Stuart Elden

Land, terrain, territory

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded space’ or the state as a ‘bordered power container’, because both presuppose the two things that should be most interrogated, space and boundaries. Rather than boundaries being the distinction between place and space, or land or terrain and territory, boundaries are a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. Territory then can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control — the technical and the legal — must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.

Governmentality, Calculation, Territory:

In this paper I discuss Foucaults two recently published courses, Sécurité, Territoire, Population and Naissance de la Biopolitique. Foucault notes that he has undertaken a genealogy of the modern state and its different apparatuses from the perspective of a history of governmental reason, taking into account society, economy, population, security, and liberty. In the “Governmentality” lecture—the fourth of the first course—Foucault says that the series of the title—that is, security, territory, population—becomes “security, population, government”. In other words, territory is removed and government appended. And, yet, the issue of territory continually emerges only to be repeatedly marginalised, eclipsed, and underplayed. A key concern of the course is the politics of calculation which Foucault discusses through the development of political arithmetic, population statistics, and political economy. Explicitly challenging Foucaults readings of Machiavelli and the Peace of Westphalia, I argue that territorial strategies should themselves be read as calculative, with the same kinds of mechanisms brought to bear on populations applied here too. I therefore discuss how Foucaults discussions of political economy, the police, and calculation are useful in thinking the history of the concept of territory.

Space, politics, calculation: an introduction

In a whole range of social, cultural and political issues the interrelation of number and politics is a critical question. How has this relation transformed the politics of space since the emergence of political arithmetic in the seventeenth century? How has it been pursued in the practices and thinking of government? How did it impact and frame such issues as race, gender and colonization? While geography’s quantitative revolution led to a number of works studying the mathematics of geography, there has been little sustained engagement with the inverted question, that of the geographies of mathematization and calculation. Recent work in Environment and Planning A (Philo (ed.) 1998) and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Barnes and Hannah (eds) 2001a, 2001b) has made some advances in this area by opening up the problematic. One of the significant differences in inverting the relationship between geography and mathematics is that it clarifies the way mathematics and mathematical thought impacts both historical and contemporary politics through the idea of calculation. The historical angle is important, as while quantification as a method in geography is relatively recent, issues of number and calculation and their geographical implications have a much longer heritage. This collection of papers provides a theoretically informed and empirically rich intervention into these issues. By calculation we mean both the purely quantitative, such as Cartesian geometry, numbers, counting and the mathematization of the subject, and qualitative issues of group management such as ranking, ordering, organizing and measuring. These latter forms of spatial calculation rely less on the obviously mathematical and more on a model of ‘rationality’ which, through its root in the Latin ratio, is both connected to mathematical models and is part of a wider process through which space is made ‘amenable to thought’ (Osborne and Rose 2004: 212). Diverse peoples too are understood as a population, a way of conceiving of bodies in plural that can be conceptualized as a group with norms, either statistical or moral. Forms of organizing, Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 7, No. 5, October 2006

Thinking Territory Historically

It is somewhat ironic, given the paucity of conceptual work on territory, that one of the key pieces that does theorise the term should so often be seen as warning us away from it. It should, of course, go without saying that territory itself is not a trap. Rather, it is certain ways of thinking about territory, particularly those largely uncritical assumptions of International Relations and International Political Economy, that is the problem. Those assumptions, which Agnew skilfully unpicked, actually require more, not less, work on territory. We need to investigate not simply the implications of thinking within this trap – how it constrains our thinking, and hamstrings our potential for critique – but how it is produced. What we do when we accept the territorial trap is to buy into a state-centred narrative that naturalises and normalises this way of thinking. What do we mean when we talk of territory? There seem to be two dominant definitions in the literature. One sees a territory as a bounded space, a container, under the control of a group of people, nowadays usually a state. The other sees a territory as an outcome of territoriality, a human behaviour or strategy. These two definitions are, of course, not mutually exclusive. Both are mentioned, en passant, in Agnew’s article. Yet neither definition really addresses the kinds of questions that Agnew is asking us to consider. How did boundaries get drawn? Why should the space that they enclose be thought of as exclusive and limited? Why are boundaries seen as dividing one polity from another, and therefore domestic from foreign politics? Why do certain groups claim a monopoly of power within those lines, and how do they continue to hold this, and then later receive a legal basis for those claims? Why do those that wish to challenge this situation – self-determination movements, for instance – not want a different system but their own stake within it? Why, today, are boundaries largely seen as fixed? In the argument being made here, territory must be conceived as a historically and geographically specific form of political organisation and political

Territorial Integrity and the War on Terror

This paper examines the use of the term ‘territorial integrity’, a term with two interlinked and usually compatible meanings. The first is that states should not seek to promote border changes or secessionist movements within other states, or attempt to seize territory by force. The second meaning is the standard idea that within its own borders, within its territory, a state is sovereign. The second of these two meanings has come under increased pressure in recent years, in part in relation to international intervention for ‘humanitarian’ reasons, and even more so since September 11 2001. And yet the other meaning is being stressed even more explicitly, often at the same time and in the same places that the second meaning is being challenged. This paper considers various historical and contemporary examples, and suggests that the two meanings of territorial integrity are increasingly in tension.

What’s shifting?:

This response to John Allen (2011) focuses on the understandings of geometry, topology, topography and territory used in the article. I challenge his largely ahistorical renderings of these terms, suggesting that these terms cannot be seen as static, and therefore put into convenient oppositions. Territory, for instance, is not simply a bounded space, and therefore topographical, which can be criticized as reductive. Rather territory is a dynamic, historically produced concept and practice, which can take on the form of a bounded space in particular circumstances. Allen’s article also often risks confusing an object of analysis with a mode of approach: territory is not something that is the explanation, but the thing that needs explaining. In sum, the question is whether it is the object of analysis that is shifting, or our way of understanding it. It may be both, but the historical-conceptual weaknesses of the account offered here make it difficult to tell.

Contributions to geography ? the spaces of Heidegger's Beiträge.

In this paper I provide a reading of Heideggers Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [the contributions to philosophy (of propriation)] as a contribution to geography. This collection of manuscripts, written between 1936 and 1938, is extremely important in terms of the development of Heideggers work, his political career, and his rethinking of the relation between space and time. This rethinking is one of the key themes discussed, along with the political and geographical implications of Heideggers notion of calculation. In order to situate these insights, I first provide a discussion of the context within which Heidegger wrote the work. After outlining this biographical, intellectual, and political situation, I move to the geographical contributions, suggesting ways in which Heideggers thought can impact on our thinking of environment, nature, globalisation, and measurement.

Spaces of humanitarian exception

Book reviewed in this article: Humanitarian Space and International Politics: The Creation of Safe Areas, by Hikaru Yamashita

Discipline, health and madness: Foucault’s Le pouvoir psychiatrique

This article provides a reading and analysis of Foucault’s 1973-4 lecture course Le pouvoir psychiatrique. It begins by situating the course within the wider context of Foucault’s work, notably in relation to Histoire de la folie and the move of the early 1970s to the conceptual tools of power and genealogy. It is argued that Le pouvoir psychiatrique is a rewriting of the last part of Histoire de la folie from the perspective of these new conceptual tools. Analysis then moves to more thematic concerns, showing how this course enriches our understanding of Foucault’s work on the sources of power, the individual and the family, and the spaces of the disciplinary society. Particular focus is given to the role of the army, public health, the hospital, children, women and hospital architecture. The article concludes by showing how the themes of this course, while not worked up for publication themselves, point the way to concerns in Foucault’s later work, notably The History of Sexuality and collaborative work on urban medicine and habitat.

Taking the Measure of the Beiträge Heidegger, National Socialism and the Calculation of the Political

This article provides a political reading of Martin Heideggers Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). One of the central themes of the Beiträge is crucial to understanding why Heidegger moved into a position of critical distance from the Nazi regime, because it is an attempt to comprehend what lies behind the events of the time. This is the notion of the politics of calculation, the issue of measure, which relates closely to Heideggers late concerns with technology. Through readings of Heidegger on Protagoras and Descartes, the role of calculation in the forgetting of being, and the notions of machination, race, and worldview, I show how the Beiträge, and particularly its explicit political context, is valuable in evaluating Heideggers own career, his political position and politics more generally.