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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Rethinking Territory AbstractTerritory is the quintessential state space and appears to be of growing political importance. It is also a key concept in geography, but it has not been subject to as much critical attention as related geographical terms and remains under-theorised.Taking my cue from Timothy Mitchell's suggestion that the state should be understood as the effect of social practices, I argue that the phenomenon that we call territory is not an irreducible foundation of state power, let alone the expression of a biological imperative. Instead, territory too must be interpreted principally as an effect. This ‚territory-effect‛ can best be understood as the outcome of networked socio-technical practices. Thus far from refuting or falsifying network theories of spatiality, the current resurgence of territory can be seen as itself a product of relational networks. Drawing on an empirical case study of the monitoring of regional economic performance through the measurement of Gross Value Added (GVA), I show that ‚territory‛ and ‚network‛ are not, as is often assumed, incommensurable and rival principles of spatial organisation, but are intimately connected.

Despite the rise of relational and antiessentialist approaches to regional theory, many accounts of regionality continue to work with territorial conceptions of regions as bounded wholes or totalities. The author suggests that this tendency can be explained in part by the continuing effect of cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism on dominant understandings of regionality. The paper examines the relationships between regional theory, different forms of totality and the cartographic impulse, and discusses possible reasons for the Eurocentric cast of some regional research. It concludes with a consideration of how regional theory might respond to cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism.

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