Shifting Grounds

Abstract

AbstractShifting Grounds brings together the existing social constructivist research in international relations (IR) and political geography, and examines the interactive relationship between territory and war from conceptual, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The central premise is the following: territory is what states and societies make of it. Put differently, states and societies have adhered to different forms of territoriality across time and space, and territory as well as territorial control meant different things in different time periods and regions. Shifting Grounds makes two claims. First, how state elites conceive territory within and beyond their domains affects their military objectives as well as methods and strategies for waging war. Second, adherence to different forms of territoriality leads to different modes and patterns of war, and wars themselves may affect how state elites and societies conceive territories. The impacts of different territorial ideas and practices on war are illustrated through a wide variety of cases including but not limited to revolutionary France, the Ottoman Empire, British colonial expansion in South Asia, and ISIS. The transformative roles that wars can play in shaping the dominant territorial ideas and geopolitical assumptions, in turn, are examined in the context of “systemic” wars, with an emphasis on the diverging impacts of such wars on Western and non-Western geographies. Shifting Grounds sheds light on the shifting and shifty nature of the relationship between territorial ideas and armed conflict not only in the context of the distant the past, but also in present-day global politics.