Decolonising territory: Dialogues with Latin American knowledges and grassroots strategies

Abstract

Territory has been increasingly interrogated within Anglophone human geography, yet it has been little examined beyond the context of the modern, Eurocentric state. Developing an open definition of territory, the appropriation of space in pursuit of political projects, this paper opens epistemological dialogue with diverse Latin America strategies to decolonise territory in thought and practice, oriented around the themes of land, terrain and the state. In so doing it aims to contribute to the dismantling and reversing of colonial hierarchies that are both reproduced through Anglophone scholarship and sustained through dominant imaginations and practices of territory.

Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery

“…Many scholars of Slavic and Eurasian studies fall into a danger of extracting a particular "Russian imperial," "socialist," or "post-socialist" experience as a regional or temporal container (Tuvikene, 2016), thus reproducing limited knowledge of the subject, instead of recognizing global similarities in the struggles over commoning and occupation of space, work, and personhood, shared across many societies today. Seeing enclosure of the commune as an ordinary experience allows one to compare this case to the broader collective practices and customary forms of property in many early settled societies and communities from the Roman slaveowning landed estates latifundia, Mexican communal farms ejidos, East African kinship-based territorial formations, or other examples that cut across the limits of regional or historical scholarship (Cymet, 1992;Jones and Ward, 1998;Shipton and Goheen, 1992).…”

“…More specifically, a robust field of political geographic literature is now involved in exploring the properties of territory that have been undervalued, due to the "analytic flattening" of the concept into a single meaning of the "encasing" of state sovereignty (Sassen, 2013). Approaching the subject from a decentralized (Agnew, 2005(Agnew, , 2015Antonsich, 2009;Paasi, 2003;Mountz, 2013), deterritorialized (Dell'Agnese, 2013Mc-Cann and Ward, 2010;Paasi, 2009), and decolonized perspective (Halvorsen, 2018;Routledge, 2015;Schwarz and Streule, 2016) requires at a minimum working on multiple operational scales and exploring alternative territorialities produced within the hegemonic systems of power, or what Prakash describes as that "which the dominant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an otherness that resists containment" (Prakash, 2000:288).…”

Contaminant, Commodity and Fuel: A Multi‐sited Study of Waste's roles in Urban Transformations from Italy to Austria

“…In recent years, within political geography there has been a renovated interest on territory and territorial politics towards original applications and directions of analysis (for reviews, see Painter, 2010;Bryan, 2012;Halvorsen, 2019;Rasmussen and Lund, 2018). These studies build on a conceptual tradition that sees territory, in the most basic sense, as a space that is 'made' throughout historical processes via a variety of social practices (Sack, 1986;Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995).…”

Producing territory: territorial organizing of movements in Buenos Aires

“…Contemporary urban struggles in Latin America have fundamentally challenged the dominance of Anglophone analyses of territory (Del Biaggio, 2015) that typically feature a residual statism (Halvorsen, 2018;Schwarz and Streule, 2016). Instead, they pose a conception of territory that emphasizes the production of territory through struggle, in which social movements and the popular classes play a key role (Stratta and Barrera, 2009).…”