Beyond the Territorial Trap?: The Geographic Interrogation of Sovereignty

Abstract

Sovereignty is now a key concept in geographic scholarship. However, sustained geographic investigation of sovereignty commenced only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Cold War order. Early, important contributions to the interrogation of sovereignty were historical, providing rigor in understanding the dialectical relationship between space and politics in the development of the state system. By the close of the twentieth century, however, historical complementarity in important geographic tracts on sovereignty, conditioned by new geopolitics of post-communism, gave way to diverging prognostications among academic geographers on the contemporary and future nature and salience of state sovereignty.

Keywords

• sovereignty
• geographic thought
• nation-state system
• territory