Rethinking Territory

Abstract

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When Soft Spaces Harden: The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region

“…, 2002b, has persistently argued that regions should be analyzed as congealed, or at least partially stabilized products of processes of regionalization, which are always interventions in the world, and whereby the drawing up of boundaries, both tacit and explicit, and both internally and externally, effects of inclusion and exclusion are produced. As Painter (2010Painter ( : 1094 reflects regarding the related concept of territory, regions (and other spatial entities) can be seen as "porous, historical, mutable, uneven and perishable... a laborious work in progress, prone to failure and permeated by tension and contradiction... never complete, always becoming". Thus conceptualized, processes towards regionalization go on all the time at all sorts of geographical scale levels (see Painter, 2008;Paasi, 2002a;Paasi, 2002b) making it a distinctly trans-scalar concept 1 that more than anything highlights the manipulation of scale (Law, 1999) and the production of new scale units.…”

A postmodern mandala? Moving beyond methodological nationalism

“…Rather than a given, borders become an element of discourse, a performative space that contributes to creating the 'imagined community' of the nation and its attendant institutional structure, the state. As the unpredictable lifting and enforcement of the European Union's eastern borders to migrant flows in the summer of 2015 clearly demonstrate; 'delimitation, contiguity and coherence have to be constantly reproduced to sustain the effect of territory through time' (Painter 2010(Painter , 1105.…”

“…Geographers have long recognised this as a 'territorial trap' (Agnew 1994), however, and have been influential in developing more performative understandings of territoriality (Painter 2010). Anthropologists too are now imagining human (power) relations as 'tangles' (Ingold 2007) or 'knots' (Green 2014), in order to escape the limiting mental map of communities bound in what Benedict Anderson (1991) called homogenous, empty time (Horstmann and Wadley 2006).…”

Devolution and the Shifting Political Economic Geographies of the United Kingdom Introduction and Context

“…This in turn is crucially interlinked with the contestation of territories and of regions and regionalism. In part this is also demanding a refocus on territorial politics in the UKöthat we indeed`rethink territory'' (Painter, 2010).…”