Mark Howard
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

territory

/ˈterəˌtôrē/

noun

1. an area of land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state.
2. (especially in the US, Canada, or Australia) an organized division of a country that is not yet admitted to the full rights of a state.
3. an area of knowledge, activity, or experience  (Oxford English Dictionary).

Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are terms used to denote the fluidity of spatial, legal, and cultural forms. They illustrate how the strategic disruption of fixed territory (defined above), offers the opportunity to recreate territorial forms with new organizations of power. 

The term ‘territory’, implicit to any definition of deterritorialization and/or reterritorialization (hereafter de/reterritorialization), is essential to interpreting the latter terms’ conceptual meanings. De/reterritorialization, unlike the noun ‘territory’, denote processes that can be rendered in both noun and verb forms (i.e. de/territorialize); they are processes that put territory in motion. 

Furthermore, the definition above reveals at least three interrelated and important dimensions of ‘territory’—space, law, culture—that are illuminated by these processes. Thus de/reterritorialization are processes that can and should be described at spatial-physical, political-juridical, and cultural levels of analysis.

Beginning with the spatial-physical dimension, de/reterritorialization both presume prior territorialization. Extending the definition above gives us the processes of: 1) putting land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state, 2) administering the division of a country that has not been given the full rights of a state, and 3) acquiring and containing an area of knowledge, activity, or experience. There are two obvious processes by which territorialization has historically taken place. The first is through regimes of imperialism and state-formation. Physical regions, along with the populations inhabiting them, have been the subject of conquest and subsequent political administration going back to the earliest records of humankind. Jared Diamond (1998) argues that it is through these processes of forced acquisition that nomadic hunter-gatherer communities developed into sedentary agrarian societies, and eventually formed a prototype of the political unit we today refer to as the state. Such states, again from their earliest documented existence, proceeded with additional acts of territorial conquest giving rise to the most famous empires of history: Roman, Mongol, Han, Ottoman, British, and so on. But there is an argument to be had that territorialization continues today in the perhaps less physical (though nonetheless spatial) form of US-modeled liberal democratization (Hall 2015, 3), which has been relatively unimpeded since the end of the Cold War. This brings into view the relevance that capitalism and its cognate political-economic forces will have on our definitions of de/reterritorialization, and also leads us to the second process by which territorialization is presumed to have taken place: so-called primitive accumulation (cf. Marx 1990, Part Eight). This process, according to Marx and his subscribers, is nothing but the original separation of producers from the means of the production (Tomba 2009, 51). In the history of capitalism, one of the most famous instances of this was seen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century process of English ‘enclosure’: the legal reclassification of common lands into privately owned estates. As with imperial practices, however, such processes are not merely a relic of the past. Max Tomba (2009, 55) reminds us that primitive accumulation and large-scale industry are not bookends to a completed historical process, but are rather complicit with a machinery of state-violence that serves to regulate contemporary forms of capital accumulation. He goes on to argue that given capitalism’s continued dependency on such processes of accumulation (i.e. through labor discipline, knowledge enclosure, etc.) we may in fact speak of the permanence of primitive accumulation under capitalism.

Given these considerations, what then of de/reterritorialization? Deterritorialization is related to, but not synonymous with, globalization. For example, deterritorialization speaks to the diminution of border relevance, whereas globalization speaks more broadly to a process of growing integration among individual, social and political entities across the physical globe. Deterritorialization refers more specifically to a disaggregation—perhaps even displacement—of cultural beings (objects and subjects) from territorial locations. It also speaks to modes of capitalism in which corporations may choose to disaggregate their operations into multiple territories in order to pursue arbitrage opportunities arising from the benefits of, say, innovation in a liberal market economy (LME) such as the US on the one hand, and high-value-added manufacturing in a coordinated market economy (CME) such as Germany on the other (Hall 2015, 5). If deterritorialization speaks of dis-aggregation, then reterritorialization is the process of aggregating cultural beings in ways that both include and go beyond the traditional political forms we associate with international and global affairs. It is often also a process accompanying or following deterritorialization, which makes sense if we consider the opportunities available to economic actors limited by traditional political forms. These actors first deterritorialize to disaggregate the content of closed locations, and then reterritorialize into new  convenient, profitable, and typically postnational forms (Sparke 2005, 89). What de/reterritorialization both also speak to is a qualitative shift in economic relations whereby spatial-physical entities are reconstituted to suit the economic imperatives of capital mobility. Property, for instance, comes to be rendered in terms of rights (claims, privileges, immunities, etc.) rather than as things (Nichols 2018, 250). Thus, arguably, markets become the spatial dimension in de/reterritorialization, while the physical dimension is rendered subordinate and utilized in whatever form is most profitable. Markets become the coeval political economic actors to states under such processes (Hall 2015, 2), and given the prevailing understanding that democracy has no place in market processes (Teubner, 2017, 94) we are seemingly sent back to a kind of imperial imposition—or perhaps even, as some (Nichols, 264) have argued, a new form of enclosure.

Moving on to the political-juridical dimension of de/reterritorialization, it  would appear prudent to begin with political economy’s (seemingly) most definitive legal entity: the nation-state. Arjun Appadurai (as cited in Sparke 2005, 55-56) suggests that key disjunctures—delineated as ethno-scapes, media-scapes, techno-scapes, finance-scapes, and ideo-scapes—between economics, culture, and politics can no longer be contained within the traditional territories of the nation-state. However we cannot simply switch analysis from domestic to international law, for international law is itself superseded by processes of de/reterritorialization. What needs to come into view is, instead, a kind of transnational law that intersects public, private, domestic, and international legal systems (Beckers & Kawakami 2017, 13). Teubner (2017, 90-91) goes as far as to claim that given the transfer of power from public to private (i.e. corporate) organizations as a result of capitalist development, we may now speak of transnational organizations and the laws that they appeal to (e.g. corporate codes of behavior) as the real constitutional authority in global political economy. What is clear is that an autonomous legal system is evolving in-between the cracks; one that—through processes of de/reterritorialization—overdetermines, underdetermines, and even mis-determines existing orders of legal practice (cf. Beckers & Kawakami, 2017: 1). One illustrative way in which this has occurred is through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) arbitration system. For Shawn Nichols, the ISDS functions as the “political-juridical counterpart to disciplinary neoliberalism” (2018, 247). Circumventing domestic judicial systems, and superseding international legal institutions, the ISDS dispute mechanisms offer private arbitration in situations whereby a state’s domestic policies appear to adversely impact transnational investment interests in that state (244). Steeped in the neoliberal conviction that the market is superior to the state in political-economic matters, the ISDS regulates disputes between domestic public and transnational private parties with a bias towards free market enterprise (244). This reflects a relegation of democratic values, as the state’s ability to set policies according to the will of its electorate is vetoed by ISDS mechanisms giving preference to unelected political-economic actors. In one case, the Mexican government was found to be violating its ‘fair and equitable treatment obligation’ by applying a tax to beverages sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) while exempting Mexican cane sugar (262-263)—the problematic reality being that HFCS is associated with numerous health issues not applicable to cane sugar. The rights of the state (and its population) that are suspended in such cases points to the notion of rights articulated in definition 2) of ‘territory’ above, and therefore represents a case of de/reterritorialization to meet global capital interests.

Finally, we come to the cultural dimension of de/reterritorialization. For some, such as Arjun Appadurai, the cultural dimension is the primary dimension. It has already been noted that one way to define de/reterritorialization is as an entropic and negentropic movement of cultural objects (objects and subjects) in relation to locations in space and time. The most obvious way this happens is through population migration, which Hardt and Negri (2001) argue is a primary characteristic of the modern world with its smooth de/reterritorialized capital flows (an immanent whole they dub ‘Empire’). Of course, Marx (1990) defined labor as variable capital, suggesting that for capital to stay in motion, not only money and machinery must move across the globe, but human labor as well. Writing in 2000, Hardt and Negri were on the tidal wave of internet communications technology expansion, a factor that has to some extent negated the need to physically move variable capital (telecommuting technologies are today far more advanced than in 2000, and the cultural values of organizations are shifting towards an acceptance of remote labor through outsourcing, or contingent labor), however even then they were able to recognize the vast deterritorializing significance of changes to spaces of communication. This continuous circulation of signs, they argued, was tantamount to the dissolution of every sovereign relationship (Hardt & Negri 2001, 347), and while history has perhaps shown this claim to be hyperbolic, there is no doubting the cultural dispersion and reformation by revolutions in communications technology as applied to capitalist enterprise. Their underlying claim is that ‘Empire’ has eliminated any territorial center of power, and we might perhaps suggest that the US shift towards economic nationalism is a recoil against the early signs of such deterritorialization. But what is clear is that the smooth space of immaterial labor and communications flows is still subject to the bumpy realities of realpolitik and material state power, and to subsequent modes of material reterritorialization. For a world in flux, it seems hard to envisage a future that is not characterized by the unending oscillation of de/reterritorialization.

(See Empire, Enclave, Enclosure/Border, Geopolitics, Labor Migration, Neocolonialism)

Bibliography

Beckers, Anja, and Makoto T. Kawakami. “Why Domestic Enforcement of Private Regulation Is (Not) the Answer: Making and Questioning the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Codes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 1-13.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. Random House, 1998.

Hall, Peter A. “Varieties of Capitalism.” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-15.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics, 1990.

Nichols, Stephen. “Expanding Property Rights under Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS): Class Struggle in the Era of Transnational Capital.” Review of International Political Economy 25, no. 2 (2018): 243-269.

Sparke, Matthew. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Vol. 26. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Teubner, Gunther. “Corporate Codes in the Varieties of Capitalism: How Their Enforcement Depends on the Differences Among Production Regimes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 81-97.

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44-65.