Keywords

Nationalism, regionalism and migration’s issues are usual areas of research in territory-oriented approaches in political sociology and political science. However, as the geographer Stuart Elden points out, this concept is largely avoided in political and social science:

Theorists have largely neglected to define the term, taking it as obvious and not worthy of further investigation. One searches political dictionaries or introductory textbooks in vain for a conception of this notion: rather it is unhistorically accepted, conceptually assumed and philosophically unexamined. Its meaning is taken to be obvious and self-evident and can therefore be assumed in political analysis. Political science that does discuss this notion tends to concentrate on legal issues of secession or border disputes, or problems of refugees, nationalism, and core-periphery relations rather than come to terms with the notion itself. (Elden, 2005: 5-6)

An important obstacle of in-depth reflections on the term territory is its “conceptual imprecision” (Elden, 2013: 3). In the Cambridge dictionary, territory has two main meanings: “land belonging to or under the control of a particular country” and an area “dominated by an animal or person”. According to the French Larousse’s dictionary, the term corresponds to a “portion of land space dependent on a state, a city, a jurisdiction”; a “space considered as a whole that forms a coherent, physical, administrative and human unit”; an “extension that an individual or a family of animals reserves the right to use”; and a “relatively well-defined space that someone attributes to himself and over which he wishes to retain all his authority”.

Given the term’s intrinsic polysemy, we propose that two main complementary meanings of territory are particularly relevant for political sociology. The first refers to the space of individual and collective life, its uses and boundaries in terms of position, social practices and representations. A territory is both a physical and a symbolic area and comprises a set of positions, practices and representations that are more or less trivial or more or less sophisticated and conveyed by individuals and groups. The second meaning emphasises its jurisdictional character and is linked to political institutions, in particular the state. The first highlights a “bottom-up” conception that is the active role of individuals and social groups in constructing and deconstructing territories, while the second alludes to a more “top-down” perspective focused on the role of political institutions in shaping, defining and controlling territorial spaces. Thus, to a first approximation, territory can be conceived as a concept that acts as a mediator between society and politics.

The two complementary meanings of the notion of territory allow to develop a territory-oriented research agenda capable of understanding contemporary democratic politics. In regard to liberal democracy, a relatively large consensus occurs around the normative idea that they should include a system of government based upon people’s participation and regular free elections of political representatives. Of course, the implementation of this general idea varies in time and space, depending on the emphasis on the institutions, on the power of citizens, and the respect of free speech and rights of minorities.

What is crucial is that both in normative and empirical analysis, the relevance of territory in democratic politics is avoided or made marginal by influent streams of scholarship. Meanwhile, in the past few decades, a heterogenous stream of literature—of geographers, sociologists, political scientists, geographers, economists, philosophers and historians—has dealt with the complexity and the importance of the role of territory and territoriality. Within territorial scholarship, cultural, social and political geography has a crucial role. By distancing from cartographic empiricism, a new generation of geographers has redefined the discipline through strong interdisciplinary dialogue. Geography has been renewed through a broad theoretical-conceptual confrontation, it has also provided considerable stimulus to its sister disciplines, including political sociology, which have drawn (at least in part) from the new directions of geographical knowledge.

Inspired by these contributions, this chapter will show how the notion of territory is part of a configuration of concepts that can frame the transformation of contemporary democratic politics. While the concept of territory is essential, its analytical use should not be isolated from other key related concepts and notions like strategies, appropriations, places, borders, scales and networks. Moreover, beyond traditional topics such as migration, nationalism, regionalism and border issues, all political phenomena are territorialised; in other words, it might be understood with a territory-oriented approach.

Space

The first issue is to discuss the concept of space, which is often treated as a proxy of territory. The main reason is that the definition of space remains vague or abstract. Instead, one of the major contributions of the heterogenous strand of scholarship previously mentioned is that of having questioned the concept of space and brought the concept of territory back to theoretical relevance. Inspired by these reflections, one might argue territory of territorial space does not focus on the biological, hydrographic and orographic characteristics of physical space. Space becomes territorial space or territory thanks to active human intervention—particularly when people engage with and occupy it as a space of life. More crucially, as a result of human action, the concept of territory challenges the geometric connotation of the notion of space. Conceived as a geometric entity, space is a single, mathematically perfect plane, a homogeneous area that is derived from Cartesian and Newtonian conceptions and defined as an objective reality existing beyond the observer. Although the geometric view of space appears as a timeless fact, it is actually a historical product, as geographer Robert Sack (1986) pointed out. Above all, it is the outcome of construction that continues to exert its influence. This idea also accompanies the traditional conception of the nation-state as an institution striving for a homogeneous territorial space, although a similar conception can be found in certain visions of globalisation, which appears as a “continuation of Cartesian thought” (Elden, 2005: 16). Sack (1986) argues that the rise of civilisations around the world and the development of capitalism and modernity have produced major historical changes in what he calls territoriality. Family, education and workplaces tended to coincide before the capitalist era. With industrialisation, the division of labour, the expansion of territorial spaces and, in particular, the conquest of distant territories, the idea of territory as an impersonal geometric space emerged. The development of an abstract meaning of space, which originated in Europe and later spread to the rest of the world, is at the root of a depoliticised interpretation of space and, thus, of territory, which we find in both democratic political theory and representations of world geographical space. Today, a conception of abstract space, which stretches from the “nation-state” to the globe and can be subdivided, ordered and classified as a whole, is favoured by the thesis that processes of “time–space compression” (Harvey, 1990) have virtually abolished distances and effectively made simultaneous global co-presence a reality. In this view, we also find the global approaches of territoriality that are in line with the Cartesian idea according to which global space is seen “in a state-centric manner, as a pre-given territorial container within which globalization unfolds, rather than analysing the historical production, reconfiguration and transformation of this space” (Brenner, 1999: 59).

A geometric and abstract vision of space can be contrasted with a relational vision, inspired by Einsteinian relativism, that intertwines space, time and subject. This reasoning forms the basis for the renewed approaches in social, cultural and political geography. In a relational conception of space, the territory is both the cause and the effect of political action. Territorial space is an organised area in which social and political interaction takes place, but this same space contributes to shaping and transforming the action. One territory is not the same as another; with its own characteristics shaped by human actions, every territory exerts a specific influence on another. In reconsidering geographical space, it is important to go beyond both evolutionary and theological historicism, which unilaterally ascribe importance to temporality while relegating spatial dimensions to the margins. It is also necessary to call into question the methodologies of investigation inspired by positivist epistemologies, which seek regularities in space (and time) or only statistical variability. Instead, we should rediscover subjective and intersubjective logics that help to construct the sense of singular territories through practices and representations. While arguing for the centrality of spatial dimensions does not necessarily involve embracing the concept of territorial space, they share certain assumptions that we can examine when rethinking the relationship between territory and politics. Through this approach, it is possible to consider politics from the perspective of territory.

Understood as a space of human action, territory should not be considered an objective datum acting as a passive background for such an action but as part of the action itself. Territory is not the antithesis of a nature opposed to culture (i.e. the human realm), and it should not be assumed that the space of that realm (i.e. territory) is a natural, taken-for-granted fact or “second nature”, as Aristotelian philosophy might suggest; or with the concept of reification, in Marxian terms, as the result of human action that tends to present itself as a thing, independent of that action. Geographical rethinking helps to make notions such as space, places, borders and territory crucial dimensions of politics. Understood as social and political constructions, these notions are not seen merely as contextual facts but rather as dimensions that shape socio-political phenomena themselves because “where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen” (Warf & Arias, 2009: 1).

Political Institution and Territorial Institutionalisation

A key shortcoming in the literature on political research is that the concept of territory is conflated with that of a political institution. In other terms, territorial institutionalisation overlaps political institutions, and more precisely the so-called nation-state. However, territory is more than political institutions, as Sack (1986) suggests. First of all, territory is a space of living that is constituted by the individual who at most negotiates and consolidates their own perimeter within the relational dynamic with other members of their family. The experience of the individual and informal groups who delimit their territory and construct it through their daily routines and mobilisations is crucial: in their home, their bedroom and their kitchen but also in the street. In this case, territorial institutionalisation, that is the routinisation of the meaning and the perimeter of the territory, is rather low, given that the latter depends on the choices—even minute and barely visible to the outside eye—of the inhabitant them self. The opposite case corresponds to a highly institutionalised territorial space: It transcends face-to-face relations, becomes a collective and anonymous phenomenon and spatially is embedded into the formal political institutions. Accordingly, the territory is institutionalised through the reproductive action of a composite set of agents of political institutions, mainly the state, supported by popular legitimacy. Between daily interpersonal experiences and political institutions, there is of course a varied set of more or less institutionalised territorial spaces.

What is crucial for territory-based political research is that public institutions are both conditions and consequences of territorial institutionalisation. As a historical construction, territory should be understood as a changing space in which political action is exercised, emphasising its contingent character but also the socio-economic and cultural conditions of its permanence. At the same time, each institutionalised territory is substantiated through the spatial control and sanctions over it but also through the dissemination of symbols, discourses and representations conveyed by the apparatuses of the state, including educational institutions and, in the case of democratic regimes, representative and governing institutions. The construction and reproduction of nation-states, as well as their action and legitimacy, are based on the definition of national, regional and local territorial spaces where democratic polity, politics and policy-making take place and assume their meanings.

Considering democratic politics through a territorial approach involves a reflective focus on the complex relations between territory and institutions and practices. Democratic states, polities or regimes are expected to circumscribe territories in which democratic opinion is expressed. However, the specific role of territorial features has often been a neglected and underestimated problem in democratic theories (Ochoa Espejo, 2020). While democratic institutions do not exist without territorial institutionalisation, a territorial approach asks for a critical analysis of the link between political institutions, nation-states and democracy. In democratic regimes, a constituency corresponds to a defined territorial space in which competition for power is exercised. The political action of those who are elected can be exercised in more restricted or more extensive territorial spaces, which depend on the competencies defined by the state order and the margins for manoeuvring particular interests and resistances. At the same time, political institutions are not only those directly related to nation-states. For instance, the current process of restructuring European democracy, regional devolution and supranational empowerment challenged the traditional assumption that the nation-state is the unique scale of the exercise of democracy (e.g. Keating, 2018). Elections and institutional decision-making are part of regional and local territories, as all European nation-states recognise some subnational autonomy, also in accordance with EU treaties (e.g. King & Stoker, 1996). Moreover, democracy is not only a monopoly of political institutions but also an expression of alternative territorial grass-root forms of democracies (Atkinson, 2017; Kaufman & Dilla Alfonso, 1997).

Strategies and Appropriations

In looking for a territory-oriented framework for political research, we advocate for considering the territory not only as a condition or a cause but also as a product and consequence of practical and symbolic actions, production and reproduction. This is relevant beyond cases of disputed territories, where there is a struggle for control, delimitation and transformation. The first sociological question on which the territorial analysis should be carried out relates to who produces and interprets territorial spaces and how they do that.

In unhistorical approaches, the issue of who takes charge of the production of territorial space is considered irrelevant. The actor is de facto equivalent to an institution whose legitimacy is taken for granted. Instead, in a relational, actor-centred perspective based on the distinction and dialectic between structures and the strategy of actors, their characteristics, aims and ideological orientations are crucial dimensions. The concept of territorial strategy expresses “the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relations by delimiting and asserting control over a geographical area” (Sack, 1986: 19). Sociologist Henri Lefebvre underlines how political elites create and reshape territories with respect to their interest:

They seem to administer, to manage and to organise a natural space. In practice, however, they substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social, and then political. They believe they are obeying something in their heads representation (of the country, etc.). In fact, they are establishing an order-their own (2009: 228).

As Claude Raffestin points out, territory is the result of an action carried out by an actor or a set of actors (2019: 199). However, a territorial space is not just a by-product of a (top-down) strategy but also a result of appropriation, that is “the act of making something one’s own” (Busse & Strang, 2011: 4). Every territory exists to the extent that there is a form of individual or collective appropriation. In appropriating a territorial space through a complex process of practical, cognitive, symbolic and emotional identification by political and social actors, the territory is produced. Actors define territorial space, delimit it and give it meaning through both practical and symbolic appropriation. Its construction results from strategies and appropriation of a heterogeneous set of actors: public institutions, political actors, civil society and experts, but also the inhabitants themselves, who fight to define and control the territory (i.e. its extension, its rights of access and filters).

Strategies and appropriations might be more or less conflictual or consensual. The territory is never a univocal element but the product of a more or less plural action, where diverse actors concur to provide subjective meanings defining territorial space in relation to their interests and strategies. From this perspective, territories are contingent phenomena: political forms shaped by power relations and their inhabitants. This perspective entails targeted objectives aimed at reinforcing a given territory according to specific interests and legitimising control over it. It also creates opportunities for conflicting strategies to emerge, which can challenge this control or the perimeter over which it is exercised. Thus, to understand how strategies and appropriation take place, it is necessary to question which actors are involved in the creation and reproduction of a circumscribing territory and, therefore, in the controls over it and to analyse the processes that lead certain actors to be recognised as authorities more or less appropriated by those who reside in that territory or want to access it.

Places

As a result of strategies and appropriations, territory tends to be translated into a set of places. Some literature, especially in the field of geography, tends to equate the notion of place with that of space, while other streams are inclined to differentiate between the two notions. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (2001) argues that space is a more abstract phenomenon than place: The former has a general connotation and the latter a particular one. Space is everywhere, but place is somewhere. While space is the realm of the impersonal, place becomes personal when it is perceived as familiar by individuals and groups through everyday practices and experiences, as well as connections and identification. While it is easier to speak of place in spaces where there are face-to-face interactions, a nation, as an “imagined community”, can also be understood as a place or Heimat, depending on the degree to which it evokes attachment and affective investment. Places are territorial spaces where localised appropriation is expressed.

However, a widespread opinion contends modernity has changed the way individuals experience places. In pre-modern times, the local dimension in the construction of collective identity was prevalent. The increased circulation of people, goods and ideas reduces the constraints of ascribed place and traditional local ways of life; it confronts different realities and opens up the possibility of contesting local meanings and constructing a different sense of place. According to the influential geographer Doreen Massey (), an advocate of a relational approach, a distinction must be made between place and locality: The latter is understood as a distinct, coherent and delimited space associated with a particular community, while place is a space of encounters, interpersonal and gendered entanglements, particular activities, connections and interconnections, influences and movements that intersect uniquely at a given time and space. The sociologist Pollini (2005) asserts that attachment to place can be read as socio-territorial belonging that is not incompatible with spatial mobility. Mobility can restrict local attachment but not necessarily prevent it. However, unlike the narrative of non-places (Augé, 2009) or the notion that places are inevitably in decline in modern societies in favour of anonymous spaces (Relph, 2008), another prominent geographer, Robert Sack, claims that human beings cannot exist without places, which, in turn, cannot exist without human beings (1997: 141). However, Sack distinguishes between “thick places”, which were dominant in pre-modern societies, and “light” or “thin places”, which reflect the spatial segmentation of life brought about by modernity. Thin places are characterised by a spatio-temporal concentration of self-sufficient human activities (Sack, 1997: 8), whereas “fluid” places, on the contrary, are interconnected and structure modern life: home, school, work, etc. In this regard, the concept of place is related to the social milieu as “a situational relationality in which social actors are embedded”, and not necessarily places based on long-term belongings (Jacobs & Malpas, 2022: 168).

Territorializations

The production of territorial space by more or less convergent or divergent strategies and appropriations can be understood through the notion of territorialisation, which designates the action through which a territory is transformed. This transformation can be read through the cycle of territorialisation, which includes forms of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. The concepts of territorialisation and de-territorialisation, as well as re-territorialisation, inspired by the reflections of philosophers Guattari and Deleuze (1987), have been used to analyse how the territorial state controls and consolidates its authority over territorial space and its resources over time (Elden, 2013; Sassen, 2006) or to understand the actions of political actors and pressure groups contending for legitimate power over the territory (Gayer, 2014; Ng’weno 2017). Although far from having an unambiguous meaning, de-territorialisation alludes both to an action of deconstruction of an established territorial space and to the hiatus between belonging and territorial borders: hybrid forms of identity that transcend belonging and identities and coincide with delimited spaces, which may, for example, transcend the borders of the nation-state (Papastergiadis, 2000: 116).

In sociology and political science, it is argued that the consequences of political actions depend on the power of those who exercise them. Similarly, political actors, elites, experts and state officials often use strategies aimed at territorialising space to mobilise groups and individuals by boosting their loyalty and adherence, leading to their appropriation of the space. These mobilisations can have more or less accomplished and more or less shared outcomes. To achieve such results, strong legitimacy is required, which is often derived from a choral action of various actors and institutions accompanied by widespread (material, practical and symbolic) appropriation on the part of the groups and individuals on the territory. Without appropriation, ownership and internalisation, there cannot be legitimacy and recognition of the territory, its perimeter or its meaning. If the state has the right to control and exercise violence over the territory, it is because a more or less substantial part of the population living there judges or accepts this right as legitimate (Lévy, 1994: 125 ff.). Any successful appropriation implies that individuals, citizens and social groups make the territory something that belongs to them and with which they identify. This identification can be directed at an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991) as an abstract whole that most frequently takes the form of a nation or a homeland. However, the history of territorial conflicts, irredentism and independentism suggests that territorialisation strategies can often be the subject of disputes and differentiated appropriations.

Borders

Territorial spaces are, by definition, bounded, so it is not surprising that the control and crossing of borders are keywords in a territorial approach to politics (Immerfall, 1998: 7). In theoretical conceptions of democracy based on an abstract view of the space in which it is exercised, there is a mutually exclusive view of territorial space. While borders (or boundaries) are often not deeply considered, in territorial approaches, it becomes crucial to question the concept of borders. In their current usage, borders usually delimit geographical spaces institutionally framed within neighbouring territorial states. Understood in this way, borders have recently been the subject of growing interest in various social and political sciences (Popescu, 2012; Wast-Walter, 2012). This interest has had to take account of a rather influential conception in the twentieth century that understands borders as demarcation lines based on permanence and impassability. In this still somewhat dominant understanding, borders play a crucial role in defining the role of the state as the exclusive arbiter of power and holder of the monopoly of sovereignty within its territory. With the expansion of transnational transformations in recent decades, some may have thought that borders were becoming a relic of the past. However, the direction of reflection has gone in a substantially different direction (Paasi, 2009).

Firstly, there seems to be a consensus that borders, broadly speaking, are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the structuring of human societies. The removal or weakening of one border does not prevent others from forming or the same borders from taking on different meanings over time. Borders are constructions and not a natural given. They do not disappear but are transformed by being deconstructed and reconstructed in new forms. They are not unambiguous but have many faces. They are material, practical phenomena but also spaces of symbolic and political appropriation. Secondly, globalisation has led to big changes in the configuration of borders between states. However, there is no clear trend: While some borders have become more permeable (in particular, because of production needs and international trade), passports and customs controls have not disappeared; although there is greater freedom for the movement of people in some parts of the world, such as the area in Europe covered by the Schengen Agreement, there are also walls—literally and figuratively—being built. Thirdly, the desire to understand the transformations but also the persistence of borders between territorial states has led geographers, sociologists, historians and political scientists to rethink the very concept of borders. In this sense, following the work of geographer Claude Raffestin, borders have different functions: They should be understood both as lines of separation and as spaces of contact, with the possibility that this relationship may generate a filter effect (Raffestin, 1986; Ratti, 1990). Limitations manifest themselves in different ways, for example through social, cultural, political and economic barriers, but they can also create points of contact, mediation and communication to function as permanently negotiated intermediate spaces, as noted by anthropologist Michel de Certeau (1984), among others.

Scales

Scale is another key concept in the territorial approach to politics. A single territorial space has always relations (and borders) with other, differentiated territorial spaces. Thus, territory is a multifaceted entity. To understand this complexity, the literature has often used the concept of scale, although there is no real consensus on the meaning of the term. In geography, it is most frequently used to distinguish between different units of scale (e.g. locality, region, nation, etc.) alluding to different sizes, powers and hierarchies. Thus, inside the jurisdiction of the territorial state, more delimited territorial spaces are played out in relations to inter- or supranational spaces. The (central) territorial state should not be confused with the diverse universe of public institutions that can operate on different and complementary scales within and beyond. Scales are to be understood as mental constructions and representations but also as practices and forms of institutional regimes. From an individual or collective perspective, some actions move on a local, neighbourhood level, while others operate on higher, broader scales.

In the relation between scales the question of the power is crucial, as a territorial space may have greater or lesser authority or legitimacy; while authority is often a legally recognised entity, power is determined by strategies, resources and the capacity to exercise control over its borders. However, the relation between scales is not conceptually univocal. Two approaches are at stake (Herod, 2011: 24). In the topographic approach, scales coincide with territorial spaces that consist of individual smooth surfaces with a defined perimeter; the topological approach implies that scales consist not of perimeters of absolute spaces of different sizes but of connections between nodes in a network. Scales are more or less long (global scale) and more or less short (national, regional, local scale). However, there is nothing to prevent us from glimpsing a third perspective, where the image of a layered set of territories that make up a multi-scalar game, where jurisdictions, rights, individual and collective forms of belonging, as well as interacting and sometimes conflicting interests, co-exist.

Multi-scalar dynamic occurs when a member of a national parliament, elected in a specific regional constituency, defends the interests of the latter in the name of a principle of fairness between EU member states through a parliamentary motion. This is a very frequent case in each of the EU’s national parliaments. In this case, there are at least three scales at play: the national, the regional and the European, in a tangle in which it is difficult to establish a clear hierarchy. All of them are important, and one depends on the other. A national parliamentarian’s position, competence and legitimacy to speak on behalf of regional interests derive from being elected in that specific constituency. They can also refer to the EU because the nation-wide territorial state that their parliament represents is part of a supranational institution. The combination of contiguous (but also cross-cutting and overlapping) territorial areas creates a field of negotiation and conflict, where the resources and control of the territorial space are once again contested. At the level of political analysis, there is a conflict of jurisdiction between public authorities that share and compete for the management of the territory. The actors can be institutional or associative (e.g. political parties and pressure groups) and may express convergent or conflicting territorialisation strategies.

From the perspective of a territorial analysis of political action, focusing on the interplay of scales makes it possible to examine varying strategies and appropriations, as well as the relevance, interdependence and complementarity of the different territorial spaces. This includes considering the impact of globalisation on the nation-state (i.e. its weakening vis-à-vis socio-economic processes) and the delegation of state power to (both sub-state and supra-state) public and private institutions. In other words, the concept of scale allows us to conceive of the plurality of territorial spaces and the relativisation of the centrality of the nation-state in relation to other spatial scales that shape collective life and political action.

Networks

It may be surprising that the notion of network plays such a key role in the territorial approach to politics. Territory can be characterised by exhaustiveness and contiguity (Lévy, 1994: 76–78), while a network is defined as a connection between points within a delimited area. However, territory is also a configuration of places and can be considered an extremely dense network. Moreover, the co-existence and interaction of nation-states can be read through the notion of networks. This notion is also relevant in political activism and the action of transnational protest movements in relation to the concept of a network of local and urban activists (e.g. Pirro & Rona, 2019). Moreover, network is a key concept in local studies of political mobilisation, which seeks to understand how the construction of places defined as a milieu is the product of a network of actors responding to different and sometimes conflicting strategies and forms of appropriation, particularly in the context of political competition (Zafirovski, 1999).

Today, network is often taken as a synonymous with the Internet, a realm of digital environment that seems to challenge and even deny legitimacy to the notion of territory. The ubiquity of Internet has raised questions about spatiality in many fields. Telecommunication systems have become the central technology of today’s capitalism, not only for large and small businesses but also for the whole of everyday consumption, personal communication, entertainment and numerous other areas of social life. Indeed, for many people who spend long periods in the digital world, this environment has become such an important part of everyday life that the boundary between real and virtual seems to have almost completely disappeared. Allowing people and companies to seamlessly connect with others across the globe at the click of a button has made the digital environment perhaps the most powerful means of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation in the contemporary world (Lambach, 2020). Although hypermobility and global communication seem to entail a neutralisation of space and distance, the use of Internet is profoundly rooted in geographical and contextual specificities (Rogers, 2013). Moreover, the strong relationship between digital and territorial dimensions in the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the limits of any technological determinism that is the interpretation of social and political changes as a direct effect of technical progress (e.g. Molnar, 2021).

According to Sassen, we need to focus on analysing the production of the control and coordination capabilities of these technologies by the transnational corporations that manage them—that is, by focusing on the practices that concretely construct economic globalisation and global control over processes and spaces. This implies, once again, the need to turn our attention to the places where production and control of processes and production are concentrated: certain global cities that serve as localised nodes of globalisation (Sassen, 2006, 2018). By contrast, the use of new technologies is reshaping the geographies of social and political mobilisations, bringing together people who identify with common, even national, causes or identities. Paradoxically, they also allow for the re-appropriation of contiguous territorial spaces even if physical mobility is less important (Hylland Eriksen, 2007; Palmer, 2012).

Towards a Territory-Oriented Research Agenda

In this chapter, we explored the notion of territory by using a set of concepts to tackle questions related to the transformation of contemporary democratic politics. Along with concepts like strategy, appropriation, territorialisation, place, scale, border and network, territory fits with the complexity of the present-day transformation. Territory is to be understood as a cause and effect of political action—in other words, a phenomenon that is both upstream and downstream of political action. It permeates political action without being reduced to it and expresses social relations while simultaneously reacting to them (Lefebvre, 2009: 56–57). In this sense, territory is created and re-created. On the one hand, territory is a product of the actions of individuals and groups (including the elites) and an expression of the subjective meanings that inform these actions. Territory results from a combination of natural environments and human actions, as a product of strategies, forms of appropriation and places of belonging. It is a bordered, multi-scalar and networked space. On the other hand, territory is a routinised space of opportunity and a constraint for political action: a perimeter characterised by consolidated institutions and forms of belonging that individuals, groups and institutions cannot willingly or unwillingly disregard.

The configurational use of the notion of territory suggests a series of research questions concerning the past and present dynamics of democratic politics: How are territorial strategies and appropriation implemented? How do strategies and appropriations affect, influence and control people and resources over a circumscribed geographical area? Who are the actors involved in the creation and reproduction of a circumscribing territorial space? To what extent do the political actors and citizens of a geographical area share or compete for different territorialisation, in particular territorial borders? How do new forms of territorialisation emerge as a milieu, that is, a network of actors moulded by specific strategies and appropriations? How do voting behaviour and protest shape (and how are they moulded by) territorial issues? How should the evolution of democratic citizenship be grasped with a territory-oriented approach? And how does territorial institutionalisation involve national states?

Territory takes an institutionalised political form when power or control over it, its resources and its population are at stake. Institutionalised territory commonly takes the form of a territorial national state, and its characteristics, its control over it, its practical and symbolic boundaries and its rights of access and presence are the result of a historical process of construction that is a key focus of the territorial approach to politics. However, the territorial space of contemporary democracies is also criss-crossed by flows of people, goods and money and characterised by customs that may be firmly established or openly contested.