The Dictionary of Human Geography (201 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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territory
A unit of contiguous space that is used, organized and managed by a social group, individual person or institution to re strict and control access to people and places. Though sometimes the word is used as syn onymous with pLace or space, territory has never been a term as primordial or as generic as they are in the canons of geographical ter minology. The dominant usage has always been either political, in the sense of necessarily involving the power to limit access to certain places or regions, or ethological, in the sense of the dominance exercised over a space by a given species or an individual organism. Increasingly, territory is coupled with the concept of network to help understand the complex processes through which space is managed and controlled by powerful organiza tions. In this light, territory is only one type of spatiaLity, or way in which space is used, rather than the one monopolizing its employ ment. From this perspective, territoriaLity is the strategic use of territory to attain organ izational goals. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Territory is particularly associated with the spatiality of the modern state with its claim to absolute control over a population within care fully defined external Borders (Buchanan and Moore, 2003, p. 6). Indeed, until Sack (1986) extended the understanding of human terri toriality as a strategy available to individuals and organizations in general, usage of the term ?territory? was largely confined to the spatial organization of states. In the social sciences, such as sociology and political science, this is still mainly the case, such that the challenge posed to territory by network forms of organ ization (associated with gLoBaLization) is in variably characterized in totalistic terms as ?the end of geography?. This signifies the extent to which territory has become the dominant geo graphical term (and imagination) in the social sciences (Badie, 1995). It is then closely allied to state sovereignty. As sovereignty is seen to ?erode? or ?unbundle,? so goes territory (Agnew, 1994). From this viewpoint, territory takes on an epistemological centrality (see episteMoLogy) in that it is understood as absolutely fundamental to Modernity. As such it can then be given an extended meaning to refer to any socially constructed geograph ical space, not just that resulting from state hood (Scivoletto, 1983; Bonnemaison, 1996; Storper 1997a). Especially popular with some French language geographers, this usage often reflects the need to adopt a term to distinguish the particular and the local from the more general global or national ?space?. It then signifies the ?bottom up? spatial context for identity and cultural difference (or place) more than the ?top down? connection between state and territory. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The territorial state is a highly specific his torical entity. It first arose in europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since that time, political power has been seen as inherently territorial. Politics take place only within ?the institutions and the spatial envel ope of the state as the exclusive governor of a definite territory. We also identify political ter ritory with social space, perceiving countries as ??state societies???(Hirst, 2005, p. 27). The process of state formation has always had two crucial attributes. One is exclusivity. All of the political entities (the Roman Catholic Church, city states etc.) that could not achieve a rea sonable semblance of sovereignty over a con tiguous territory have been delegitimized as major political actors. The second is mutual recognition. The power of states has rested to a considerable extent on the recognition each state receives from the others by means of non interference in so called internal affairs (see sovereignty). Together, these attributes have created a world in which there can be no territory without a state. In this way, territory has come to underpin both nationaLism and representative democracy, both of which de pend critically on restricting political member ship by homeLand and address, respectively. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In political theory, control over a relatively modest territory has long been seen as the pri mary solution to the ?security dilemma?: to offer protection to populations from the threats of anarchy (disorder: cf. anarchism), on the one hand, and hierarchy (distant rule and sub ordination), on the other. The problem has been to define what is meant by ?modest? size. To Montesquieu (1949 [1748], p. 122), the enLightenment philosopher, different size ter ritories inevitably have different political forms: ?It is, therefore, the natural property of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince.? Early modern Europe offered propitious circumstances for the emergence of a fragmen ted political system primarily because of its topographical divisions. Montesquieu (1949 [1748], pp. 151 62) further notes, however, that popular representation allows for the territorial extension of republican government. The founders of the USA added to this by trying to balance between centralizing certain security functions, on one side, and retaining local controls over many other functions, on the other (Deudney, 2004). The recent history of the European Union can be thought of in similar terms (Milward, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Human activities in the world, however, have never conformed entirely to spaces de fined by proximity as provided by territory. Indeed, and increasingly, as physical distance proves less of a barrier to movement, spatial interaction between separated nodes across networks is an important mechanism of geo graphical sorting and differentiation (Durand, Levy and Retaille, 1992). Sometimes posed today in terms of a world of fLows versus a world of territories, this is better thought of in terms of territories and/or networks of flows rather than one versus the other. Territories and networks exist relationally rather than mu tually exclusively. If territorial regulation is all about tying flows to places, territories have never been zero sum entities in which the sharing of power or the existence of external linkages totally undermines their capacity to regulate. If at one time territorial states did severely limit the local powers of trans territorial agencies, that this is no longer the case does not signify that the states have lost (NEW PARAGRAPH) all of their powers: ?Territory still matters. States remain the most effective governors of populations. . . . The powers to exclude, to tax, and to define political rights are those over which states acquired a monopoly in the seventeenth century. They remain the essen tials of state power and explain why state sov ereignty survives today and why it is indispensable to the international order? (Hirst, 2005, p. 45). jaa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agnew (2005, ch. 3); Anderson (2002); Hirst (2005); Paasi (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
terrorism
Organized vioLence that deliber ately targets civilians and that is intended to sow fear among a population for political pur poses. It is a deeply contested term, because many writers restrict the term to non state actors and exclude the state from the (direct) use of such violence; they argue that since the state lays claim to the legitimate use of phys ical force, then by definition it is incapable of the deliberate targeting of a civilian popula tion, which is an offence under international humanitarian law (see just war). It then fol lows that all violent challenges to the authority of the state, including armed resistance to military occupation (see occupation, miLi tary), risk being identified as terrorism. Against this, others argue more persuasively that states have often used violence to intimi date populations, either their own or those of other countries, through a systematic assault on ?enemy, ?alien?, ?dissident? or ?subversive? bodies and their associated places. Indeed, the term originates in the Reign of Terror carried out by the Committee of Public Safety in 1793 4 to purge the revolutionary French re public of its ?internal enemies?. Modern state terror includes both: (i) the exemplary vio lence of colonial wars and counter insurgency, Stalin?s campaign of terror against dissidents in the 1930s, the German Blitz over London, the hoLocaust, the saturation bombing of German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, and the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima during the Second World War (Hewitt, 1987: see also ethnic cLeansing; genocide); and also (ii) more in sidious forms of violence that work to extend the envelope of fear within their target popu lations through arbitrary detention, disappear ance and torture (including the campaigns perpetrated by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America in the 1970s and 1980s, often with the support of the USA) (Hewitt, 2001: see also exception, space of). In addition, and making a distinction between its own actions and those of those states, the USA has identified selected states as ?spon sors? of international terrorism notably Iran, Syria and North Korea. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In both cases, non state and state, ?terror ism? functions as what Miinkler (2005) calls a ?term of exclusion?: its use is intended to ex clude specific acts of political violence from the sphere of political legitimacy. It follows that the public attribution of the term depends on the successful mobilization of imaginative geographies that deny legitimacy (even hu manity) to those who perpetrate such acts of violence (Coleman, 2004). But terrorism is itself deeply invested in public acknowledge ment: it seeks to spread fear among a much wider group than those who are its immediate, physical objects of attack. It is thus a commu nicative strategy: ?Terrorism is a form of war fare in which combat with weapons functions as a drive wheel for the real combat with images . . . The most important feature of the recent wave of international terrorism is this combination of violence with media presenta tion? (Miinkler, 2005, pp. 111 12; see also RETORT, 2005). Hannah (2006b, p. 627) argues that fear has become such a powerful international weapon in our late modern world because the threat of indiscriminate, indeter minate violence at once ?acknowledges and feeds off the modern biopolitical responsibility of states? to protect the welfare of their own populations: in short, terrorism is now a biopo litial strategy (see biopolitics, biopower). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Compared to mid twentieth century terror ism, the terrorist organizations that Mirnkler, Hannah and others have in mind have been able to launch far more destructive attacks, to act across far greater distances and to make far larger political demands. The 2005 Human security report calculated that ?significant? inter national terrorist attacks increased from seventeen in 1987 to more than 170 in 2003, with a similarly clear, if uneven, upward trend in numbers killed and wounded (but see below). Terrorism continued at other scales too, and local and regional terrorist campaigns continued to kill and maim victims around the world: people in africa, asia, europe and South America had been living with terrorism long before 11 September 2001, and domestic terrorism in the USA also plainly pre dates 9/11 (Nunn, 2007). But as in many other fields, the closest analytical engagement of human geography with terrorism was prompted by the extraordinary reach of (NEW PARAGRAPH) al Qaeda?s attacks on the World Trade Center (NEW PARAGRAPH) and the Pentagon on 9/11, and subsequent (NEW PARAGRAPH) attacks by al Qaeda and its affiliates around (NEW PARAGRAPH) the world (see figure). Three geographical re (NEW PARAGRAPH) sponses can be distinguished: (NEW PARAGRAPH) A more or less ?popular? geographical imaginary cast those responsible for ter rorist attacks outside any space of reason, so that to try to explain their actions was to exonerate them. No cause could jus tify such violence: the only response to barbarians hammering at the gates of civilization was to meet their violence with greater violence. The cry was taken up by others who dismissed any oppos ition to the enlarged powers of the secur ity state as itself a form of terrorism, and who enlisted the rhetoric of the ?war on terror? as a means of legitimizing and intensifying the apparatus of repression. At its worst, this slid into an overt racism that fanned the flames of hostility to Arabs and Muslims in North America and Europe. This geographical imagin ary conjured up a series of ?wild spaces?, ?their? spaces where deviant others sup posedly scurried away in the interstices and beyond the bounds of ?our? spaces (cf. Coleman, 2004; Gregory, 2004b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) An ?expert? or ?managerial? response drew on geographical technologies (that were also political technologies) to profile, predict and manage the threat of terrorism as an enduring mode of late modern government heavily invested in logics of security. The emphasis was on geographies of risk assessment, on geospatial data management and modelling, and on the vulnerability of biophysical and built environments to terrorist attack (Cutter, Richardson and Wilbanks, 2003; see also Sui, 2008). This geographical imaginary worked to transform ?our? spaces into ?safe spaces?: the domain of homeland security (cf. Kaplan, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A more critical response was to map the connections between ?their? spaces and ?our? spaces, and to unsettle the partitions between them. This involved explorations of the changing political and theological ideologies of terrorist organizations, which often involved locating potential targets within distinct ive geographical imaginaries (Hobbs, 2005); analyses of the relations between material conditions, recruitment and the locations of terrorist attacks (Enders and Sandler, 2006; Simons and Tucker, 2007; Watts, 2007); reconstruc tions of the fluid and fractured networks through which regional and trans national terrorist groups are organized (Ettlinger and Bosco, 2004; Hastings, 2008), including investigations of the re mittance networks that have been used to scapegoat potential sources of terrorist finance (de Goede, 2003, 2007; Amoore and de Goede, 2008); and examinations of the effects of counter terrorist strat egies on the representation, built form and everyday life of cities (Coaffee, 2004; Graham, 2006; Gray and Wyly, 2007; Katz, 2007). These contributions are closely connected material condi tions shape but do not determine terror ist networks, for example, while transactions monitoring infiltrates mul tiple spheres of everyday life and inter sect with more general critiques of the ?war on terror? and its extensions (e.g. Gregory, 2004b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) but the authors of the Brief claim that this is in large measure a result of their inconsistent def inition of?terrorism?. While those other surveys count as victims of terrorism large numbers of civilians killed by non state actors in Iraq?s civil war, they exclude large numbers of civil ians killed by non state actors in sub Saharan Africa?s civil wars (so called?new wars?). They trace this back to the US State Department, which identifies ?foreign terrorist organisa tions? as those that threaten the security of US citizens or the national security of the USA. This dispute focuses attention on the contro versy identified in the first paragraph, and on the vexed distinctions between (for example) terrorism and insurgency. These are innately contested terms precisely because they are per formative: naming political violence in these and other ways has acutely real consequences for recruitment and support, legitimation and response. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Coleman (2004); Flint (2003b); Gregory and Pred (2007). The most recent Human security brief (2007) argues that the global incidence of terrorism has dramatically declined since 2003. Other reports and databases suggest the opposite,

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