Taking territory seriously in a fluid, topologically varied world: reflections in the wake of the populist turn and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue based on the Vega symposium: ‘Bounded spaces in question: X-raying the persistence of regions and territories, edited by Anssi Paasi.

ABSTRACT

A concern with territory may seem anachronistic in the face of the interconnected, fluid, topologically complex political-geographic landscape of the twenty-first century. Yet in many places borders are hardening, the movement of people is becoming more limited, and state nationalism is gaining ground. The recent rise of populist-nationalist movements and the responses to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 around the world are illustrative of conflicting political and social dynamics that are simultaneously reinforcing and challenging dominant territorial ideas and assumptions. Coming to grips with this state of affairs demands an increasingly sophisticated engagement with the concept of territory–one that treats territory as a shifting, yet sticky, element of a complex system that is constantly being remade through the interplay of material circumstances and ideological dispositions.

KEYWORDS:

• Territory
• topology
• sovereignty
• hyperglobalization
• COVID-19
• populism

Introduction

How should we think about territory in the fast-changing, diverse, interconnected, segmented, uneven world of the twenty-first century? Such a question might have seemed odd fifty years ago when territory was largely thought of simply as a discrete, bounded area over which a political entity (a state, a metropolitan land-use commission) or a social group (a religious institution, a gang, a marketing group) had—or claimed to have—some degree of effective control. In keeping with this way of thinking, territorial arrangements were viewed as matters that could be straightforwardly identified and mapped. To be sure, many such arrangements were understood to be tenuous or contested, but for the most part the concept of territory itself was treated as definitionally unproblematic.

That is certainly not the case today, particularly when it comes to studies of territory as an attribute of states or state-like entities (the main focus of this article and indeed of much of the literature on territory). A growing awareness of developments undercutting traditional assumptions about territory and the growing influence of critical theoretical approaches have upended the conceptual complacency around territory—raising many questions in the process. What are the problems of thinking about territory simply as a space with a set of attributes (as opposed to a process or relational construct)? How discrete or bounded does an area have to be for it to be considered a territory? Should the concept of territory include aspirational as well as existing territorial constructs? How much control is needed to make an area an actual territory—and what constitutes effective control? More broadly, is territory even a useful concept given the fluid, networked, spatially interpenetrated character of the contemporary world?

As Anssi Paasi points out in his contribution to this special issue (Paasi 2022), the range of such questions, and the different answers offered to them, provide evidence of how deeply contested the concept of territory has become. That contestation finds expression in a wide range of studies examining territory’s ambiguities, contingencies, and limitations (e.g. Agnew 2020a; Storey 2020; Paasi, Harrison, and Jones 2018). Yet making sense of the concept requires reflection not just on territory’s exigencies and problematic characteristics, many though they may be; it is also important to consider how territory is thought about, understood, and acted upon by people moving through the world in their everyday lives, whether they be influential political and social figures or members of the lay public. The foregoing statement is hardly path-breaking or likely to give rise to much disagreement, but it raises a matter worth highlighting given that the preponderance of efforts to unpack the nature, meaning, and significance of territory (in the state-derived sense of the term) have paid less attention to territory’s everyday uses and resonance than they arguably deserve (Paasi and Prokkola 2008).

I made an argument along these lines some years ago in a piece titled Territory's Continuing Allure (Murphy 2013a). When that piece was published, it was somewhat out of step with much of the contemporary literature on state territory, which focused heavily on the eroding significance of territory as a discrete space of political control in the face of challenges above, below, and across the spaces depicted on conventional political maps (e.g. Potulski 2013). My goal in writing that piece was not to suggest that such studies were wrong; instead it was to argue that we need to pay more attention to the disconnect between deterritorialization (as it is sometimes called) and territory’s continuing material influence and perceptual hold on the popular imagination.

Events of recent years are suggestive of the continued relevance of the argument I was making. Right-wing populist-nationalist movements grounded in a discourse emphasizing territorial sovereignty have gained ground. The borders between states have hardened in many places. Territory has been at the forefront of clashes in Israel-Palestine, along the China–India border, in the South and East China Seas, between Russia and Ukraine, in and around Syria, in Afghanistan and Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and in many other places. High-profile controversies have raged in many countries about the territorial status of migrants and refugees. Increasingly formidable restrictions on access to the internet have been imposed by some countries within their territorial domains.

Against this backdrop, proclamations of territory’s anachronistic status have become more muted of late, and the continuing physical and psychological influence of territory has begun to attract increasing attention (Storey 2020; Lizotte 2020). In keeping with this shift in emphasis, the present study considers what the recent rise of nationalist-populist movements in response to hyperglobalization and efforts to confront the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes (commonly referred to as COVID-19) can tell us about territory’s continuing perceptual, and indeed tangible, impact. Focusing on these developments is particularly revealing because they are the product of occurrences that, on the surface, might seem to cut against state territory’s continuing prominence in human affairs: the intensification of economic globalization in recent decades and a global health emergency. Yet each has played out in ways that do not simply undermine the modernist territorial order; they also serve to reinforce territory’s tangible and perceptual inertia.

To be clear, my exploration of these developments is not grounded in an effort to provide a comprehensive assessment of their territorial dimensions. Instead, I focus on what their more general features can tell us about two questions of a more conceptual nature: how the study of territory (in its statist guise) should be explored and what territory’s continuing allure might mean for political projects, including those aimed at overcoming the apparent irrationalities of the currently dominant political-territorial order. With those goals in mind, I begin by situating this study in relation to major recent debates about the nature and meaning of territory. I then turn to what the responses to hyperglobalization and the COVID-19 pandemic suggest about the conflicting political and social dynamics shaping territorial practices, ideas, and assumptions. The closing section of the paper considers the theoretical and practical political implications of these two broadly sketched case studies.

Conceptual backdrop

The self-evident disconnect between the world map of so-called independent states and almost any spatial delineation of economic arrangements, socio-cultural patterns/connections, or realms of effective power projection puts the lie to the idea that territorial states are de facto sovereign units that serve as building blocks of twenty-first-century society. As such, it is not surprising that a voluminous literature has emerged challenging the traditional equation of territory and sovereignty (e.g. Agnew 2017), the methodological territorialism of much social science (e.g. van Schendel 2005), and the tendency to treat territory as something that is separate and apart from other socio-spatial forms and relations (e.g. Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008). This line of scholarship has opened up new and important questions about territory—what it is and how it should be characterized. Over the past couple of decades, two of the more prominent challenges that have emerged to traditional approaches focus on (1) whether territory should be thought of primarily in relational or topological, as opposed to classical spatial, terms and (2) whether sovereignty has lost meaning as a concept of relevance to our understandings of territory in its statist guise. Each of these challenges raises heuristically important issues, but careful consideration of territory’s enduring material and perceptual impacts offers a useful frame of reference for assessing the advantages and limitations of these attempts to rethink territory.

Consider the claim that territory is best understood in relational terms—and the offshoot of that general idea emphasizing the value of adopting a topological perspective on territory. The literature in support of this approach has done much to highlight the ‘limited ability of conventional geometric concepts to account for recent spatial shifts in the architecture of power' (Allen 2011, 284). The relational/topological turn is premised on the idea that spaces of power are not fixed; they are instead part and parcel of a constantly shifting array of circumstances and processes that shape and are shaped by differently configured spaces of power and temporal circumstances (see, e.g. Axelsson 2022; Massey 2004). Aside from drawing attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness that undermines traditional assumptions about territory, this line of work makes clear that power is not a singular force that can be straightforwardly located in space; power takes on many forms and spatial configurations that both arise from and produce continually fluctuating spatial formations.

The literature in this vein has shed light on various complexities of the territory-power relationship that are missing in most conventional accounts. What sometimes gets less attention than it deserves, however, is the idea that certain spaces and configurations of power are more deeply embedded and less mutable than others. Territory (in the modernist, state-derived sense of the term with roots in Early Modern Europe, see Elden 2013) is a case in point; in some respects it is a notably sticky space (Murphy 2013b, 168)—a space that is not easily malleable. That lack of malleability is not just a product of concrete governance practices or power geometries that are influenced by state-territorial spaces; it is also constantly reproduced by the sentimental and ontological hold of territorial structures on the popular geographical imagination (Espejo 2014; Lizotte 2020). That hold gradually deepened and broadened as the territorial norms associated with the modern state system expanded geographically and intensified functionally. Aided and abetted by tendencies inherent to territorial compartmentalization (Sack 1986), social spatialization (Paasi 2009), state-driven knowledge production (Häkli 2001), and the construction of regimes of territorial legitimation (Murphy 2005), the idea of a world composed of discrete state-territorial spaces came to occupy a special place in the way that many people conceptualized the planet and their place in it—irrespective of underlying circumstances that did not fit with this Weltanschauung. In the process state territory acquired an unusual degree of stickiness.

Of course the growing effective power of states also contributed to that stickiness, even though state-territorial power remained geographically varied and contingent and was never neatly consonant with the map of states. It is the apparent weakening of that effective power in recent decades that helps explains the topological/relational turn described above. As Jan Aart Scholte (2000), among many others, argues, territorial states have been eclipsed in important ways in the face of economic globalization, time–space compression, distance-eradicating communication technologies, and challenges to state territorial control within and between states. To be sure, states continue to exert substantial territorial control in many realms, but the recent functional challenges that have emerged to state territorial stickiness have emphatically diluted the strength of the underlying glue.

Nonetheless, when attention turns to how people think about the world, the evidence for glue dilution is not particularly compelling outside certain corners of academia and elite business, media, entertainment, and technology circles—realms encompassing a distinct minority of the population at large. We should expect nothing less; as Jean Gottmann (1973, 158) put it, ‘one cannot expect the partitions in the minds of people to shift quickly.' It is arguably the slowness of that shift that gives territory (in its statist guise) much of its power and influence—attributes that should not be underestimated. Recognition of this point can be seen in Anssi Paasi’s (2011) response to John Allen’s (2011) ‘topological twists' paper. In Paasi’s words, ‘we still have certain sociospatial elements that we cannot write off' (Paasi 2011, 301), including ‘material practices (boundary-making), representations (mapping), and lived meanings (affective loyalties to territorial units)' (Paasi 2011, 302). The role played by territory’s continued perceptual (and functional) stickiness can also be seen in both Martin Jones’ (2022) discussion of plasticity and Anssi Paasi’s (2022) exploration of spatial socialization in this symposium, and earlier in Jessop, Brenner, and Jones’ (2008) call for a polymorphic approach to socio-spatial theory that treats territories not simply as relational abstractions, but as constructions co-constituted by places, scales, and networks (see also Jones 2009; 2010). If we are to embrace the points these interventions make, it is important to tie the abstract insights of relational/topological approaches to territory to the continued (even if compromised) functional, and especially perceptual, influences of territory.

A similar argument can be made regarding efforts to expose the problematic nature of the territory-sovereignty nexus. More than anyone else, John Agnew has developed an extended, persuasive argument challenging the tendency to conflate state territory and sovereignty (see especially Agnew 2017). As a principle that developed in conjunction with the emergence of the modern state system—a political-territorial order theoretically rooted in the idea of the right of states to control circumstances within their recognized borders (Murphy 1996)—what is sometime called Westphalian sovereignty came to be viewed as a fundamental attribute of territory.¹ The sovereignty-territory relationship became, as Agnew (2017, 15) notes, a foundational myth for a worldview that was ‘virtually unassailable (Agnew 2017, 68)—with sovereignty treated simply as a matter of fact' (Agnew 2017, 134).

It is, of course, a fiction that the world is made up of functionally sovereign territorial units called states. Indeed, sovereignty need not necessarily even be thought of as inherently territorial or state based. In Agnew’s words, ‘even the seemingly most Westphalian of states … are riddled with authoritative power networks whose extension beyond territorial boundaries can render claims to absolute sovereignty moot' (Agnew 2017, 147). As such, Agnew seeks to draw attention to how sovereignty actually operates, which he suggests is important if ‘political reach' is to ‘match the geographical scope' of the issues and problems humanity is confronting (Agnew 2017, 258).

Agnew’s project is an important one, and his writings clearly illustrate the geographically uneven, often illusory character of state territorial sovereignty. But in our efforts to unravel sovereignty’s complex de facto character, it is important not to marginalize a reality that Agnew also recognizes: in his words, ‘state-centricity has continuing normative attractions' (Agnew 2017, 33)—ones that are regularly invoked to defend or advance all sorts of interests (Agnew 2017, 117). To be sure, ‘present circumstances do not necessarily have unlimited staying power' (Agnew 2017, 168), but there are limits to what the permutations of sovereignty can tell us about the political-territorial dynamics of the contemporary moment. If, as seems highly likely, the ‘present regime still has much mileage in it' (Agnew 2017, 169)—a point Agnew has reinforced in some of his recent writings (e.g. Agnew 2020b)—then the project of unpacking the sovereignty-territory coupling needs to be complemented by consideration of the continuing hold of Westphalian sovereignty ideas on the contemporary political-geographic imagination. Advancing that agenda requires careful consideration of how the perceptual inertia of the territory-sovereignty link works together with certain on-the-ground, state-based powers to influence understandings and practices, and to shape what is possible in the political arena.

The overarching goal of the present effort, then, is to encourage increased attention to an issue that the literatures on both territory’s relational/topological character and the sovereignty-territory nexus recognize but sidestep to some degree: the continuing influence of Westphalian territorial arrangements and assumptions on politics and society. The contemporary world may be fluid and topologically varied, but taking territory seriously in that world requires more than explicating aspects of that fluidity and associated socio-spatial complexity. Territory’s stickiness also needs to be taken squarely into consideration. Many of the attention-grabbing events of the day underscore this point, whether they be border conflicts, successionist claims, or attempts to suppress or deny ethnic differences within and across states. Even developments that seemingly undermine the Westphalian territorial ideal can serve as catalysts for solidifying that ideal. The two examples to which I now turn—responses to hyperglobalization and a global health emergency—are illustrative of this point.

The populist response to hyperglobalization

There is no more powerful symbol of the declining significance of the territorial state than the complex array of economic arrangements and connections that are loosely captured by the term hyperglobalization. As used here, hyperglobalization refers to the marked expansion in the spatial extent and intensity of economic activities in recent decades at the expense of both individual locales and territorial states. To be sure, a degree of economic globalization goes back centuries, if not millennia (Hansen 2020), and as already noted, few if any territorial states have ever been discrete economic units with effective control of economic activities within their borders. But the past few decades have seen a marked acceleration in economic globalization in the face of rapidly rising capital and human mobility, the development of more—and more powerful—transnational corporations, an explosive growth in global trade and investment flows, and an array of technological innovations that have facilitated the development of global production and consumption networks and associated economic activities that transcend international boundaries. The result is an unprecedented level of economic interdependence across state lines and a concomitant challenge to the economic power and significance of territorial states.

Against this backdrop, it is easy to understand why obituaries for the territorial state began to appear in the 1990s (Guéhenno 1995; Ōmae 1996) and why a growing number of commentators began shifting their attention to extra-state global and regional networks as the twenty-first century unfolded (e.g. Khanna 2016). States remain undeniably relevant actors, and active efforts aimed at what is sometimes termed ‘reterritorialization' (Ó Tuathail and Luke 1994) are common. But almost no one would argue that the territorial state is as significant an economic space as it was a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, and political and economic elites within states have played a major role in this shift by actively encouraging hyperglobalization.

Events of the past few years, however, have shown that hyperglobalization is not simply a force undermining state-territorial stickiness. To the contrary, hyperglobalization has played a major role in the rising power of a right-wing variant of populism rooted in the tenacious glorification of state sovereignty.² A significant catalyst for the rise of this kind of right-wing populism has been the embrace in recent decades of policies and practices that have led to a reduction in barriers to international trade, a massive increase in production outsourcing, increased immigration, declining unionization, and labour arbitrage (the replacement of high-wage workers in some regions with low-wage workers). Cheered on by government and business elites from across the political spectrum, hyperglobalization has spawned considerable resentment in areas in North America, Europe, and beyond that have been left behind—areas where job losses have followed the outsourcing of production, where a growing supply of immigrant labour and union-busting have made it easier for employers to suppress wages and replace long-standing workers with those willing to work for less, where investment has dried up, where people feel less able to afford the kinds of things their parents could afford, and where lack of opportunity leads, with some frequency, either to outmigration of the young or to a downward spiral into alcoholism and drug addiction (see Judis 2018; Lind 2020). The case can be overstated. In his discussion of support for former U.S. President Donald Trump, Michael Lind (2020) attributes much of Trump’s appeal to his embrace of aspects of right-wing populism that resonated with those living in economically disadvantaged areas.³ Yet Lind says little about why tens of millions of Trump supporters not living in depressed areas were also drawn to his populist rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is incontestable that populist support ‘correlates with the stagnating incomes, increased income inequality, and declining life opportunities for many in countries that have experienced high economic growth' (Agnew and Shin 2019, 6)—an observation borne out by research in Europe as well as the U.S. (Colombo 2018; Dipple, Gold, and Heblich 2016). And it is the erosion of the Westphalian territorial ideal that gets much of the blame for this state of affairs; ‘bringing back sovereignty to these people is the refrain' (Agnew and Shin 2019, 7).

The centrality of territorial sovereignty to the rise of populism is evident in everything from the populists’ emphasis on strong borders to their vilification of international institutions and trade deals to their efforts to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment (Jacobson 2017). Populist leaders have moved territorial sovereignty to the discursive forefront, with the nation-state cast as ‘a legitimate and above all familiar and reassuring model to re-imagine and articulate this project of reclaiming sovereignty' (Kallis 2018, 287). In the process, the ‘performance of sovereignty' has moved to centre stage (Moffitt 2016; Blu and Butzlaff 2018)—statements and acts that purport to reinforce sovereignty irrespective of their actual impact on the traditional territorial order. Concomitantly, borders—the most tangible markers of territoriality in the modern state system—have become principal objects of attention. Calls for border hardening and militarization easily tap into the sense of disadvantage and loss of control that many communities associate with hyperglobalization.

It is not hard to understand why such feelings have played a role in the rise of right-wing nationalist populism in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. The outsourcing of production has had a clear, tangible impact on the economic vitality of many communities—precipitating a downward spiral that is extremely difficult to reverse. And outsourcing by its very nature is a territorial strategy associated with hyperglobalization—one that overtly takes advantage of the accelerating disintegration of Westphalian sovereignty arrangements. As such, eroding sovereignty norms offer a seductively easy way to whip up nationalist-populist sentiment, made all the easier by the fact that outsourcing has encountered little resistance—and to some extent has even been championed—by a wide range of mainstream political figures and media commentators.

The central role played by territorial sovereignty in populist discourse is also a reflection of the fact that the economic decline of many older industrial communities and rural areas came about at a time when borders were becoming more porous and illegal migration was on the rise. At least a superficially appealing argument could thus be made that the influx of undocumented migrants had depressed wages, reduced job opportunities, and undermined community vitality. The reality, of course, is more complicated. A ream of studies has shown negligible, or even positive, impacts of migration on labour markets in many places because migrants bring with them needs that can only be met through economic expansion and associated job creation (see the studies cited in Smith 2020). But perception often trumps reality, and that is clearly the case when it comes to popular assumptions about the employment impacts of migration, which underscore the appeal of the populist emphasis on territorial sovereignty.

The psychologically disruptive impacts of economic globalization also tend to reinforce the appeal of the populist-nationalist economic agenda. The spatial and scalar reorganization of economic life accompanying globalization left many people feeling culturally besieged, to use Jacobson’s (2017) turn of phrase. That helps explain the results of a recent European Social Survey, which showed that cultural and attitudinal factors were key drivers of support for populist parties championing economic nationalism (Inglehart and Norris 2016). That support is particularly strong in places where hyperglobalization has upended the shared norms, values, traditions, and customs that foster a sense of community (Chua 2019). In many such places, ‘nostalgic deprivation' has taken root and flourished (Mazzoleni and Ivaldi 2020, 3). That deprivation, in turn, plays well into the populist call for harder borders and a return to traditional sovereignty arrangements, no matter how fictive those arrangements might be.

The larger point is that a set of developments that has fostered greater global connectivity across borders and undermined traditional territorial norms has paradoxically served to promote a sense of territory’s importance and value among a significant segment of society, even as it has elevated territory’s prominence in the political arena—and not just among those who are usually regarded as the strongest supporters of populist politics (white men). In the United States, for example, a 2018 Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that 53 percent of Latinos favoured the deportation of immigrants who cross the border illegally, and an even higher percentage favoured more restrictive immigration laws (discussed in Lind 2020, 78–79). Against this backdrop, the notion that the modernist idea of territory is dead would seem to be seriously flawed.

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

It is well understood that the COVID-19 pandemic is global in scope, and calls for a coordinated ‘borderless' response are common (see, e.g. Mohamed et al. 2020). Yet policy responses to the rapid spread of COVID-19—as well as dominant ways the pandemic is conceptualized and discussed—provide another telling example of the enduring impact of traditional territorial norms. Within weeks, if not days, of the COVID-19 outbreak, national (i.e. state) withdrawal was the order of the day, exemplified by border closures, the hording of medical supplies by individual countries, and related efforts to protect national (read state-territorial) space. The way information was collected and disseminated also reflected primary deference to the traditional world political map. For every effort to show cross-border disease clusters or even the uneven distribution of the disease within countries, there were tens of thousands that showed COVID-19 case totals by country. Those representations helped to fuel a public discussion of the pandemic that focused on what was happening in Italy, in Sweden, in South Korea, and the like (cf. Sparke and Anguelov 2020, 499, which highlights the importance of examining the multiple spatialities of the pandemic). Moreover, the pandemic paved the way for a largely uncontested expansion in the data-gathering and surveillance capacity of the state, further solidifying the state’s potential for territorial control (Dodds et al. 2020, 292).

To be sure, there were efforts to develop coordinated responses to the pandemic through the World Health Organization, but most of what happened reflected a country-by-country policy approach—in many cases driven by territorial nationalism rather than health considerations. In the spring of 2020, for example, many countries placed bans on people arriving from other countries but exempted their own nationals who were living or travelling abroad even though the latter had just as much potential to spread COVID-19 as the former. And there was remarkably little cross-border collaboration to address disease clusters that straddled international borders. In the words of Marco Antonsich (2020), ‘it only took a sub-microscopic pathogen to confirm that, when a crisis strikes, it is the national framework that becomes crucial in offering a sense of security to disoriented masses.' Antonsich went on to note that the pandemic also revealed ‘social tensions and territorial fractures'—pointing, for example, to differences in responses to the pandemic at local and subnational scales, as well as the tensions that arose from the failure to consider the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged communities (Antonsich 2020). But his main point is as inescapable as it is obvious: pandemic management and thought were overwhelmingly refracted through a territorial-nationalist prism.

The most obvious explanation for this state of affairs lies in the fact that it is governmental institutions and figures that have the clearest capacity and mandate to adopt policies affecting territories and borders—part of the stickiness that helps to sustain territory’s inertia. Even comparatively powerful supranational organizations such as the European Union lack much power to promulgate and enforce policies in the public health arena. But the functional privileging of responses at the state-territorial scale goes hand in hand with the broader influence the conventional world political map has on the public geographic imagination. That influence is evident in the territory-reinforcing ways the pandemic began to be talked about: variants described by reference to country name (the Brazilian variant, the Nigerian strain, the South African variant, etc.), the racist ‘othering’ of individuals who were from places where COVID-19 emerged or became particularly virulent (Dodds et al. 2020, 292), and (most starkly) then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s overtly provocative use of the phrase ‘China virus' to refer to COVID-19. The pandemic also highlighted, and reinforced, distinctly territorial-cum-nationalistic ways of thinking about and approaching the world—for example, claims and counterclaims about how well different countries coped with the pandemic (China vs. South Korea vs. New Zealand vs. Sweden, etc.). Japan offers an extreme example of the nationalist-territorial prism through which the pandemic was refracted; as reported in the Japan Times, the slow pace of the vaccine rollout in Japan was due in part to concerns about whether vaccines developed elsewhere were safe for use on the Japanese people (Osaki 2021).

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic also reflected and helped to promote geopolitical dynamics of a territorial nature. In the international arena, direct evidence is sometimes murky, but there are reasons to suspect that offers of assistance by Russia to the EU were aimed in part at blunting criticism of Russa’s 2014 annexation of Crimea (Dodds et al. 2020, 293), and China’s overtures to Southeast Asia arguably were aimed in part at solidifying China’s territorial position and claims. Turning to the domestic sphere, in many places the pandemic has been cast as a national security issue (a territorial threat)—a framing that has served to make state territorial power more visible (see Moisio 2020 for how this played out in Finland).

The roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines came on top of the kinds of territory-reinforcing practices and ways of thinking noted above, and in some respects the roll-out took the territorial underpinnings of the pandemic response to a new level. The term vaccine nationalism came into widespread use as individual countries claimed credit for the development of particular vaccines, as countries jockeyed for advantage in obtaining vaccine supplies, and as governments with greater resources and power stockpiled surplus vaccines rather than sharing them with other parts of the world (see generally Zhou 2021). Shortly after the vaccine rollout, stockpiling efforts drew attention to the deeply unequal world we inhabit, with countries representing no more than a seventh of the world’s population reserving well over half of all the leading vaccine supplies for their own citizens—clearly exacerbating global inequality in the process.

Vaccine nationalism has, of course, come in for significant criticism, particularly in the halls of international organizations and in academic circles (e.g. Bollyky and Brown 2020), and by the summer of 2021 the U.N.-backed global vaccine sharing programme COVAX started gaining steam. Yet enormous disparities in vaccine availability did not end, and even the justification for vaccine sharing on the part of political leaders often took place against the backdrop of an argument with a national-territorial tinge: if we don’t help to get more of the world’s population vaccinated, variants are likely to develop that could spread and affect citizens of our country, our nation, our territory (see, e.g. the justification for vaccine sharing by U.S. President Joe Biden, cited in Miller 2021). Interestingly, this justification acknowledges border porosity even as it invokes a territorially driven social logic.

None of this is surprising. As Florian Bieber (2020a) has pointed out, the psychological and economic impacts of the pandemic have exacerbated a politics of fear, and a strong undercurrent of fear plays well into a territorially grounded nationalist agenda where borders are cast as sacrosanct and strengthened sovereignty is held up as a vital need (accord Agnew 2020b). Claudio Minca (2020) makes a similar point, arguing that the very nature of the virus puts bordering narratives into play. The growing influence of such narratives and related practices helps explain the consensus among the contributors to a 2020 scholarly exchange (Woods et al. 2020); in response to a question about whether COVID-19 would likely reinforce or erode the nation-state, there was general agreement with Liah Greenfield’s conclusion that ‘it is transnational institutions, rather than nation-states, that are likely to fall victim to the pandemic' (Woods et al. 2020, 813). To be sure, one of the contributors, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, noted that countries where pandemic response efforts were notably ineffective could be exceptions. But there is little evidence that the pandemic has the potential to seriously challenge, much less upend, territorial nationalism’s widespread influence and hold on the public imagination. Instead, the evidence suggests that its influence is working in the opposite direction.

Conceptual and political implications

The territorial impulses behind the populist response to hyperglobalization and the struggle to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic are only two of many examples that could be cited in support of the idea that modernist territorial arrangements and norms continue to have considerable functional and perceptual significance in the contemporary world. Even more obvious manifestations of that hold are evident: the notably successful efforts of leaders in China, Armenia, Israel, Poland, and elsewhere to fan the flames of exclusive nationalism in support of a territorial-nationalist agenda; the general unwillingness of countries to cede control over small, economically and culturally insignificant territories, no matter the political or economic costs of sustaining control over them; the marginalization of non-state-territorial entities in supranational institutional arrangements; the reflexive resort to the world political map when assessing economic, social, and even physical-geographic circumstances; the growing influence of ideological movements that treat state territory as a fortress that needs to be strengthened to prevent cultural dilution (e.g. the Hindutva movement in India); and on and on. The two examples outlined above, however, are particularly revealing because they arise out of developments that are manifestly at odds with a world partitioned among discrete territorial entities. If even these kinds of developments produce reactions that serve to reinforce territory’s continuing functional and perceptual power, territory’s stickiness has to be taken seriously.

Discounting that stickiness in the face of fluidity, hyperconnectivity, and specious sovereignty arrangements not only overlooks the multitudinous empirical examples of territory’s continuing influence and allure; it ignores the perceptive insights of social theorists who have grappled with the nature and implications of state power, governance arrangements, and the nature of political community. Michael Billig (1995) and others have shown how territorial nationalism is perpetuated though symbols and actions that are almost impossible to avoid (see also Koch and Paasi 2016). Pierre Bourdieu (1977) has connected territorial arrangements to what he calls habitus—producing deep-seated social habits and inclinations. Benedict Anderson (2006) has highlighted the formative role territory plays in producing and sustaining ‘imagined communities.’ Turning attention away from territory’s continuing significance and allure risks minimizing the perceptiveness of such insights.

Studies of the psychological foundations of human identity provide additional reasons for taking seriously territory’s imaginative significance (Muscarà 2020). Literature in that vein has emphasized the communitarian importance of symbols, conventions, and material conditions that give people a feeling of belonging and a sense of place (Tyrrell 1996; Searle-White 2001). Those symbols, conventions, and conditions derive their power in turn from the distinctions they draw out among peoples and places—distinctions that make people feel part of one group but different from others. As such, their influence stems from celebrating or privileging particular groups and spaces, and they serve to foster loyalties to sports teams, cities, regions, ethnic groups, and, of course, nations and states (see generally Antonsich 2010; Lizotte 2020). The latter may be somewhat embattled in the face of social, economic, and political upheavals, but territory in its statist guise remains a deep-seated, powerful manifestation of difference that inspires feelings of belonging and attachments to place. The very fact that fluidity and topological complexity do not offer substitutes for the kind of foundational psychological benefit territory provides gives territorial fixity a distinct advantage in its confrontation with deterritorializing forces.

There is, in summary, a strong theoretical case for treating territory as something more than somewhat ephemeral, malleable social space. Anssi Paasi’s (1996, 1998) early work on the territory suggests as much, for the institutionalization of territorial arrangements that he charts gives those arrangements an inertia that does not simply disappear (see also Sassen 2006, who argues that territorial norms still influence outcomes despite significant changes in the socio-political, technical, and institutional ‘assemblages' that shape social and economic life over the course of the past several centuries). It follows that territory should be treated as a powerful structural influence, albeit one that is embedded in a complex socio-spatial system that constantly exerts pressure on traditional territorial norms.

Of course, focusing attention on the inertia inherent to the modernist territorial system should not lead us to ignore the enormous pressures weighing on that system or minimize the magnitude of fluidity or topological upheaval that has been taking place. Nor should it mean accepting the rationality or virtue of modernist territorial arrangements. Moreover, there is danger in overemphasizing territory’s stickiness, as that can serve to perpetuate the territorial trap that Agnew (1994) has so powerfully and persuasively argued against (for how this relates to the pandemic context, see Wang, Zou, and Liu 2020). But in our efforts to make sense of the contemporary moment, we cannot lose sight of territory’s inertia or the circumstances that sustain the territorial ideal.

The tendency to look away from such matters represents not just a potential conceptual pitfall in efforts to analyze contemporary political dynamics; there are also tangible political pitfalls to underestimating the power and influence of territorial nationalism. The concrete practice of international relations by the United States in recent decades offers telling examples of such pitfalls. For decades, some of the United States’ most significant international engagements have been shaped by a mindset that underplays territory’s continuing perceptual influence (in the sovereignty-infused sense of the term)—with deeply problematic consequences. In the aftermath of an explicit promise to the Soviet Union in 1990 not to expand NATO, U.S. President Bill Clinton endorsed NATO expansion later in the 1990s, in the process helping to usher in an aggressive Russian nationalism (Judis 2018). President George W. Bush’s U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was driven by claims about the putative advantages of implanting a free-market democracy in the heart of the greater Middle East, while failing to adequately acknowledge the importance of underlying ethno-territorial dynamics—despite efforts by some analysts to draw attention to those dynamics (Murphy 2003). (The widely acknowledged debacle that followed clearly shows the consequences of undervaluing the importance of ethno-territorial sentiments and attachments, and the same can be said about the decades-long U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan.) Turning to another example, in the wake of South Sudan’s independence, the U.S. intelligence community’s dominant focus on economic arrangements and political institutions resulted in analysts being caught completely off guard when South Sudan’s president mounted a deadly offensive against his vice president’s ethnic brethren, the Nuer (Stewart 2020). A similar tendency to downplay the nature and depth of ethno-territorial sentiments is evident in U.S. engagements with many other places, including Iran, China, Libya, Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine.

Critiques of the geographical naiveté on display in the foregoing examples are not hard to find, but the practical consequences of underestimating territory’s continuing allure have concrete political resonance that extends to a wide range of problems that are inherent to a system in thrall—no matter how imperfectly—to Westphalian territorial principles. Consider the debates and policy proposals surrounding migration, the policing of borders, and citizenship requirements. Despite the decades-long struggles of scholars, activists, and interested organizations to expose the injustices of current practices and encourage policy shifts, there are few cases where major reforms have been adopted, whether in North America, Europe, Pacific Asia, or elsewhere. In almost all cases, reform efforts fall short because they come up against a wall of what Bieber (2020b) calls exclusionary nationalism—a concept that is fundamentally territorial because of the material and psychological role territory plays in advancing exclusion. Linn Axelsson’s (2022) contribution to this symposium attests to the consequences; refracted through an exclusionary territorial-nationalist lens, migration is often simplistically treated as a threat to people’s livelihoods and ways of life, borders are viewed as lines that need to be strengthened, and easy paths to citizenship for migrants are actively opposed. If this way of looking at things were simply the province of a small minority, it could perhaps be dismissed as an aberration, but in the political-geographic world we currently inhabit, it is not. As previously noted, for many people it matters not whether, in actuality, migration negatively affects the job prospects of long-time residents of an area or border-strengthening projects serve to stem migration. What matters is that migration, borders, and citizenship are widely thought about and talked about in exclusionary territorial-nationalist terms. Importantly, this way of thinking and discourse has resonance far beyond the vocal supporters of exclusionary territorial nationalism that capture the headlines; all available evidence suggests that it permeates the thinking of a much larger swath of the population. As such, efforts to carve out alternative visions and related policy reforms face daunting odds if they ignore the continuing influence of the modernist territorial order on the wider public geographic imagination.

What, then, are the options for a champion of migration or border reform? One option is to ignore the nationalist-territorial imaginary, but the general lack of success of that approach points to the importance of acknowledging the embeddedness of territory’s influence and allure and constructing policy frameworks accordingly. Such an approach could take a number of different forms: tying migration reform to community development grants aimed at expanding the job opportunities for long-time residents, making the path to citizenship for undocumented migrants contingent on some kind of community or national service that is widely understood to be in the broader interest of the polity at large, or promoting more humane borderland policing practices in conjunction with the adoption of protectionist or economic development measures that have the potential to benefit borderland communities. In a more abstract vein, reform activists might well have much to gain if they tied the rhetorical assault on existing migration and bordering policies to explicit statements of concern for the well-being of communities most concerned about migration, while continuing to draw attention to empirical evidence that undercuts simplistic assumptions about the negative impacts of migration, wall construction, and the like.

To be sure, all these ideas smack of compromise with a territorial system that, in many respects, is inherently flawed. After all, Agnew and Shin (2019, 145) are surely right when they note that ‘there is no single solution at a single geographical scale to the dilemmas of modern life.' But in the absence of some relatively pervasive, influential alternative to territory as a focus of identity and way of thinking about the socio-political organization of the world, some deference to territory would seem to be inevitable. The demand for such deference helps explain why even reformist-minded political leaders often end up playing by many of the rules of the traditional political-territorial game. After defeating former President Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, President Joe Biden set out to reverse much of his predecessor’s approach to immigration: rescinding a travel ban excluding arrivals into the U.S. from certain countries, abandoning the kinds of dehumanizing descriptions of migrants commonly advanced by Trump, suspending funding of Trump’s border wall with Mexico, championing policy reforms that would make it possible for migrants who came as children to become full citizens, and reversing the requirement that asylum seekers coming into the U.S. from Mexico stay in Mexico until the date of their U.S. immigration court hearing. Yet at the same time the Biden administration continued to send a ‘don’t come' message to migrants (an oft-repeated plea by Vice President Kamala Harris during a 2021 visit to Central America) and continued to turn away most migrants at the border. The latter statements and practices are hardly uncontroversial, but any attempt to explain them cannot escape referencing the power of the structural constraints that give rise to them—constraints that are firmly embedded in the modernist territorial order.

It is worth emphasizing that the foregoing discussion is not meant to suggest that the world is static or that we should ignore the power and possibility of emergent alternative bases on which political and social communities can be built. But it is also important to recognize that the extra-territorial forces of change affect places and communities in very different ways. The substantial decoupling of territory and socioeconomic circumstance, for example, has a very different meaning for urbanized elites in the more prosperous parts of the world than it does for many rural dwellers or those not directly caught up in, and profiting from, the swirl of hyperglobalization. For the latter segments of society, growing interconnections across the planet represent a threat rather than an opportunity, and territorial fixity offers an appealing alternative. Whatever opinion one might have about the wisdom of this way of thinking, its appeal is a contemporary political-geographic reality that should not be underestimated.

Conclusion

The political-territorial order has never been stable, and there will surely come a time when the strains on a system underpinned by centuries-old ideas about how to organize political life lead to the disintegration of the system. We are not there yet, however. Instead, recent developments in the social and economic realms attest to the continued inertia of the territorial arrangements and sensibilities that developed along with the modern state system. As responses to hyperglobalization and the COVID-19 pandemic suggest, even developments that seemingly challenge the logic of the traditional political-territorial order can have the effect of reinforcing it. That is because they play out against the backdrop of the still-powerful material-ideological prism of the Westphalian territorial ideal. That prism does not operate independently of a global condition characterized by fluidity, connectivity, topological complexity, and shifting sovereignty arrangements—a condition sometimes described as postmodern in its essence (e.g. Ruggie 1993). But postmodern complexities have not rendered obsolete traditional territorial arrangements and ideas. The challenge is to put the modern and the postmodern into conversation with one another—focusing on how they work together to produce the social and political contexts that shape the evolving human geography of the planet. That means paying more than lip service to territory in its traditionalist guise. It means treating modernist territorial arrangements and commitments as significant influences in the face of a broad array of extra- and post-territorial developments.

Such an approach not only speaks to empirical circumstances that cry out for attention; it has the potential to call into question conventional assumptions about where the greatest threats to the modernist political-territorial system actually lie. Many studies treat shifting patterns of connectivity and the spatial reorganization of economic activity as primary threats to modernist territorial arrangements and associated imaginaries. A more significant threat, however, may lie in the growing intensity of social and political polarization unfolding around the world—a polarization that is produced only partially and indirectly by increased fluidity and the emergence of new economic spaces. In many countries growing polarization is fostering a notable erosion of commitment on the part of a broad swath of the population to the state, its territory and its people. Deterritorialization, border porosity, and other extra- and post-territorial developments play a role in that erosion, but so do a set of social, economic, technological, and (yes) territorial circumstances that cannot be reduced down to those developments—most notably a broad failure to address social and geographic inequalities in meaningful ways, the fragmentation of communication and information flows, and the inability of states to satisfy basic demands traditionally expected of them (on the latter front, see Agnew 2021). Overemphasizing fluidity, topological complexity, and shifting sovereignty arrangements at the expense of these others forces—territory’s structural stickiness among them—risks missing fundamental forces shaping the contemporary world.

Bringing territory more firmly into the equation is also important if researchers are to respond to the growing call to direct more attention to the geographic underpinnings of populism, boundary transgressions, and geopolitical strife (Casaglia et al. 2020). Taking up this challenge requires addressing questions of a territorial nature that have received less attention than they deserve of late—a reflection, perhaps, of the tendency to underplay territorial stickiness in the face of postmodern upheavals in the geographic organization of political, social, and economic life. The following are examples of the types of questions that are arguably deserving of attention:

• Which economic and political-geographic circumstances are most and least conducive to the diffusion and deepening of nationalist-territorial ideas?

• What policy approaches have or might serve to undercut the reflexive commitment of communities to insular nationalist-territorial ideals?

• How does the commitment to sovereignty ideals shape geopolitical thinking?

• How has the failure to take territory’s continuing allure and significance seriously undermined international stability and efforts to address conflict situations?

Far from being outdated or backward looking, questions of this sort are of signal importance to a world still confronting the fractures, and indeed irrationalities, of a centuries-old, yet still influential, concept of territory that has proven to be remarkably tenacious.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anssi Paasi and the leadership of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography for the invitation to participate in the Vega Medal symposium for which this manuscript was prepared. Thanks to the contributors to that symposium, Shaul Cohen, and Richard H. Murphy for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One of the best-known commentators on sovereignty, Stephen Krasner (1999, 3–4), defines Westphalian sovereignty as ‘exclusion of external actors from authority structures within a given territory'. He views this as only one of four types of sovereignty; the others are international legal sovereignty (‘practices associated with mutual recognition'), domestic sovereignty (‘ability of public authorities to exercise effective control within the borders of their own polity’), and interdependence sovereignty (‘the ability of public authorities to regulate the flow of information, ideas, goods, people, pollutants, or capital across the borders of their state').

2 Populism is difficult to define and has had different meanings in different places and times. Thomas Frank's (2020) latest book, for example, seeks to challenge the tendency to view populism as an insular, conservative, backward looking phenomenon by drawing attention to the progressive nature of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century agrarian populist movement in the U.S. The populism discussed in this piece, however, refers to an approach to politics that seeks to return countries to a (largely mythologized) past characterized by territorial sovereignty, strong borders, and hostility toward those who are seen to be outside the ethno-national mainstream.

3 I refer to Donald Trump’s ‘embrace of aspects of right-wing populism' rather than calling Trump a populist because, as others have noted (e.g. Krugman 2019), Trump was a faux populist in many respects because his populist rhetoric was not often reflected in his approach to governance (e.g. championing a large tax cut that mostly benefited the wealthy and attempting to throw millions of low-income Americans off the health-care programme pioneered by his predecessor).