Spatializing Politics

In much discussion about the relationships between territory, politics and governance, there is a tendency to trace a direct connection between state and territory, on the one hand, and politics and governance, on the other. For example, modern citizenship is often viewed as flowing from the redefinition of a monarchical subject as the citizen of a given nation in its territory. An overemphasis on this theoretical framing misses paying much attention to the processes involved in what can be called ‘subjectification’ or the making of political subjects by suddenly leaping from territory to politics and governance. In this regard, as De Carvalho (2016, 60) puts it:

accounts of state formation have generally not explored the historical processes that link territory and population to the state. As a consequence, we have a limited understanding of the processes through which heterogeneous space became the ordered and homogenized territory of the state. Equally, there is little understanding of how a multitude of individuals—often with crisscrossing patterns of (multiple) allegiances—became the unified and homogeneous group of political subjects of the state.

The taken-for-granted character of this connection was rooted in a long historical process that was by no means automatic. Indeed, a case could be made that it was only partially complete even in those cases, such as the Tudor England investigated by de Carvalho, and has never taken root in many of the world's putative ‘states’.

The conventional wisdom also tends to reify state–territory as the singular spatiality of political subjecthood. Yet, we know that politics is never entirely ‘top down’, restricted to the operations of statehood and an associated political self. It arises from the everyday social dynamics in which people are inevitably ensnared. As Wendel (2015, 3) says:

Politics is contingent. It develops from spaces of encounter, where individuals make demands of each other, compare shortage and surplus, create a sense of self, community, and alterity, gain influence, and exert control. In each of these encounters, spaces locate, represent, or form political subjectivity, engagement, and power.

In this construction, there is a ‘spatial epistemology’ to politics that extends beyond the state–territory fetish to identify the place-specific and contextual basis to politics and governance.

The articles in this issue look beyond typical accountings to help in reconstituting the spatial epistemology of politics. Quintessential nation-states as the preferred units of governance are thrown into question, the imagined spaces of nation-statehood are identified as crucial to projects of violent removal of those groups who do not fit into those spaces, municipalities on different sides of borders previously wracked by interstate conflict can overcome hostile relations, the so-called smart city discourse can offer opportunities for social justice as well as reinforce existing inequalities, there is a profound tension between national policies and local practices in the enforcement of immigrant asylum rules, and local land-use movements can become important nodes for larger political projects questioning how cities are ruled and for whom.

Rezvani (2015, in this issue) makes the case for seeing ‘partially independent territories’ (PITs) as superior to so-called sovereign states in delivering public goods, political reconciliation, and credible policies. Using a range of empirical indicators, Rezvani argues that the widespread existence and seeming advantages of PITs in a globalizing world suggest that there are possibilities for governance between classical or Westphalian statehood, on the one hand, and imperial rule, on the other. This logic builds on that of some prior writing about states-unions (Deudney, 1995) and ‘incomplete sovereignty’ (e.g. Cooley and Spruyt, 2009). It suggests a somewhat different and more positive set of possibilities for political rule in hybrid spaces than those raised previously by Lilyblad (2014).

Egbert et al. (2015, in this issue) examine the mass violence associated with genocide by positing a fundamental idealized territorial imagination as its basis. From this perspective, outbreaks of ‘territorial cleansing’, as they term the net outcome, rest on the opposition between a dominant in-group whose claim to an entire space is violated by the presence of an othered group whose existence can under certain circumstances lead to coerced assimilation, ethnic suppression or forced removal/annihilation. Rather than the Pollyannaish vision of political subjecthood informing so much political theory, this approach suggests a rather more violent source to who is ‘inside’ and who is ‘outside’ the process whereby populations are allocated to territories and political subjectivities emerge.

Recently, there has been much interest in cross-border regions as units of policy collaboration that bypass, to a certain degree, interstate relations (e.g. Blatter, 2004; Fricke, 2015). Typically, these arrangements involve borders between states that are non-contested or, as with member states of the European Union, where there is a highly institutionalized set of relationships between the states whose regions are collaborating across borders. Arieli (2015, in this issue) engages with an example of cross-border municipal cooperation across a border, that between Israel and Jordan, that has been until very recently anything but uncontested. The case is that of the two adjacent cities of Eilat in Israel and Aqaba in Jordan. Despite the evident role of national governments in setting the terms of cooperation, Arieli finds evidence for collaboration on a range of issues. Even in the most potentially combative of settings, borders are not the hermetically sealed perimeters they often appear to be in conventional accounts of statehood.

An enthusiasm for revitalizing cities by adopting smart technologies to manage city infrastructure and transportation has often been criticized for being a type of techno-utopianism that simply surrenders cities and their populations to the computers of multinational companies and their local servants. Despite the element of truth in this characterization that he agrees with, using the case of Turin in Italy Rossi (2015, in this issue) also sees the potential of the smart city discourse in offering real opportunities for popular participation and the realization of the new technologies in projects that can favour social justice. Politics is not necessarily undermined by the economics of smart city technologies because these technologies also have a liberatory potential irrespective of who introduces or initially governs them.

Increasingly, immigration-law enforcement in many parts of the world has shifted away from the borders as such into the territories of states (e.g. Strunk and Leitner, 2013). There is thus a politics to immigration-law enforcement depending on the vagaries of local enforcement behaviour and the extent of collaboration between national immigration authorities and local law enforcement. Less is known about how local governments manage the fallout from the outcomes of national policies towards immigrants in general and political refugees in particular. In the Netherlands, political-asylum seekers can find themselves losing their status and suffering the loss of services but not being expelled. Subsequent homelessness and destitution puts a burden on local governments that then react in different ways to this situation. According to Kos et al. (2015, in this issue) rather than invariably generating a politics hostile to refugees, this situation can lead to pro-refugee local policies and critique of national-government policies for imposing burdens unfairly on municipalities. In fact, local governments have often become agents for mobilizing public opinion about national policies.

Finally, spatial politics is at the centre of campaigns in many places to challenge the ways in which land-use changes involving residential development, environmental dumping, and highway construction are managed. There is a huge literature on such ‘locational conflicts’. This was a popular topic of study in the 1970s and 1980s, closely associated with the work at the time of scholars such as Julian Wolpert and Kevin Cox. More recently, interest in it faded. Its recent revival is worthy of note (e.g. Wendel, 2015; Raco et al., 2015). In their article, del Romero Renau and Valera Lozano (2015, in this issue) trace the course of urban conflicts in two Spanish cities from 2002 to 2012. They note that not only was increased disaffection with planning processes increasingly manifest but that social movements became less focused on particular local problems and more part of broader citywide protest movements. The spatial focus of urban politics shifted from the local to the metropolitan. Political subjectivity, therefore, is never simply just a question of territorial membership.