Geographies of state formation Flashcards
(Biersteker, 2002)
The Westphalian idea of sovereignty that envisions the world as a patchwork of states each exercising ultimate control over its territory has always been an ideal. It has never captured the actual spatiality of power.
Glassman, 1999; Sidaway, 29002) - political geography
Political geography is attuned to the operation of state sovereignty in different social contexts such as global south vs global North and to the fact that states are far from equal or identical in the power they exercise within and outside their territorial boundaries.
Political geography offers evidence of…
how the discourse of state sovereignty enables and conditions the spatial exercise of power.
Alex Callinicos (2004)
notes for Marxist theory that ‘it brackets the state system’. State institutions and state power are generally studied in terms of their internal organization rather than their external definition and legitimation.
Constructivism, postmodernism, or post-structuralism approach to state soverignity
This critical research approaches state sovereignty as a historically specific construct, whose effects vary across space.
Contemporary discourses of sovereignty rely on…
specific assumptions about subjectivity and agency in the international arena. These assumptions reinforce mainstream discourses of state sovereignty as a natural and necessary framework of power.
The view of the state as the subject of international politics is based on
the modernist conception of the autonomous self as ‘the heroic figure of reasoning man who is himself the origin of language, the maker of history and the source of meaning in this world’. It presumes that state sovereignty reflects the interests of a pre-existing subject.
State subjectivity
The state as a subject of international politica frames the study of the state in terms of its ‘real’ identity and interest - its subjectivity - because state action is assumed to flow from its subjectivity. This organic conception of the state was most prevalent in the early 20th century.
Marston, 2003
The state has no ontological status apart from the practices that constitute its reality. In other words, a state is not a thing in itself but is constituted out of the representations and practices that are associated with it. It is not the source but the effect of the power.
Materiality of the state
to say that states have no separate ontological existence is not to say that they have no materiality. State institutions and state power surely exist materially and have material effects. The materiality of the state power is part and parcel of the discourse of sovereignty.
Murphy, 1996
Linked to the view the state is an autonomous subject of international politiucs is the assumption that political authority is invariably exercised territorially. The success of states sovereignity as an organizing principle of politics has much to do with its terrirorial underpinnings.
Modern poitical theory tends to understand geography
entirely as territorial: the world is divided up into contiguous spatial units with the territorial state as the basic building block.
Sack, 1986
Territoriality is in fact a strategy that has developed more in some historical contexts and places than in others.
Territorialisation of political authority was enhanced by
the development of mercantilist economies and, later, by an industrial capitalism that emphasised capturing powerful contiguous positive externalities from exponential distance-decay declines in transportation costs and from the clustering of external economies.
Durand et al, 1992
The terms ‘territoriality’ and ‘space’ need to be carefully distinguished. Territory refers to the units of a portioned space, not to spatial organisation in its entirety.
