The Confines of Territory by John Agnew

Author:John Agnew [Agnew, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367560706
Google: Z6-bzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 54418438
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The question of a bordered territory as a parameter for authority has today entered a new phase. States'exclusive authority over their territory remains the prevalent mode of final authority in the global political economy; in that sense, then, state-centered border regimes— whether open or closed—remain foundational to our geopolity. But at least some of the critical components of this territorial authority are actually no longer national in the historically constructed sense of that term. They are, I argue, denationalized components of state authority: they look national but are actually geared toward global agendas, some good, some not so good at all.

State borders, with all their continuing formal weight and practical flexibility, are merely one of several key elements in a larger operational space that began to take shape in the 1980s and today deborders the interstate system.This type of debordering needs to be distinguished from older types, some still ongoing, such as the presumptions of dominant powers to violate the sovereignty of weaker countries. It is a debordering that constitutes new types of bordered spaces inside national territory itself. These may be internal to a state's territory or cut across state borders. To give them conceptual visibility I argued that they are a distinct, albeit partial jurisdiction not generated by or dependent on the state itself. In so doing, they make legible asymmetries between the state's sovereign jurisdiction and the territory itself. Thus, the making of this formation needs to be distinguished from the mere fact of cross-border flows, whether pre- or post-deregulation.

This does leave us with a question as to what forces shape these diverse meanings of territory that go beyond the still prevalent and dominant national-state meaning. Defining territory as marked by embedded logics of power and of claim-making helps make visible the jurisdictional features of both the new internal and transversally bordered spaces examined in this article. These spaces can be elementary (the spaces of the Occupy movements) or complex (the territory of global finance, a mix of digital networks and global cities). Thus, it is not illuminating to see Wall Street as simply a national territory, nor is it useful to confuse the Occupy movements with a demonstration. Each is a project that makes a distinct territory.

These diverse meanings put the category territory to work analytically. And they bring to the fore the issue of who has border-making capabilities.

If there is one sector where we can begin to discern new stabilized bordering capabilities and their geographic and institutional locations, it is in the corporate economy. Strategic agents in this shifting meaning of the territorial and of bordering are global firms and financial networks. Most sovereign states in the world have now formalized the right of such firms and networks to cross-border mobility. This, in turn, has produced a large number of highly protected bordered spaces that cut across the conventional border, are exempt from significant elements of state authority, and while known to state authorities are actually marked by considerable regulatory invisibility; the so-called dark pools of finance discussed here are one major example.

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