HKKK00057U KK, Territorialization and Global Enclosures

This course reviews understanding of key concepts such as territorialization, globalization and enclosures. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach (guided by readings in political science, anthropology, history and human geography) to the process of how state governments seize upon the exclusive notion of sovereignty and adopt new technologies and new forms of knowledge to demarcate their national borders and resources the course goes beyond notions of bounded state territoriality and takes a broader view of people’s notions of social space. Through the course students will be introduced to critical understanding of historical, contemporary and imaginary projections of a technology of power onto spaces that geographical characteristic made them susceptible or resistant to state territorialization. By undertaking case comparisons of the selected spaces such as the Amazon Rainforest, the world’s oceans, the Arctic or the landscape of mountains—which might be hotly contested areas and subject to claim of sovereignty and enclosures by competing global powers—students will learn to analyze the specific mixture of interests involved for each claimant (e.g. identity, legitimacy, resources and/or great power rivalry) and the effects of multiple textual, pictorial and cartographic discourses on state and non-state perceptions of territoriality.