Terrestrial territories: From the Globe to Gaia, a new ground for territory

Abstract

Territory is a central tool for analysing the politics, primarily between nation-states, of the division of a world based on the figure of the Globe. However, with the Anthropocene, the ground of territories has somehow changed, shifting from ‘the Globe’ of the globalisation age, to the Anthropocene, where Gaia, or the earth-system, ‘irrupts’ onto the political scene. Yet, both sovereign territories and critical approaches to territoriality, despite revealing the role of non-human actors in territorial interactions, fail to take into account the issue of the habitability of the Earth. This article advances the notion of ‘terrestrial territories’ as a new descriptive and analytical tool for a Gaia-politics intended to transcend traditional geopolitics by taking into account the dynamics of the planet. Resulting from the original intersection between critical territory studies and the late work of Bruno Latour, it introduces terrestrial territories as an original and much-needed notion that could help to describe new coalitions of actors along new lines of divisions and conflicts based on the logic of Gaia. Beyond the famous but inefficient ‘think global, act local’ scheme, the notion of terrestrial territory tries to reconcile the apparent hyperglobal nature of the planetary and the obviously local nature of action.