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Symposium ‘Theories of Territory beyond Westphalia’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2014

Ayelet Banai
Affiliation:
School of Political Sciences, The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel (symposium editor)
Margaret Moore
Affiliation:
Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada (symposium editor)
David Miller
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Cara Nine
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Frank Dietrich
Affiliation:
Institute of Philosophy, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany

Abstract

Is territory a trap? Does the concept of territory trap us into false assumptions of internally homogeneous, externally bounded political communities that exercise uniform sovereignty across their domain? Against the background of debates about territory and the territorial state in international relations, this symposium brings together five contributions in political theory that advance a nuanced and systemic understanding of what territory is. Taken together, they indicate that there is much to the territorial paradigm beyond the modern, sovereign, and territorial state model. There are diverse conceptions of territory, which may be relevant across different legal and political orders. The various conceptual analyses of territory in this symposium suggest that the sovereign state model is only one way in which a sovereign political authority can be territorial. These essays provide the conceptual tools to formulate (and subsequently test) the hypothesis that the transformations in statehood may not be best described in terms of the rise and decline of territorial sovereignty, but as moves from one model of territorially bounded political authority to another. In political theory, it is only in recent years that this foundational concept has received sustained attention from political theorists. This symposium aims to take forward this welcome theoretical development.

Type
Original Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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