Geographizität des Rechts – ein <i>missing link</i> in der geographischen Theoriebildung?

Abstract

Abstract. Law is on the one hand indispensable for the constitution of space, and, on the other, legal orders emerge or develop in specific local situations. Does the question of the law exist in geographical theories and how has it been received? The article raises the issue of a missing link in geographical theorisation: Are the legal dimensions of social spatialities sufficiently considered? This text aims at enriching geographical theory formation through legal dimensions, especially by translating legal studies’ contributions into geographical questions who experience a specific spatial turn. On the one hand, the concept “geographicity of Law” is being developed for this purpose. On the other hand, two examples will be used to illustrate how geographical theory can benefit from legal dimensions: the right to public space and the issue of urbanness.

Geographies of nationalism

“…Indeed, the rapid growth of xenophobic and animosityfueled nationalist storylines, espoused by far-right politicians and populist leaders across the world since the mid-2010s has sparked new interest among scholars, who suddenly became anxious about the perceived threat of these forms of nationalism to the cosmopolitan worldview that they once took for granted. This newer scholarship on the geography of "exclusionary nationalisms" or "ethno-nationalism," aims to show how hate-based and exclusionary scripts of nationalism work to territorialize a community within an imagined "pure" (or "purified") homeland (e.g., Avni, 2021;Anderson and Secor, 2022;Bescherer and Reichle, 2022;Bosworth, 2022;Chatterjee, 2021;Conversi, 2020a;Cunningham, 2020;Dahlman, 2022;Decker et al 2022;Dempsey, 2022aDempsey, , 2022bDevadoss and Culcasi, 2020;Dossa, 2021;Flint, 2004;Getzoff, 2020;Goalwin, 2017;Goonewardena, 2020;Hart, 2020a;Khan, 2022;Koch and Vora, 2020;Kolstø and Blakkisrud, 2016;Luger, 2022;Mulej, 2022;Mullis and Miggelbrink, 2022;Nagel and Grove, 2021;Shoshan, 2016;Singh, 2022;Stock, 2020;Wondreys and Mudde, 2022;Yiftachel and Rokem, 2021).…”

“…Nationalism is an inherently affective phenomenon because it is tied to the experience of community, of “what Max Weber called a Zusammengehorigkeitsgefuhl , a feeling of belonging together” (Brubaker, 2004: 46). As geographers have long shown, nationalism is a spatial expression community because it “is fundamentally an ideology and political action program designed to convert land into national territory” and is thus “a mode of constructing and interpreting social space” (Kaiser, 2002: 231; see also Anderson, 1988; Herb and Kaplan, 1999; Hooson, 1994; Kaplan, 2018; Kaplan and Herb, 2011; Knight, 1982; Mayer, 2000; Murphy, 1990; Storey, 2001; Williams and Smith, 1983).…”