ABSTRACT
Oxford English Dictionary We live in unruly times and, increasingly, in unruly places and spaces. Throughout the globe at the end of the twentieth century, a series of unruly and contradictory problematics are working themselves out across states, nations, economies, environments, and bodies. From the emergence of integrated global financial systems, the globalization of production, the rise of planetary networks (Castells 1996), and the de-traditionalization of identity (Heelas et al. 1996), to the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” the end of the Cold War, and the creation of new transnational institutions, longstanding structural forces and processes are colliding and converging to produce a fin de millénaire world that is relentlessly compressed and restlessly dynamic, while also spectacularly riven and dangerously fragmented. Just as Halford Mackinder (1904) proclaimed a “postColumbian epoch” of closed global space at the beginning of the twentieth century, so might one be tempted to proclaim at century’s end the emergence of an “unruly epoch” of ungovernable, turbulent, and disorderly global space. Caught in the maelstrom of the processes which are re-writing the rules of world order are the old masters of global space, the state formations that have historically divided territories and organized economies, ruled sovereignly over populations and corporations, disciplined subjects, and consolidated identities. Absolute rulers no more, the slipping power of states threatens the advent of an unruly world, a world no longer amenable to the state-centric ruling systems and disciplining institutions of the past.
