Provides a focus on the planet’s elements, environments, and edges, to extend our understanding of territory to the dynamic, contentious spaces of contemporary politics.

Territory is shifting. No longer defined by the dotted line of the border or the national footprint of soil, today’s territories are enacted through data infrastructures. From subsea cables to server halls, these infrastructures underpin new forms of governance, shaping subjects and their everyday lives. Technical Territories moves from masked protestors in Hong Kong to asylum-seekers in Christmas Island and sand miners in Singapore, exploring how these territories are both political and visceral, altering the experience of their inhabitants. Infrastructures have now become geopolitical, strategic investments that advance national visions, extend influence, and trigger trade wars. Yet at the same time, these technologies also challenge sovereignty as a bounded container, enacting a more distributed and decoupled form of governance. Such “technical territories” construct new zones where subjects are assembled, rights are undermined, labor is coordinated, and capital is extracted. The stable line of the border is replaced by more fluid configurations of power. Luke Munn stages an interdisciplinary intervention over six chapters, drawing upon a wide range of literature from technical documents and activist accounts, and bringing insights from media studies, migration studies, political theory, and cultural and social studies to bear on these new sociotechnical conditions.

From the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations. The contributions showcase novel theoretical and empirical insights, analyzing how people are living on, with, and from their land. From Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the colonial United States, the scholars in this collection uncover histories and retell stories with a focus on the lived experiences of rural and urban land dispossession and repossession. Contributors: Kati Álvarez, Clint Carroll, Flora Lu, Richard Mbunda, Gregg Mitman, Paul Nadasdy, Robert Nichols, Andrew Ofstehage, Laura Schoenberger, Kirsteen Shields, Emmanuel Sulle, Erik Swyngedouw, Gabriela Valdivia, Katherine Verdery, Callum Ward, Ciara Wirth, Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo

This innovative Research Agenda draws together discussions on the conceptualization of territory and the ways in which territory and territorial practices are intimately bound with issues of power and control. Expert contributors provide a critical assessment of key areas of scholarship on territory and territoriality across a wide range of spatial scales and with examples drawn from the global landscape.

Territories are more than simply bounded spaces; they reflect the ways in which we think of geographic space. Territoriality, or laying claim to territory, can be seen as the spatial expression of power, with borders dividing those inside from those outside. The book provides an introduction to the concept of territory, the ways in which ideologies and social practices are manifested in space, the deployment of territorial strategies and the geographical outcomes of these. This revised and updated third edition focuses on both macro-scale examples and those less obvious micro-scale ones, and it explores how territorial strategies are used in the maintaining of power, or as a means of resistance. Throughout the book, key questions emerge concerning geographic space. Who is "allowed" to be in particular spaces and who is excluded or discouraged from being there? How are territorial practices utilised in conflicts concerned with socio-political power and identity and how are ideologies transposed onto space? Written from a geographical perspective, the book is interdisciplinary, drawing on ideas and material from a range of academic disciplines including history, political science, sociology, international relations, and cultural studies. Theoretical underpinnings are supported by a variety of historical and contemporary examples, drawn from a range of geographic contexts.

Space and place are at the heart of how geographers and sociologists think. This updated edition of the essential undergraduate text will introduce you to the most influential thinkers in the tradition of social theory, with a new focus on the past fifty years. This book is designed to engage with theoretical debates in human geography through the individuals who have made the most significant contributions to this field. This will show you how ideas are shaped by contexts, and how those ideas in turn effect change. This book shows how theoretical understandings evolve, shift and change. It also highlights the connections between different thinkers, whose ideas are developed in collaboration with or in reaction to others. Spatial thought is never developed in a vacuum, but is always constructed by individuals and groups of people located in particular institutional and social structures, with their own sets of personal and political beliefs. The biographical approach of this book reveals how individual thinkers draw on a rich legacy of ideas from past and contemporary generations. With increased coverage of international and female thinkers, as well as those who work against Eurocentric notions of space and place, this book reveals the exciting reorientation of Geography towards new ideas and methods in the last decade. Each entry contextualises its subject within on-going (inter)disciplinary debates and important political moments, as well as highlighting connections between different thinkers. Together the chapters uncover the rich and diverse evolution of social theory, equipping you with the foundational ideas of geographical thought. Each entry offers the following components: i) a short biography ii) an explanation of ideas iii) an exploration of how their ideas have been used and critiqued iv) a selective bibliography of key publications (and key publications which review or critique)

From the Arctic to the South China Sea, states are vying to secure sovereign rights over vast maritime stretches, undersea continental plates, shifting ice flows, airspace, and the subsoil. Conceiving of sovereign space as volume rather than area, the contributors to Voluminous States explore how such a conception reveals and underscores the three-dimensional nature of modern territorial governance. In case studies ranging from the United States, Europe, and the Himalayas to Hong Kong, Korea, and Bangladesh, the contributors outline how states are using airspace surveillance, maritime patrols, and subterranean monitoring to gain and exercise sovereignty over three-dimensional space. Whether examining how militaries are digging tunnels to create new theaters of operations, the impacts of climate change on borders, or the relation between borders and nonhuman ecologies, they demonstrate that a three-dimensional approach to studying borders is imperative for gaining a fuller understanding of sovereignty. Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Franck Billé, Wayne Chambliss, Jason Cons, Hilary Cunningham (Scharper), Klaus Dodds, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Gastón Gordillo, Sarah Green, Tina Harris, Caroline Humphrey, Marcel LaFlamme, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Aihwa Ong, Clancy Wilmott, Jerry Zee