Kings of the Wild Frontier

Kings of the Wild Frontier: International Society and the Territorialization of Empty Space

Daniel Lambach (Universität Duisburg-Essen, [email protected])

***Work in Progress – please do not forward or cite***

Abstract: The international system of states displays an inherent drive to territorialize and control ‘empty’ or ‘ungoverned’ spaces. There are historical examples (the Scramble for Africa, the American Frontier), contemporary ones (the territorialization of the high seas and of cyberspace) and probable future cases (outer space, Antarctica). States are the ‘kings of the wild frontier’ who lay claim to frontier spaces, establish control and defend it against rivals. But territorialization is not a continuous process – it occurs in episodes. In this paper I compare three cases, the imperialist partition of Africa, the expansion of the territorial sea and the territorialization of cyberspace, to advance a twofold argument about the nature of these episodes. First, I argue that the root causes of this drive to territorialize are located in a global system of capitalism demanding the valorisation of unused resources, an international society for which spaces that are outside any kind of state authority are anathema, and modernity which creates expectations of rules-based interaction and universal human rights. Second, a territorializing episode occurs a) when a space is constructed as ‘empty’, b) when there are impelling economic and/or security incentives, and c) when the available technology makes cost-efficient control over the space possible. States take an active role in shaping these conditions, i.e. by deploying securitizing discourses or by commissioning the development of new technologies of control.

Empty spaces – what are we living for? Abandoned places – I guess we know the score… On and on! Does anybody know what we are looking for? --- Queen, The Show Must Go On

Introduction Empty spaces exert an irresistable mystique. As the physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer puts it, there is a ‘profound fear of emptiness that accompanies human encounters with the unknown’ (von Baeyer 1993: 13). They are a blank canvas upon which people project their secret desires, hopes and fears. Such mental decoration seems to be part of the human condition: ‘Temporal or spatial absences seem to beg for termination, filling or completion’ (Hearst 1991: 432). One well-known expression of this is in historical map-making (see Harley 1987 for an overview). While it is largely an urban legend that medieval cartographers marked unknown spaces on their maps with the phrase ‘hic sunt dracones’ (‘Here There Be Dragons’) – there is only one recorded instance of this phrase – they did use ‘hic sunt leones’ (‘Here There Be Lions’) much more often, as far back as Roman times. Often, empty spaces were adorned with phantastic and terrifying beasts. Such phrases and pictures, including ‘terra pericolosa’ (Italian for ‘dangerous land’) constructed the unknown as a source of exotic dangers (Dicke 2002: 16, Agnew 2009: 107). Empty spaces were also threatening in a theological sense as they challenged Christian ideas of universal salvation through Jesus Christ. St. Augustine considered a ‘genus incognitum’ (unknown peoples) a logical impossibility: ‘If these unknown lands could not be reached by us, any inhabitants could not have descended from Adam, and had not been redeemed by Christ’ (Hiatt 2002: 227). If any people were to be found inhabiting these spaces, this would have called a central tenet of Christian theology into question. As these examples show, emptiness is not a neutral description. A space designated as ‘empty’ inevitably raises issues of control over its land, people and resources. The construction of ‘empty space’ 2

invites these issues directly. As Ciobanu (2006) has shown, the European gaze represented on early modern maps often depicted the inhabitants of ‘barbarous’ countries as monstrous cannibals. This elicited revulsion but also incited calls for the conquest, subjugation and enforced ‘civilization’ of these peoples. At this point, one might interject that empty spaces are a thing of the past. After all, as an anonymous saying goes, ‘we are the middle children. Born too late to explore the earth, born too early to explore the stars’. While it is true that terrestrial maps of the earth have been largely completed since the poles were charted in the early 20th century, there are still several frontiers on earth – and beyond. The oceans, especially the deep sea, are still mostly unknown to us. The Arctic is being transformed from an empty space to a closely monitored and contested one. Antarctica is still mostly empty, with issues of control held in momentary abeyance by the Antarctic Treaty. And as the exploration and the commercial and military use of near-earth space increases, debates about the nature of this space will follow. This is not to mention those remote, liminal spaces within states which are being, or are yet to be territorialized (Vandergeest/Peluso 1995, Rasmussen/Lund 2018). These are all examples of physical spaces located in classic Cartesian geometry. But the same principle can be applied to ‘social’ or ‘relational spaces’, i.e. those space that emerge through interaction and social construction. These spaces are ‘trans-local’, i.e. connecting different places on the earth’s surface. Contemporary examples are cyberspace, global markets and financial networks. Lövbrand and Stripple (2006) demonstrate how even the global carbon cycle can be viewed through such a spatial lens. These spaces, much like physical ones, raise issues of control, and are frequently subject to contestation. How international society deals with empty space is therefore not simply of historical interest. These cases seem to be governed by a common dynamic. Unpacking that dynamic will help us better understand similar processes happening in the present and in future. This is what this paper – in broad and sweeping generalizations – sets out to do.

3

My argument is that international society ‘territorializes’ empty space, not in a continuous process but in episodes (the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ of Gouldian evolutionary theory). As I discuss below, territory should not be equated with sovereign statehood but is understood as all delimited and controlled space. Accordingly, territorialization means allocating regulatory competence along spatial criteria. I locate the causes of this seemingly inexorable drive towards the territorialization of space in an entangled bundle of political, economic and normative factors that are the contemporary but contingent products of historical processes. This is why my argument is limited to the era of modernity and Western capitalism, which I locate as starting in the mid-19th century and then expanding across the globe as membership in international society increased. The key mechanisms are capitalism’s logic of accumulation through geographical extension (Landnahme), an international society that is dependent on mutual recognition of states, and modernity’s emphasis on rules-based interaction and human rights. A territorializing episode occurs when three necessary conditions are present: First, the space has to be constructed, reified and inscribed as empty. Second, states need to have access to cost-effective technologies of control that are appropriate to the material characteristics of the space. Third, states need economic or security incentives for territorialization. As long as one of these elements is missing, a space will not be territorialized. If a space is not seen as a space, there is no basis for drawing boundaries and making claims. If states have no technological capability of exerting control, all they can do is make claims without enforcing them. If states have no economic or security incentives, they will refrain from making any costly move towards establishing their dominance. If the first condition is met but either or both of the second and third is absent, states will usually prefer some kind of international agreement, like with the Antarctic Treaty or the Outer Space Treaty. However, these agreements may be revised or broken if the underlying conditions change, as the expansion of territorial claims upon the high seas illustrates.

4

These arguments are illustrated by three case studies of territorialization: the Scramble for Africa during the imperial period, the expansion of territorial waters to today’s twelve-mile standard, and the territorialization of cyberspace. These cases represent a diverse set of terrestrial, oceanic and virtual environments that demonstrate that territorialization as a process is not dependent on particular material properties of a space.

Empty space and territorial practices There are different ways of conceptualizing ‘space’. The first is to view it as a container in Cartesian space, i.e. a place that other things exist or happen in. This is the approach that is closest to our intuitive geographical understanding of space as a place that is defined by its physical dimensions, e.g. a country, a city or a neighborhood. The second views space as the result of interactions among phenomena or people. This is what we understand as a ‘social space’. These spaces are not tied to, but can coincide with physical spaces – in fact, they can even connect multiple localities into a conjoined, ‘translocal’ social space. In both approaches, spaces require limits (borders or frontiers) which distinguish them from other spaces. There is a third approach that lies somewhat orthogonal to the first two. It is less interested in identifying existing spaces but problematizing the process by which spaces emerge. This constructivist approach rejects conceptions of space, whether physical or social, as ‘natural’ and foregrounds the process of space-making. It is in this tradition of critical geopolitics where my approach is situated (Agnew/Corbridge 1995, Paasi 2003). This means that spaces are never truly fixed but subject to change. Territory is marked and bounded space. This notion represents the intersection of space and power: territories are spaces that are claimed, defended and contested (Cox 2002: 1). Territories have three characteristics (Blacksell 2006: 18-20): The first is a ‘classification by area’ (Sack 1986: 21). Second, territorial claims have to be communicated, e.g. by reification of a space and the symbolic marking of

5

borders both in space but also on maps and suchlike (Monmonier 2010: 31-39). Third, territoriality always implies an attempt at enforcing claims of control. Political Science and International Relations have the unfortunate tendency to limit the meaning of territory to sovereign state territory (Agnew 1994) but a critical understanding is open to multiple forms of territoriality, i.e. ‘the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area’ (Sack 1986: 5). For instance, the notion of ‘regulatory spaces’ (Varone et al. 2013) can also be read as multiple overlapping and potentially competing territorialities established in transnational economic and financial spaces. I use ‘empty space’ to refer to a space that is imbued with the idea of emptiness. This does not imply being empty of features such as terrain or pre-existing relationships. What actors wish to convey when they treat a space as empty is that it is free from government control. This is accomplished by signifiers like ‘lawless’, ‘beyond the law’, ‘beyond national jurisdiction’ or more prosaic formulations like ‘Wild West’ or ‘frontier’. I use ‘empty space’ to distinguish these discourses from the more specific and politically charged notion of ‘ungoverned’ spaces or territories. Discourses of ‘ungoverned spaces’ are widespread in Western security and development policy communities (Clunan/Trinkunas 2010), usually referring to spaces within fragile or failed states where the state is unable to exercise authority. These discourses are often criticized for their securitizing character, legitimizing interventions in these spaces (Schetter 2013). Furthermore, the idea of ‘ungovernedness’ is misleading – these spaces have variegated governance arrangements whose common features is that they are organized and run by non-state actors and authorites (Risse 2011). To avoid these associations I prefer to speak of ‘empty’ rather than ‘ungoverned’ spaces. Territorialization, finally, denotes the process by which ‘empty space’ is brought under control of some actor. As the process of establishing territoriality, territorialization contains all aspects thereof. In other

6

words, the territorialization of a space must contain a classification by area, it must be clearly communicated and the actor must attempt to establish control over the area. Taken together, this leads us to a new appreciation of territory. Brighenti sums it up well: “(T)erritory is better conceived as an act or practice rather than object or physical space” (Brighenti 2010: 53). He argues that we should analyze how actors and technologies produce territory (e.g. through cartography, see Branch 2014). This allows for a more fluid understanding of territories that is sensitive to the mutual constitution of agent and structure. Thinking about territorial practices allows us to ask how practices constitute spaces and how these spaces impact future practices. In my understanding of practice I follow the definition offered by Adler and Pouliot: ‘practices are socially meaningful patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world’ (Adler/Pouliot 2011: 4). They identify five elements of practice: (1) practices are performative, (2) practices follow regular patterns without determining behavior, (3) practices are interpreted and understood in terms of social relations, (4) practices depend on background knowledge that gives them a particular purpose, and (5) practices link discourses with the material world because the discourses give meaning to the act (Adler/Pouliot 2011: 6-7). So what can be considered a territorial practice? For the purposes of this paper, I define territorial practices as those practices whose performance has spatial aspects and a political dimension. Territorial practices can a priori be performed by any actor although in this paper I will limit the following discussion to territorializing practices by states. Based on suggestions from Blacksell (2006: 21-27) and Vollaard (2009) I suggest the following taxonomy of state territorial practices1: 1. Reification of a territory, e.g. on maps, as a statistical category, in art. 2. Communication of territorial control through symbols and boundary-markers.

1

Rasmussen and Lund (2018: 393-396) offer a similar taxonomy of the dimensions of territorialization even as they use a different apprach, distinguishing between (1) establishing political authority, citizenship and property rights, (3) communicating territory via boundaries and maps; and (4) enforcement.

7

3. Enforcement of claims through regular displays of power, e.g. patrols, policing, taxation, lawmaking, or surveillance. 4. Integration of the territory, i.e. connecting center and periphery.

Causes of Territorialization Based on such an understanding of territorialization, I argue that states are the ‘kings of the wild frontier’ (Ant/Pirroni 1980) who lay claim to frontier spaces, establish control and then defend it against rival claims. This is one of historical mechanisms underpinning the English School argument of the ‘expansion of international society’ (Bull/Watson 1984). And while this standard view of the globalization of the system of states has recently come under fire for its euro-centrism (Ejdus 2014) and its lack of attentiveness towards regional variation (Phillips 2016), it is still influential in International Relations. In this section, I outline the root causes of the drive to territorialize empty space. The causes are systemic in that they cannot be reduced to individual action even as they are constituted by it. As such, my approach follows Cox’s notion of a ‘historical structure’ which ‘determine actions in any direct, mechanical way but imposes pressures and constraints. Individuals and groups may move with the pressures or resist and oppose them, but they cannot ignore them’ (Cox 1981: 135). As a basic ontology, I view the contemporary international system as the momentary product of historical forces. Historical development is never even or unidirectional and inequality is pervasive and entrenched. And yet, there is the possibility of change although change should not be confused with isomorphism and homogeneity (Phillips/Sharman 2015). Change, when it occurs, often happens in episodes rather than continuously, as the linked notions of ‘critical junctures’ and ‘path dependence’ illustrate. The upshot is that the territorialization drive is not a constant feature of all international systems. My claim is limited to the international society of states as it has existed in the capitalist era since about

8

the mid-19th century.2 Earlier systems did not clearly exhibit such a drive, at least not with the same degree of intransigence (Taylor 1995: 8). There are many pre-modern examples of ‘empty spaces’ that were not integrated into regional systems. ‘Frontier’ spaces were sometimes left unterritorialized to serve as buffers between rivalling powers. Occasionally, regional hegemons like the Roman Empire and various Chinese empires checked their own expansion, preferring to deal with the ‘barbarians’ beyond on a transactional basis. But in its current form, the international system has a teleological drive towards ever more territorialization, although this drive may lessen or disappear if the fundamental characteristics of the system change (Taylor 1995: 10). The territorialization drive is rooted in the inextricably entwined forces of capitalism, international society and modernity. I arrive at this trinity based on the sociologically inspired IR scholarship by Robert Cox and Dietrich Jung and the post-Marxist geography of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre. Of these, Jung (2001) offers a far-reaching account of how the post-Westphalian age of globalization is witnessing a shift of social reproduction from the national to the global, leading to the emergence of a world society. His argument centers on the ‘three elementary functions all empirical societies have to fulfil – the control of physical force, the guarantee of material means, and the production and preservation of symbolic means of orientation’ (Jung 2001: 452). Jung is a bit too enamored of the ‘decline of the state’ literature that was popular in the 1990s, so I do not find his argument about the inevitability of a world society convincing, but this threefold taxonomy is echoed by other authors. For instance, the aforementioned Cox offers an analytical approach to historical structures that ‘(1) the organisation of production, more particularly with regard to the social forces engendered by the production process; (2) forms of state as derived from a study of state/society complexes; and (3) world orders, i.e. the particular configurations of forces which successively define the problematic of war or peace for the ensemble of states’ (Cox 1981: 137-138). These perspectives are antidotes against

2

On the historicity of the current international system see Ferguson and Mansbach (1996)

9

the widespread practice of dividing analytical labour between International Relations and International Political Economy scholarship (Mastanduno 1998, Koddenbrock 2017). They also echo similar understandings of the logic of capitalism in the post-Marxist geography of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre. Their works are particulary instructive in that they discuss the spatial dimension of the expansion of capitalism. Of the two, the earlier works by Lefebvre (1991, 2009) develop the general ideas, specifically that capitalism has ‘passed from the production of things in space to the production of space itself’ (Lefebvre 2009: 186). Capitalism rests on a ‘pulverization of space by private property’ into ‘interchangeable fragments’ (Lefebvre 2009: 189), turning previously unoccupied spaces into commodities (Lefebvre 2009: 212). Harvey builds upon these insights and articulates a geographical approach to Marxism. For him, as for Marx, capitalism is faced with regular crises of accumulation where demand has to grow to meet the overproduction to which producers inevitably tend. A ‘geographical extension’ (Harvey 2001: 255) of capitalist relationships into new regions is one way of alleviating the crisis. But while Marx was relatively sketchy on geographical details, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, in his theory of imperialism, were more explicit. Luxemburg’s notion of Landnahme (‘land grabs’), which has recently been rediscovered by critics of capitalism like Dörre (2009), has been particularly influential. Luxemburg posits that the continuous accumulation of capital in capitalism can only be sustained by regularly opening up new markets which will inevitably cease once there are no more precapitalist societies in which to expand (Harvey 2001: 251). By linking capitalist development and geopolitics, this provides an explanation of colonialism and imperialism (Bieler et al. 2016). Similarly, Rasmussen and Lund speak of the ‘commodification’ of frontier spaces through spatial practices like ‘enclosures, land grabbing, and other forms of primitive accumulation’ (Rasmussen/Lund 2018: 389). These post-Marxist approaches are instructive where they highlight that capitalism possesses an inherent expansionary drive. However, many of the aforementioned theorists are prone to teleological claims of capitalism’s inevitable demise, which is why I follow Harvey who is less convinced than Marx,

10

Luxemburg or Lenin that capitalism will eventually collapse under its internal contradicitions. He acknowledges that technological innovations like the railroad, the automobile or telecommunications have allowed capitalism to reinvent its own territorial division of labor and increase the speed at which capital is able to travel (Harvey 2001: 325). We can learn from the above discussion that capitalism views empty space as a site of unused resources: ‘Global capitalism commodifies nature, life, and labor by incorporating resources, peoples, activities, and lands that were previously controlled by noncapitalist modes of arranging the social order and the environment’ (Rasmussen/Lund 2018: 393). Tellingly, the German cadastral system defines areas that feature no buildings and little to no plant growth, e.g. dunes or scree, as ‘unland’ – impliying that land only truly becomes proper ‘land’ through the possibility of exploitation. This is also how ‘frontier’ explanations tend to work, by speaking of ‘the absorption of peripheral regions by an expanding capitalism’ (Cleary 1993: 331, Geiger 2008, Rasmussen/Lund 2018). We can also go further in outlining the mechanisms through which the expansionary drive of capitalism is transmitted. For one, actors may view empty spaces through a mercantilist lens, hoping to gain control over resources that can be used to further national prosperity. For another, there is also an institutionalist argument for territorialization that views empty space as problematic for property rights. While there are examples of property rights regimes that exist without state supervision (e.g. Loshin 2007), for modern capitalism any uncertainty about property rights and legal systems is a business risk that should be minimized. Institutional economics tell us that clarifying property rights increases general welfare. Even if these gains are distributed unevenly, they provide an incentive for actors, and particularly the state to support territorialization even if they themselves do not profit directly from it (Harvey 2001: 273). But, departing from a purely post-Marxist explanation, I argue that the international society and its internal logic has a second, autonomous effect. As much as the state supports capital’s expansionary drive, it also views spaces outside of any kind of state authority as anathema. Taylor speaks of ‘interterritoriality to indicate the presumption that every section of occupied land across the world is 11

the sovereign territory of some state. […] In the modern world-system there can be no empty political spaces: interterritoriality abhors a political vacuum’ (Taylor 1995: 3-4). This presumption is partly based in shared norms and understandings about how the world should be ordered. But more importantly, it is embedded in the entire edifice of the international system of states. This system is based upon the mutual recognition of sovereign states (for an overview of recent debates about recognition see Bartelson 2013). In philosophical terms, recognition only matters if it is freely conferred by someone of equal status. That is why states form a ‘recognition regime’ (Griffiths 2017) that organizes relations of mutual recognition to safeguard states’ ontological security, i.e. ‘the need to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time — as being rather than constantly changing — in order to realize a sense of agency’ (Mitzen 2006: 342). Interstate relations are maintained through diplomatic practices that stabilize states as sovereign agents in global politics and other mechanisms of institutional isomorphism (Meyer et al. 1997). This recognition regime is so strong that great powers engage in implicit coordination when it comes to the recognition of de facto states, even when they have divergent national interests (Coggins 2014).3 Recognition by non-state polities is meaningless for states. So, on that level, states have no incentive to tolerate the existence of non-state polities. Worse, admitting non-state polities to the international system risks unravelling the ‘organized hypocrisy’ (Krasner 1999) of sovereignty. This is why states refrain from extending diplomatic relations to non-state actors, at least officially, and why non-state polities so often seek recognition as sovereign states. This intolerance vis-à-vis non-state entities is a crucial element underpinning exclusionary practices in international society in that it allows members of the international society to withhold recognition from non-members and thereby justify imperialism and conquest (Gong 1984). The development of capitalism and the international society of states is bound up with modernity. For Jung, modernity and modernizatuon are characterized by the ‘emergence of law as the transnational

3

Gozzi (2007) rightly points out that the development of the recognition regime in international society was anything but a smooth process.

12

language of formal value rationality’ (Jung 2001: 467). A similarly progressive reading of modernity was very influential in the development of international law (Koskenniemi 2007). This understanding of modernity emphasizes rationality and equality and argues that human relations should be organized not by power but by laws. This has implications on several levels. We can perceive the impact of modernity in the idea of human rights and their inherent claim to unversality.4 The guarantee of human rights, though enshrined in a multitude of international conventions, is inextricably linked with the state through the notion of citizenship (Lund 2016). In addition, most enforcement and implementation capabilities for the protection of human rights lie with the state. With empty spaces existing beyond national jurisdiction, they are ‘lawless’ which includes the proper guarantee of human rights. Much like the theological argument around a ‘genus incognitum’, human rights as an international norm would be called into question if there were any people who would be excluded from the opportunity to enjoy their human rights. This is why territorialization can thus be justified by the argument that it will give people living in empty spaces access to human rights. It is, however, a point of contention whether this is a genuine concern – the entire history of colonialism was based on bald-faced hypocrisy about ‘civilizing’ the natives while withholding them their supposedly natural rights. ‘Creating access to rights’ may only be a motivating factor for some territorializing actors, but it can be a useful cover story for everyone. On a larger scale, modernity is also linked with the development of international law, i.e. an attempt to transform power-based inter-state relations into a more rules-based system more conducive to cooperation and peace (Ruggie 1993: 145-146). Much like the property rights argument above, governing through a rules-based agreement is seen as preferable to leaving empty space ungoverned. Territorialization is but one instrument of achieving that, as the widespread practice of using international conventions to regulate the global commons shows.

4

Donnelly (1998) discusses how adherence to universal human rights is emerging as a new standard of civilization.

13

We can find evidence of this modern predilection for rules-based interaction in territorialization episodes. Obviously, the results of territorialization are enshrined through laws and international agreements such as the UN Law of the Sea Convention. But modernity even affects the way that actors territorialize: not in an unruly free-for-all but usually through negotiation, like the Berlin Conference that governed the imperial partition of Africa, and on the basis of contracts and laws that govern the reach of states in cyberspace. So it is not just the results of territorialization that exhibit signs of modernity, but the very process itself. These three causes – a global system of capitalism, the international society of states, and modernity – jointly form the historical structure that explains the contemporary drive for territorializing empty spaces. Each factor rests on a different causal mechanism: accumulation for global capitalism, mutual recognition for international society, rights-based interaction for modernity. These causal mechanisms can reinforce each other, for instance in the emergence of property rights regimes where capitalist accumulation is facilitated by states recognizing each other’s business regulations. But there can also be tensions between these causes. The development of a modern international society has led to the outlawing of certain forms of primitive accumulation like plunder or raiding (Sandholtz 2008). Also, the ‘universal language of rights and legitimate procedures’ can be at odds with ‘the universal language of price’ as (Jung 2001: 467) points out. These tensions can be seen in the governance of the deep seabed which was classified as the common heritage of mankind and where commercial interests have to be balanced against environmental concerns and the interests of landlocked countries. These tensions are unlikely to break apart this trinity of factors – they are simply too embedded into each other, even in a time where concerns about the ‘liberal order’ have become widespread. And even if tensions sometimes come to the fore, they do not undermine the the general drive towards the territorialization of empty space, although the territories thus created, like Marine Protected Areas on the high seas, might not be amenable to commercial exploitation.

14

Territorializing episodes Territorialization is not a continuous or smooth process. It proceeds in fits and starts and is occasionally, briefly reversed. There is no automatic mechanism that leads states to territorialize empty spaces as soon as they become aware of them. Instead, territorialization occurs in episodes that kick off when the conditions are right. These episodes often produce substantial territorial advances in empty spaces before reverting to a more placid situation. This framework is broadly similar to Rasmussen and Lund’s (2018) who provide a detailed theory of ‘frontier dynamics’ as the simultaneous destruction of existing authorities and the emergence of new institutional arrangements. There are two main differences: First, my approach also applies to uninhabitaed space of a non-terrestrial (high seas, outer space) or virtual nature (cyberspace), and second, my approach to territorialization does not focus as much on the problem of resource control. I propose that a territorializing episode occurs when three necessary conditions are jointly present. The first condition, construction of space, refers to the first territorial practice presented above, reification of a territory. The second condition, availability of technologies of rule, refers to the second and third practice, communication of territorial control and regular displays of power. Finally, third condition, economic or security incentives, impels states to engage in the fourth practice, integration of the territory. First, a space must be constructed as ‘empty’. This is in contrast to Marxist theory that presumes that precapitalist spaces exist which are then integrated into the world economy. Instead, I follow critical geopolitics’ insistence that space is not a naturally occurring ‘thing’ but the product of active construction (see also Rasmussen/Lund 2018: 390). Construction implies three elements: identification, reification and inscription. Identification means viewing a particular site or set of relationships as a space and describing its spatial limits. For example, during the Cold War, the Arctic was seen as a non-space, ‘a frozen wasteland over which intercontinental missiles might fly’ (Young 1997: 54) but has since been undergoing a process of ‘region-building’ (Keskitalo 2007, see also

15

Dodds/Ingimundarson 2012). Reification is to treat a space as having an ontological existence, as something ‘that is there’, e.g. by giving it a name. For instance, while the term ‘cyberspace’ has existed since the 1980s, the ‘cyberspace as space’ metaphor was not a natural fit for the emergent digital realm. As Olson (2005) details, an alternative ontology of the internet as a public utility, e.g. as a phone network or a ‘data superhighway’, was available but was ultimately crowded out by the commercially more attractive notion of spatiality. While identification and reification construct the space, inscription gives it content and meaning. ‘Emptiness’ is inscribed into the space by portraying it as disorderly, lawless, ungoverned, uninhabited etc., making it into a blank slate upon which observers can project their own interpretations (Rasmussen/Lund 2018: 392). Second, when the available technologies make cost-efficient control over this space possible. Technology is more than artifacts and also includes infrastructures and background knowledge that are necessary to make use of particular tools.5 It can also refer to ‘technologies of rule’, i.e. techniques that institutions and actors deploy to exert their authority. As examples of the latter, Scott (1998) refers to cartography, demographics, land registers, and natural resource governance as technologies that states have developed to more efficiently penetrate and govern societies and spaces (see also Harvey 1990: 228-229). These technologies create ‘affordances’ that enable states to act in and upon the space. Giddens (1985) has highlighted the central role of surveillance in establishing state control. Surveillance is both symbolically important and makes other kinds of governance possible, from everyday management to force projection. The latter is usually not necessary but a state needs to have the possibility to project force, if the need arises, to have its claims of control taken seriously. Sometimes, these technologies are available but their application is too expensive to justify. For instance, while many states have the capability to maintain a year-round presence in Antarctica, expanding their reach would simply be too expensive and for too little a payoff.

5

The importance of technology for the continued expansion of capitalism is highlighted by Lefebvre (2009: 189) and Harvey (1990: 233).

16

Third, when there are economic or security incentives that impel states to action. Without such incentives, states may have the capability to territorialize a space but would lack the motivation to do so. Economic incentives offer direct gains or an increase in overall welfare (depending on how one stands in the old relative vs. absolute gains debate). An empty space that offers economic benefits is seen as an untapped ‘land of promise’, such as the frontier territory of the Wild West. As the example of mineral resources underneath the seabed illustrates, these incentives are dependent on markets – as prices rise and fall, interests will wax and wane (Economist 2009). For a security incentive, emptiness must be viewed as a threat associated with lawlessness and chaos, as recent debates about the ‘Dark Web’, an anonymous sub-section of the internet, illustrate (Berton 2015). To be sure, sometimes incentives will make states resist territorialization, e.g. on the high seas where states with powerful navies and fishing fleets tended to be critical of attempts to establish larger territorial waters and exclusive economic zones, arguing instead for the traditional mare liberum. It should be noted that I focus on the incentives to states, it is not states alone that territorialize a space. States often lack the requisite capital and technical expertise to mount these projects by themselves, which is why they often tend to cooperate with private companies, e.g. in the age of imperialism or in the commercial exploration of the deep seabed, or individual pioneers as in the American West or in the frontier spaces that Rasmussen and Lund (Rasmussen/Lund 2018) discuss. In such a division of labor states follow the trails blazed by private entrepreneurs, provide opportunities to hedge individual risks by guaranteeing exploitation rights, award contracts or delegate quasi-official authority to private enterprises. I would like to stress that states exercise substantial agency in shaping these conditions. This is obvious when it comes to the construction of spaces: Cartography has always been a tool of statecraft and statebuilding (Kagan/Schmidt 2007, Branch 2014). Names for physical places are assigned through a system of international organizations dominated by governmental and para-statal agents. The inscription of spaces also favors the state as its agents occupy privileged positions in public discourse,. States also take an active role in stimulating technological development, e.g. through research funding 17

or by actively commissioning innovations. A current example of this is state demand for surveillance technology to more efficiently track internet users’ behavior which is met by a range of commercial operators continuing to refine their products in response. Finally, what constitutes an impelling incentive is never a question of meeting objective criteria but a subjective assessment which may also change over time. States may also put their own ‘spin’ on a situation to over- or underplay an incentive to obfuscate other motives for territorialization. The following three case studies serve to illustrate this framework of territorializing episodes. They cover a diverse spectrum – Africa, the oceans and cyberspace – to show that my approach can be applied to different material environments (terrestrial, oceanic, virtual) and to both inhabited and uninhabited space. In each case study I will focus on the timing of each episode rather than on the underlying causes which are more difficult to establish and would require a much more thorough discussion.

Terrestrial Territorialization: The Scramble for Africa [This case study still needs to be written. Very briefly, this section will focus on the puzzle why European imperial powers had had colonial and quasi-colonial territories along the coastline since the early 16th century but only partitioned the interior of the African continent in the late 19th century. My argument is that it was only with technological improvements in medicine (specifically chinin), transport (steamships, railways), communication (telegraph) and armaments (repeating rifle), and with the increasing value of African agricultural products like e.g. palm oil for the rapidly growing European economies that this became a realistic and attractive proposition for European governments.]

Oceanic Territorialization: The Expansion of Territorial Waters Beyond the Three-Mile Limit

18

The high seas may seem like the quintessential ‘empty space’, shapeless and ever-changing, with an alien materiality that is inhospitable to human settlement. This is in line with a modern reading of the sea as a space, akin to the air, that cannot be tamed and regulated. As Steinberg (2001) elaborates in his monograph The Social Construction of the Ocean, geopolitics constructed the ocean as an empty space upon which states then projected their claims of power and supremacy. In contrast to terrestrial wilderness, which can be civilized and colonized, the high seas stand outside of modernity and law, resisting capitalist exploitation. However, this picture is one-sided at best, and wrong at worst. ‘Since the middle of the 20th century, states have continually sought to push back frontiers at sea in order to exploit all available resources. Maritime activities, long confined to coastal waters, have steadily expanded in step with the globalization of trade. At the same time, the overexploitation of fish stocks has pushed fishing into more remote areas, while the increasing demand for mineral resources has driven exploration activities further into the deep ocean’ (Houghton/Rochette 2014: 81). Ryan even speaks of a ‘zoning and routinization […] that seeks to gentrify rural and wilderness sea-spaces’ (Ryan 2015: 570). As a result, the oceans have seen a multitude of territorialization episodes, with state control, economic exploitation and legal regulation encroaching on ever larger areas of oceanic space. The names of these territories are as variegated as the purposes for which they were created: territorial waters, contiguous zones, Exclusive Economic Zones, Search and Rescue Zones, Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, Regional Seas and more. The first three were developed in the multi-decade deliberations that culminated in UNCLOS, the next two are governing instruments established through various international agreements, and the final one is a programme by an international organization. This is not to mention the special regime for resources located under the seabed and territories used for regulating the space above the oceans, e.g. Air Defence Identification Zones. As a case study, I will focus on one particular episode of territorialization on the high seas, the expansion of territorial waters from the 1950s to the 1980s, specifically the First Anglo-Icelandic ‘Cod War’. Territorial waters are defined in the 1982 UNCLOS as the coastal waters of a state stretching 12 19

nautical miles (22.2 km) from the coast. Territorial waters are treated as an extension of the sovereign territory of the state, giving it near-absolute control over this space, with the exception of certain navigational rights (innocent passage or transit passage) for foreign civilian ships. This 1982 definition represented the culmination of discussions and conflicts spanning decades, if not centuries. Since the 18th century, most states claimed a three-mile territorial sea (Walker 1945, Kent 1954) based on antecedents going as far back as classical antiquity (Fenn 1926). But in the 20th century, this practice, never properly codified, began to fray in some wonderfully blunt instances of Landnahme. First, states claimed rights over resources in the continental shelf extending beyond their territorial waters. Some also claimed special rights in the 12-mile area just beyond the territorial sea, e.g. for purposes of law enforcement. Starting in 1947, several Latin American states (such Chile, Ecuador and Peru) started to claim 200-mile territorial waters while the Soviet Union and other countries extended their claims to the 12-mile line (Stone 1955). Other countries followed suit and during the period 1950-1982, a wide variety of territorial waters claims, from 2 to 200 miles, could be found. These extensions of claims were not uncontroversial. A well-known instance of conflict arising out of this were the so-called Cod Wars between Iceland and the United Kingdom (this account is mainly drawn from Jóhannesson 2004).6 British fishing vessels had long fished in the North Atlantic. Icelandic attempts to claim fishing grounds beyond their 3-mile territorial sea had been rebuffed in the 19th century but in the 1950s, against the backdrop of changing practices in other countries, Iceland extended its territorial claims, first to 4 miles with a more favorable baseline calculation (1952) and then to 12 miles (1958). After the first extension had already led to a tense conflict between Iceland and the United Kingdom, the second set off the First Cod War. British naval vessels accompanied their fishing fleet into disputed areas and there were several standoffs at sea, with shots fired between

6

The Cod Wars have provided an interesting object of study for IR scholars of the democratic peace (Hellmann/Herborth 2008, Steinsson 2017a) and for neorealists wondering why the weaker power was able to prevail in each instance (Steinsson 2017b), while geographers and legal scholars have focused on issues of resource management and the development of international law.

20

Icelandic patrol boats and British trawlers and navy vessels. The Cod War was settled in 1961 after Iceland threatened to withdraw from NATO, with an agreement that was very favorable for Iceland. Two further Cod Wars (1972-1973 and 1975-1976) occurred over Icelandic claims for fishing rights in what was to become its Exclusive Economic Zone, again with Icelandic victories. It is notable that in spite of the dispute being somewhat exaggeratedly described as a ‘war’ both parties continued to engage in practices of recognition and rules-based interaction. The Icelandic abrogation of the Anglo-Danish treaty that had previously governed fishing rights in the North Atlantic followed the rules laid out in the treaty, there were on-and-off negotiations between 1952 and 1956 following the four-mile extension, with one part of the dispute (the Faxa Bay delimitation) referred to the International Court of Justice in 1953. The First Cod War was also deeply entangled with the decadeslong debates about a law of the sea convention from the 1950s onwards. With the construction of the oceans as an empty space a historical constant, the timing of this particular territorialization episode can be explained with reference to the other two conditions, the availability of technology and impelling economic or security incentives. There were various technologies that made control over the expanded territorial waters feasible. The first was the development of patrolling capability in the Icelandic Coast Guard (whose Icelandic name, Landhelgisgæsla Íslands, directly translates to ‘Territorial Waters Guard’). The Coast Guard had only been founded in 1926, although single vessels had been used for coastal protection since the 1900s. By the time of the First Cod War, the Coast Guard had grown to six patrol vessels and one flying boat, still a relatively small number for such a large oceanic area. Furthermore, only the flagship was powerful enough to arrest and tow an infringing trawler. ‘The head of the coast guard, Pétur Sigurdsson, quietly admitted that his vessels were “utterly incapable” of providing credible law enforcement inside the new line’ (Jóhannesson 2004: 559). This demonstrates that control claims need not be fully enforcable to matter. In some cases, symbolically expressing control is at least as important as being able to execute control. Usually, fishing interdiction did not depend on the ability to project force: ‘In normal circumstances an Icelandic gunboat which caught a vessel inside the fishing limit 21

would order it to stop and fire a blank shot across its bows if the demand was ignored. This almost always worked because the trawler skippers knew that they could not get supplies and service in Icelandic ports if they tried to escape the authorities’ (Jóhannesson 2004: 560). Other technologies also afforded the Icelandic government the capacity to extend its territorial claims. For one, scientific data on fish stocks was an important instrument in the dispute, with Iceland and the UK producing different estimates about the risks of overfishing (Mitchell 1976: 137).7 For another, international legal opinion was a useful technology to legitimize the extension of territorial waters. With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision in the ‘Fisheries Case’ (United Kingdom v. Norway 1951), a more favorable method of establishing the baseline was deemed lawful (Jóhannesson 2004: 546), which was used by Iceland to justify its 1952 expansion to a four-mile area. The deliberations at the 1958 and 1960 UN Conferences on the Law of the Sea (UNCLS) bolstered Iceland’s position further. As Brown (1973: 69) notes, Iceland fought a ‘consistent and intensive campaign’ in the two UNCLS conferences for a twelve-mile limit. After the failure of the conferences to agree on this limit, the Icelandic government argued that given the present risks of overfishing, it could not wait for the next UNCLS conference and had to act unilaterally, without endangering its reputation in the international community and among the U.S. government (Mitchell 1976: 138, Tomasson 1976, Jóhannesson 2004). The economic incentives for Iceland are easily understood. Fishing has always been a vital sector of the Icelandic economy and was the country’s most important export industry in the 1950s (Tomasson 1976, Ingimundarson 2003). Given the growing concerns about overfishing, a collapse of fish stocks would have endangered the national economy (Jóhannesson 2004: 547). But the territorial claims had additional significance for Iceland beyond purely economic concerns, ‘such as the nation's cultural and economic survival’ (Mitchell 1976: 134). Newly independent Iceland’s membership in NATO was not uncontroversial and a contentious issue in domestic politics. Accordingly, successive Icelandic

7

See Matthíasson (2003) for the further development of fisheries management techniques in Iceland.

22

governments did not shy away from questioning their Western alliance commitments if the perceived hostilities by the United Kingdom were to continue. There are other reasons that militate against an earlier expansion of territorial claims. The most obvious is that Iceland only became independent in 1944. Furthermore, Jóhannesson (2004: 545) argues that Iceland relied on precedents set by other countries from 1947 onwards. It was also bound by the Anglo-Danish Territorial Waters Treaty of 1901 which stipulated a three-mile limit and which Iceland abrogated upon completion of the fifty-year timeframe stipulated in the treaty.

Virtual Territorialization: Cyberspace There are wide-ranging debates about the territorialization of cyberspace. Cyberspace is not a static environment, but a dynamic and evolving domain whose parameters shift with each new innovation (Deibert/Rohozinski 2010: 45). Definitions of cyberspace refer to an socio-technical assemblage that is based on data storage and exchange via electronic networks. As such, cyberspace consists of physical hardware, code and social interactions which jointly create an emergent place in which these activities happen (Slack 2016: 70). As a (partly) social-relational space, it can be territorialized even as the notion of territorializing a virtual environment may be difficult to visualize. The founding myth of the Internet is that cyberspace is an ungoverned and ungovernable space. In his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, John Perry Barlow warned the governments of the world, the ‘weary giants of flesh and steel […] On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’ (Barlow 1996). In this narrative of ‘Internet exceptionalism’ (Wu 2010), cyberspace was conceptualized as an electronic frontier, ‘a terra nullius in which social relations and laws have no historical existence and must be reinvented’ (Chenou 2014: 216). Based on the historical ‘Western frontier’ of the early United States, this was meant to suggest freedom from state regulation, autonomy and opportunity, but like its historical antecedent, the electronic frontier is destined for a tragic fate. Just as the American West 23

was gradually territorialized and incorporated into the United States, cyberspace is currently undergoing a similar process, becoming ever more regulated and territorialized. Today, cyberspace cannot be conceived as separate from the ‘offline world’. Rather, it is tightly enmeshed in the logics of physical space. States assert their sovereign authority over cyberspace by translating the territorial logics they are familiar with to this ‘undiscovered country’ (Neuland, as it was memorably called by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, see Zeh 2013). To name just a few examples, national jurisdiction is assigned according to the geographical location of servers and users, content is routinely geoblocked, countries enact ‘national firewalls’ to control cross-border data flows, and data localisation laws regulate the transfer of sensitive personal data. This (re-)assertion of state sovereignty has led to fears that the Internet as we know it is under threat. For instance, Slack argues ‘(t)he international community must secure digital borders without erecting walls that ultimately divide [cyberspace] to the detriment as one of the greatest wealth-creating and socially empowering inventions of our time’ (Slack 2016: 74). This fear of the ‘fragmentation‘ or ‘Balkanization’ of cyberspace into a patchwork of loosely connected ‘national’ cyberspaces is widely shared (e.g. Glen 2014, Kamis/Thiel 2015). There are nascent, and as yet largely unrealized possibilities to make cyberspace map even closer to offline geographies (Mueller 2017: 81-84). This would entail a substantial revision of fundamental protocols that govern the Internet’s functionality. One such possibility would be to move the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates domain names into the numerical format that the Internet Protocol uses, from a global system into a system of interconnected national Domain Name Systems, so as to give national regulators control over the assignation of domain names in their ‘national space’. In the words of three leading Internet experts, this would create ‘the mother of all fragmentations’ (Drake et al. 2016: 28). Similarly, countries like China and Russia are pushing a discourse of ‘cybersovereignty’ that, in extremis, could entail the creation of what the Russian government calls ‘national segments’ of the Internet (Drake et al. 2016: 45-48). Recent discussions about ‘digital’ or ‘technological sovereignty’ represent

24

other, less extreme examples of this approach which are also palatable to democratic audiences (Fliegauf 2016). But territorialization does not have to imply recreating national boundaries in cyberspace. Territorialization merely means that cyberspace is demarcated and treated as a space or set of spaces under the formal or informal control of some actor. This does not necessarily imply that these spaces correspond to borders in the offline world. Control can be non-exclusive and overlapping. In other words, a user may have to follow rules established by multiple actors within the same space and for the same activity. For instance, file-sharing can fall under different national legislations depending on the physical presence of the user and the computers/servers involved. Control also does not imply sovereignty. The degree of control is not a criterion, and sometimes claims for control can be contested. Territorialization is also not something that is just done by states but also by corporations, as the ‘walled gardens’ of AOL and Compuserve or the ‘ecosystem’ approach by Google and others easily show. All of this wouldn’t have been possibly without a conceptualization of cyberspace as space. Instead of alternative metaphors (e.g. as a public utility like a phone network or a ‘superhighway’), understanding the internet in spatial terms has allowed for private ownership over parts of cyberspace, leading to the ‘propertisation of the internet’ (Olson 2005: 12). Terrritorialization usually entails the localization of, and control over information flows (Mueller 2017). This includes filtering or blocking access to online content and applications, geo-blocking and data localization requirements. Content control and censorship are a territorially delimited display of power and depend on jurisdictional clarity. When objectionable material (like child pornography, hate speech or political propaganda) resides on a server over which a country claims jurisdiction, it can demand the removal of said material. When the material is outside the country, it can still try to prevent users from accessing the material while in-country (Franzese 2009: 13). Whereas the first principle, jurisdiction by server location, cleanly maps to offline territory, the latter, jurisdiction by origin of user, creates a mess of overlapping jurisdictional spaces. Large content providers like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook have

25

to comply with national laws of all of their users and offer content that differs from country to country (geoblocking). Data localization (or data sovereignty) laws have also become very popular in recent years in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Their stated aim is to safeguard data protection for citizens and corporations, mandating ‘that certain types of data collected in a particular country be stored and/or processed within that country’ (Bowman 2015) and regulating which companies are allowed to manage these kinds of data based on whether the corporation falls under national jurisdiction. This practice reifies the national territory in cyberspace by discriminating against data flows that are deemed ‘transborder’. National firewalls are one of the best-known ways for governments to both communicate their territorial claim and to display power within the bounded space. These firewalls combine a range of filtering mechanisms like IP blocking and keyword searches to censor discussion of sensitive topics and deny access to websites deemed subversive. The ‘Great Firewall of China’ is the best-known example but other countries have developed, or are developing similar systems of censorship. Finally, Internet ‘kill switches’ are the ultimate display of power. Being able to shut off the entire national Internet, or parts thereof, for extended periods of time demonstrates the capability of the state. And while this is clearly a tactic of last resort, there have been shutdowns lasting days or weeks, partial shutdowns only affecting certain parts of the country or certain times of the day. Worryingly, Gohdes (2016) shows that Internet shutdowns are becoming more frequent, especially, but not exclusively, in authoritarian and semi-democratic countries that wish to prevent the opposition from mobilizing. Much like in the earlier case studies, the construction of cyberspace as ‘empty’, unruly and dangerous (often expressed through the stereotype of the ‘Wild West’) has been a standard trope of internet discourse (Saco 1999), and even a source of identity for its libertarian prophets. As a space partly constituted by technology, it should also come as no surprise that technology has provided the 26

instruments which have made territorialization possible, as the above examples – content filtering, data localization, national firewalls, kill switches – attest. All of these instruments were dependent on multiple technical capabilities, such as mass surveillance of internet traffic and automated keyword searches, as well as legal techniques that assign physical locations to stored data and that allow control over Internet Service Providers and autonomous systems (Belson 2017, Chertoff 2017). But these capabilities have only been developed and refined fairly recently. Content control has always been a concern for state security institutions but data localization laws and kill switches have only really attracted attention since about 2015. It would be very straightforward, but also a bit too deterministic, to suggest that this is solely down to technological, legal and political capabilities of states lagging behind the problems they wish to solve. To get a fuller picture, we must also look at incentives for states to get involved in cyberspace, which they have started to do increasingly since the mid- to late 2000s. There are growing commercial incentives for states to exert control in cyberspace. Examples of this are the (successful) attempts to levy value added taxes on e-commerce transactions in the early 2000s (McLure 2003, Cockfield 2006) and the (unsuccessful and still ongoing) attempts to get internet corporations to pay corporate taxes commensurate to their turnover. An institutionalist account would therefore concluce that as economic activity moves to cyberspace, regulation of property rights must follow. A more mercantilist approach would argue that states will engage in Landnahme so that they can work towards favorable conditions for “their” corporations. For instance, the US government has been very critical of EU rules and court judgments that applied to US companies like Microsoft or Google, labelling these as attempts to protect European companies from international competition. There are also security discourses underpinning the drive towards territorialization. Fears about Islamic terrorist groups (Stevens 2015), especially on the Dark Web (Chen et al. 2008, Berton 2015), and cyberwarfare by hostile powers (Manjikian 2010, Dunn Cavelty 2013) have galvanized states into action.

27

Conclusion This paper has argued that in contemporary international society, ‘empty spaces’ are subject to episodic processes of territorialization. These episodes occur when a) spaces are constructed as empty, b) the available technology facilitates cost-efficient modes of control, and c) states have impelling economic or security incentives. The three case studies lend support to these assumptions and show avenues for more detailed theorizing. For example, in each case the first condition, the construction of empty space, had been constant for a long time. Images of ‘barbaric’ Africa, the ‘vast and empty’ oceans and the ‘wild west’ of cyberspace had been standard narratives before the territorializing process set in. It was only as incentives changed and/or new technology became available that states, in cooperation with private actors, started pushing for territorialization. It is noteworthy that the framework holds up in spite of the different materialities of the three cases. The spaces were uninhabited (oceans), inhabited (Africa) and less and less distinguishable from our everyday lifeworld (cyberspace); they were terrestrial (Africa), oceanic (oceans) and virtual (cyberspace), meaning that spatial features were constant (Africa), constantly shifting (oceans) and evolving rapidly (cyberspace). The most obvious implication is that this required different technologies of control that were optimized for governing populations (Africa), activities (oceans) and flows (cyberspace), to put it very bluntly. As a result, the imperial partition of Africa and high seas governance followed classic intergovernmental models of control, with states playing a primary role in setting and enforcing rules, whereas private corporations and other intermediaries have a much bigger role in cyberspace. We should also keep in mind that the great power competition of the late 19 th century (Africa) was different from international politics of the late 20th century (oceans) and cyber-diplomacy in the 21st century (cyberspace). Deliberations about the governance of these spaces followed very different timeframes, from the languid and historically deep discussions about the high seas to the high28

frequency innovation in cyberspace governance. I am therefore confident that the model will broadly be applicable to other cases of territorialization, at least for those occurring outside of national boundaries. The territorialization of the high seas is an ongoing process, with delimitations of maritime boundaries, continental shelf claims and various functional territories still ongoing. We can also think about the territorialization of processes and flows like the carbon cycle (Lövbrand/Stripple 2006) or the spectrum of radio frequencies (Wolf 1991). As future cases, Antarctica and outer space come to mind. I claim that these episodes are due to a historical structure of global capitalism seeking the valorization of unused resources, an international society of states intolerant of non-state spaces, and modernity which creates expectations of rules-based interaction and universal human rights. Due to the their systemic, multidimensional character, these causal claims require a much deeper investigation than is possible within this paper. To that end, closer engagement with historical institutionalist work seems suitable to get a better handle on identifying the underlying causes.

Bibliography Adler, Emanuel/Pouliot, Vincent (2011): International practices. In: International Theory 3(1): 1-36. Agnew, John (1994): The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory. In: Review of International Political Economy 1(1): 53-80. Agnew, John (2009): Globalization and Sovereignty. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Agnew, John/Corbridge, Stuart (1995): Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Ant, Adam/Pirroni, Marco (1980): Kings of the Wild Frontier. Kings of the Wild Frontier: CBS Records International. Barlow, John Perry (1996): A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Retrieved 1 September 2013, from https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. Bartelson, Jens (2013): Three concepts of recognition. In: International Theory 5(01): 107-129. Belson, David (2017): The Migration of Political Internet Shutdowns. Internet Intelligence https://blogs.oracle.com/internetintelligence/the-migration-of-political-internet-shutdowns 2018. Berton, Beatrice (2015): The dark side of the web: ISIL’s one-stop shop? : European Union Institute for Security Studies. Bieler, Andreas/Bozkurt, Sümercan/Crook, Max/Cruttenden, Peter S./Erol, Ertan/Morton, Adam David/Tansel, Cemal Burak/Uzgören, Elif (2016): The enduring relevance of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital. In: Journal of International Relations and Development 19(3): 420-447. Blacksell, Mark (2006): Political Geography. London: Routledge. Bowman, Courtney (2015): Primer on Russia’s New Data Localization Law National Law Review. 29

Branch, Jordan (2014): The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, E. D. (1973): Iceland's Fishery Limits: The Legal Aspect. In: The World Today 29(2): 68-80. Bull, Hedley/Watson, Adam (eds.) (1984): The Expansion of International Society. Chen, Hsinchun/Chung, Wingyan/Qin, Jialun/Reid, Edna/Sageman, Marc/Weimann, Gabriel (2008): Uncovering the DarkWeb: A Case Study of Jihad on the Web. In: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(8): 1347–1359. Chenou, Jean-Marie (2014): From Cyber-Libertarianism to Neoliberalism: Internet Exceptionalism, Multi-stakeholderism, and the Institutionalisation of Internet Governance in the 1990s. In: Globalizations 11(2): 205-223. Chertoff, Michael (2017): A public policy perspective of the Dark Web. In: Journal of Cyber Policy 2(1): 26-38. Ciobanu, Estella A. (2006): Early Modern Brave New Worlds? . In: Annals of Ovidious University Constante – Philology 17: 7-23. Cleary, David (1993): After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon. In: Journal of Latin American Studies 25(2): 331-349. Clunan, Anne L./Trinkunas, Harold A. (eds.) (2010): Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cockfield, Arthur J. (2006): The Rise of the OECD as Informal 'World Tax Organization' Through National Responses to E-Commerce Tax Challenges. In: Yale Journal of Law and Technology 8(1): 136-187. Coggins, Bridget (2014): Power Politics and State Formation in the Twentieth Century: The Dynamics of Recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, Kevin R. (2002): Political Geography: Territory, State, and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cox, Robert W. (1981): Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory. In: Millennium 10(2): 126-155. Deibert, Ronald J./Rohozinski, Rafal (2010): Liberation vs. Control: The Future of Cyberspace. In: Journal of Democracy 21(4): 43-57. Dicke, Klaus (2002): Raumbezogene Leitbilder in der politischen Ideengeschichte. In: Karl Schmitt (ed.): Politik und Raum. Baden-Baden: Nomos: 11-27. Dodds, Klaus/Ingimundarson, Valur (2012): Territorial nationalism and Arctic geopolitics: Iceland as an Arctic coastal state. In: The Polar Journal 2(1): 21-37. Donnelly, Jack (1998): Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization? In: International Affairs 74(1): 123. Dörre, Klaus (2009): Die neue Landnahme: Dynamiken und Grenzen des Finanzmarktkapitalismus. In: Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich and Hartmut Rosa (ed.): Soziologie - Kapitalismus - Kritik: Eine Debatte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp: 21-86. Drake, William J./Cerf, Vinton G./Kleinwächter, Wolfgang (2016): Internet Fragmentation: An Overview. Future of the Internet Initiative White Paper. Geneva: World Economic Forum, January 2016. Dunn Cavelty, Myriam (2013): From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout: Threat Representations with an Impact in the Cyber-Security Discourse. In: International Studies Review 15(1): 105-122. Economist (2009): The Scramble for the Seabed: Suddenly, a Wider World Below the Waterline. The Economist. Ejdus, Filip (2014): The Expansion of International Society after 30 Years: Views from the European Periphery. In: International Relations 28(4): 445-478. Fenn, Percy Thomas (1926): Origins of the Theory of Territorial Waters. In: The American Journal of International Law 20(3): 465-482. Ferguson, Yale H./Mansbach, Richard W. (1996): Political Space and Westphalian States in a World of "Polities": Beyond Inside/Outside. In: Global Governance 2(2): 261-287. Fliegauf, Mark T. (2016): In Cyber (Governance) We Trust. In: Global Policy 7(1): 79-82. Franzese, Patrick W. (2009): Sovereignty in Cyberspace: Can it Exist? In: Air Force Law Review 64(1): 142. 30

Geiger, Danilo (2008): Turner in the Tropics: The Frontier Concept Revisited. In: Danilo Geiger (ed.): Frontier Encounters: Indigenous Communities and Settlers in Asia and Latin America. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs: 77-215. Giddens, Anthony (1985): A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. 2: The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glen, Carol M. (2014): Internet Governance: Territorializing Cyberspace? In: Politics & Policy 42(5): 635657. Gohdes, Anita (2016): Internet Shutdowns During Political Unrest Are Becoming Normal – And It Should Worry Us. Political Violence at a Glance https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2016/09/16/internet-shutdowns-during-political-unrest-arebecoming-normal-and-it-should-worry-us/. Gong, Gerrit W. (1984): The Standard of "Civilization" in International Society. Oxford: Clarendon. Gozzi, Gustavo (2007): History of International Law and Western Civilization. In: International Community Law Review 9: 353-373. Griffiths, Ryan D. (2017): Admission to the sovereignty club: the past, present, and future of the international recognition regime. In: Territory, Politics, Governance 5(2): 177-189. Harley, J.B. (1987): The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography. In: J.B. Harley and David Woodward (ed.): The History of Cartography, Volume 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1-42. Harvey, David (1990): The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David (2001): Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hearst, Eliot (1991): Psychology and Nothing. In: American Scientist 79(5): 432-443. Hiatt, Alfred (2002): Blank Spaces on the Earth. In: The Yale Journal of Criticism 15(2): 223-250. Houghton, Katherine/Rochette, Julien (2014): Introduction: Advancing governance of areas beyond national jurisdiction. In: Marine Policy 49: 81-84. Ingimundarson, Valur (2003): Fighting the Cod Wars in the Cold War: Iceland's challenge to the Western Alliance in the 1970s. In: The RUSI Journal 148(3): 88-94. Jóhannesson, Gudni T. (2004): How ‘cod war’ came: the origins of the Anglo-Icelandic fisheries dispute, 1958–61. In: Historical Research 77(198): 543-574. Jung, Dietrich (2001): The Political Sociology of World Society. In: European Journal of International Relations 7(4): 443-474. Kagan, Richard L./Schmidt, Benjamin (2007): Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography. In: David Woodward (ed.): The History of Cartography, Volume 3 (Part 1): Cartography in the European Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 661-679. Kamis, Ben/Thiel, Thorsten (2015): The Original Battle Trolls: How States Represent the Internet as a Violent Place. Working Paper, 23. Frankfurt: HSFK. Kent, H. S. K. (1954): The Historical Origins of the Three-Mile Limit. In: The American Journal of International Law 48(4): 537-553. Keskitalo, Carina (2007): International Region-Building: Development of the Arctic as an International Region. In: Cooperation and Conflict 42(2): 187-205. Koddenbrock, Kai (2017): Mehr Kapitalismus wagen! Herrschaft „jenseits der Anarchie“ und die Rolle des Geldes. In: Politische Vierteljahresschrift 58(2): 258-283. Koskenniemi, Martti (2007): The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics. In: The Modern Law Review 70(1): 1-30. Krasner, Stephen D. (1999): Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1991): The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri (2009): State, Space, World: Selected Essays, Edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Loshin, Jacob (2007): Secrets Revealed: How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property Without Law. Lövbrand, Eva/Stripple, Johannes (2006): The Climate as Political Space: On the Territorialisation of the Global Carbon Cycle. In: Review of International Studies 32(2): 217-235. 31

Lund, Christian (2016): Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship. In: Development and Change 47(6): 1199-1228. Manjikian, Mary McEvoy (2010): From Global Village to Virtual Battlespace: The Colonizing of the Internet and the Extension of Realpolitik. In: International Studies Quarterly 54(2): 381-401. Mastanduno, Michael (1998): Economics and Security in Statecraft and Scholarship. In: International Organization 52(4): 825-854. Matthíasson, Thórólfur (2003): Closing the open sea: Development of fishery management in four Icelandic fisheries. In: Natural Resources Forum 27(1): 1-18. McLure, Charles E. (2003): The Value Added Tax on Electronic Commerce in the European Union. In: International Tax and Public Finance 10(6): 753-762. Meyer, John W./Boli, John/Thomas, George M./Ramirez, Francisco O. (1997): World Society and the Nation-State. In: American Journal of Sociology 103(1): 144-181. Mitchell, Bruce (1976): Politics, Fish, and International Resource Management: The British-Icelandic Cod War. In: Geographical Review 66(2): 127-138. Mitzen, Jennifer (2006): Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma. In: European Journal of International Relations 12(3): 341-370. Monmonier, Mark (2010): No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mueller, Milton (2017): Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty, Globalization and Cyberspace. Cambridge: Polity Press. Olson, Kathleen K. (2005): Cyberspace as Place and the Limits of Metaphor. In: Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 11(1): 10-18. Paasi, Anssi (2003): Territory. In: John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (ed.): A Companion to Political Geography. Malden: Blackwell: 109-122. Phillips, Andrew (2016): Global IR Meets Global History: Sovereignty, Modernity, and the International System’s Expansion in the Indian Ocean Region. In: International Studies Review. Phillips, Andrew/Sharman, J. C. (2015): Explaining Durable Diversity in International Systems: State, Company, and Empire in the Indian Ocean. In: International Studies Quarterly 59(3): 436-448. Rasmussen, Mattias Borg/Lund, Christian (2018): Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The territorialization of resource control. In: World Development 101(Supplement C): 388-399. Risse, Thomas (ed.) (2011): Governance Without a State? Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood. New York: Columbia University Press. Ruggie, John Gerard (1993): Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations. In: International Organization 47(1): 139-174. Ryan, Barry J. (2015): Security spheres: A phenomenology of maritime spatial practices. In: Security Dialogue 46(6): 568-584. Sack, Robert D. (1986): Human Territoriality: Its theory and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saco, Diana (1999): Colonizing Cyberspace: 'National Security' and the Internet. In: Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall (ed.): Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sandholtz, Wayne (2008): Dynamics of International Norm Change: Rules against Wartime Plunder. In: European Journal of International Relations 14(1): 101-131. Schetter, Conrad (2013): Ungoverned Territories: The Construction of Spaces of Risk in the 'War on Terrorism'. In: Detlef Müller-Mahn (ed.): The Spatial Dimension of Risk: How Geography Shapes the Emergence of Riskscapes. London: Routledge: 97-108. Scott, James C. (1998): Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Slack, Chelsey (2016): Wired yet Disconnected: The Governance of International Cyber Relations. In: Global Policy 7(1): 69-78. Steinberg, Philip E. (2001): The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 32

Stevens, Tim (2015): Security and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds: Who Is Watching the Warlocks and Why? In: International Political Sociology 9(3): 230-247. Stone, W. T. (1955): Territorial Waters and the High Seas. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Taylor, Peter J. (1995): Beyond Containers: Internationality, Interstateness, Interterritoriality. In: Progress in Human Geography 19(1): 1-15. Tomasson, Richard F. (1976): Iceland's Survival and the Law of the Sea. In: Current History 70(415): 155-158. Vandergeest, Peter/Peluso, Nancy Lee (1995): Territorialization and State Power in Thailand. In: Theory and Society 24(3): 385-426. Varone, Frédéric/Nahrath, Stéphane/Aubin, David/Gerber, Jean-David (2013): Functional regulatory spaces. In: Policy Sciences 46(4): 311-333. von Baeyer, Hans Christian (1993): The Fermi Solution: Essays on Science. New York: Random House. Walker, Wyndham L (1945): Territorial Waters: The Cannon Shot Rule. In: British Yearbook of International Law 22: 210-231. Wolf, Klaus Dieter (1991): Internationale Regime zur Verteilung globaler Ressourcen: Eine vergleichende Analyse der Grundlagen ihrer Entstehung am Beispiel der Regelung des Zugangs zur wirtschaftlichen Nutzung des Meeresbodens, des geostationären Orbits, der Antarktis und zu Wissenschaft und Technologie. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Wu, Tim (2010): Is Internet Exceptionalism Dead? In: Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus (ed.): The Next Digital Decade. Washington: TechFreedom: 179-188. Young, Oran (1997): Arctic Governance: Bringing the High Latitudes in from the Cold. In: International Environmental Affairs 9(1): 54-68. Zeh, Juli (2013): Es geht um etwas anderes: Merkel und das "Neuland". Retrieved 05 July 2013, from http://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/merkel-und-das-neuland-es-geht-um-etwas-anderes2030451.html.

33