Continuity, Discontinuity and Contingency: Insights for IPS from Political

Geography
in Transversal Lines in IR (D. Bigo et al. eds) Routledge: 2016.

John Agnew (UCLA)

The field of international relations (IR) has been defined by the notion of a world divided
up into mutually exclusive territorial states. The very term describing the field implies a
focus on relations between states (albeit confused with nations) in contradistinction to
what happens within state territorial borders. To the extent that there has been any debate
about this distinction it has been entirely in terms of the presence or absence of the
territorial state rather than whether any or all states are ever entirely territorial in their
modus operandi. The irony in this, as Rob Walker (1993, 13) once pointed out, is that
international relations theory “has been one of the most spatially oriented sites of modern
social and political thought” in fixing an understanding of space as simply territorial that
is held as trans-historical in its effects. All politics is to be understood as defined by the
inside and the outside of territorial containers called states.
The purpose of this chapter is threefold. I begin with a critique of IR’s totalistic
territorial logic by using what can be called a spatial lens. I distinguish between a number
of spatial modalities of political power – territoriality, spatial interaction and place
making – to suggest that orthodox IR has simply focused on one, associated it entirely
with states, largely through an English-language bias in the meaning of the word
territory, and completely missed the other ways in which world politics has been
organized geographically. This has given intellectual continuity to the field by simply
avoiding the political-economic fractures and divisions that characterize the real world
other than those between putative territorial states. But I will also survey the extent to
which IR as a field has begun to take seriously the critiques of its spatial assumptions by
looking at citations to two articles from the 1990s by John Ruggie (1993) and John
Agnew (1994) that addressed in distinctive ways the “territorial trap” into which the field
has fallen.
I then move beyond this critique by laying out a geo-sociology of world politics
that takes seriously the spatial complexities of world politics primarily by refusing to
privilege the “territorial-international” as the sole spatial “field” of relevance (Bigo
2011). There are two parts to this section: first is that the concept of territory has become
fatefully tied to the modern state, when in fact territorial division among states is only
one way of organizing politics around the world. State territories should be placed within
a wider spatial frame of reference to understand their uses and limitations. I briefly draw
here on my own work of spatialities of power (Agnew 2005) and sovereignty regimes
(Agnew 2009) to provide a theory of spatial discontinuity. In the second part, I argue that
not all politics (or law, for that matter) is exhausted by accepting the logic of territory.
The epistemological monopoly of state territory in relation to politics has become taken-
for-granted in political studies. In fact, any socially constructed space is a place or
territory. The state is not needed to define it. People do that for themselves. Much
politics is socially mediated through places that the state may only have marginal
influence over. Important interactions over space – movements of people, goods and
capital – are also not well captured by the image of a world demarcated into neat
territories. Writing on “world” and “global” cities shows how much political power can
lie outside the grasp of states as such.
Finally, I briefly develop three empirical topics to illustrate how this geo-
sociology can be put to use. The cross cutting theme is that of historical-geographical
contingency. One topic is that of the broad historical dynamics of statehood, comparing
the European experience with that of Asia and the United States. The second topic is that
of the ways geographical scales are mutually constituted in producing political action
rather than everything simply emanating from the “state.” The third topic is the
contemporary impact of non-state actors in world politics using my own research on
credit-rating agencies and that of others on the “contracting out” of state authority.

Territory as Seen Through a Spatial Lens

The territorial state has long been seen in International Relations and political theory as
not simply the primary but as the singular actor of modern world politics. Previously, I
outlined the ways in which this had become an intellectual "trap" (Agnew 1994). Three
interlocking geographical assumptions reinforce one another in conventional theories:
sovereignty as territorial, the domestic-foreign opposition, and the state-society match.
The first and most important assumption is the association between state
sovereignty and the state’s territorial field as both limiting and legitimizing the state. The
claim of all states is to represent the workings of an abstract or idealized sovereignty
irrespective of the effectiveness with which that is administered or the degree to which it
is devolved onto other authorities (including a wide range of private as well as public but
non-state actors). But this more often than not a fictive claim that cannot be backed up
empirically. Consider the long history of imperialist interventions by more powerful
states in less powerful ones and the longstanding ability of big businesses to manipulate
government policies across borders to their satisfaction. A second assumption is to see
the territorial state as a singular actor struggling against others whereby other actors
operating at other geographical scales (such as multinational businesses, for example) are
squeezed into a territorialized model of interstate competition. As is well known, at least
outside of international relations theory, mercantilism has never been the transcendental
guiding ideology of economic policies across all countries even though it has had
episodic importance in some eras. Third, and finally, the territorial state is viewed as the
strict container of society. Under certain historical circumstances it is clear that a social
order can take a territorialized form under the influence of powerful state authority. But
historically it is also clear that there is no rational unity between society, broadly
construed, and a given territorial state. Consider those parts of the world with nominal
states in which clan, ethnic or other ties extend well beyond state borders and undermine
the achievement of an homogeneous social order within them. Even for seemingly well-
established territorial states, local and regional socio-cultural differences have always
challenged the idea of a simple parallelism between social boundaries and state borders.
The use of territory as a means of organizing politics through a state is historically
specific and partial (e.g. Agnew 2007). The territorial state as known to contemporary
political theory developed initially in early modern Europe with the retreat of dynastic
and non-territorial systems of rule and with the transfer of sovereignty from the
personhood of monarchs to discrete national populations present in a territory but also

2
gathering together groups previously spread around in diasporas (as in Greece and Israel).
Territorialization of political authority was enhanced by mercantilist economic policies
and by industrial capitalism as it exploited national economies of scale in demand for its
products. Even so, long after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that in IR folklore is seen
as heralding the birth of modern statehood, Germany and Italy as they are today remained
territorially divided. It is only very recently that struggles for political representation and
rights to public goods have underpinned address within a given territory as signifying
membership in “welfare states” that have come to seem the norm in the world of “states”
across the world. Even though six or so “waves” of state formation have washed over the
world since the early 19th century giving rise to what are frequently described as the
“nation-states” that constitute the world political map (e.g. Wimmer and Feinstein 2010),
many of these entities are neither nations nor states in the sense of representing either
groups sharing common nationality or effective state apparatuses of rule, respectively.
Everywhere, as Pierre Bourdieu (2014, 207) recounts: “the construction of the state came
up against tremendous resistance, which is not even dead today.” Projecting onto all other
states as we conventionally label them from the historical experience of England, France,
Sweden, or the USA as the finished products of successful statehood is to miss this
obvious point.
The obsession with state territory as the exclusive spatial modus operandi of
world politics ignores the significance of other spatial modalities such as networks/flows
and place making for understanding its organization. The first of these refers to politically
relevant transactions and exchanges that are not necessarily contained in contiguous blocs
of space but that span distances over space. The second involves the ways in which the
life-spaces of everyday social activities (work, leisure, school, and so on) in particular
places mediate between political offerings, on the one hand, and outcomes, on the other,
for such political activities as voting, striking, protesting, and rioting. These are discussed
in more detail in the next section. Some practitioners in such branches of international
relations as IPE have long regarded the territorial assumption as limiting but have never
adequately replaced it with a richer geographical analysis. Putting geography into
international relations must necessarily address the territorial assumption. It cannot
simply take states as individual self-evident units and then engage in analysis of their
relations by adding distance or proximity into existing non-spatial models.
In a 1993 article John Ruggie had also pointed to the lack of attention that
students of international relations had paid to their basic spatial assumptions, particularly
that of territoriality or the implications of how territory is implicated in world politics.
Unlike in the argument of Agnew (1994), Ruggie does accept that the territorial state
(and the ideological baggage surrounding it) does more-or-less match up to actual
practice worldwide for a period lasting from the 16th century down to the recent past. But,
as he concluded (Ruggie 1993, 174), “It is truly astonishing that the concept of
territoriality has been so little studied by students of international politics; its neglect is
akin to never looking at the ground that one is walking on.” So, although Ruggie does not
question the historical relevance of the territorial state as a singular presence in modern
world politics, he strongly suggests that its continuing status as such is now in doubt in
the face of what he calls the “unbundling” of sovereignty as a result of postmodern
globalization. In this construction, just as territorial states emerged out of the hierarchical
subordination that characterized the medieval period in European history, so today a

3
reversal is under way with the emergence of systems of supranational authority (such as
the European Union) and the increasing crisis of the “absolute individuation” – totally
disjoint mutually exclusive and fixed territoriality -- upon which state territorial
sovereignty has relied. The episteme of international relations is thus also in crisis
because of its failure to engage with the emerging reality. It was designed for a world
that has changed fundamentally. It now should change too. This is a similar argument to
that of Ulrich Beck and some other proponents of globalization as a recent world-
changing phenomenon about “methodological nationalism” in which “arguments on the
current dissolution of nation-states are backed up by exaggerating the alleged solidity of
the nation-state’s recent past, so that we end up with the worst of both worlds: the more
solid the image of the past of the nation-state, the more spectacular its path towards
extinction” (Chernilo 2006, 12). The urge to have clean breaks in history with completely
different spatial forms before and after has dogged much recent writing critical of
conventional wisdom in IR. Indeed, even writers with spatially nuanced understandings
of the workings of political power, such as Michel Foucault, have had their
understandings periodized by clean-break theorists (Coleman and Agnew 2007).
My original argument about the territorial trap has been subject to some criticism
in its details if not more generally. For one thing, my argument has been assimilated to
that of Ruggie and also to that of Peter Taylor (1994) about the containerization for
society provided by states. My argument is actually much more radical than Ruggie’s in
pointing to the longstanding failure of any territorial state to live up to its territorialized
billing rather than simply being a “crisis” coming about because of globalization and is
more theoretically comprehensive than Taylor’s in not restricting itself solely to the
economic and social matching between states, on the one hand, and the workings of the
modern world economy, on the other.
Turning to the criticism addressed more directly and specifically at the territorial
trap article, it is useful to distinguish two aspects to the argument that I had made. This is
done most clearly by Simon Reid-Henry (2010): its epistemological critique of the
reductive nature of thinking in IR that has made an eternal ontological form out of a
historically contingent idea of how “best” to organize a polity and an ontological critique
of the anchoring of states in the closed world of interstate relations in which the working
of power at other scales and across networks is essentially ignored so as to define a field
of study and better “model” so-called interstate relations. In regard to the first aspect,
Stuart Elden (2010) argues that the history of the idea of territory in relation to statehood
needs much more detailed investigation that it was given in the 1994 paper. The idea
cannot be simply dismissed as misleading or mistaken because it has in fact had a long
history in relation to proposals for establishing jurisdictions with characteristics favoring,
inter alia at different times, efficient political rule, opposition to the “univeralising
aspirations of the pope” (Elden 2010, 758), or supremacy of monarchical authority within
a bounded space. In respect of the second aspect, a number of critics (such as Alec
Murphy (2010) and David Newman (2010)) have suggested that the territorial trap thesis
partakes of the end or decline of the nation-state thesis in its suggestion that states have
become hollowed out or less sovereign in a globalizing world. This is perhaps a plausible
reading of the paper, particularly if assimilated to those by Ruggie and Taylor, but both
misses the paper’s insistence that the hollowness is nothing new (a point I have reiterated
in Globalization and Sovereignty (2009)) and my primary target: the isolation of

4
interstate relations (and “the international,” as we have come to define it) as politically
trumping all other geographic scales (the local, urban, regional, supranational, etc.) and
ways in which politics operates (place making, spatial interaction). It is to this exclusivity
of the interstate scale as thereby irretrievably territorial and not needing other
geographical descriptors -- such as spatial interaction and place making -- that the second
part of the subsequent section of the chapter is devoted.
Nisha Shah (2012) has argued that the territorial trap remains an intractable
problem for IR because most thinkers remain locked into the territorial state as an ideal
that can be scaled up to the global scale rather than re-placed as an enterprise by
something attuned to the truly global character of the contemporary world. The “trap”
isn’t just about a physical space but the very areal basis on which political theory relies
for its ideal conceptions of peoplehood, citizenship, and association. Be that as it may, it
does suggest the difficulty of extricating ourselves from associating statehood and the
political with the territorial. Accepting that her standard may be hard to attain, what
exactly has happened to the two papers from the 1990s, mine and Ruggie’s, in terms of
citations in Google Scholar? Obviously, this is only a rough and ready way to see if
debate has been conjoined. For one thing, many of the citations could well be as
dismissive as celebratory or evocative in any specific case. But it does provide a
straightforward way of estimating the extent to which there has been discussion about the
territorial assumption as I have described it previously. Focusing on what seem to be
genuine journal and book citations, other citations (to reports, unpublished papers, etc.
are not included in the tables) are excluded but counted in “complete totals” (Agnew =
849; Ruggie = 1813). So, of the citations included, Agnew (1994) has 719 between 1994
and 2013 and Ruggie (1993) has 1568 between 1993 and 2013. Clearly, the Ruggie
article is the more cited of the two.
There are a number of comments that can be made about these data once
deconstructed. One is that the rate of citation has either increased (Agnew) or remained
pretty constant (Ruggie) over time. This is encouraging. It can also be read, pending more
thorough investigation, of course, as suggesting that the more radical critique of IR
theory explicit in the Agnew article has tended to acquire more traction more recently
than it had previously. A second comment would be that there is a definite disciplinary
bias to the citations. Agnew’s cites (particularly in journals) are overwhelmingly in
geography journals whereas Ruggie’s cites are overwhelmingly in political science and
international studies journals. Encouraging, however, is that the mutual exclusivity of
both has decreased considerably over time. Third, outside the main fields considered
here, in the “other” category, Ruggie’s paper figures much more prominently, suggesting
that in the fields in question (sociology, psychology, feminist and gender studies) that the
“hollowing out of the state” approach rather than the focus on long enduring territorial
assumptions of IR theory is more of interest. Finally, the general weakness of the Agnew
article relative to Ruggie’s in the international studies literature as distinct from that of
political science reinforces the position of this chapter that IR is in fact little reformed in
its commitment to a world historically and perhaps still monopolized by territorial states.
The data suggest that in mainstream political science the territorial trap thesis has had
more resonance than it has had in international studies broadly construed, at least until
very recently. This of course gets to the heart of the matter: that even considering the
territorial trap thesis may threaten the identity of IR as it is presently constituted. It is a

5
sort of lese majesty!

The Geo-Sociology of Politics

In this section I will make two main arguments that are most relevant for linking a critical
political geography to the project of IPS (e.g. Bigo 2011). The first is that there are
multiple spatialities of power or ways in which politics can be organized geographically.
What I am saying here is that states and other actors can adopt territorial and other
strategies to project and manage power that challenge the conventional story of states as
the singular actors and singularly territorial agents of politics around the world (Agnew
2009, 28). The second is that territories or places are not necessarily state-dependent at all
and that spatial interaction links places across space without the necessity of territorial
propinquity. In many languages other than English territory often means much the same
thing as place, simply a chunk of space in which people live and that has some
sociological basis. These places structure politics from below, so to speak, rather than
being sanctioned entirely by state authority. With respect to spatial interaction, this can
refer to more powerful states claiming extra-territorial jurisdiction within the borders of
other states as it is known to lawyers or supranational parties (e.g. the WTO or the ICC)
but also to the ways in which politically relevant flows of goods, capital and people take
place with minimal effective interference from state agencies. They can also be the
authoritative decisions of private and public actors of a regulatory cast licensed
collectively or given dispensation by states for certain purposes (for example credit-rating
agencies and other transnational rule-setting organizations including churches).

States and Territories

There are two ways to show the variety of ways in which power is exercised over space
power and thus the discontinuity in the ways in which state territory works in relation to
other spatial modalities of politics. The first embeds the history of territorial states in a
broader set of ways in which power can be organized geographically. At any one time a
single spatiality may be predominant but none ever completely monopolizes. The second
takes off from an idealized image of territorialized state sovereignty to provide a range of
alternative “regimes” only one of which is the classic territorial state. Again, none of
these is ever completely dominant in any one time period or geographic world region.

Spatialities of power

Three conventions about political power and the state must be exposed in order to
establish a typology of spatialities in the workings of political power. The first, of course,
is the rigid territorial conception of how power operates: a system of territorial states. A
richer conception of space sees state territory as only one of a range of historically
plausible geographical forms that the distribution of power takes: imperial, global-
network, alliance and supranational, for example. Quite which combinations are at work
in any specific epoch depends crucially on the spatial ordering of political, cultural and
economic activities at that time. A second is the dyadic understanding of power
relationships that pervades conventional wisdom in IR and political theory: be they

6
person-person, person-state or state-state. This individualizes and abstracts power from
historical-geographical settings and views it as a possession of a pre-given set of
individual entities. The embedding of relationships in changing material conditions
makes this approach extremely dubious for understanding how actual world politics
really works. Third, and finally, states are regarded as the moral and ontological
equivalent of individual persons. This assumption privileges the state by associating it
with the character and moral agency of individual persons in Western political
philosophy. Taken together these three conventions de-historicize and spatially reify the
relationship between power and states.
Crucially, therefore, to truly understand world politics requires taking history and
space equally seriously. At least four heuristic models of the spatiality of power and their
workings over time can be used to offer an alternative general account to that of the
conventional wisdom (Agnew 2005). The theoretical logic of the approach is that specific
material conditions and ideological understandings correlate with the relative
predominance of different spatialities of politics. But these are only useful when they are
tested against empirical research (Bigo 2011, 231). The first model is an ‘ensemble of
worlds’ in which human groups live in relative isolation and whose spatiality of politics
is that of absolute physical distance constraining interaction and dramatically limiting
circulation. This fits best the world before the sixteenth century. The second is of a ‘field
of forces.’ This is the geopolitical model par excellence in which rigidly defined
territorial units vie for control over territory at the expense of each other. The dominant
spatiality is that of state-territoriality run by political elites who mimic one another’s
discourse and practices. In large part this is a facsimile of the so-called Westphalian
world emerging first in Europe in the late seventeenth century and then spreading in
waves worldwide. Third is the ‘hierarchical network.’ This reflects the political economy
of a world economy in which transactions across networks link geographical cores and
peripheries, imperial centers and colonial hinterlands and global cities and smaller ones
in the worldwide urban hierarchy. The spatiality is that of spatial networks joining
together a hierarchy of nodes across space. This is the world of global trade, investment
and imperialism. Non-state organizations need not simply be networked. They can also
be organized territorially over space. In this way they actually penetrate and hollow out
the territoriality exercised by states. Finally is the model of the ‘integrated world society.’
This represents both a world facing common problems and the possibility of economic
and cultural integration in the face of managing them. Networks are viewed as reticular
rather than hierarchical and state-territories as seen as threatening to the very possibility
of creating any sort of world polity.
One can see evidence for the co-presence of each of these models in the
contemporary world with the middle two as still particularly significant, the first one as in
possible eclipse and the final one as possibly emergent (at least in relation to some issues
such as global warming). Obviously, the models only make sense as heuristic devices but
they do help us think beyond the limitations of the conventional wisdom of space as
being entirely a question of state-territories.

Sovereignty regimes

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We all know that states are not equally sovereign in terms of their control over their
borders, effective central bureaucracy to achieve collective ends, recognition by other
states, capacity to influence and coerce others, or domestic legitimacy in the eyes of their
populations (Agnew 2009). The term sovereignty is used in all of these various ways to
express the relationship between states, on the one hand, and people, considered as
subjects or citizens, on the other. Yet, the world political map and some international
organizations, such as the United Nations, are based on the fiction that each territory
claimed by a given state is equally sovereign to all others. This is obviously problematic
if we consider for a moment how many of the world’s putative states are in fact
completely ineffective, absent, lacking in control over large chunks of the state’s
territory, and faced with significant legitimacy deficits. Think, for example, of such
contemporary cases as Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria,
Pakistan, Mexico, and Greece. Of course, these are all distinctive cases with various
degrees of depleted sovereignty. The same might be said of so-called strong states; they
have also long faced serious if different challenges to their claims to monopolize
sovereignty over a given territory.
Most states have never in fact had much effective sovereignty. Many emerged
from colonialism and never achieved any real independence. Across the board, state
borders match neither any sort of cultural entity (such as a nation) nor meaningful
economic unit (such as a settlement network or a resource base). Some states have
become dependents of other states, are fractured by organized criminal gangs or
secessionist movements, or are reliant on debt servicing and remittances from external
sources. Some, including many economically developed states, have become subject to
policing by various public and private agencies such as credit-rating agencies, law firms
and courts, human rights organizations, and charities that have become sovereigns in their
own right as a result of licensing by states because of their superior knowledge, expertise,
and claims to neutrality. These agencies and more dominant states exercise their
sovereignty through geographical networks rather than by territorial control. Thus
immigration enforcement now takes place away from state borders both inside and
outside of states, credit-rating agencies based in world cities such as New York rank the
sovereign bonds of even the most powerful states, such as the United States, and London
based law firms and English courts increasingly adjudicate on cases brought by parties
resident in or with assets in long-distant jurisdictions. These types of claims feed into the
so-called “transnational” and “international” debates that Bigo (2011, 249-54) signals are
central to the development of IPS.
One useful approach comes from writing on the historical sociology of power. In
distinguishing despotic from infrastructural power, Michael Mann (1984) identifies two
different ways in which states acquire and use centralized power. These words refer to
two different functions that states perform for populations and that jointly underpin their
claim to sovereignty: respectively, the struggle among elites within and between states
(despotic power) and the provision of public goods by states as a result of placating
various social groups (infrastructural power). When interests and identities do not
conform completely to territorialized norms, rulers must adjust likewise. This can involve
pursuing increased influence elsewhere (as in an imperium) or ceding authority to other
parties in order to manage dissent and resistance. There is no necessary correlation,
therefore, between despotic power and central state authority. Elites can globalize with

8
respect both to pursuing their goals through “expanded statehood” beyond home shores
and in terms of alliances with multinational companies, banks, and other agents of a more
networked world. The main theoretical conundrum in terms of the ‘where’ or spatiality of
sovereignty is the relative balance between the strength of continued central state
authority (despotic power), on the one hand, and the degree to which public goods are
provided and regulated on a territorialized basis, (infrastructural power), on the other.
The former involves judgment as to the extent a state has acquired and maintains an
effective and legitimate apparatus of rule. The latter refers to the extent to which the
provision and regulation of public goods is heavily state regulated and bounded
territorially.
The two dimensions of sovereignty define (a) the degree of state autonomy and
(b) the extent to which it is territorialized. From these, four extreme or ideal-type
categories or what I term ‘sovereignty regimes’ can be identified. These are relational in
character. They refer to the character of sovereignty as manifested by differing
combinations of central state authority and territorialized provision of public goods in
different places. They are not best thought of as characterizing particular states in all
their aspects; no particular state fits exactly into any of the boxes in question. But they
do provide a heuristic basis for identifying the relative complexity of sovereignty around
the world today. This is a patchwork of more-and-less sovereign spaces and flows, not a
rigidly territorial order, with some states and organizations more sovereign (in terms of
their effectiveness) than others. The simplified relational categories are seen as
representing stronger and weaker central state authority and consolidated and open
territoriality. The purpose of thinking relationally about sovereignty is to move away
from trapping thinking in absolute as opposed to relative distinctions. From this
viewpoint, there is no simple ‘either/or’ to sovereignty when it is, on the one hand, either
completely territorialized or, on the other, is not manifested territorially and therefore
ceases to exist. This has been the trap into which much thinking about sovereignty has
fallen. We should expand the “notion of the ‘public’ as a domain from its association
with state-based authority” (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2011, 747).
Of the four ideal types of regime, the first one, the classic, comes closest to the
conventional story about sovereignty. Both despotic power and infrastructural power are
largely territorialized and central state authority remains effective. Contemporary China
perhaps best fits this case. The second case, the imperialist, represents best the case of
hierarchy in world politics but with networked as well as territorialized reach. It is the
complete opposite of the classic case. Central state authority is seriously in question,
often exercised by outsiders if in collusion with local elites, and infrastructural power is
weak or reliant on external support. Much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa
falls under this regime. The other two regimes are more complicated. The first, the
integrative, is a regime where authority has migrated to both higher and lower tiers of
government as a result of a sharing of sovereignty among states and infrastructural power
takes both territorialized and networked forms. Various sorts of unions or confederations
of states take this form, for example the United States before the US Civil War. The
fullest contemporary example would be the European Union from the perspective of its
member states. The second of the two more complex sovereignty regimes is the globalist.
This regime is closely associated today with the globalization of the world brought about
since the 1960s under US auspices. In this construction, the world city system,

9
particularly the cities at the top of it, such as New York and London, provide the
geographical nodes for the agents who are central to this regime. They exercise
sovereignty wherever states have ceded authority to external agents because of debt
dependence or delegation of regulatory oversight. But the many micro-states around the
world can also use their formal independence to cash in on this sovereignty regime
through providing low or no income taxes and registration advantages for multinational
businesses.

Place Making and Spatial Interaction

The second argument is that although a state’s territory ties acts of other agents to state
responsibility not all politics is exhausted by accepting the logic of territory as such. In
much of the recent literature on territory and territoriality, no adequate distinction is
drawn between the terms space and territory (e.g. Brenner and Elden 2009; Sassen 2013).
The epistemological monopoly of state territory in relation to politics is simply assumed.
But any socially constructed space is a place or territory. A state is not needed to define a
place. It arises out of social interaction between people. Also, connections between places
are not simply ones of territorial contiguity but often involve interaction over space that is
not captured by the image of space as entirely territorial. So that much politics, even
when oriented to the state in elections and so on, is mediated through places that the state
may only have limited influence over (as perhaps in drawing electoral or municipal
boundaries, etc.) and/or through transactions over space in networked webs of
interconnection. A less internationalized/territorialized IPS has much to offer in moving
the discussion of world politics into sociologically rich but relatively uncharted waters for
the field of international studies.
People are natural “place makers” the world over and much politics takes the
form of initiatives and struggles directed towards defending, assisting, and developing
places (Agnew 1987; Jerram 2013). Jacques Lévy (2011) identifies eight different
meanings of the word territory in current usage in a range of languages, only one of
which is that typically meant in IR usage. This may be the typical meaning in English but
in many languages territory is closer in meaning to the English “place.” Not only does
this suggest that the recent hegemony of the English language bears some role in the
elevation of one meaning of territory to superordinate status but that as a result a
restriction is placed on the possibility of thinking about politics in terms of places beyond
the purview of the state. That this is problematic is immediately apparent if one reflects
on the origins of the word politics itself in the Greek “polis” and the longstanding
association in practice between cities and politics rather than that between territorial
states and politics. The “statist ontology” of politics, to borrow a phrase from Warren
Magnusson (2014, 1563) is of recent vintage, even if extremely powerful intellectually.
Yet, as Magnusson (2014, 1571) suggests “To see like a city is to recognize that politics
is implicit in everything people do. It is in the fabric of everyday urban life. It is not some
exceptional activity that occurs in its own sphere.”
The sociologist Georg Simmel, in particular, offers some important pointers in
this connection worth taking seriously (Allen 2000; Pyyhtinen 2010). He is the classical
sociologist whose writings are both most congenial and most productive for engaging in a
geo-sociology of politics beyond that of the state and its territory per se. He sees social

10
groups as forming boundaries that frame social spaces in which people define themselves
and distinguish themselves from others. It is this process of socialization that lies at the
heart of the meaning of place for politics (Agnew 1987). Places are dynamic and not
static. This is because social boundaries shift and change across time and in the intensity
of their differentiation, using nearness and farness and marking out strangers from
insiders as means of organizing social life. Social distance is thus the primary mechanism
by which places become distinguished from one another through, on the one hand,
proximity and distance, and, on the other, movement and mobility. Out of the different
experiences that different places give rise to come different dispositions towards self and
others. In other words, according to Cresswell (2011, 237), “Place … combines the
spatial with the social”. These, in turn spawn collective action, define place attachments
of memory and loss, create place hierarchies of greater and lesser political capacity, and
produce spatializations of empowerment and resistance (Diani 2000; Gieryn 2000). This
is a politics that emerges from the social phenomenology of everyday life rather than
from the machinations or framings of states. In this construction, places can be both
stretched out or limited spatially. Sometimes the term “scale” is invoked to account for
this effect. If typically places are defined by locally dense patterns of association, they
can also be “overlapping and intermeshing patterns of association, the scale effects of
which [local, urban, regional, national and so on] cannot be known a priori” (Jonas 2011,
388). The local is influenced by cross-scalar and frequently hierarchical relationships
such as those between political centers and peripheries and between local and national
interests and identities.
Consequently, place is a “dynamic and provisional category” (Pilkington 2012,
270) combining rational-cognitive judgments with affective-sensual engagements in
producing political subjects. As Hilary Pilkington (2012), for example, shows in her
research with young people in the post-Soviet Russian town of Vorkuta, the periphery
engages on its own terms with the center (Moscow). “Insider stories” about the city and
its landscape are the key to understanding local notions of how to perform politically
even though marginalized within the wider Russian polity. In a different register,
Prasenjit Duara (2000) shows how in twentieth-century China the “local” rather than
being simply absorbed into the national was in fact redefined in the process of the
stretching of national authority outwards from the center. So, rather than “fixed” within
the emerging Chinese nation, there has been a longstanding “struggle over [the local] by
wider forces such as nationalism(s) and imperialism(s) and the effort to locate its
meaning beyond their reach” (Duara 2000, 15-16). Places can be appropriated into state
territories but also have the capacity to resist this and become their own objects of
political identification.
Perhaps more radically, politics is never simply bottled up in territorial containers,
state-based or otherwise, as with place making. Places are rarely if ever isolated one from
the others. Places are linked in networked ways across space. Networks between agents
need not conform at all to the territorial borders of states. Trying to understand the
politics of the world economy, particularly in its financialized form since the 1980s, by
restricting attention solely to transactions and policy measures within those borders
would obviously be deficient. Yet that is exactly what much contemporary theorizing
about statehood and territory in IR and political theory tends to do. It is still mercantilized
in its lack of attention to spatialities such as flows in networks that offer a fundamentally

11
different ontology from that of territory. World politics has long been but is also
increasingly about flows of capital, people and things between cities and across
jurisdictional boundaries that are regulated in ad hoc and patch-worked ways rather than
through the singular workings of absolute sovereignty over clearly bounded territorial
spaces. Networked actors can but need not engage strategically in territorial modes of
self-organizing. Spatial interaction takes place over space rather than through partitioning
space as with territoriality. Returning to Simmel in this regard as well, he argued that to
be socialized with others is not necessarily about mere contiguity between persons
(Pyyhtinen 2010, 97). Rather, the social being carried “within” individual persons can be
expressed across space through exchanges. As John Allen (2000, 63) notes “To bring
Simmel up-to-date …, perhaps there is now as much need to live the ‘global’ intensity of
relationships and their effects at a distance, as there is the complex rhythms within
cities.”

Using Geo-Sociology

In this third section of the chapter I briefly develop three empirical topics to illustrate
how this geo-sociology can be put to use for some of the current concerns of IPS. The
cross cutting theme is that of historical-geographical contingency.
One topic is that of the broad historical dynamics of statehood, comparing the
European experience with that of the rest of the world. Statehood itself is historically and
geographically contingent. This is a banal fact but one that writing about “the” state in the
abstract seemingly misses. A number of points can be made. One is that though the
original European states emerged as dynastic states that took a strongly territorial form,
when modern sovereignty really took root in the nineteenth century it had to cope with
the rise of a “trans-territorialising logic” based in the rapid spread of capitalism (Teschke
2006, 38). This did not just start in the 1970s. Secondly, the roughly territorial form of
the nascent European “nation-state” was widely borrowed as a model by nationalist
movements beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the basis to
their claims to political independence from pre-existing empires, even when, as in the
case of Greece, the population was still scattered in a diaspora (Agnew 2007). This has
never meant that the one (the state) always successfully maps onto the other (the nation).
The continued independence of micro-states rests on playing out the “rituals” of
sovereignty as borrowed from elsewhere and as underwritten by active membership in
intergovernmental organizations (Sharman 2015). Thirdly, there is a clear difference in
trajectories of statehood, particularly with respect to relative territorial openness, across
world regions from the prior impact of European imperialism (above all in Africa and
Middle East) (e.g. Tansel 2015) and the continuing dilemmas of postcolonial statehood
(e.g. Parasram 2014) to the increasing strength of memberships in regional organizations
(such as the EU and ASEAN) in some parts of the world as states “pool their
sovereignties” (Beckfield 2010). Finally, some states, particularly Japan and the United
States, have had unusual trajectories as states that lead them to be tagged frequently as
“abnormal” (as with Japan, see Hagström 2015) or “exceptional” as with the United
States. Of course, these are the two extra-European states that in conventional terms
managed to move from peripheral to core positions within global geopolitics. Rather than
ignoring their particularities, however, these should be seen as important guides to what

12
they bring to global society, particularly the fact that much contemporary globalization
can be traced back to the prototype provided to the world by the United States itself
(Agnew 2005). It is not simply yet another state in “international relations.”
The second topic is that of the ways geographical scales are mutually constituted
in producing political action using by way of example, Cooper’s (2014) case for
understanding African history (and its “states”) as part of world history and Abraham’s
(2014) emphasis on its diaspora in the making of modern India. In the former case,
Cooper argues that modern “Africa” should not be seen as a totally dependent and
dominated continent. Rather, while rejecting such clichés that Africa is home to the
world’s “bottom billion” and that Africans somehow had no role in their own
compromises with the slave trade and colonialism, he points out how varied post-colonial
experiences have been between countries and that many of the immediate postcolonial
rulers were well aware that they needed to seek “alternatives to both colonial rule and
what they feared would be the powerlessness of small impoverished nation-states”
(Cooper 2014, 66). Both the asymmetries between countries and their former colonial
masters made it difficult to move beyond inherited borders, dysfunctional as they
typically were and are. The very labels of Africa, Ghana, and Senegal as presumptive
actors made for difficulty on the part of even best intentioned leaders such as Julius
Nyerere to transcend the allure of the territorial state. For his part, Itty Abraham (2014)
provides an “international history of the nation-state” focusing in part on the role of an
Indian diaspora in forging the “idea” of India before Independence even as it was then
officially excluded from the rigidly territorial state that was put into place between 1947
and 1990. To keep good relations with its neighboring states, India repudiated its
emigrants. The case of the Indian population expelled from Uganda in 1972 and the
failure of India’s government to respond, for example, is used to illustrate this
longstanding policy. They were not “real’ Indians, only people of Indian descent. That
this has dramatically reversed in recent years is put down to the remittances and, most
importantly, the enormous business success of high-caste Indians in the United States and
elsewhere. The Indian nation now extends well beyond the territorial borders of the
Indian state. As Abraham (2014, 103) puts it: “The return of the global Indian nation was
a product of the transformation of the image of the normative diasporic subject.” Political
community is thus deterritorialized largely on the basis of caste as the new basis for
exclusion.
The third topic is the contemporary impact of non-state actors in world politics,
using my own research on credit-rating agencies (Agnew 2012) and that of others on the
“contracting out” of state authority (e.g. Cooley and Spruyt 2009; Lewis 2015). Non-state
actors such as NGOs, law firms, business corporations, and private regulatory bodies are
important players in world politics. The spread of US-style pre-trial discovery and class
action law suits around the world is one simple, if hardly straightforward, example
(Brake and Katzenstein 2013). A more institutional than processual example comes from
the immense authority now vested by states (including the most powerful ones) in the
rating of their sovereign bonds by private agencies. The Big Three of these (Moody’s,
Standard and Poor’s and Fitch) operate a network of branches across the world from their
seats in New York City using their claim to specialized expert knowledge to judge the
bonds of companies, municipalities and national governments alike. The very financial
reputation of different states depends on the relative status attached to their bonds by

13
these agencies. These agencies in turn receive revenues for what they do from the very
subjects that they vet. This networked authority is a significant feature of contemporary
world politics. This is because “states negotiate about, bundle, or surrender their
sovereign prerogatives” (Cooley and Spruyt 2009, 3). They contract out to other
authorities. For examples, the massive chain of US military and naval bases around the
world is the product of negotiating “incomplete contracts” (ones subject to renegotiation)
with host governments. Land, resources, and potential independence are given up for
certain presumed benefits in security, employment, corrupt creaming off of supply
contracts, and so on. But not just powerful states and private actors have spatial reach
beyond their own borders. Even relatively “powerless” but authoritarian states can pursue
dissidents and adversaries abroad both clandestinely and openly using official channels as
they develop “extraterritorial security practices” (Lewis 2015).
All told, therefore, if the world is not yet flat, neither is it best thought of as
entirely a reflection of the world political map.

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