The following paper was read in the First International Seminar of Social Spatial Studies:

Geopolitics, Power Spaces and Spaces Power (Primer seminario internacional de estudios

socioespaciales: geopolíticas, espacios de poder y poder de los espacios) which took place

by instance of the Regional Studies Institute of the University of Antioquia (Insituto de

Estudios Regionales de la Universidad de Antioquia) in Medellín, Colombia on September

13th and 14th. This colloquium, besides Agnew’s, also counted with the participation of

Heriberto Cairo Carou, Guillermo Gutiérrez, Hugo Achugar (although he couldn’t assist

due to health complications), Carmen Guerra, Félix de La Iglesia, Carlos Tapia, Carmen

Maganda, Santiago Castro, Emilio Piazzini, Claudia Puerta and Robert Dover.

Spatiality and Territoriality in Contemporary Social Science

John Agnew (UCLA)

In many languages the word territory typically refers to a unit of contiguous space that is

used, organized and managed by a social group, individual person or institution to restrict

and control access to people and places. Though sometimes the word is used as

synonymous with place or space, territory has never been a term as primordial or as generic

as they are in the canons of geographical terminology (Agnew 2005a). The dominant usage

has always been either political, in the sense of necessarily involving the power to limit

access to certain places or regions, or ethological, in the sense of the dominance exercised

over a space by a given species or an individual organism. Increasingly, territory is coupled

with the concept of network to help understand the complex processes through which space

is managed and controlled by powerful organizations. In this light, territory is only one type

of spatiality, or way in which space is used, rather than the one monopolizing its

employment. From this perspective, territoriality is the strategic use of territory to attain

organizational goals. It is only one way of organizing space.

In this paper I begin by exploring how territory and territoriality operate as modes

of spatiality, or conceptions of the uses of space in the social sciences. I then argue that

territory has become fatefully tied to the modern state, particularly in English-language

understandings. Finally, I suggest that two further modes of spatiality, spatial interaction

and place-making, provide analytically important ways of thinking about space and society

beyond the limitations imposed by a geographical imagination limited by a singularly

territorial conception of spatiality.

Spatiality

Territory is particularly associated with the spatiality of the modern state with its

claim to absolute control over a population within carefully defined external borders

(Buchanan and Moore, 2003, p. 6; Agnew 2005b). Indeed, until Sack (1986) extended the

understanding of human territoriality as a strategy to individuals and organizations in

general, usage of the term territory was largely confined to the spatial organization of

states. In the social sciences such as economics, sociology and political science this is still

mainly the case, such that the challenge posed to territory by network forms of organization

(associated with globalization) is invariably characterized in totalistic terms as ‘the end of

geography.’ This signifies the extent to which territory has become the dominant

geographical term (and imagination) in the social sciences (Badie, 1995). It is then closely

allied to state sovereignty and, sometimes, to an entirely nested, scale-based territorial

conception of space (from the local and the urban through the national to the global). Thus,

as sovereignty is seen to ‘erode’ or ‘unbundle,’ so it seems goes territory (Agnew 1994).

From this viewpoint territory takes on an epistemological monopoly that is understood as

absolutely fundamental to modernity. As such, it can then be given an extended meaning to

refer to any socially constructed geographical space, not just that resulting from statehood,

and can be used as equivalent to the term place in many languages including French,

Spanish and Italian (Scivoletto, 1983; Bonnemaison, 1996; Storper 1997). Especially

popular with some French-language geographers, this usage often reflects the need to adopt

a term to distinguish the particular and the local from the more general global or national

‘space.’ It then signifies the ‘bottom-tier’ spatial context for identity and cultural difference

more than a simple ‘top-down’ connection between state and territory but still within an

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encompassing territorialized conception of spatiality. In absolute counterpoint, some

proponents of a postmodern conception of space see that space as completely “flat” without

any sort of territorial division or hierarchies whatsoever (e.g. Marston et al. 2005) and thus

provide a totally opposite but equally singular view of spatiality, albeit this time of

localized sites in a networked spatial topology rather than of an absolute territorialized

space.

Territoriality in its broadest sense, then, is either the organization and exercise of

power, legitimate or otherwise, over blocs of space or the organization of people and things

into discrete areas through the use of boundaries. In studies of animal behavior spatial

division into territories is seen as an evolutionary principle, a way of fostering competition

so that those best matched to their territory will have more surviving offspring. With

human territoriality, however, spatial division is more typically thought of as a strategy

used by organizations and groups to manage social, economic and political activities. From

this viewpoint, space is partitioned into territorial cells or units that can be relatively

autonomous (as with the division of global space into territorial nation-states) or arranged

hierarchically from basic units in which work, administration, or surveillance is carried out

through intermediate levels at which managerial or supervisory functions are located to the

top-most level at which central control is concentrated. Alternative spatialities of political

and economic organization, particularly hierarchical networks (as in the world-city

network) or reticular networks (as with the Internet), can challenge or supplement the use

of territoriality.

At least four models of the spatiality of power can be identified. I draw here on the

work of the French geographers Marie-Françoise Durand, Denis Retaillé and Jacques Lévy

(e.g. Durand et al. 1992) who have used idealized models of economic and cultural patterns

and interaction to understand long-term shifts in world politics. Each of their models is

closely associated with sets of political-economic/technological conditions and associated

cultural understandings. The logic of the approach is that the dominant spatiality of power

will change as material conditions and associated modes of understanding of them change.

Such processes of change are not construed as entirely spontaneous. Rather, this approach

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to the historicity of spatiality implies that both material forces and intellectual perspectives

or representations interact in a dominant set of practices or hegemony to produce the

spatiality of power predominant within a given historical era. But each spatial model also

has a synchronic validity in the sense that political power in any epoch can never be totally

reduced to any one of them. In a sense equivalent to Karl Polanyi’s discussion of market

society in terms of the emergence of market exchange at the expense of reciprocity and

redistribution as principles of economic integration, as one model comes to predominate

others are not so much eclipsed as placed into subordinate or emerging roles. The models

offer, then, not only a way of historicizing political power but also of accounting for the

complexity of the spatiality of power during any particular historical epoch (Figure 1).

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(Figure 1)

In the model of an “ensemble of worlds,” human groups live in separate cultural

areas or civilizations with limited communication and interaction between them. Each area

in this model has a sense of a profound difference beyond its own boundaries without any

conception of the particular character of the others. Communal forms of social construction

take place within a territorial setting of permanent settlement with flows of migrants and

seasonal movements but with fuzzy exterior boundaries. Time is cyclical or seasonal with

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dynasties and seasons replacing one another in natural sequence. Political power is largely-

internally oriented and directed towards dynastic maintenance and internal order. Its

spatiality rests on a strongly physical conception of space as distance to be overcome or

circulation to be managed.

In contrast, is the geopolitical model of states in a “field of forces.” It revolves

around rigidly defined territorial units in which each state can gain power only at the

expense of others and each has total control over its own territory. It is akin to a field of

forces in mechanics in which the states exert force on one another and the outcome of the

mechanical contest depends on the populations and resources each can bring to bear.

Success also depends on creating blocs of allies or clients and identifying spatial points of

weakness and vulnerability in the situation of one’s adversaries. All of the attributes of

politics, such as rights, representation, legitimacy and citizenship, are restricted to the

territories of individual states. The presumption is that the realm of geopolitics is beyond

such concerns. Force and the potential use of force rule supreme beyond state boundaries.

Time is ordered on a rational global basis so the trains can run on time, workers can get to

work on time and military forces can coordinate their activities. The dominant spatiality,

therefore, is that of state-territoriality, in which political boundaries provide the containers

for the majority of social, economic and political activities. Political elites are state elites

and they mimic one another’s discourse and practices.

Third on the list of models is that of the “hierarchical network.” This is the spatial

structure of a world-economy in which cores, peripheries and semi-peripheries are linked

together by flows of goods, people and investment. Transactions based largely on market

exchange produce patterns of uneven development as flows move wealth through networks

of trade and communication producing regional concentrations of relative wealth and

poverty. At the local scale, particularly that of urban centers, hinterlands are drawn into

connection with a larger world which has become progressively more planetary in

geographical scope over the past five-hundred years. Political power is a function of where

in the hierarchy of sites from global centers to rural peripheries a place is located. Time is

organized by the geographical scope and temporal rhythm of financial and economic

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transactions. The spatiality is of spatial networks joining together a hierarchy of nodes and

areas which are connected by flows of people, goods, capital and information. Today, such

networks are particularly important in linking together the city-regions which constitute the

nodes around which the global economy is increasingly organized. In some circumstances,

networks can develop a reticular form in which there is no clear center or hierarchical

structure. This is the case, for example, with the networks implicit in some business

models, such as strategic alliances, in which partnership over space rather than

predominance between one node and the others prevails and, more notoriously, in some

global terrorist and criminal networks.

The fourth, and final, model is that of the “integrated world society.” This

conforms to the humanistic ideal of a world in which cultural community, political identity

and economic integration are all structured at a global scale. But it also reflects the

increased perception of common global problems (such as environmental ones) that do not

respect state borders, the futility of armed inter-state conflict in the presence of nuclear

weapons and the advantages of defense over offense in modern warfare, and the growth of

an international “public opinion.” This model privileges global scale communication based

on networks among multiple actors that are relatively unhierarchical or reticular and more

or less dense depending upon the volition of actors themselves. The sprout-like character

of these connections leads some to see them as (in a term popularized by Gilles Deleuze)

somewhat like the “rhizomes” of certain plants that spread by casting out shoots in multiple

but unpredictable directions. Time and space are both defined by the spontaneous and

reciprocal timing and spacing of human activities. Real and virtual spaces become

indistinguishable. This model obviously has a strong utopian element to it but does also

reflect some emergent properties of the more interconnected world that is presently in

construction.

In the contemporary world there is evidence for the effective co-presence of each of

these models with the former territorial models somewhat in eclipse and the latter network

models somewhat in resurgence after a one hundred-year period in which the field of forces

model was pre-eminent (if hardly exclusive). If the trend towards regional separatism

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within existing states portends a fragmentation that can reinforce the field of forces model

as new states emerge, then economic globalization and global cultural unification work to

reinforce the hierarchical network and integrated world society models. At the same time

movement towards political-economic unification (as in the European Union) and the

development of cultural movements with a strong territorial element (as with Islamic

integralist movements) tend to create pressures for the reassertion of an ensemble of

worlds. Historically, however, there has been a movement from one to another model as a

hegemonic or directing element. In this spirit I would propose a theoretical scheme

drawing from the work of Durand et al. in which, first of all, the “ensemble of worlds”

model slowly gave way to the “field of forces” model around 1500 AD as the European

state system came into existence (Figure 2).

Figure 2

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But since then the hegemonic influence of the different models has tended to vary

geographically, so that by the nineteenth century a balance-of-power hegemony between

territorial states was dominant in Europe. Imperial hegemonies, however, were uppermost

in much of the rest of the world save for the public goods hegemony exercised by Britain

through its roles as upholder of the gold standard and entrepôt in a multilateral trading

system that unified an emerging world economy. As this model was establishing its

dominance, the modern “hierarchical network” also began its rise in and around the

framework provided by the state system. Under European colonialism the part of the world

in which states recognized one another as legitimate actors (what is now often called the

Global North) was divorced from the regions in which such status was denied. With

Independence after the Second World War numerous new states, irrespective of their

relative political efficacy, spread to cover most of the world’s land area. But many of these

new states were either clients of the United States or the Soviet Union – within two sphere-

of -influence hegemonies – or located in violent zones of conflict between them. In the

field-of-forces, therefore, these were hardly equal forces. Since 1945 the hierarchical-

network model has become more and more central to the distribution of political power as a

result of the increased penetration of state territories by global trade, population and

investment flows under an increasingly unilateral US hegemony. This is now a truly

planetary hegemony – the first in history – both with respect to its potential geographical

scope and to the range of its functional influence, based on the tenets of marketplace

society, even as its primary agent, the United States, may itself become less central to it.

With the end of the Cold War, which had produced an important reinstatement of the field

of forces model among the most powerful states, the hierarchical network model is in the

ascendancy with signs of the beginning of a trend towards an “integrated world” society

model. But this is as yet very much in its infancy. This framework is, of course, only

suggestive of long-term tendencies. What it does provide is a sense of the historical

spatiality of political power, associated in different epochs with different dominant modes

of spatiality and the co-presence of others. Ideal-types are a way of thinking about the

world, not to be used as a substitute for its actual complexities at any moment in any place.

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Territoriality as a feature within these models can be judged theoretically as having

a number of different origins or sources. These would include the following: (1) as a result

of explicit territorial strategizing to devolve administrative functions but maintain central

control (Sack, 1986) ; (2) as a secondary result of resolving the dilemmas facing social

groups in delivering public goods (as in Michael Mann’s (1984) sociology of territory); (3)

as an expedient facilitating coordination between capitalists who are otherwise in

competition with one another (as in Marxist theories of the state); (4) as the focus of one

strategy among several of governmentality (as in Michel Foucault’s writings); and (5) as a

result of defining boundaries between social groups to identify and maintain group

cohesion (as in the writings of Georg Simmel (Lechner, 1991) and Fredrik Barth (1969),

and in more recent sociological theories of political identity (Agnew 2003)). Whatever its

social origins, territoriality is put into practice in a number of different if often

complementary ways: (1) by popular acceptance of classifications of space (e.g. ‘ours’

versus ‘yours’); (2) through communication of a sense of place (where territorial markers

and borders evoke meanings); and (3) by enforcing control over space (by barrier

construction, surveillance, policing, and judicial review).

Territory and Statehood

Unfortunately, the tendency to restrict spatiality to territoriality and to associate

territoriality only with statehood is not only profoundly mistaken but also widespread. It is

worth reflecting a little on how this has happened. The territorial state is a highly specific

historical entity. It initially arose in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. Since that time, political power has come to be seen as inherently territorial

because statehood is seen as inherently territorial. From this viewpoint, politics thus take

place only within ‘the institutions and the spatial envelope of the state as the exclusive

governor of a definite territory. We also identify political territory with social space,

perceiving countries as “state-societies”’ (Hirst, 2005, p. 27). The process of state

formation has always had two crucial attributes. One is exclusivity. All of the political

entities (the Roman Catholic Church, city-states, etc.) that could not achieve a reasonable

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semblance of sovereignty over a contiguous territory have been delegitimized as major

political actors. The second is mutual recognition. The power of states has rested to a

considerable extent on the recognition each state receives from the others by means of non-

interference in their so-called internal affairs. Together these attributes have created a

world in which there can be no territory without a state and vice versa. In this way,

territory has come to underpin both nationalism and representative democracy, both of

which depend critically on restricting political membership by homeland and address,

respectively.

More abstractly, in modern political theory control over a relatively modest territory

has long been seen as the primary solution to the ‘security dilemma:’ to offer protection to

populations from the threats of anarchy (disorder), on the one hand, and hierarchy (distant

rule and subordination), on the other. A major problem has been to define what is meant by

‘modest’ size. To Montesquieu (1949, p. 122), the Enlightenment philosopher, different

size territories inevitably have different political forms: ‘It is, therefore, the natural property

of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch,

and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince.’ Early modern Europe offered

propitious circumstances for the emergence of a fragmented political system primarily

because of its topographical divisions. Montesquieu (1949, pp. 151-62) further notes,

however, that popular representation allows for the territorial extension of republican

government. The founders of the United States added to this by trying to balance between

centralizing certain security functions, on one side, and retaining local controls over many

other functions, on the other (Deudney, 2004). The recent history of the European Union

can be thought of in similar terms (Milward, 2005).

Beyond Spatiality as Territoriality

a) Spatial Interaction

Human activities in the world, however, have never conformed entirely to spaces

defined by proximity as provided by state territory. In this context, I wish to make two

related points. First of all, and increasingly, as physical distance proves less of a barrier to

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movement because of technological change and the removal of territorially-based

regulative barriers to trade and investment, spatial interaction between separated nodes

across networks is an increasingly important mechanism of geographical sorting and

differentiation (Durand et al., 1992). Sometimes posed today in terms of a world of flows

versus a world of territories, this is perhaps better thought of in terms of territories and/or

networks of flows rather than one versus the other, against the claims of both territorialism

and “flat ontology.” Territories and networks exist relationally rather then mutually

exclusively. If territorial regulation is all about tying flows to places, territories have never

been zero-sum entities in which the sharing of power or the existence of external linkages

totally undermines their capacity to regulate territorially. If at one time territorial states did

severely limit the local powers of trans-territorial agencies, that this is no longer the case

does not signify that the states have lost all of their powers: ‘Territory still matters. States

remain the most effective governors of populations. … The powers to exclude, to tax, and

to define political rights are those over which states acquired a monopoly in the seventeenth

century. They remain the essentials of state power and explain why state sovereignty

survives today and why it is indispensable to the international order’ (Hirst, 2005, p. 45).

Nevertheless, notwithstanding a certain ambiguity inherent in the terms, in a world in

which evidence for both reinforced territorialization (e.g. the Israel-Palestine Separation

Barrier) and de-/re-territorialization (e.g. the European Union Schengen passport zone) is

not hard to come by, their usage suggests a dynamism to the forms of territories and

territorialities and a challenge from other spatialities of power that some have been all too

willing to deny.

In a 2005 article on sovereignty and territory I have developed this argument at

some length (Agnew 2005b). I start from the proposition that modern political theory tends

to understand geography entirely as territorial: the world is divided up into contiguous

spatial units with the territorial state as the basic building block from which other territorial

units (such as alliances, spheres of influence, empires, etc.) derive or develop. This is the

reason why much of the speculation about “the decline of the state” or “sovereignty at bay”

is posed as the “end of geography.” Yet, the historical record suggests that there is no

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necessity for polities to be organized territorially. As Hendrik Spruyt (1994, 34) claims, “If

politics is about rule, the modern state is verily unique, for it claims sovereignty and

territoriality. It is sovereign in that it claims final authority and recognizes no higher source

of jurisdiction. It is territorial in that rule is defined as exclusive authority over a fixed

territorial space. The criterion for determining where claims to sovereign jurisdiction begin

or end is thus a purely geographic one. Mutually recognized borders delimit spheres of

jurisdiction.”

Territoriality, the use of territory for political, social, and economic ends, is in fact,

as I mentioned previously, a strategy that has developed more in some historical contexts

than in others. Thus, the territorial state as it is known to contemporary political theory

developed initially in early modern Europe with the retreat of non-territorial dynastic

systems of rule and the transfer of sovereignty from the personhood of monarchs to discrete

national populations. That modern state sovereignty as usually construed did not occur

overnight following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is now well established.

Territorialization of political authority was further enhanced by the development of

mercantilist economies and, later, by an industrial capitalism that emphasized capturing

powerful contiguous positive externalities from exponential distance-decay declines in

transportation costs and from the clustering of external economies (material mixes, social

relations, labor pools, etc.) within national-state boundaries.

Absent such conditions, sovereignty–in the sense of the socially constructed

practices of political authority--may be exercised non-territorially or in scattered pockets

connected by flows across space-spanning networks. From this viewpoint, sovereignty can

be practiced in networks across space with distributed nodes in places that are either

hierarchically arranged or reticular (without a central or directing node). In the former case,

authority is centralized, whereas in the latter, it is essentially shared across the network. All

forms of polity–from hunter-gatherer tribes through nomadic kinship structures to city-

states, territorial states, spheres of influence, alliances, trade pacts, seaborne empires--

therefore, occupy some sort of space. What is clear, however, if not widely recognized

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within contemporary debates about state sovereignty, is that political authority is not

necessarily predicated on and defined by strict and fixed territorial boundaries.

Two issues are crucial here: that political authority is not restricted to states, and

that such authority is thereby not necessarily exclusively territorial. Authority is the

legitimate exercise of power. The foundation and attribution of legitimacy to different

entities has changed historically. By way of example, the legitimacy of rule by monarchs in

the medieval European order had a different meaning from that of later absolutist rulers and

that operating under more recent democratic justifications for state power. In no case,

however, has the authority of the state ever been complete. There have always been

competing sources of authority, from the church in the medieval context to international

organizations, social movements, businesses, and NGOs today. More specifically,

transparency, efficiency, expertise, accountability, and popularity are as much foundations

of legitimacy as are nationality and democratic process. Thus, even ostensibly private

entities and supranational governments are often accorded as great or even greater authority

than are states. Think, for example, of credit rating agencies, charitable organizations such

as Human Rights Watch and the European Union. Using two countries as examples, within

the United States there is widespread popular suspicion of the efficiency and accountability

of the federal government, not just since the military debacle in Iraq and the pathetic

response to Hurricane Katrina. This often leads to perhaps excessive faith in the virtue of

privatization through corporate networks of what are elsewhere seen as “public” services

such as health care. In Italy, much of the popular enthusiasm for the European Union is

driven by the hope that Brussels will increasingly supplant Rome as the seat of power most

effective in relation to people’s everyday lives not so much territorially as in relation to the

functional effects in particular places of European-wide initiatives.

b) Place-Making

My second point about needing to diminish the overall emphasis on territoriality as

if it referred to spatiality tout court involves a rather different focus. This is the

significance of the human experience of space reflected at least in English language usage

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of the word ‘place.’ In this perspective, space is bracketed, or put to one side, because its

“abstractness discourages experiential explorations” (Casey 2001, 683). In his

philosophical rehabilitation of place, Edward Casey (1997, x) notes how “place has been

assimilated to space. … As a result, place came to be considered a mere ‘modification’ of

space (in Locke’s revealing term) - a modification that aptly can be called ‘site,’ that is,

leveled-down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises” (author’s

emphasis). Casey’s goal is to argue for the crucial importance of place in much thinking

about community and the public sphere, even though the connections are often not made

explicit by the thinkers in question. He wants to make place different from site and space,

even though he acknowledges Michel Foucault’s point that the modern world is largely one

of Leibnizian sites and relations rather than Newtonian absolute spaces (Casey 1997, 298-

300). In rethinking space as place, his primary interest lies in phenomenologically or

experientially linking places to human selves (also see Entrikin 1991; 2001). The central

issue is that of “being in place differently” (Casey 1997, 337) conditioning the various

dimensions of selfhood, from the bodily to the psychological, institutional, and

architectural. So, though the “shape” of place has changed historically, it is now no mere

container but, rather, a taking place, its rediscovery and naming as such is long overdue.

Thus: “Despite the seduction of endless space (and the allure of serial time), place is

beginning to escape from its entombment in the cultural and philosophical underworld of

the modern West” (Casey 1997, 339).

Symptomatic of the conceptual separation of space and place are the three dominant

meanings that geographical place has acquired in writing that invokes either space or place

(Agnew 1987, 1989; 1993). Each meaning tends to assimilate place to one or the other end

of a continuum running from nomothetic (generalized) space at one end to idiographic

(particularistic) place at the other. The first is place as location or a site in space where an

activity or object is located and which relates to other sites or locations because of

interaction and movement between them. A city or other settlement is often thought of this

way. Somewhere in between, and second, is the view of place as locale or setting where

everyday-life activities take place. Here the location is no mere address but the where of

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social life and environmental transformation. Examples would be such settings from

everyday life as workplaces, homes, shopping malls, churches, etc. The third is place as

sense of place or identification with a place as a unique community, landscape, and moral

order. In this construction, every place is particular and, thus, singular. A strong sense of

“belonging” to a place, either consciously or as shown through everyday behavior such as

participating in place-related affairs, would be indicative of “sense of place.”

Attempts at putting space and place together must necessarily try to bring at least

two of these various meanings of geographical place together. Currently, there are four

main ways in the Anglo-American and French literature in which this task has been

approached: the humanist or agency-based (e.g. Sack 1997), the neo-Marxist (e.g. Lefebvre

1991), the feminist (e.g. Massey 1994), and the contextualist-performative (e.g. Thrift

1999). Each of these rejects the either/or logic in relation to space and place that has

characterized most geographic and social thought from the seventeenth century to the

present (Agnew 2005a). For the first, and one with which I am most in sympathy, the focus

lies in relating location and locale to sense of place through the experiences of human

beings as agents. In one of the most sophisticated statements of this perspective, Robert

Sack (1997, 58) provides the essential thrust when he writes that his “framework draws on

the geographical experiences of place, space, home, and world which people use in their

lives to integrate forces, perspectives, and selves.” From this point of view:

Place implies space, and each home is a place in space. Space is a property of the natural world,

but it can be experienced. From the perspective of experience, place differs from space in terms of

familiarity and time. A place requires human agency, is something that may take time to know, and

a home especially so. As we move along the earth we pass from one place to another. But if we

move quickly the places blur; we lose track of their qualities, and they may coalesce into the sense

that we are moving through space. This can happen even in my own home. If I am hardly there and

do not attend to its contents, it may seem unfamiliar to me, more like a part of space than a place

(Sack 1997, 16).

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In this frame of reference, cultural differences, for example, emerge because of place-based

experiences and human agency but also because places are never separate but always part

of larger sets of places across which differences are more or less pronounced depending on

the permeability of boundaries between places as people experience them. Places are

woven together through space by movement and the network ties that produce places as

changing constellations of human commitments, capacities, and strategies. Places are

invariably parts of spaces and spaces provide the resources and the frames of reference in

which places are made.

In a recent research project on Italian electoral politics since the late 1980s, I and

my colleague Michael Shin (2008) have made the case for contexts of “place and time” in

accounting for what has transpired nationally in terms of the rise and fall of the various

political groupings. We argue that these are are not best thought of as invariably regional,

local, or national although they frequently have elements of one, several, or all. Rather,

they are best considered as always located somewhere, with some contexts more stretched

over space (such as means of mass communication and the spatial division of labor) and

others more localized (school, workplace, and residential interactions). The balance of

influence on political choices between and among the stretched and more local contextual

processes can be expected to change over time, giving rise to subsequent shifts in political

outlooks and affiliations. So, for example, as foreign companies introduce branch plants,

trade unions must negotiate new work practices, which, in turn, erode long-accepted views

of the roles of managers and employees. In due course, this configuration of contextual

changes can give an opening to a new political party or a redefined old one that upsets

established political affiliations. But changes must always fit into existing cultural

templates that often show amazing resilience as well as adaptation. Doreen Massey (1999,

22) puts the overall point the best when she writes: “This is a notion of place where

specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives not from some mythical internal

roots nor from a history of isolation – now to be disrupted by globalization – but precisely

from the absolute particularity of the mixture of influences found together there.”

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We have used the term place, therefore, to capture the mediating role of such

geographically located milieux. What we mean by this word are the settings in which

people find themselves on a regular basis in their daily lives where many contexts come

together and with which they may identify. Or, as I have made the point previously

(Agnew, 2002: 21): “places are the cultural settings where localized and geographically

wide-ranging socioeconomic processes that condition actions of one sort or another are

jointly mediated. Although there must be places, therefore, there need not be this particular

place.” So, if, in this case, individual persons are in the end the agents of politics, their

agency and the particular forms it takes flow from the social stimuli, political imaginations,

and yardsticks of judgment they acquire in the ever-evolving social webs in which they are

necessarily enmeshed and which intersect across space in particular places. Mair (2006,

44) suggests that as party affiliations have weakened over the past thirty years in most

European countries, voting behavior is “increasingly contingent.” From our perspective,

this means that geographical patterns of turnout and affiliation will become more unstable

even as they often still respond to place-based if evolving norms of participation and

differing relative attraction to the offerings of different parties. Maps of the results from the

proportional representation parts of the 2001 and 2006 elections to the Italian Chamber of

Deputies show something of this geographical dynamic (Figure 3).

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Figure 3

Conclusion

Clearly, there are important cultural and historical dimensions to both practices and

theories of spatiality and territoriality. Churches and polities (states, empires, federations,

etc.) have been the most important users of territoriality. Some churches (such as the

Roman Catholic Church) and some states (such as the United States) have more complex

and formally hierarchical territorialities than do others. Today, transnational and global

businesses erect territorial hierarchies that cut across existing political ones. So, even as

some uses of territoriality attenuate or even fade away, others emerge. Though varying in

precise form and complexity, therefore, territoriality seems always to be with us as an

important strategy for organizing human activities even as it must be considered alongside

other types of spatiality, such as interaction across space and place-making, that both direct

19

and give agency to human social existence. But as the modes of analysis and empirical

examples from my recent publications I have introduced today suggest, we must reject the

confusion of territoriality with spatiality, or how space is defined and used socially, and be

much clearer in our use of spatial terminology such as territory, space and place.

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