as specifying scope conditions. In this perspective, the

States do share sovereignty, don’t they?

How can we analyse and understand the different ways in which states today, to an increasing extent, share, contract or unbundle sovereign rights? Under what conditions do states sign (incomplete) contracts of sovereignty transfer and what are the implications of such contracts? These are some of the guiding questions explored by Alexander Cooley and Hendrik Spruyt in a book that investigates the notion of sovereignty transfer in International Relations (IR). By analysing governance structures between anarchy and hierarchy, the book transcends this orthodox IR binary, and opens up a new avenue for studying specific sovereignty arrangements. This is becoming ever more relevant in today’s world of boundary crossing governance arrangements and ongoing discussion concerning the future role of the state. Generally, the book represents a fascinating and innovative attempt to employ a novel theoretical framework (incomplete contract theory) in order to understand a politically pressing issue (the transfer of sovereignty). As will be clear subsequently, I find the overall purpose of the book promising and very useful. However, I also find limitations in the sense that the theoretical frame is perhaps stretched too much and made too ambitious. And seen in the context of this special issue, the question of whether it represents a useful tool to understand ‘Imperial power and the organisation of space in Europe and North America’ is one I will return to. The book primarily addresses concerns within international security and international political economy. As such, it is written against a particular theoretical framing that tends to see sovereignty in terms of a dichotomy between hierarchy and anarchy, as well as a particular theoretical landscape constituted around a division between realism and constructivism. The authors start by pointing to what they find paradoxical; namely that on the one hand sovereignty represents the key constitutive rule in IR, while on the other it appears fragile and is often undermined. Hence, sovereignty is both a fundamental institution while at the same time appearing somewhat fictitious. The central concern is that sovereignty remains crucial but that it should not be understood in either-or terms or as a zero-sum game where one state’s loss of sovereignty is another state’s gain. Often shared sovereignty agreements are to the benefit of all states involved. The core idea of the book is very strong. Rather than engaging in endless arguments about whether sovereignty as a legal norm matters, or whether sovereignty is a relative or absolute concept, the book engages in empirical analyses of contracts that serve to transfer sovereign rights between state(-like) actors. As such, the authors demonstrate forcefully how sovereignty is often negotiated, divided and voluntarily transferred by states to other entities. Cooley and Spruyt’s empirically rich Journal of Political Power Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2011, 472–476

The State of Territory

There was a certain sense of harmonious correspondence between a world of sovereign nation states and the cold war. The spatial image of the state seemed a perfect match with the spatiality of the world. To the extent that it was theorized at all, territorial space was implicitly conceptualized as a billiard ball, as a solid unit interacting with other units according to the mechanical physics of Newton. One ball moves, hits the neighbouring one and thus causes a reaction. The right policy within this world ought to be one pursuing a balance of power seeking to prevent the movement of any ball, and thus preserve a stable system. The main lines of conflict were supposedly those between territorially defined states constituting a system whose image was a collection of different-coloured territories projected on to the map of the world. From one side, the aim was to contain and prevent further spread of the opposite colour. Territorial exclusivity was the rule of the game. The enemy was kept at bay through containment and wall building.

The Cartographic Formation of a Global World

Some years after the publication of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570, a grateful owner of the atlas expressed his admiration in the following words: ‘You compress the immense structure of land and sea into a narrow space, and have made the earth portable, which a great many people assert to be immovable’ (quoted by Brotton 1997: 175). The praise of this statement contains significant ideas concerning the mobility and unity of global space that speaks to the theoretical concerns raised so far. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the map preceded and produced the globe as a social space or, in other words, how the globe has been unified through cartographic means prior to, and concurrent with, European imperial projects. It will be argued that mapping was prioritized as it enabled the coordination of social practice on a global scale, as if the world was a single and unified space.

The Cartographic Foundation of Territory

Much has been written on the relationship between the map and what it supposedly represents. In On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote about an empire where the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire occupied the entirety of a province. Over time these maps were no longer satisfactory and the cartographers’ guilds created a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire and which coincided point for point with it (Borges 1998: 325). This story questions the relationship of representation and the quest for accuracy of the scientific map. Such questions further raise questions about the relationship between the map and the territory. More than 50 years ago, Alfred C. Korzybski stated that a ‘map is not the territory’ (Korzybski 1948: 58), while half a century later David Turnbull’s Maps are Territories (1993) sent the opposite message; and emphasizing the constitutive power of maps, Jacques Revel has suggested that ‘knowledge of the territory is a production of the territory itself’ (1991: 134). Suggesting a temporal diagnosis to this issue of representation, Baudrillard stated that the ‘territory no longer precedes the map […]. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory’ (1983: 2).

Reclaiming a Spatial Reality

I would suggest that it is only when the spatial order has appeared to be relatively stable, that is during the cold war years, that the political organization of space can seem insignificant. As soon as the sovereign territorial order is challenged, then the significance of space is brought to the fore in social scientific enquiry and expressed in attempts to examine what the international is inter between and how this is ordered. Assuming that space is both a universal condition of social practice, and as such plays a conditioning role, while at the same time space is a result of social production or construction, and as such plays a constitutive and a supportive role, the challenge that remains is how to theorize space in a fashion that avoids the spatial determinism of the geopolitical tradition without rendering space an overtly social phenomenon. In order to play a conditioning role for politics, space must be rendered autonomous, to a degree, of the social processes that they are supposedly framing. If not, space will become tied up in the greater narratives and rendered an outcome of, typically, capitalism or state formation. In other words, the task is to render space autonomous without making it a natural object.