Abstract:
The current fashion among geographers is to see territory as an intellectual trap as it applies to analysis of states. Critical geopolitical analysis in particular focuses on "unpacking embedded discourses of power" while postulating a cosmopolitan, anti-territorial (flat earth?) utopia in which borders have vanished or become irrelevant.
The aim of this paper is to "trouble" these notions and to construct a more realistic (those for whom this is troubling would say essentialist) model of geographic analysis of the phenomenon of territory, especially as it applies to the process of state-building. Territory remains the sine qua non of internationally recognized statehood. It is also an essential part of the political and cultural identities which provide the impetus for forming a state from the ground up, and which also provide borders, if not frontiers.
The paper will demonstrate the counterintuitive notion that, indeed, more borders are better than fewer borders. Truly effective state-building is done by those who see themselves as citizens of the state in question or emergence. Such state-building is often achieved using the "ground-up" fragmented territorial pieces of a failing or failed state. The case of the former Yugoslavia will be used in combination with concepts from the work of Leopold Kohr, James Scott, and Jeremy Rifkin to show how a political world with two thousand states is both more logical and more moral than the political world of two hundred states we inhabit now.
