The final chapter concludes the research project, offers a summary of the four main findings and the diagnosis of deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation. The chapter then shows how this new legal geography can be applied in practice and outlines avenues for further research. The chapter argues territories can at the same time be understood as more complex and dynamic than the discipline of international law has hitherto imagined them to be, and, at the same time, as devastatingly simple if territory is instead understood as constituted by practices of control performed in relation to specific spaces, people, and activities.

This chapter gets to the heart of why the disciplinary imagination of international law is only able to see deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, by excavating the content of the orthodox concept(s) of territory and scrutinising the spatial assumptions. For it is how territory is understood that forces the production of aterritorial functionalist account of law. The chapter reviews the standard definition(s) of territory before deconstructing the characteristics and qualities of the concept of territory. These include: that territory is only states’; that territory is imagined in a two-dimensional, flat, jigsaw-like form; that the physical referents are analytically prioritised over the social; that territory tends to be imagined as homogeneous, uniform, and contiguous ; that territory is bound by a particular technology and representation of borders; and that territories are relatively static. The final sections delve into the signification of territory and outline five different uses for territory in the discourse, before exploring how territory has mediated legal theoretical understandings of sovereignty.

This chapter re-inserts the (rethought) concept of territory into the legal-theoretical framework, offering a look at how this concept can be realised and might differently operationalise concepts such as sovereignty and jurisdiction. Taking the concept of sovereignty first, the chapter operationalises this concept as a bundle of legal rights, duties, etc. informed by legal realist methods and social constructivism. The chapter then turns to the concept of jurisdiction, problematising the ‘boundaries’ of and reterritorialising extraterritorial jurisdiction. The chapter offers an alternative to the ‘ownership’ and ‘exclusive’ model of legal rights, which otherwise has at its core a reified and flat territory. The final part explores actorhood, demonstrating how the spaces of international organisations can be understood as their territories. Taking as its starting point the possibility of territorial pluralism, multiplicity, and continuous (re)production, the chapter ends with an account of territories proliferating rather than diminishing. Taking the idea of reterritorialising seriously, it proposes a legal account of the relationship between actors and their spaces.

The introductory chapter outlines the need for a rethink of territory. Beneath the surface of international and transnational discourses about globalisation and global governance is a conceptual and theoretical indeterminacy deriving from the, often unperceived, conflicting nature of the spaces of globalisation and the spaces of sovereignty. Where global law and governance are discussed, the old statocentric conceptions of spatiality provide the governing model, dominating such that if there is no state-territory, it is asumed there is no territory at all. There is tension between theories of a system with an overly determined spatial logic to ones without much account of space. There is little discussion about where functions go nor of the logics of the spaces in which they are exercised. The spaces of reterritorialisation are missing. As a result, functions exercised ‘beyond’ state territories appear to ‘float free’ of the highly specific territorialised legal order. Many theories cannot account for reterritorialisation because the territories of non-state actors are invisible to international legal thought because its orthodox spatial imaginary only makes visible state spaces.

Chapter 2 provides an overview and critique of discourses about deterritorialisation in international law. The first sections sketch out three main strands to these discourses. The first strand contains accounts of a fundamental transition in the organising logic of international law; a shift from ordering competences on the basis of territory to functions. The second strand groups together accounts addressing the relocation of power but containing imprecise and undertheorised understandings of these spaces. The third strand includes accounts concerning the porosity of states. The chapter then problematises these discourses. Each strand applies a similar legal-spatial imaginary, and in so doing omits the resulting spaces produced by deterritorialisation. Common to all is a tendency to continue to applying a particular and unproblematised concept of territory, limiting theoretical insight, consistently producing deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, and often conflating at an analytical level actors, spaces, and functions. The reason for this again lies in the continuing prioritisation of the stato-centric approach to territory in international law’s implicit geography.

This chapter turns to how the concept of territory might be reimagined, exploring how the concept of territory might be rethought of as the product of social relations. It offers a way for international law as a discipline to differently conceptualise territory, drawing on insights from (critical) spatial theorists about space to ‘update’ the discipline’s onto-theoretical approach to conceptualising territory. These insights allow us to rethink the concept of territory and emancipate international law’s spatial imaginary, by developing a legal theoretical understanding of control and authority that better reflects contemporary governance, law-making, and regulatory practices, rather than one limited to a twentieth-century state-centric international legal positivism. As a result, it also offers insights that enable the better observation of the relationship between power, law, and space, making sense of the competing state and non-state institutions and their territories ‘physically’ overlapping one another.