The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory

TLDR

Territoriality is often conflated with mutual exclusion, yet debates about the territorial state focus on its static persistence rather than its historical‑geographical significance, a view that conventional assumptions—states as fixed sovereign units, domestic/foreign polarity, and containers of societies—trap into a territorial trap. The end of the Cold War, the accelerating global economy, and the rise of non‑territorial political movements motivate a historical‑contextual analysis of state territoriality.

Abstract

Abstract Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modern territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by international relations theorists the discussion is overwhelmingly in terms of the persistence or obsolescence of the territorial state as an unchanging entity rather than in terms of its significance and meaning in different historical‐geographical circumstances. Contemporary events call this approach into question. The end of the Cold War, the increased velocity and volatility of the world economy, and the emergence of political movements outside the framework of territorial states, suggest the need to consider the territoriality of states in historical context. Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions ‐ states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity, and states as ‘containers’ of societies ‐ that have led into the ‘territorial trap’.