Deterritorialization of the world as a challenge for contemporary political geography

Human societies have traditionally had clear territorial foundations. People knew and interacted with others within their community and, to a lesser extent, with people from neighbouring communities. Geography and distance mattered. Globalization, however, has led to the rise of “supraterritoriality” or deterritorialization, through which the constraints traditionally imposed by geography and distance have been substantially overcome. Some authors have associated contemporary globalization with a tendency towards deterritorialization, so that social space can no longer be wholly mapped in terms of territorial places, territorial distances and territorial borders. Deterritorialisation is a name given to the problematic of territory losing its significance and power in everyday life. Territory, the concept suggest, is no longer the stable and unquestioned actuality it one was. Rather than it being an assumed given, its position and status now in question. Term deterritorialisation is one among many other - globalization, glocalisation, postcolonial, postnational, transnational, cyberspace - that have been coined to try to describe the rearranging and restructuring of spatial relations as a consequence of the technological, material and geopolitical transformation of the late twentieth century. For political geographers interested in conceptualizing the changing world political map, discourses of deterritarialization are significant as sings and symtoms of geopolitical change.

Tomasz Wiskulski