State, Territory & Sovereignty

Question 1

What is sovereignty?

Answer 1

“A claim to the final and ultimate authority over a political community” Flint (2009)

Question 2

What is territory?

Answer 2

“A unit of contiguous space that is used, organised and managed by a social group, individual person or institution to restrict and control access to peoples and places” Agnew (2009)

Question 3

What is the modern state?

Answer 3

An effective combination of both to create territorial sovereignty.

Question 4

What are Glassner’s (1993) common characteristics of the state?

Answer 4

Land/ territory  
Permanent population 
Government 
Organised economy  
Sovereignty
Recognition

Question 5

Explain the revival in interest interest in traditional concepts of the state, sovereignty and territory?

Answer 5

1. Original focus was on how politics is informed by geography, and how this played out at the scale of the state.
2. Late 1980s – growing consensus that political geography’s fixation with the state and formal politics was limiting. Turn to social theory after the cultural turn – shift in attention from “big P” politics (formal institutions) to “little p” politics (the everyday).
3. BUT danger of emptying ‘the political’ of meaning through finding it everywhere and thus ultimately nowhere.

Therefore revival of interest in traditional concepts of the state, sovereignty and territory, but re-examined through the a plurality of theoretical lenses.

Question 6

What is the origin of the modern state?

Answer 6

Nation state emerged from a particular time and place - Europe in Middle Ages, made out of the Treaty of Westphalia.
This was exported and imposed elsewhere (colonialism).

Question 7

Define internal and external sovereignty?

Answer 7

Internal: Leader had sovereignty over own people within bounded area.
External: Based on mutual recognition of equal political states.

Question 8

Link with colonialism?

Answer 8

Increase in nation states related to isolation of empires and export of idea of nation state (way of controlling space and power). Highly problematic, lead to many ‘failed states’.

Question 9

How is the state being ‘unmade’?

Answer 9

“The suggestion is that we may now be witnessing a transformation in state sovereignty and territoriality…changes [which] may be directly linked to the contemporary ‘shrinking of the world’ and ‘time-space compression’” (Anderson 1995: 66)

Question 10

What is the pincer movement?

Answer 10

Simultaneous…

• Pressures from sub-state nationalisms
• The prevalence of transnational and global flows of information
• Prevalence of supra- and non-state political organisations and actors (UN, NATO etc.)
• Forces of globalisation (economic infrastructures and institutions WTO, World Bank etc)

Question 11

What is the ‘Tragedy of the Nation State’? (Agnew, 2017)

Answer 11

Explosive combination of:
i. substate, extrastate, and transnational spaces in which identity are articulated that refuse to line up neatly with state borders
and
ii. hardening of nation-state territorialism in the wave of populist politics sweeping across the world.

The “tragedy” he alludes to draws attention to the apparent incoherence of holding up the modern nation-state as the gold standard for evaluating claims to political legitimacy and democratic participation.

Question 12

What role does the nation state have today?

Answer 12

The world remains in form of nation-states, but much messier with overlapping hierarchies of power. Now the nation-state is just one form of important sovereignty that exists, alongside regional powers and supra-national forces. There are competing attachments to territory.

Question 13

What is territoriality?

Answer 13

Territoriality is ‘a device to create and maintain much of the geographic context through which we experience the world and give it meaning’ (Sack 1986: 219)

Question 14

How has territory been reconceptualised?

Answer 14

Reconceptualisations of political space have moved beyond reified, abstract and absolute notions of territory and state-space as bounded and contiguous:
‘boundaries don’t have to be fixed, they can be fluid, they don’t have to be linear, they can be zonal, they don’t have to be continuous they can be disconnected, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive they can overlap’ (Forsberg 1996: 363).

Question 15

What understandings of sovereignty does Agnew (2005) challenge?

Answer 15

Agnew (2005) challenges 3 assumptions underpinning conventional understandings of sovereignty:

1. sovereignty is absolute and indivisible
2. sovereignty is invariably territorial
3. equality between states claiming sovereignty

Question 16

Explain de jure and de facto states.

Answer 16

De jure states:
States that exist according to the law (assumed to have internal sovereignty - not always true, e.g. African states with competing internal peoples)
De facto states:
States that exist in reality, or in fact, but without lawful authority.

Question 17

What is the paradox of sovereignty?

Answer 17

Paradox between territorial sovereignty being disregarded e.g. invasion of Iraq (sovereignty was lost as a military justification) at the same time as attempts to strengthen own territorial sovereignty.
Challenges idea that states are equally sovereign.

Question 18

What does it mean for sovereignty to be contingent?

Answer 18

‘contingent sovereignty’ - based on idea that, in circumstances such as seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, harbouring terrorists or inability to control state borders, the norms of sovereignty do not apply (Elden 2006). i.e. notion that sovereignty can be ‘lost’ and/or ‘earned’.