Introduction: theorising special territorial status and extraterritoriality

ABSTRACT

The goal of this special issue is to offer critical explorations of territoriality both in historical and within contemporary special territorial designations, with a specific focus on space, place, and landscape rather than just individuals. The articles in the issue are linked by their novel application of the principal of extraterritoriality to special territorial designations of various types in a range of geographic contexts. This introduction explains how each article in the issue utilises extraterritoriality in a distinctly innovative way to help make sense of a particular circumstance that is insufficiently explained by other available theories. They are linked by their concern with space, governance and the invisible operation of exceptions to the normative order of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Extraterritoriality
• sovereignty
• territory

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to acknowledge the participants in the conference Special Territorial Status and Extraterritoriality for their collective contribution to the development of the special issue theme, and to thank Adam Grydehøj and Island Dynamics for sponsoring the conference.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zachary T. Androus

Zachary T. Androus is an anthropologist based in Florence, Italy, where he directs the Florence Ethnographic Field School. Alongside long-term research in Florence on the impacts of mass tourism on the city’s intangible cultural heritage, his work is organised around a focus on the intersection of sovereignty, state formation and linguistic nationalism, supported by fieldwork in Corsica and Southern Italy.

Magdalena Stawkowski

Magdalena Stawkowski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and faculty associate at the Walker Institute at the University of South Carolina, and a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. Her current projects include examining the everyday experiences of security and invisible military ruins of the Anthropocene at nuclear test sites in the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia and Kazakhstan; and state-level physical distancing policies and epidemiological approaches to COVID-19.

Robert Kopack

Robert Kopack is a full time faculty instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. His research looks at defence site closure, remediation and reuse projects in Kazakhstan, elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and North America; and the politics, economics and environmental costs of commercial space launch facilities in the United States.