Stojanović, Đorđe (2024) Space, Territory and Sovereignty: Critical Analysis of Concepts. Human territorial behaviors and power politics in Assaf Gavron’s The Hilltop: a spatial re-examination, 89 (1). pp. 111-184. ISSN 0439-5905

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Abstract

Recognising the exceptionally complex context of the high post-modernity of current global situation, this study deals with the genealogy, critical examination and importance of the concepts of space/spatiality, territory/territoriality and sovereignty for the theory of international relations. At the first analytic level, primary effect of the “spatial turn” in social sciences will be detected, in the sense that politics is hardly conceivable without space, since there is no interrelation with the heterogeneous Other. Space is continuously articulated and rearticulated, it is discontinued/topological and under constant construction, through multifaceted and multi-dimensional relations and identities made of intersecting, networked political, social, economic and cultural circulations and connections. Hence, in line with the afore-said, remodeled regions are now treated as the connecting nexus of numerous fluxes and harmonised, juxtaposed and converging diversities. At the second and third analytic levels, the focus is on the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as the central characteristics of contemporary international politics and the associated reformulation/ reconfiguration of the idea of sovereignty. The centrepiece of the new territorial ontology and epistemology is the change of perspective in the conception of the territorial state as an omnipresent nucleus of modern political thought. The study emphasizes the idea of the social production of space and territory, the importance of the contingent, historical-cultural-social articulation of territoriality as a genuinely political project, foregrounding territory as a “networked social/spatial quantum”, as an underlying expression and agent of pluriversal spaces/territories, as apparently parallel and autarchic, but actually intersecting and tangent spatial units.

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