Territoriality and Political Violence

Territorial aspects of conflict are an important focus of much of the research on civil war, political violence and ethnic conflict and there is widespread agreement that territory is a crucial dimension of violent conflict. Despite this political violence research is seldom underpinned by an explicit theorization of territory and territoriality. Much of the work on political violence works with conceptions of territory that remain implicit and does not involve sustained theoretical engagement with the relationship between territoriality, violence, and order. This paper analyses and critiques the implicit theorizations and conceptions of territory and territoriality that underpin existing approaches to the study of political violence and civil war. We focus our analysis on four existing approaches, all of which emphasize the spatial and territorial dimensions of conflict to one degree or another: studies of territorial conflict and territorial aspects of conflict based on large-n data at the level of the state; large-n studies that analyse spatial variation and diffusion using geographically disaggregated data; micro-level work on violence that identifies the importance of zones and boundaries; the closely-related work on wartime political orders. We identify the theoretical lacunae in these approaches, and combine the work of key theorists of territoriality, including Sack and Raffestin, with the territorial aspects of the work of Giddens and Mann on political power to suggest a new approach to conceptualising and deploying the concepts of territory and territoriality in the study of political violence. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for a more sociologically aware, processual and relational understanding of the mutually constitutive relationships between territory, violence, and order. We suggest several avenues of inquiry that are opened up by this new approach, on themes including communication, negotiation, surveillance, institutionalization and ideology.