ABSTRACT
Issues of space, place and scale are incredibly important for politics and citizenship, with public space forming an integral feature of Western democracy going back to the agora of ancient Greece (Isin 1997: 118; Bickford 2000: 355; Hirst 2005: 10). As a tentative definition, territory is a type of place, insofar as it is a manner of organizing material space that operates through human signification (Cresswell 2004: 8; Massey 2005: 130), but with an added political element – sovereignty. Territory defines the boundaries of the polity that the citizen exists in relation to (Sassen 2006: 277). This chapter starts with an overview of dominant theories of territory in the context of the rise of the sovereign state. As throughout, I will be using ‘dominant’ in the Lefebvrian sense of ‘dominating’ (Lefebvre 1991: 164–8). I also consider the relation of state sovereignty to capitalism, and argue that although capitalism is often seen to exist in tension with state sovereignty, the two are in fact intertwined in history and are based on mutually reinforcing ontological assumptions concerning abstract possessive individualism and the instrumental necessity of private ownership. These have political implications concerning the enclosure of public space. A case is made that the concept of territory can fruitfully be reconsidered from a critical utopian standpoint. From this perspective, territorial sovereignty can be understood as a totalizing utopian ideal that has dominated political thought and practice, based on normative ideals and assumptions advocating the alienation of authority from individuals and their immediate relationships to fixed entities (states) defined in abstract terms such as territoriality and nationhood. Thus the dominant conception of space is itself utopian insofar as it is a way of imagining place by imposing a cartographic space on it, identifying it with the state (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). This critique is briefly situated with relation to anarchist, situationist and post-foundational political theories, and their alternative, critical utopian modes of conceptualizing space are put forward.
