International Encyclopedia of Geography

Territory and territoriality are generally regarded as key concepts in political geography.While Anglophone geographers have privileged a rather politico-institutional understanding, closely related to the state and the notion of sovereignty, Francophone geographers have privileged a social and semiotic approach, which emphasizes the role people play in the production of territories.After having been dismissed as a relic of the past in an age of flows and networks and obfuscated by the hegemonic role place has played in geography, territory seems to have attracted new interest and gained momentum in the discipline in the last few years.Main TextMeanings are not fixed, but historically, geographically, and socially specific.This simple, but insightful lesson of the post-modern and post-structural turn seems quite appropriate when looking at the notion of "territory."In its original Latin use, territorium referred to the agricultural and grazing land surrounding a human settlement.With the rise of the modern state in Europe, around the 15 th century, the term has increasingly been associated with the state.Among Anglo-American geographers, territory is today often conceptualized as a bounded space over which a form of political authority is exercised, although it can also be used as a generic synonym of place and region.A similar multiple usage can also be found in French and Italian, but within these geographical traditions territory tends to be treated as a lived space more than as a space monopolized by a politico-institutional power.And yet, if we move out of the Western world, we will see how territory cannot be easily translated into other languages.Territory is therefore a polysemic term and the fact that it is a key-notion in several disciplines (geography, law, ethology, ecology, anthropology, etc.) makes the task of pinning down its meaning even more dependent on the context within which it is used.For the purpose of the present article, territory will therefore be analyzed within a limited disciplinary and linguistic scope.Preference will be given to the geographical literature in English and French.This choice might sound too confining, but I would argue that within both the Anglophone and Francophone geographical literature territory and territoriality have been extensively researched, producing the prevailing interpretations in use today within the international scientific community more widely. Early steps on territoryIn his historical account of the political and legal institutions of the Western world, Carl Schmitt (2006, 74), echoing the linguist Jost Trier, affirmed: "In the beginning was the fence.Fence, enclosure, and border are deeply interwoven in the world formed by men, determining its concepts […]".Nomos, the legal principle around which, according to Schmitt, the first political institutions were created, is a spatial term which recalls indeed the notion of fence.Nomos stands for the primeval form of land appropriation and delimitation-the first partition and classification of space, which gives orientation (Ortung) and order (Ordnung) to space.This interpretation is particularly relevant when thinking of territory, which still today is mainly defined as a portion of the Earth, delimited by borders, over and through which some form of power is exercised.In one of the first geographical reflections on the notion of territory, Jean