Space

From a governance perspective, space is far from a natural, pregiven, purely external condition of social action. It comprises socially produced grids and horizons of social action that divide the material, social, and imaginary worlds into different places, areas, territories, and scales and also orient actions in terms of such divisions. Even the space-time coordinates of a given physical space can intersect with many spaces, places, and scales that have different identities, spatiotemporal boundaries, and social import. Cyberspace also poses complex governance issues. Such issues may even arise and have real-world consequences with regard to purely imaginary spaces and places, such as utopias, dystopias, heavens, and hells. In all cases, the material and symbolic delimitation of spaces, places, and scales and their social meanings is inherently contestable.

Overall, as a product of social practices that appropriate and transform physical and social phenomena and invest them with social significance, space can function as a site, object, and means of governance. Inherited spatial configurations and their opportunity structures are sites where governance may be established, contested, and modified. Space is an object of governance insofar as it results from the fixing, manipulating, and lifting of material, social and symbolic borders, boundaries, and frontiers. Space can be a means of governance when it defines horizons of action in terms of inside and outside and configures possible connections among actors, actions, and events inside and outside. Because boundaries contain and connect, they frame interactions selectively, privileging some identities and interests over others and they structure possible connections to other places and spaces across different scales. While such spatial divisions may generate fundamental antagonisms and more or less unrestrained conflict, they may also facilitate and require coordination across spaces, places, and scales through solidarity, hierarchy, networks, markets, or other governance mechanisms. Which mechanisms, if any, dominate and their relative success or failure vary with the primary forms of sociospatial organization, ranging from simple nomadic bands and segmentary societies through center-periphery relations to world society with its multiscalar functional differentiation and multiple bases of social fragmentation.

Space is constructed and governed at many scales, ranging from the corporeal to outer space. Individuals create their own personal space materially and socially, with intimacy and distance varying by locale, type of social relation, and capacities for surveillance-intrusion. External efforts also occur to govern bodies (including hearts and minds) and their interrelations in many ways. Thus, Michel Foucault analyzed the anatomo-political (individual) and bio-political (population-focused) practices of modern states and other disciplinary apparatuses. Other sites of spatial governance, involving enormous heterogeneity in objects, stakes, mechanisms, actors, and potential lines of conflict, include residential areas, markets, workplaces, schools, prisons, places of worship, (de-)militarized zones, public spaces, private and common land, the built environment, airspace and outer space, areas of outstanding natural beauty or special scientific interest, and so on. Even this incomplete list suggests that there is no “one best way” to govern time and space and that no actors are inherently privileged or powerful in this regard.

This said, modern states do claim special responsibilities for control over political territory as a crucial site, object, and means of governance. Statehood involves authoritative power that is collectively binding on those present in a given territory. The classic case is the modern Westphalian state system based on mutually exclusive, hierarchically organized, sovereign [Page 915]national states that coconstitute an essentially anarchic interstate system that is governed, if at all, quite differently from domestic relations within states. Besides the classic Westphalian international balance of power system, we find relations of dependency, suzerainty, and colonial domination. Earlier forms of the state include city-states, classic agrarian empires with complex center-periphery relations, the patchwork medieval state system, and absolutism. A recent innovation is the European Union, with its variable geometry and evolving multiscalar system of government, governance, and metagovernance. Many other novel forms of spatial governance, such as those concerned with cross-border regions, free ports and free enterprise zones, or international trade, investment, and service regimes, are also emerging in the postnational era, leading some to suggest the arrival of a neomedieval polity. This raises interesting questions about the relations among different spatial scales of governance.

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