ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that there are profound changes to the interrelationship between borders, sovereignty, and law in contemporary political life, and that there is a pressing need for alternative problematisations of these concepts. It analyses the spatial-ontological dimensions of Carl Schmitt's work, particularly his 1950 text The Nomos of the Earth, and Giorgio Agamben's more recent uptake of it in order to explore the prospects of the concept of the nomos for rethinking the borders-sovereignty-law problematic. The concept of nomos is a derivation of the Greek word nemein meaning 'to take or appropriate'. In German nemein translates as nehmen, which, in turn, is linked to the verbs teilen and weiden. The idea of nomos, then, encompasses these three dimensions - the appropriation, division, and cultivation of land - as the 'primal processes of human history, three acts of the primal drama'. For this reason Schmitt refers to nomos as a 'fence-word'.
