This chapter gets to the heart of why the disciplinary imagination of international law is only able to see deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, by excavating the content of the orthodox concept(s) of territory and scrutinising the spatial assumptions. For it is how territory is understood that forces the production of aterritorial functionalist account of law. The chapter reviews the standard definition(s) of territory before deconstructing the characteristics and qualities of the concept of territory. These include: that territory is only states’; that territory is imagined in a two-dimensional, flat, jigsaw-like form; that the physical referents are analytically prioritised over the social; that territory tends to be imagined as homogeneous, uniform, and contiguous ; that territory is bound by a particular technology and representation of borders; and that territories are relatively static. The final sections delve into the signification of territory and outline five different uses for territory in the discourse, before exploring how territory has mediated legal theoretical understandings of sovereignty.

This chapter turns to how the concept of territory might be reimagined, exploring how the concept of territory might be rethought of as the product of social relations. It offers a way for international law as a discipline to differently conceptualise territory, drawing on insights from (critical) spatial theorists about space to ‘update’ the discipline’s onto-theoretical approach to conceptualising territory. These insights allow us to rethink the concept of territory and emancipate international law’s spatial imaginary, by developing a legal theoretical understanding of control and authority that better reflects contemporary governance, law-making, and regulatory practices, rather than one limited to a twentieth-century state-centric international legal positivism. As a result, it also offers insights that enable the better observation of the relationship between power, law, and space, making sense of the competing state and non-state institutions and their territories ‘physically’ overlapping one another.