Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

Deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes are spatial manifestations of contemporary changes under way in the relationship between social life and its territorial moorings. The two terms were originally employed in the 1970s in the work of French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who are often associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism. Using insights from philosophy and psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari developed a sophisticated understanding of capitalism, power, and identity, [Page 723]which are locked in a fluid process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization of social structures and processes. These terms have subsequently been adopted by the social sciences and humanities, that is, geography, anthropology, international relations, linguistics, and others.

Deterritorialization has often been associated with globalization. The bonds that tied economics, politics, and culture to fixed spatial configurations such as national territories are loosened under globalization pressures. Globalization flows, suggesting mobility, are perceived as replacing the space of places, suggesting territorial fixity. In a broader interpretation, deterritorialization processes indicate a decrease in the significance of territory for social life, which is thus an unraveling of territoriality as it has been constructed during the modern era. It appears that a primarily networked organization of spatial power is replacing a primarily territorial organization of spatial power. Specifically, deterritorialization processes take aim at the global system of sovereign nation-states and their boundaries that has dominated the territorial organization of power during the modern era. Nation-states are devolving powers on two main geographical scales: upward to the supranational bodies such as the European Union, NAFTA, and the International Monetary Fund; and downward to subnational institutions such as regional governments, local councils, and development agencies. These developments are unseating the traditional role of the nation-state as the territorial container of social relations and opening up novel possibilities for the spatial organization of social relations.

From a political economy perspective, deterritorialization processes are understood in terms of the spatial dimensions of successive rounds of capital accumulation. If the previous strategies of capital accumulation largely took place at the scale of the national markets, the current ones favor global markets. Financial markets, in particular, are among the most dynamic global markets. Financial flows circle the globe at unprecedented speeds via digital telecommunications networks, unsettling national control over the economy and making national boundaries appear archaic. Manufacturing is outsourcing jobs from the developed to the developing economies as part of a strategy to compete in global scale markets. At the same time, numerous firms have adopted truly global production models that involve an integrated network of places.

Geopolitically, with the end of the Cold War the world political map has registered dramatic developments that have dismantled the geography of power that once appeared unshakable. Sovereign states have fragmented, while new ones have appeared on the map. The lines between the domestic and the foreign spheres of politics have blurred as national governments face increasing difficulties in managing crisis situations that often acquire transnational dimensions.

Cultural and social issues are increasingly playing out in the global arena rather than simply within nation-state borders. Globalization-induced migration flows and information technologies have created transnational networks of diasporic communities and have reinvigorated local and regional identities that are now enacted globally. Numerous governmental social policies and executive functions have been privatized, indicating a spatial shift from hierarchical government to networked governance.

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