Keywords

In this book, we examined the meanings, relevance, concepts and research questions related to a territorial approach to democratic politics. Using a constructivist approach, we underscored how territory, understood in a broad sense as a “portion of circumscribed space” (Elden, 2013: 66), is a result of human–natural interactions and how it plays a significant role in interpreting key transformations and events of contemporary society and politics.

We thoroughly evaluated the shortcomings of unterritorial approaches and showed that territory is often just avoided or reduced to a passive substratum—a reified context where political action occurs, where organised actors and public institutions, as well as the opinion of citizens, are located. We also highlighted how unterritorial approaches cannot understand important issues and challenges in contemporary democracies. As we have seen, globalisation has changed but not erased the political relevance of territorial spaces or the need for a territory-oriented approach to democratic politics. The relevance of territory is demonstrated by the economic, social and political shocks of recent decades, the resurgence of nationalism and regionalist claims, the increased role of subnational and supranational powers, the emergence of new territorial divides in the electoral field, socio-territorial inequalities and new urban dynamics, the mutations of citizenship and territorial rights in the face of migration challenges, the spread of “territorial populism” and, last but not least, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been one of the biggest territorial crises of contemporary times. Beyond unterritorial views of society and politics, this book advocated an interdisciplinary dialogue with territorial scholarship within various disciplines to enrich and challenge current views. Within this dialogue, geographical knowledge plays a significant role, especially in its innovative contributions on social, cultural and political dimensions. In this final chapter, we will focus on key analytical tools based on territory, emphasising three possible ideal types.

Between Society and Political Institutions

The concept of territory is complex and includes forms of settlement and occupation of a geographical area with its own historical evolution and specific socio-economic and cultural configurations. At the same time, territory is also a space of narratives, collective identities and scientific images, including cartographic ones shaped by complex formal and informal traditions. Given this complexity, the approach presented in this book is based on a constellation of features:

  • Territory is both integrated into and made distinct from societies and political institutions. Territory is a component of social ties, as ties with territory connect individuals and collective bodies. The territorial space is both a social construction and a necessary condition of political institutions.

  • The concept of territory is multifaceted and has material, practical and representational components. It is simultaneously a land with natural resources and a geographic space inhabited by a population. It is a practical construct created by both the population, through their settlement patterns and mobility, and political institutions, through the definition and control of its borders. Territory is also an individual and collective perception; in other words, it is a discursive, symbolic and scientific map. It is a space of narratives, collective identities and scientific images, including cartographic ones.

  • A territorial space is always influenced by historical and situational factors and does not maintain a static condition. Territory is shaped by persistence and transformation, as a result of the territorialising action of citizens, public institutions, political actors, experts and individuals who aim to define their belonging and actions within a circumscribed spatial perimeter. Territory is a by-product of actors’ strategies and appropriations. The construction of territory involves forms of practical and symbolic appropriation, that is, creating a space of belonging or a place inhabited by individuals and groups.

  • Once highly institutionalised, or routine, a territory usually translates into a legal entity intertwined with jurisdiction and sovereignty. Throughout formal rules and top-down forms of disciplines and controls, territories tend to consolidate over time and contribute to shaping the structure of opportunities and constraints for political action. However, while control over territory may be claimed, it may not be fully established. Territory is not only a space under control and a functional aspect within an institutional perimeter, such as a territorial state, but also a negotiated and/or politicised phenomenon. When territorial space is challenged, its perimeter is transformed, its jurisdiction is disputed, processes of de- and re-territorialisation display, and the structure of opportunity and constraints become more flexible.

  • A single territorial space is never uniform or isolated; it is interconnected through networks linking locations and places and defined and redefined by other territories at multiple scales. Territorial states have borders with neighbouring territorial states but also border regions and, sometimes, with neighbouring territorial space defined and controlled by supranational institutions, such as the UK, Norway or Switzerland in relation to the European Union.

  • Territorial space is inherently offline. However, as the digital economy hubs are located in specific urban areas of the world (Sassen, 2006: 323 ff.), online networks always connect nodes of individuals or groups located in certain places. While fluid and contingent territorial and unterritorial spaces shaped by high mobility and global exchanges challenge the relevance of traditional territorial spaces (e.g. those defined by state borders), such a transformation does not preclude neither intra-group diversity in territorial appropriation and belonging nor forms of politicisation (e.g. in terms of nationalist and sovereignist claims).

Stable, Contingent and Politicised

In principle, within an essentialist epistemology, territory should not be considered a scientific concept due to the many definitions and somewhat contradictory meanings attributed to it. In an anti-essentialist epistemology, which does not seek a universal and unique definition, it can be useful to look for inspiration in Max Weber’s approach. Among his classic sociological contributions, two key aspects are well known: his theory of the state and the bureaucracy and his theory of ideal types. In this final chapter, we argue for the importance of the concept of territory in understanding democratic politics and, at the same time, propose it as an ideal type, moving away from a reified meaning. What is crucial is that territory takes many forms and is a multi-dimensional concept. As such, it is open to different ideal types corresponding to different related notions and distinct analytic research agendas. The purpose of this book is to provide an illustration of the heuristic utility of the three main ideal types of territory, which should be considered complementary rather than alternatives.

The first ideal type, territory as stable space, denotes the most important political spatiality in modern times. According to this type, territory is an integral part of political institutions and the legal rules that define, control and share it. It is the product of the same institutions that can legitimise their existence through it; therefore, it presents as a take-for-granted space. The most successful example of such a territory is the nation-state. The Westphalian model, consolidated within liberal democratic regimes through universal suffrage and popular sovereignty, represents the triumph of a homogeneous and “un-scalar” model of territoriality that covers the perimeter of the state and the nation. This model embodies the institutionalisation or routinisation of territorial space as an object of control, as a contextual perimeter of social and political action and as a stable network of places shaped by formal rules and institutional legacies. In addition, it also concerns the persistence of nationalist imaginary or banal nationalism, which reinforces the linkage between territory and state. Within this ideal type, two main research questions arise: How is the legitimate space of state power institutionalised and to what extent does it persist as such? And to what extent do state territoriality and institutionalised spatiality, as designed by nation-state organisations, continue to shape voting behaviour, political cleavages, citizenship, party mobilisation and public policies?

The second ideal type defines the territory as a contingent and transforming space. Territorial spaces are perennially produced and reproduced through a variety of strategies and appropriations, such as practices and representations. Under this ideal type, territory takes on multiple forms. It is fragmented, recomposed and multiplied. Territory is shaped by processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation that transform borders and their capacity for control. This ideal type aligns with the recent transformations of democratic regimes, where nation-state borders have become less clear-cut, a complex territorial rescaling has emerged (Keating, 2018), and the scales of action and representation of territories are increasingly local, micro-regional, supranational and macro-regional. However, within this definition, territorial spaces can evade any formal institutionalisation in sub- or transnational jurisdictional authorities. The effects of the disarticulation and re-articulation of consolidated territorial spaces concern, among others, hybrid forms of collective appropriation connected by transnational spaces or unterritorial spaces represented by online forms of appropriation. Adopting this ideal type, it would be interesting to grasp how citizens, voters and political actors adapt and transform their own territorial belonging in a global era. This is a crucial point, as strategies and appropriations of territory as an everyday practice and symbolic representations might vary depending on geographic position and socio-economic status.

The third ideal type regards territory as a politicised space. The persistence and transformation of territory are not natural and are often marked by conflict. Territory is a by-product of political action and struggles between actors. The practical and symbolic strategies behind the processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, the limits of its extension, access rights, filters and boundaries, as well as forms of appropriation, can be analysed as arenas of struggle (Bourdieu, 1993). This ideal type would be heuristically useful for understanding the conflicts arising within and against processes of globalisation. At a time when it was thought to disappear in immaterial flows and networks, territory has become a contested space. In the current era of globalisation, with its profound socio-economic and cultural transformations, the osmosis between nation-states and territories that characterised the evolution of Western democracies between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been partly disarticulated.

Structural opportunities for politicising territory stem from the tension between democratic decision-making that exercises its power within circumscribed territorial boundaries, and the aims of global economic powers, which tend to be less dependent on these kinds of boundaries. The consequences of partial disarticulation between jurisdictions and economic development are varied, including, for instance, inequalities between global cities and “left-behind” regions. Tensions are also growing between the law and sovereignty of single nation-states and the recognition of human rights by supranational courts, resulting in a lack of political rights for immigrants living, working and paying taxes in a specific territory. All of these tensions have created opportunities for actors seeking to protest or engage in anti-establishment politics in recent decades. The weakening of nation-states has led to an increase in autonomist or secessionist regionalisms, as well as nation-wide sovereignism that aligns with populist stances. The rising importance of defending the osmosis between people and the territory, threatened by uprooted elites or extra-territorial cultures, as a crucial component of strategies by successful political parties across Europe and other continents, also highlights the need to adopt a territory-oriented approach to politics.

Thus, the book provides and discusses some analytical tools that aim to think territory from a socio-political perspective and, at the same time, think politics from a territory-oriented approach. This entails the two-fold assumption that territorial spaces are shaped by processes, actions and strategies led by political groups and institutions, and that, at the same time, territories—as spaces of representation, a set of practices and a resource—contribute to shaping democratic structures and processes. In pursuing these aims, the book covers some crucial territorial crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Other recent territorial crises, however, like the war in Ukraine and global environmental challenges, were not considered in depth. Moreover, the book did not explore some crucial aspects of democratic politics, such as “unconventional” forms of action and the significance of social movements, which are spatially rooted collective actors with transnational scopes closely related to the safeguard of territory conceived as a set of environment resources (e.g. Tokar & Gilbertson, 2020).