Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500

"I think, rather than an introduction to the tension, I would characterise this book as more of a questioning of the self-evident novelty of that tension—which isn’t to deny that the tension exists, but it is to ask how new that tension really is. Maier is a historian. And, what he’s doing here is trying to trace over 500 years of thought and practice around the role of territory and what it means to think territorially—and how this has shaped the global political map. Territory, he argues—and political geographers would agree—isn’t just land. It’s a global space that has been partitioned for the sake of political authority. So, we can assume, then, that as ideas of political authority shift, as ideas of what sovereignty means shift, for example, so too may ideas about territory. Just like we can study how ideas of authority have changed, we can also study how ideas and practices of territory have changed. “Territory isn’t just land. It’s a global space that has been partitioned for the sake of political authority” This is important to do, because, as with many things that structure our daily lives, we often see territorial division into sovereign states, for example, as natural and permanent, something that has just always been there. So, when we see mounting challenges to that sense of territorial stability and control, this tends to lead to a very real sense of crisis or unease that I think we see in a lot of discourse around globalisation and the relationship between globalisation and the state. Maier claims, importantly, though, that we can understand territory in terms of decision and identity. So, territory as a decision space and as an identity space. A decision space in the sense that turning land into territory establishes spatial boundaries or limits of legislation and decision-making. And, identity space, in the sense that we often endow territory with certain attributes that evoke collective loyalties. What’s interesting is that there aren’t many places and times, it turns out, in the last 500 years that Maier examines, where and when people have understood their decision space and their identity space to be congruent with each other. It’s actually been much more common that the two diverge from each other, there’s a mismatch between the two. The space and time where they’ve tended to converge or be congruent with each other has been in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century in the West. So, this mismatch between decision space and identity space is being felt by more people in the West today than historically. And, I think this might be what is leading to ideas of the novelty of this mismatch—this tension between globalisation and the sovereign state. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But, there are a number of other interesting things in the book that I think would be interesting to people who are interested in how the state might be changing under globalisation. There’s a discussion of cartography, or map making, and how the practice of depicting territorial control and the ways that territorial control is depicted helped shift understanding of frontiers and borders away from a more fluid, temporary thing—the early imperial boundaries, which weren’t designed to halt expansion—to the more fixed, static dividing lines we normally think of when we think of borders now. There’s also a really interesting discussion of how the Industrial Revolution gave to the developing modern state the ability to exercise control in real time, over large expanses of territory that, up until that point, had exercised only nominal control. Developments like the railroad or the telegraph or steamships helped create the modern state as we know it. I think these sorts of technological shifts are really important to think about in light of contemporary developments, like artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision making, remote warfare capabilities, shifting how territorial control is exercised where, by whom, and upon whom. I think that each of the five books is formed by the same desire that animates my own work: to re-examine ideas or issues that we take for granted; to draw on resources that might not seem to be the most obvious ones; to try to foreground the experiences or voices of marginalised groups. In my own work, this has taken the form of questioning what problem it is when we talk about ‘the refugee problem,’ and exploring how different ways of understanding a problem will make different kinds of solutions seem feasible or infeasible, logical or illogical, or workable or unworkable. And, trying to think through what migrant-centred, rather than state-centred, solutions might look like. In the work I’m doing at the moment, I’m exploring the ethical challenges posed to liberal democracies by the development and proliferation of digital border control technologies: the data gathering and sharing, algorithmic decision-making, and artificial intelligence that they rely upon, from the perspective of the kinds of harms that these technologies do to those who are subjected to them. I think good scholars remain open to different ideas and different ways of thinking. And that’s what I think these recommended reads encourage you to do. That’s a hard question. I think, I would say, if you’re going to read any of the books that I recommended: be prepared for your questions to proliferate at a greater rate than answers to them. And: beware of anyone peddling a simple solution to a particular problem, especially if it’s a global political problem. Things are always going to be more complicated than you think. But, I would say embrace the complexity, don’t run from it."