Territorial Discourse Research Articles

Settlement types, territorial discourse and the symbolic production of the ‘post-industrial town’

Couched in work on territory, discourse and symbolic power, this paper examines how dominant representations and classifications of settlement types are produced by overlapping political, media and academic discourses through an investigation of the ‘post-industrial town.’ The 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) membership and the 2019 General Election thrust England’s deindustrializing towns into the foreground. Viewed as the primary settlement type of the ‘Brexit heartlands’ and the ‘Red Wall’, descriptions, encodings and classifications of the ‘post-industrial town’ have proliferated across media, academic and political discourses. Following, the article draws on Critical Discourse Studies to trace the emergence of the ‘post-industrial town’ as a territorial production. I argue that the ‘post-industrial town’ has been produced by discursive and socio-technical practices invoking symbolic imaginaries of how places look, who lives there and their practices. In the case of ‘post-industrial towns’, a dominant symbolic production has emerged of an older, white, working-class, non-cosmopolitan and socially conservative type of settlement. Moreover, discursive and symbolic territorial productions have led to (un)wilful misrepresentation and misrecognition as places ‘on-the-ground’ are brought into political strategizing and discourse.

La despensa nacional: Quinoa and the Spatial Contradictions of Peru’s Gastronomic Revolution

AbstractThis article explores the spatial politics of Peru’s gastronomic revolution and corresponding efforts to territorialize Peruvian agricultural products by tracing the spatial dynamics of quinoa’s trajectory from highland dietary staple to coveted national food. Efforts to codify Peru’s national cuisine have involved mapping ingredients and dishes onto specific regions while dramatically reshaping agricultural production geographies and culinary topographies. Because of quinoa’s success as a high-value export crop, the Peruvian altiplano is no longer perceived as a landscape useful exclusively for livestock pasture and mining. Instead, it is imagined as agriculturally productive: the country’s quinoa heartland. At the same time, quinoa’s trajectory illuminates spatial contradictions in the gastronomic boom’s purported objectives and its tangible effects. The revalorization of quinoa led to a geographical expansion of its production outside the high Andes, undermining the spatially bound concepts of authenticity promoted by gastronomic leaders in Peru. Broadly, efforts to commercialize marginalized food products and their corresponding regions can at once reconfigure territorial discourses in important ways, reinforce long-standing geographical inequalities, and generate contestations of the geographic imaginaries of food and nation.

Spiritual geopolitics of Georgia's territorial integrity

This paper represents a study of the geopolitical reasoning of the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) and its leader Patriarch Ilia II regarding the question of Georgia's territorial integrity. Does the GOC's territorial discourse complement or challenge Georgia's territorial nationalism? The empirical analysis of the geopolitical discourses of Patriarch Ilia II in the early 1990s and in the wake of the 2008 August (Russia-Georgia) War shows a complicated relationship between spiritual and secular geopolitical discourses on Georgia's territorial integrity. Ilia's spiritual geopolitics is neither dissident nor entirely complementary. The Patriarch's definition of Georgia's territorial integrity eschews the broadly accepted formulation of “Russian occupation” within Georgia and in its place, insufficient faith and religiosity within the Georgian society take a more prominent place in the explanation of the problem's origins. Ilia II defines the religion and the GOC as the unifying factor, spiritually, territorially, and politically, of the rival parties and alienated peoples and territories. The church's canonical territoriality, rather than the state's sovereign territoriality, plays the key object of concern in the Patriarch's geopolitical discourse. However, Ilia II frames this narrow institutional interest of the church as the basis for the nation's territorial unification. By advocating more narrowly for the GOC's canonical jurisdiction across the entire disputed territories, rather than actively embracing secular anti-Russian geopolitical narratives, the church simultaneously stands outside of the territorial conflict, taking a seemingly neutral position, and reinforces the territorial claim of the Georgian state. By distinguishing and problematizing the role of GOC's canonical territoriality in the question of Georgia's sovereign territoriality, the paper concludes that the GOC is a territorial power in its own right, not merely a spiritual wing of the state of Georgia.

The role of territorial conflicts in multi-municipal water governance: a case study from Taipei Metropolis

ABSTRACT Multi-municipal water governance, with fragmentation and asymmetry among boundaries and institutions caused by water sharing, can give rise to quarrels among governments. Many related cases worldwide suggest integration and bottom-up participation as solutions for fostering multi-municipal collaboration, although existing power imbalances and competing interests continue to motivate conflicts. The research attempts to provide insights on how territorial conflicts can create barriers to multi-municipal integration. The case study considers the headwater of Taipei Metropolis, located in a rural-urban nexus in Taiwan, which is characterised by disconnected territory and authority. Along with democratisation and urbanisation, conflicts in interests between the headwater municipality, New Taipei City, and the capital downstream, Taipei City, have become more significant. By content and discourse analysis using secondary data and semi-structured interviews, the study identifies critical changes leading to the curious status quo and possible reasons for unresolved conflicts. The configuration of a multi-municipal water-sharing region has mediated inner tensions of territorialisation, which have been stimulated by developmental pressures of a growing entity under changing scalar status in the municipal hierarchy. The research indicates that territorial discourses provide legitimacy for municipal interests, while marking a shift from upstream inequity to downstream water sharing. The case study identifies the role of territorial conflicts and stresses the impacts of municipal competition triggered by scale politics, thereby offering an alternative understanding of conflicts in multi-municipal water governance.

Contesting uneven development: The political geography of natural gas rents in Peru and Bolivia

Political and academic debates about the distribution of resource rents to producing areas have addressed the issue of whether or not the transfers unleash conflicts. While this kind of debate is valid, the present paper argues that such a discussion is missing the point regarding the processes behind said types of conflicts, as well as how such conflicts are framed at the sub-national political geography of the state. By more deeply exploring these dimensions, the argument of this paper is that the production of uneven development within sub-national areas is crucial for understanding the above-mentioned conflicts and how the central state internalises those conflicts, producing new political geographies of rent distribution. As such, different territorial discourses of autonomy emerge along with uneven development, but their capacity to reach institutional autonomy is grounded on the spatial politics of each state. Empirically, this paper analyses how natural gas rents are distributed to sub-national producing areas in Peru and Bolivia, and how the production of uneven development through natural gas rents at sub-national level re-activated previous territorial demands for autonomy, which were internalised by central states in different ways.

ГЕОИНФОРМАЦИОННО-КОГНИТИВНАЯ РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНЫХ РЕСУРСОВ

The relevance of the study lies in considering the new content and features of a unified geospatial support for the economy and the life of society in the context of digital transformation. The aim of the work is to present the essence, fundamental points, new views and approaches to geospatial activities. Methods of formal logical analysis, linear programming, theory of matrix games with nature are used. A formal interpretation of the assessment and use of territorial resources as objects of a single geospatial activity is proposed. From the standpoint of the structural-functional approach, the essential characteristics of ensuring the life of society with geo-information and geosciences are considered. A formal-logical analysis of ideas about life in the surrounding geospace is given in order to optimize the use of its resources on the basis of an all-encompassing geospatial perspective. The concept of "geofragment" is introduced as an elementary unit of geospace, in which sectoral and / or natural processes take place and objects of different sectoral spaces interact. The role of geospatial knowledge is substantiated and an integrated approach to the processes of preparing spatial solutions for territory management based on a combination of geoinformation and geocognitive spaces is proposed. Geospatial activity in the territorial discourse is becoming an independent factor in the management of territories to ensure the life of society, based on the optimization of the distribution (redistribution) of territorial resources through the complex interaction of industries and clusters. This activity provides geodata, geo-information and geosciences for the diverse processes of interaction between industrial spaces and nature within the framework of a common physical geospace.

Symbolic spaces: Nationalism and compromise in the former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India

Bangladesh and India exchanged all of their 162 border enclaves in 2015 after 70 years of protracted negotiations. This paper offers an explanation as to why these enclaves were exchanged and why it took so long for the exchange to be executed. In so doing, I offer the concept of “symbolic spaces” to demonstrate that in postcolonial South Asia, enclaves gained oversized significance in nationalistic and territorial discourses. Such elevated significance effectively turned them into symbols of nationalism and territoriality, which played the major role in both their existence and their exchange. In explaining the exchange, I also contend that, although rare, states may exchange territories if it serves significant geopolitical and geo‐economic interests for the parties involved and if the exchange can be portrayed as a victory for the nation.

Discursos territoriales contrapuestos en el siglo XXI: el caso de Chile-Perú: desde la geopolítica crítica

The objective of this article is to understand, from the perspective of critical geopolitics, how the discourses of territorial conflicts between Chile and Peru in the 21st century have been represented by each of the parties, while at the same time establishing underlying elements that they go beyond the official conceptions issued by the States. To obtain this, a theoretical-conceptual approach to the notion of territory is considered from the mentioned discipline, and thus establish how the territory has been considered mostly as a conflictive aspect in bilateral history, demonstrated in recent years in the territorial oppositions made by the maritime border and in the so-called terrestrial triangle. It is concluded that the territorial conflicts are only a sample of a more structural problem in the relationship between both countries, while the territorial discourse is used to maximize the differences and minimize the similarities.

El socialismo aragonés, entre la obediencia territorial, el federalismo y el posibilismo autonómico (1976-1983)

In the transition towards democracy, two models of socialism fought for leadership in the Aragonese Left. The federalist Socialist Party of Aragon (PSA), with solid arguments for self-management and autonomy, nourished high expectations before the first democratic elections. With a poorer structure and support, though sheltered by its history, the alternative option, represented by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), won that “battle” on June 15, 1977. This triggered the PSA crisis, with the transfer of supporters to PSOE, and a process of unification that became in fact a takeover. Thus the Aragonese PSOE assumed a more explicit territorial discourse, embodied by some former PSA members. From 1979, they would lead the regional executive. In 1983 they became the first elected Aragonese government, after a process towards autonomous government in which PSOE evolved from possibilism to protagonism.

‘DANGEROUS GEOGRAPHIES’: THE ERASURE AND RECALIBRATION OF THE CONTESTED SPACE OF THE NATION IN TIMES OF WAR AND PEACE IN SRI LANKAN FICTION

This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the contested space of the nation during and after the war in Sri Lanka in the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera. In their realist novels that portray the ethnic conflict and its ramifications, these writers approach the topography of Sri Lanka as the overlapping material and discursive sites of meaning shaped by the overdetermined forces of colonialism, class and ethnic strife, and postcolonial nation-building projects, postwar reconstruction and neoliberal policies. Their novels represent the erasure and recalibration of the contested space of the nation during and after the war – the dialectical effects of which can be seen in the discursive production of the North as “dangerous geographies”, an inhospitable terrain of death, disease, scarcity and violence, enabling both the erasure of landscape by war and its reconstitution after “peace”. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the influential role colonial and postcolonial rule have played in the co-production of space and ethnic identity, and Aihwa Ong’s theorization of “neoliberalism as exception” in Asian contexts, this essay explores the ways in which these novelists represent postcolonial space as an anomaly riven with contradictions between the fixity of territorial discourse and the dislocations of war and neoliberal forces.

Debating the Arctic during the Ukraine Crisis – comparing Arctic state identities and media discourses in Canada and Norway

Previous studies have argued that domestic factors, including each state’s Arctic state identities, may explain why some Western states (e.g. Canada) have been more critical of Russia in the Arctic than others (e.g. Norway). The present study analyses part of the link between Arctic state identities and foreign policy by showing that these identifications affected domestic media discourses about the Arctic in Canada and Norway during the first years (2014–2016) of the Crisis. Canada’s territorial identification made it difficult for the newly elected Trudeau government to push for a less assertive course vis-à-vis Russia. In Norway, the strong economic discourse coloured early debates about the crisis, but after the widening of economic sanctions against Russia in the summer of 2014, territorial discourses played a more important role. The article thus illustrates that Arctic state identities shape media debates, but that the identifications themselves can change. In general, the article advocates for a comparative approach towards the analysis of Arctic state identities.

Images and Imaginings of Palestine: Territory and Everyday Geopolitics for Palestinian Jordanians

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I delve into the complex ways in which Palestine is conceptualised as both a concrete and amorphous territory through an examination of the everyday practices of displaying images and imagining Palestine. Building from fieldwork conducted with Palestinian Jordanians, I analyse and contextualise images and maps of Palestine that they display in their homes and communities. I complicate what these images seem to represent with insights from interviews I conducted about how they spatially imagine Palestine. Throughout the paper I show that images and imaginings of Palestine are quite diverse and have various territorial meanings. Yet, as varied and seemingly different as these images and imaginings may be, they are nevertheless intimately linked through territorial discourses of displacement and rootedness, as well as through the everyday practices of remembering and resistance. Thus, I contribute to recent scholarship within geopolitics by highlighting (1) the value of examining images and imaginings of everyday geopolitics in tandem with one another, (2) the complex and fluid ways in which territory configures into everyday geopolitics, and (3) that amorphous notions of territory need to be integrated into work on territory more broadly.

Constructing Peripheral Cross-Border Regions in Planning: Territory—Network Interplay in the Barents Region

This paper studies how supranational regions are built through the interplay of borders and networks. The focus is on how territory and network become manifest in planning, and in particular on the actual contexts in planning where the territorial discourse is emphasized. Conceptually, territory–network interplay is linked to recent discussions on relational/territorial space, multidimensionality of sociospatial relations, and thin and thick region building. The Barents Euro-Arctic Region is used here as an example, and the region's recent geoeconomic turn is studied first. The paper concludes that, despite geoeconomization, network is not dominant over territory as a key category in supranational region building. Although the contemporary (new) regionalist planning discourse emphasizes the institutionalization of network-oriented regional (economic) spaces without definitive boundaries, processes such as representing the region in branding or (re)defining who is eligible to join the official structures of cross-border cooperation entail a degree of territorial thinking and make use of the notions of boundedness and spatial symmetry. In planning practices networks commonly create the territory effect and vice versa. However, due to their different ontologies, network and territory can appear as separate or even contradictory discourses as well.

Icons, Itinerary, and Identity: Associations of Boundary and Mobility within the Contemporary US Passport

Regulatory shifts in US border policy set in motion through implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative are concurrent with recent formal and functional changes to the US passport. This article examines these modifications interweaving themes of boundary, mobility, and identity. The study focuses on the tripartite means by which the state employs the passport: as the primary affixer of national identity; as a mediator of contact and mobility across national boundaries; and as a mode for the projection of a certain territorial discourse to its citizenry and ‘others.’ These concepts are developed through an analysis of the narrative and iconic representations contained within the new book itself; material sources from government archives; as well as discussions and interviews with US State Department functionaries closely associated with the design and distribution of the new e-passport. Through the latter examination, a view is afforded into the process by which key state documents are crafted and an inherent tension revealed within an agency charged with establishing a particular unifying ‘brand’ for the preeminent instrument of national identification, whilst dutifully acknowledging the diverse constituency of a nation that historically fashions itself as one constructed from the many. In conclusion, the study suggests that the new passport is the handiwork of a plethora of state actors and a servant of many masters, for it is not only a facilitator of mobility and a vouchsafe for the identity of the bearer, but also, a tiny but significant piece of US property, itself an agent of border maintenance and boundary construction that enables the state to lay claim to its citizenry.

The communicative dimension of landscape: A theoretical and applied proposal

The fusion of knowledge, the interrelationship of disciplines and, finally, the interaction of learning fields, provides new challenges for an auto denominated global society. The contemporary value of landscape, linked to the patent commodification of culture, the commercial construction of identities, the triumph of inauthenticity, of the induced representation or the economy of symbolism, open up great prospects for studying the symbolic value of landscape. The rapprochement of geographical praxis to the study of space intangibles, linked to the discovery of emotional geographies, besides the growing interest of communicational sciences on the territorial discourse, allow us to envisage a communicative study of landscape based on a fusion of geographical and communicational knowledge. The balancing of the variables: geography, landscape, emotion and communication, enables the progress towards analysing the emotionalisation of space to discern its intangible value, which emerges from the application of different communication techniques.

La dimensión comunicativa del paisaje: Una propuesta teórica y aplicada

The fusion of knowledge, the interrelationship of disciplines and, finally, the interaction of learning fields, provide new challenges for an auto denominated global society. The contemporary value of landscape, linked to the patent commodification of culture, the commercial construction of identities, the triumph of inauthenticity, of the induced representation or the economy of symbolism, open up great prospects for studying the symbolic value of landscape. The rapprochement of geographical praxis to the study of space intangibles, linked to the discovery of emotional geographies, besides the growing interest of communication a science for the territorial discourse, allow us to envisage a communicative study of landscape based on a fusion of geography and communicational knowledge. The balancing of the variables: geography, landscape, emotion and communication, enables to progress towards analysing the emotionalisation of space to discern its intangible value, which emerges from the application of different communication techniques

U dhashay—Ku dhashay: Genealogical and Territorial Discourse in Somali History

Genealogical reckoning has always been a prominent aspect of Somali social organisation long characterised as a ‘segmentary’ lineage-based political system. Beyond this ethnographic foundation there was also a widely-held view that the Somali nation—despite the inherent ‘republicanism’ of the segmentary system—did at least possess a distinctive and inclusive ‘national’ genealogy. However for a decade now—following the collapse of the unified state of Somalia—authors have been re-examining the basic assumptions of the Somali nation. True to the traditions of the segmentary system they describe, a younger generation of scholars has challenged their elders and these youthful revisionists have uncovered the ethnic and even ‘racial’ complexity of the Somali state and questioned the dominant national genealogical discourses. This article asks that the dominant genealogical framework of Somali studies be taken back to its local contexts, and that descent by lineage (or indeed race) should be seen as only one part of the repertoire of political legitimacy in Somalia.

Destabilizing the identity–territory nexus: Rights-based discourse in Sri Lanka’s new political geography

This paper describes the changing discourses of territory in Sri Lanka and their utility in conflict relations. The primordial homeland has been at the center of Sri Lanka’s armed struggle, in which both Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms have used claims of ancient and ethnically determined territories to justify their right to self-determination, territorial sovereignty, and armed struggle. This identity–territory nexus based on historical argument has been destabilized in Sri Lanka, however. Scholarly findings suggest that historical linkages between ethnicity and territory in Sri Lanka are highly problematic and are no longer effectual means for adjudicating territorial desires in Sri Lanka and producing stable homelands. I argue that rights-based territorial discourses have emerged to enhance the old historical justifications for territorial authority. New narratives based upon fulfilling or denying human rights have been put to work linking authority to territory based upon moral fitness and unfitness, political legitimacy and illegitimacy, and ultimately, upon which political actor deserves to rule the territorially bound population under its control. The first part of the paper examines historical narratives linking national homelands to identity as well as scholarly work that deconstructs this linkage. In part two, external sovereignty and political legitimacy are discussed as the starting point for understanding how rights-based discourses justify territorial claims. In part three, accusations related to human rights violations are described as an important vehicle for shaming political adversaries, undermining their legitimacy, and making and unmaking territorial claims in Sri Lanka.

‘Nature’, nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka

Ruhuna, or Yala as it is more commonly known, is Sri Lanka’s most famous national park, attracting hundreds of thousands of nature lovers annually. Included in the wealth of attractions that Ruhuna offers its visitors are transcendent landscape experiences amidst what is popularly considered to be its sacred and premodern ‘nature’. This paper traces the powerful connections between this popular poetics of landscape experience and the creation of racialized difference and political enmity, in the context of a modern nation-state that has only just seen the end of a fiercely contested civil war between a Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Tamil separatists. It suggests that movement through Ruhuna’s space variously fosters senses of belonging, attachment and exclusion in relation to Sri Lankan soil. The paper begins with the history of the reinscription of meaning in this former colonial game reserve. It then proceeds to show how the park’s contemporary and sacred meanings shape experiences in the present, mapping subjects’ bodies with historical, religious and territorial discourses that configure Tamils as ‘invaders’ and ‘interlopers’ in national space that has become Sinhalese and Buddhist by ‘nature’. Ruhuna emerges as a powerful tool whose Sinhala history and Buddhist ‘nature’ are not merely palimpsests of a primordial and premodern antiquity, but map and signify Sri Lanka’s exclusive topographies in the present.

International boundaries, geopolitics and the (post)modern territorial discourse: The functional fiction

International boundaries, geopolitics and the (post)modern territorial discourse: The functional fiction