Territory and territoriality: retrospect and prospect

The word ‘territory’ is commonly used to refer to an area of land claimed by a state, or to a ‘homeland’ associated with, or claimed by, a national grouping seeking self-determination. The word tends quite often to conjure up images of highly contested political spaces such as Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh or Northern Ireland. Although territory might be seen as a core geographical
concept, it is one that has tended to be taken for granted and treated in a somewhat descriptive sense until comparatively recently. Territoriality is normally seen as the actions or behaviours used to control or exert power over a geographically designated space. The pioneering work of Robert Sack (1986) drew attention to territoriality as a spatial expression of power. More recently, ideas of territory and territoriality have been interrogated in more depth (Delaney 2005; Storey 2012), a heightened attention further reflected in the launch of the journal Territory, Politics, Governance in 2013 and in edited volumes drawing together recent scholarship (Paasi et al. 2018)