Territorial Absolutism and its Evasions
Abstract
The linking of state and nation by territory has produced a modern politics that is fundamentally territorialized: politics has come to be defined by boundaries that delimit absolute spaces of power. But this politics is not trans-historical and investigation of the historical specificity of territorializing power shows it to be specifically modern. It is argued that boundaries may have once been reasonably functional but that they are now becoming broadly dysfunctional in nature. For the contemporary world the problems of territorial absolutism are rehearsed and a series of alternative non-territorial organizations of politics are explored.References
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