State‐Space beyond Territory: Wormholes, Gravitational Fields, and Entanglement

Abstract

Neo-Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that 'territory' is not a pre-existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non-territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics -wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement -as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state-space. ***** In one sense, historical sociology has long conceptualized the emergence and consolidation of the modern state in terms that are profoundly, and quite explicitly, spatial. Weber's (1991) classic definition, after all, emphasizes that the state must claim its monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory. This identification of state and territory was subsequently taken up by numerous historical sociologists and comparative political scientists of the second wave (Evans et al. 1985;Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1975b), who found in Weber's writings the basis of a more adequate framework for understanding statesociety relations than that adopted by either their neo-Marxist or liberal pluralist contemporaries. In positing the state to be a territorially organised body of institutions that had the potential for autonomy from society, neo-Weberians established a conceptual agenda that to this day continues to inform the study of state formation in comparative-historical political science and sociology.The well-established military-fiscal model of state formation elaborated by second-wave historical sociologists -and enthusiastically adopted by historically minded political scientists (Vu 2010) -has accorded territory a critical importance in its accounts of the making of modern states. In neo-Weberian studies of the intra-state dynamics of military competition in Europe inspired by the early work of Tilly (1975bTilly ( , 1985Tilly ( , 1992 e.g. Downing 1992;Ertman 1997;Rasler and Thompson 1989), warfare is held to explain the emergence of modern states as mutually exclusive, sovereign spatial units from a complex morass of overlapping and interwoven medieval jurisdictions The acquisition of territories through embattled expansion is here a principal rather than peripheral factor in state formation: the state emerges as both cause and effect of struggles in, for, and over territory. Scholars such as Mann (1984; 2012a; 2012b) and Giddens (1987), moreover, who focus on the domestic sources of state power, explore how state autonomy derives from its powers of internal pacification, infrastructural penetration, and bureaucratic regulation. They similarly highlight that the most crucial factor in generating infrastructural power is the state's unique ability to organize, order, and control the terr...

The rise of linear borders in world politics

“…The role of state territoriality or ‘state space’ as a container of power and social relations is historically particular (Agnew and Corbridge, 1995; Taylor, 1994). The territorial trap provides a set of spatial assumptions at the foundations of both policies and theories that naturalizes states’ control over territory and makes non-territorial spaces difficult to imagine (Adamson, 2016; Neep, 2017; Shah, 2012).…”