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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2024
Territory and territoriality lie at the heart of both world politics and International Relations (IR) theory. In terms of IR theory’s geographical assumptions, one of the most influential studies to date has been political geographer John Agnew’s 1994 article on the ‘the territorial trap’ (TTT). While Agnew’s original insights and subsequent research has reached canonical status in political geography, mainstream IR scholarship has yet to fully engage TTT. Political geographers, in turn, have largely dealt with the consequences of TTT for our understanding of world politics. This study offers the first detailed account of the origins of TTT, which are hidden in broad daylight in IR’s own history. The origins of TTT and mainstream IR are intertwined in terms of two dynamics: the racist and colonial origins of IR, and the selective nationalistic ontology that dominated IR especially in the first half of the 20th century. The arguments offered in this study have a wide variety of implications for problematising the ways in which IR-as-epistemological-community approaches territory and territoriality as well as our understanding of the origins and evolution of the present-day global territorial order.
1 Stephen Graham, ‘The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology’, Progress in Human Geography, 22:2 (1998), pp. 165–85; Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Continuum, 1998); Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Picador, 2000); Michael J. Greig, ‘The end of geography? Globalization, communications, and culture in the international system’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46:2 (2002), pp. 225–43; Kenichi Ohmae, Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Collins, 1999); Mary Kaldor, Old and New Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
2 Alexander B. Murphy, ‘Territory’s continuing allure’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103:5 (2013), pp. 1212–26 (p. 1214). Also see David Newman, ‘Territory, compartments and borders: Avoiding the trap of the territorial trap’, Geopolitics, 15:4 (2010), pp. 773–78 (p. 775); John Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Barbara F. Walter, ‘Conclusion’, in Miles Kahler and Barbara F. Walter (eds), Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 288–96 (p. 288).
3 Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz, Territorial Changes and International Conflict (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 2; Miles Kahler and Barbara F. Walter (eds), Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Paul K. Huth, Standing Your Ground: Territorial Disputes and International Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Harvey Starr, ‘Territory, proximity, and spatiality: The geography of international conflict’, International Studies Review, 7:3 (2005), pp. 387–406; Thorin M. Wright and Paul F. Diehl, ‘Unpacking territorial disputes: Domestic political influences and war’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 60:4 (2016), pp. 645–69.
4 Dominic D. P. Johnson and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Grounds for war: The evolution of territorial conflict’, International Security, 38:3 (2014), pp. 7–38.
5 For an introduction to this research, see David Storey, Territories: The Claiming of Space (London: Routledge, 2012).
6 Burak Kadercan, Shifting Grounds: The Social Origins of Territorial Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
7 John Agnew, ‘The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of International Relations theory’, Review of International Political Economy, 1:1 (1994), pp. 53–80.
8 Alexander B. Murphy, ‘Identity and territory’, Geopolitics, 15:4 (2010), pp. 769–72 (p. 771).
9 Stuart Elden, ‘Land, terrain, territory’, Progress in Human Geography, 34:6 (2010), pp. 799–817.
10 For instance, Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Stacie E. Goddard, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jeremy Larkins, From Hierarchy to Anarchy: Territory and Politics before Westphalia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Ron E. Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Nadav G. Shelef, ‘Unequal ground: Homelands and conflict’, International Organization, 70:1 (2016), pp. 33–63; Kerry Goettlich, ‘The rise of linear borders in world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 25:1 (2019), pp. 203–28; Naosuke Mukoyama, ‘The eastern cousins of European sovereign states? The development of linear borders in early modern Japan’, European Journal of International Relations, 29:2 (2023), pp. 255–82. See also Boaz Atzili and Burak Kadercan, ‘Territorial designs and international politics: The diverging constitution of space and boundaries’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 5:2 (2017), pp. 115–30.
11 Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers, Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
12 John G. Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1 (1993), pp. 139–74; Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Of systems, boundaries, and territoriality: An inquiry into the formation of the state system’, World Politics, 39:1 (1986), pp. 27–52.
13 For a detailed discussion, see Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
14 Kratochwil, ‘Of systems, boundaries, and territoriality’; Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and beyond’; Richard K. Ashley, ‘The geopolitics of geopolitical space: Toward a critical social theory of international politics’, Alternatives, 12:4 (1987), pp. 403–34.
15 Elden, ‘Land, terrain, territory’ pp. 799–800; Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and beyond’, p. 174; Hans Vollaard, ‘The logic of political territoriality’, Geopolitics, 14:4 (2009), pp. 687–706 (p. 688); Anthony D. Smith, ‘States and homelands: The social and geopolitical implications of national territory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10:3 (1981), pp. 187–202; Marco Antonsich, ‘On territory, the nation-state and the crisis of the hyphen’, Progress in Human Geography, 33:6 (2009), pp. 789–806 (p. 795); J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, ‘The state and the nation: Changing norms and the rules of sovereignty in International Relations’, International Organization, 48:1 (1994), pp. 107–30 (p. 107); Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty, p. 29; Alexander B. Murphy, ‘National claims to territory in the modern state system: Geographical considerations’, Geopolitics, 7:2 (2002), pp. 193–214 (p. 208); Jan Penrose, ‘Nations, states and homelands: Territory and territoriality in nationalist thought’, Nations and Nationalism, 8:3 (2002), pp. 277–97 (p. 283); David Newman and Anssi Paasi, ‘Fences and neighbors in the postmodern world: Boundary narratives in political geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 22:2 (1998), pp. 186–207 (p. 187); Murphy, ‘Identity and territory’, p. 771; Jeppe Strandsbjerg, Territory, Globalization and International Relations: The Cartographic Reality of Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 29; Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 97, 182.
16 Agnew, ‘The territorial trap’, p. 59.
17 R. B. J. Walker, ‘International Relations and the possibility of the political’, in Ken Booth and Steve Smith (eds), International Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 306–27 (p. 306). Also see Mathias Albert, ‘On boundaries, territory and postmodernity: An International Relations perspective’, Geopolitics, 3:1 (1998), pp. 53–68 (p. 55).
18 Bear F. Braumoeller, Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), loc. 1761.
19 Tarak Barkawi, ‘On the pedagogy of “small wars”’, International Affairs, 80:1 (2004), pp. 19–37; Tarak Barkawi, ‘Decolonising war’, European Journal of International Security, 1:2 (2016), pp. 199–214; Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The postcolonial moment in Security Studies’, Review of International Studies, 32:2 (2006), pp. 329–52.
20 Sinisa Malešević, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 133. See also Paul K. MacDonald, ‘Civilized barbarism: What we miss when we ignore colonial violence’, International Organization, 77:4 (2023), pp. 721–53.
21 Available at: {https://trip.wm.edu/research/faculty-surveys}.
22 Ty Solomon and Brent J. Steele, ‘Micro-moves in International Relations theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 23:2 (2017), p. 277; Murphy, ‘Identity and territory’, p. 770.
23 As of 21 November 2023.
24 Benjamin J. Cohen, ‘Phoenix risen: The resurrection of global finance’, World Politics, 48:2 (1996), pp. 268–96.
25 On ‘critical geopolitics’, see Marcus Power and David Campbell, ‘The state of critical geopolitics’, Political Geography, 29:5 (2010), pp. 243–46.
26 Elden, ‘Land, terrain, territory’.
27 Penrose, ‘Nations, states and homelands’; Elden, ‘Land, terrain, territory’; Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
28 Anssi Paasi, ‘Territory’, in John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 109–22 (p. 110).
29 Robert D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 10; Penrose, ‘Nations, states and homelands’, p. 279; Jean Gottmann, The Significance of Territory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973); Peter J. Taylor, ‘The state as container: Territoriality in the modern world-system’, Progress in Human Geography, 18:2 (1994), pp. 151–62 (p. 151); Paasi, ‘Territory’, p. 111; Kadercan, Shifting Grounds; Storey, Territories; Alexander B. Murphy, ‘Historical justifications for territorial claims’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80:4 (1990), pp. 531–48 (p. 532). Jouni Häkli, ‘Territoriality and the rise of the modern state’, Fennia, 172:1 (1994), pp. 1–82 (p. 26).
30 Kadercan, Shifting Grounds; Jean Gottmann, ‘The evolution of the concept of territory’, Information (International Social Science Council), 14:3 (1975), pp. 29–47 (p. 29); Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 5; Andreas Osiander, Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
31 Miles Kahler, ‘Territoriality and conflict in an era of globalization’, in Miles Kahler and Barbara Walters (eds), Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–21 (p. 3). Also see Antonsich, ‘On territory’, p. 795; Edward W. Soja, The Political Organization of Space (Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, Commission on College Geography, 1971), p. 33; Anssi Paasi, ‘Boundaries as social processes: Territoriality in the world of flows’, Geopolitics, 3:1 (1998), pp. 69–88; Davis Newman, ‘Revisiting good fences and neighbors in a postmodern world after twenty years: Theoretical reflections on the state of contemporary border studies’, Nordia Geographical Publications, 44:4 (2015), pp. 13–19.
32 For instance, Meghan McConaughey, Paul Musgrave, and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘Beyond anarchy: Logics of political organization, hierarchy, and international structure’, International Theory, 10:2 (2018), pp. 181–218.
33 On this concept, see Daniel Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation-State: The Political Forms of Modernity beyond Methodological Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2007); Daniel Chernilo, ‘The critique of methodological nationalism: Theory and history’, Thesis Eleven, 106:1 (2011), pp. 98–117.
34 Neta Crawford, L. H. M. Ling, Daniel H. Nexon, and Meera Sabaratnam, ‘White world order, Black power politics: A discussion of Robert Vitalis’s “White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations”’, Perspectives on Politics, 14:4 (2016), pp. 1123–9.
35 Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall, ‘The impact of colonialism on policy and knowledge production in International Relations’, International Affairs, 98:1 (2022), pp. 5–22 (p. 9).
36 See also Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty.
37 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose imagined community?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 20:3 (1991), pp. 521–25 (pp. 522–23).
38 Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘Retrieving the imperial: Empire and International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31:1 (2002), pp. 109–27 (p. 113); Barkawi, ‘Decolonising war’, p. 209. See also Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
39 Barkawi, ‘On the pedagogy of “small wars”’.
40 Andreas Wimmer, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 2.
41 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Barkawi, ‘Decolonising war’.
42 John Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty: Beyond the Territorial Trap (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
43 Tayyab Mahmud, ‘Colonial cartographies, postcolonial borders, and enduring failures of international law: The unending wars along the Afghanistan–Pakistan frontier’, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 36 (2010), pp. 1–74 (p. 15).
44 Joshua Castellino, ‘Territory and identity in international law: The struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 28:3 (1999), pp. 523–51 (p. 547).
45 Gerry Kearns, ‘The territory of colonialism’, in Boaz Atzili and Burak Kadercan (eds), Territorial Designs and International Politics (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 76–92.
46 Branch, The Cartographic State; Larkins, From Hierarchy to Anarchy; Goettlich, ‘The rise of linear borders in world politics’. See also Strandsbjerg, Territory, Globalization and International Relations.
47 For a broader debate, see Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
48 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 332; Barkawi, ‘Decolonising war’, p. 205.
49 For a similar perspective, see Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
50 On this debate, see David A. Lake, ‘Anarchy, hierarchy, and the variety of international relations’, International Organization, 50:1 (1996), pp. 1–33; McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon, ‘Beyond anarchy’.
51 On this argument, see Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
52 Kerem Nisancioglu, ‘Racial sovereignty’, European Journal of International Relations, 26:1 (2020), pp. 39–63 (p. 40). See also Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Bianca Freeman, D. G. Kim, and David A. Lake, ‘Race in International Relations: Beyond the “norm against noticing”’, Annual Review of Political Science, 25 (2022), pp. 175–96 (p. 182).
53 Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken, ‘Why race matters in International Relations’, Foreign Policy, 237 (2020), pp. 11–13 (p. 11).
54 Freeman, Kim, and Lake, ‘Race in International Relations’, p. 177.
55 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). See also John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); William Edward Burghardt DuBois, ‘Worlds of color’, Foreign Affairs, 3:3 (1925), pp. 423–44; Errol A. Henderson, ‘The revolution will not be theorised: Du Bois, Locke, and the Howard School’s challenge to white supremacist IR theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:3 (2017), pp. 492–510.
56 For a similar perspective, see Agnew, ‘Globalization and Sovereignty’ and John Agnew, ‘The language of intractability and the Gaza War: Conflating anti-semitism and anti-zionism is historically problematic and misses how much contemporary Israel has become a role model for ethno-nationalists worldwide’, Human Geography, 17:2 (2023), p. 19427786231220046.
57 For example, see Mark Frank Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law: Being a Treatise on the Law and Practice Relating to Colonial Expansion (London: Longmans, Green, 1926). For the relevant debate on ‘Orientalism’, see Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).
58 On this term, see Maïka Sondarjee, ‘Decentering the Western gaze in International Relations: Addressing epistemic exclusions in syllabi in the United States and Canada’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 51:3 (2023), pp. 686–710.
59 Quoted in Norman Etherington, ‘Reconsidering theories of imperialism’, History and Theory, 21:1 (1982), pp. 1–36 (p. 9).
60 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).
61 Andrew Sartori, ‘The British empire and its liberal mission’, The Journal of Modern History, 78:3 (2006), pp. 623–42.
62 Buzan and Lawson, The Global Transformation, p. 127.
63 Sartori, ‘The British empire and its liberal mission’; Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The colonial rule of law and the legal regime of exception: Frontier “fanaticism” and state violence in British India’, American Historical Review, 120:4 (2015), pp. 1218–46 (p. 1223).
64 Robert Vitalis, ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race development’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:4 (2010), pp. 909–38.
65 George H. Blakeslee, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Race Development, 1:1 (1910), pp. 1–4 (p. 1).
66 William G. Hyland, ‘Foreign affairs at 70’, Foreign Affairs, 71:4 (1992), pp. 171–93. On how IR scholarship may tend to formulate and ossify misleading origin myths, see Benjamin De Carvalho, Halvard Leira, and John M. Hobson, ‘The big bangs of IR: The myths that your teachers still tell you about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3 (2011), pp. 735–58.
67 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
68 Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
69 Barkawi and Laffey, ‘Retrieving the imperial’, p. 113; Buzan and Lawson, The Global Transformation, pp. 3, 35; Liam O’Dowd, ‘From a “borderless world” to a “world of borders”: “Bringing history back in”’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28:6 (2010), pp. 1031–50 (p. 1043); Barkawi and Laffey, ‘The postcolonial moment in Security Studies’.
70 Taylor, ‘The state as container’.
71 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
72 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, ‘From borderlands to borders: Empires, nation-states, and the peoples in between in North American history’, The American Historical Review, 104:3 (1999), pp. 814–41 (p. 823).
73 John Etherington, ‘Nationalism, territoriality and national territorial belonging’, Papers: Revista de Sociologia, 95:2 (2010), pp. 321–39 (p. 324); Penrose, ‘Nations, states and homelands’, p. 294; Monica L. Smith, ‘Networks, territories, and the cartography of ancient states’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95:4 (2005), Nations, states and homelands’(p. 834); Thanachate Wisaijorn, ‘The inescapable territorial trap in International Relations: Borderland studies and the Thai–Lao border from 1954 to the present’, Geopolitics, 24:1 (2019), pp. 194–229; Murphy, ‘Territory’s continuing allure’; Rhys Jones, ‘Relocating nationalism: On the geographies of reproducing nations’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33:3 (2008), pp. 319–34.
74 On relevant debates in the context of IR, see Bernardo Teles Fazendeiro, ‘The question of truth: How facts, space and time shape conversations in IR’, European Journal of International Relations, 29:4 (2023), pp. 832–51.
75 Murphy, ‘Territory’s continuing allure’, p, 1215. See also Henri Lefebvre and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 280–1.
76 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
77 Ariel I. Ahram, ‘On the making and unmaking of Arab states’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 50:2 (2018), pp. 323–27 (p. 326).
78 See Chernillo, ‘Critique of methodological mationalism’, (2011), pp. 98–117 (p. 99); Michael Barnett and Ayşe Zarakol, ‘Global international relations and the essentialism trap’, International Theory, 15:3 (2023), pp. 428–44; Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).
79 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation–state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2:4 (2002), pp. 301–34 (p. 302).
80 Chernillo, ‘Critique of methodological mationalism’ (2011), p. 99.
81 Ibid.
82 Wimmer and Schiller, ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond’, p. 304.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid, p. 307.
85 Chernillo, ‘Critique of methodological mationalism’, p. 100; Wimmer and Schiller, ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond’, p. 303.
86 Krasner, Sovereignty; Andreas Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian myth’, International Organization, 55:2 (2001), pp. 251–87; Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Sebastian Schmidt, ‘To order the minds of scholars: The discourse of the peace of Westphalia in International Relations literature’, International Studies Quarterly, 55:3 (2011), pp. 601–23.
87 Leo Gross, ‘The peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948’, American Journal of International Law, 42:1 (1948), pp. 20–41 (p. 28).
88 Kahler, ‘Territoriality and conflict’, p. 3. Also see Antonsich, ‘On territory’, p. 795; Soja, The Political Organization of Space, p. 33; Paasi, ‘Boundaries as social processes’; Juliet J. Fall, ‘Artificial states? On the enduring geographical myth of natural borders’, Political Geography, 29:3 (2010), pp. 140–7; David Newman, ‘Revisiting good fences and neighbors’.
89 Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
90 Häkli, ‘Territoriality and the rise of the modern state’, pp. 41, 48–54; O’Dowd, ‘From a “borderless world”’, p. 1042; Guntram H. Herb, ‘National identity and territory’, in Guntram H. Herb and David H. Kaplan (eds), Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 9–30 (p. 23); Andreas Wimmer, ‘The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: A multilevel process theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 113:4 (2008), pp. 970–1022 (p. 991); Barkin and Cronin, ‘The state and the nation’.
91 On the concept, see Daniel Neep, ‘State‐space beyond territory: Wormholes, gravitational fields, and entanglement’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 30:3 (2017), pp. 466–95
92 Arthur J. May, The Age of Metternich, 1814–1848 (New York: H. Holt, 1933), p. 20; Evan Luard, War in International Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 156–7; Charles Tilly, ‘States and nationalism in Europe 1492–1992’, Theory and Society, 23:1 (1994), pp. 131–46 (p. 140).
93 Smith, ‘States and homelands’, p. 191; Teschke, The Myth of 1648, pp. 203, 232, 233, 239; Tilly, ‘States and nationalism’, p. 140; John Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Peter Sahlins, ‘Natural frontiers revisited: France’s boundaries since the seventeenth century’, The American Historical Review, 95:5 (1990), pp. 1427–8.
94 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press ([1832] 1976), p. 589.
95 Clausewitz, On War; Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); Sinisa Malešević, Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organization, Ideology and Solidarity (Oxford: Polity, 2013).
96 Taylor, ‘The state as container’, p. 155; Alejandro Colás, Empire (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 62.
97 Taylor, ‘The state as container’, pp. 155–6; Anderson, Frontiers, Territory and State Formation, p. 3; Anssi Paasi, Territories, Boundaries, and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish–Russian Boundary (Chichester: Wiley, 1996), p. 55; David J. M. Hooson, Geography and National Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Anssi Paasi, ‘Nationalizing everyday life: Individual and collective identities as practice and discourse’, Geography Research Forum, 19:1 (1999), pp. 4–21; Colin Williams and Anthony D. Smith, ‘The national construction of social space’, Progress in Geography, 7:4 (1983), pp. 502–18; Oren Yiftachel, ‘Territory as the kernel of the nation: Space, time and nationalism in Israel/Palestine’, Geopolitics, 7:2 (2002), pp. 215–48.
98 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Tilly, ‘States and nationalism’, p. 138; Malešević, Nation-States and Nationalisms.
99 John H. Herz, ‘Idealist internationalism and the security dilemma’, World Politics, 2:2 (1950), pp. 157–80 (p. 161).
100 As Etherington (‘Nationalism, territoriality and national territorial belonging’, p. 333) highlights, even civic nationalism is essentially territorial.
101 Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
102 David Miller, ‘Territorial rights: Concept and justification’, Political Studies, 60:2 (2012), pp. 252–68.
103 Daniel Philpott, ‘In defense of self-determination’, Ethics, 105:2 (1995), pp. 352–85; Ivor Jennings, The Approach to Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 55–6; Anthony Whelan, ‘Wilsonian self-determination and the Versailles settlement’, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, 43:1 (1994), pp. 99–115.
104 Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
105 Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ‘The Great War as a global war: Imperial conflict and the reconfiguration of world order, 1911–1923’, Diplomatic History, 38:4 (2014), pp. 786–800 (p. 791).
106 David A. Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), p. 13.
107 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
108 Ralph Wilde, International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 306.
109 Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 70.
110 Gerwarth and Manela, ‘The Great War as a global war’, p. 73.
111 Wilde, International Territorial Administration, pp. 306, 318; Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 157.
112 Boaz Atzili, Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012).
113 O’Dowd, ‘From a “borderless world”’, p. 1043.
114 On the concept, see Malcolm N. Shaw, ‘The heritage of states: The principle of uti possidetis juris today’, British Year Book of International Law, 67:1 (1997), pp. 75–154.
115 Castellino, ‘Territory and identity in international law’, p. 527.
116 Mahmud, ‘Colonial cartographies’, p. 59.
117 Ibid., p. 60.
118 Castellino, ‘Territory and identity in international law’, p. 529.
119 Mahmud, ‘Colonial cartographies’, p. 61.
120 Achille Mbembé and Steven Rendall, ‘At the edge of the world: Boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12:1 (2000), pp. 261–2.
121 Castellino, ‘Territory and identity in international law’, p. 524.
122 Barkin and Cronin, ‘The state and the nation’, p. 125; Castellino, ‘Territory and identity in international law’, p. 529.
123 Mahmud, ‘Colonial cartographies’, p. 65. See also Atzili, Good Fences, Bad Neighbors.
124 Kadercan, Shifting Grounds, p. 199–215.
125 Castellino, ‘Territory and identity in international law’, p. 530.
126 Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
127 Mahmud, ‘Colonial cartographies’, p. 60.
128 Daniel Levine, Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
129 For a detailed discussion, see Burak Kadercan, ‘Triangulating territory: A case for pragmatic interaction between political science, political geography, and critical IR’, International Theory, 7:1 (2015), pp. 125–61.
130 Zoltán I. Búzás, ‘Racism and antiracism in the liberal international order’, International Organization, 75:2 (2021), pp. 440–63.
131 John M. Hobson, ‘Re-embedding the global colour line within post-1945 international theory’, in Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (eds), Race and Racism in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 81–97 (p. 82).
132 Ibid., p. 86.
133 Ibid.
134 On the debate, see Beth A. Simmons and Hein E. Goemans, ‘Built on borders: Tensions with the institution liberalism (thought it) left behind’, International Organization, 75:2 (2021), pp. 387–410.
135 See also Kadercan, ‘Triangulating territory’ and Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
136 On this point, see Kadercan, Shifting Grounds.
137 For instance, Kadercan, Shifting Grounds; Andy Hanlun Li, ‘From alien land to inalienable parts of China: How Qing imperial possessions became the Chinese frontiers’, European Journal of International Relations, 28:2 (2022), pp. 237–62.
138 Erik Ringmar, ‘Performing international systems: Two East-Asian alternatives to the Westphalian order’, International Organization, 66:1 (2012), pp. 1–25 (p. 1).
139 Most notably, Amitav Acharya, ‘Global International Relations (IR) and regional worlds: A new agenda for International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 58:4 (2014), pp. 647–59.
140 For example, Ray Hudson, ‘The new geography and the new imperialism: 1870–1918’, Antipode, 9 (1977), pp. 12–19; Gerry Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gerry Kearns, ‘Geography, geopolitics, and empire’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35:2 (2010), pp. 187–203; Gerry Kearns, ‘Topple the racists 2: Decolonising the space and the institutional memory of geography’, Geography, 106:1 (2021), pp. 4–15. For a similar perspective from IR, see Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘Realism and the spirit of 1919: Halford Mackinder, geopolitics and the reality of the League of Nations’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2011), pp. 279–301 (p. 284).