ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the geopolitical power relations in this era of contemporary globalization are examined at several scales: the supranational, the nation-state, the urban and the regional. Today’s global system of international relations between nation-states, between cores and peripheries, and between the Global North and Global South, has grown out of a long sociohistorical process of expanding and contracting commercial and geopolitical relationships in which the modern state and the developmental state have assumed sovereign power over their territories and its resources, as well as sovereign responsibility for the safety and welfare of the people within their territories (Taylor 1993). The nation-state has “come of age” in the twentieth century to become the major functioning and decision-making geopolitical unit of independent jurisdictional authority, and to be recognized as such by the United Nations. Although it was common in the 1980s to suggest that globalization forces would undermine the legitimacy and authority of the nationstate, rendering the world “borderless” and the nation-state as a “de-territorialized” borderless space, such early claims of the nation-state’s demise have been found to be premature (Agnew 2003; Weiss 1998).
