Land as Resource and Affection

Abstract

to fill. The innumerable analyses of the effects of on the modern nation-state comprise the principal background literature for this volume. Yet, most of its individual contributions are anchored in more specific bodies of literature, in particular conflict studies, critical geopolitics and political geography, social anthropology and migration studies, and even US legal history. A noteworthy strength of the volume is that it not only combines approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, but it also manages to combine contributions with quite different epistemological and methodological backgrounds. These approaches range from a constructivist analysis of collective identity to a quantitative analysis of the relationship between dyadic conflict and the distance between states. Although it might seem too much to expect that a running theme would unite eleven contributions from such different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, one such theme is continuously addressed throughout the volume. The one running theme is that in order to understand how increasing alters the institution of territoriality, and the implications of these changes for conflict and conflict resolution, one must not reduce territoriality to either its symbolic dimension or its function as a quasi-natural resource. In this sense, Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization strongly reinforces a broad trend in the analysis of territoriality that has occurred at the interstices of international relations and political geography over the last couple of years. This trend emphasizes the importance of understanding territory both as an symbol to which different meanings can be attached and as a power resource and manifestation of lived space (see, for example, Paasi 1995; Agnew 1998; Newman 1998; and, for the philosophical differentiation between abstract and concrete space, see Lefebvre 1991). Although they focus on these two dimensions of territoriality to varying degrees, all the contributions to Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization agree that is, in fact, transforming the relationship and causal nexus between territoriality and conflict. Even though most of the contributors use slightly different understandings of what globalization involves, most also limit themselves to a conceptualization that concentrates on the intensification of global economic and, to a lesser degree, communicative interchanges. The first set of chapters in Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization illustrates the various ways in which territorial attachment and detachment can