Territory

Three Key Functions of Territory

There are three dominant ways of understanding territory:

• 1.
  It refers to the natural habitat of a group of people or animals. In zoology, it refers to an area occupied by an animal or a group of animals, which they defend against others of their own kind.
• 2.
  It represents a social space that is constituted as a result of the behavior of a group of people, for example, when the supporters of one football team occupy a part of a section of a stadium, they create an area designated for them, where supporters of the other team are not welcome.
• 3.
  It denotes an area over which a polity claims dominion. This could be the area surrounding a city-state in early modern Italy or a modern state territory as that of contemporary France. In international law, territory plays an essential role in defining nation-states as legal members of the international community.

Common to these three understandings is the creation of a space from where something, or somebody, else is potentially excluded.

Thing Versus Process

It is impossible to understand territory without a reference to land; however, the physical character of territory is often overestimated. While territory is constituted through the demarcation of a physical space, it is the delimitation and character of this space that give territory its characteristics. The existence of boundaries is never a natural phenomenon; even if mountain ranges or seas can make it impractical for people to move across them, boundaries are always a relational, and hence socially created, phenomenon. One should be careful, therefore, about treating territory simply as a physical object. Rather, territory should be understood in terms of the social relations that produce territory and are affected by territory. For example, it was the development of cartography that provided the spatial knowledge necessary for states to precisely define and agree on the boundaries vis-à-vis each other. This change, in turn, facilitated the development of distinct territorial societies. Without these developments in geographic knowledge and technologies, territory is unlikely to have played the central role that it plays in current affairs. Therefore, to understand what territory is, and how territory is created, we need to look at the historical social processes involved. Such processes are usually described as territoriality or territorial behavior.

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