“The evil of the Argentine Republic is its extension”: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento´s famous admonition in Facundo (1845) was not only a program for the modernization of Argentina but a figurative horizon for the literary genre that was going to critically analyze that very modernization until the mid-twentieth century: the “national character essay.” This genre had analogous developments in many parts of Latin America, but did not establish the link between territory and national identity as strongly as it did in Argentina. In the century that leads from Sarmiento to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada the genre displays a series of literary resources that seek to take the geographical configuration of the country as a measure of its people’s soul. This can be seen both in the invention of a physical sphere of the nation to set the stage for his political drama (Sarmiento) and in the metaphorization of the map as the nation’s body (Martínez Estrada). This corpus is analyzed here in relation to real and imaginary geographies that produced it and were produced by it.

The introductory chapter establishes the central questions, the rationale and structure of the monograph noting that it is concerned with the impact of unresolved conflict and contestation on the effectiveness of Europe’s human rights protection architecture within the framework of the Council of Europe. It also highlights several limits, such as the European focus and the deliberate decision not to seek to advance any reform proposals for the European Court of Human Rights Article 1 jurisprudence. It also engages, and dismisses, the potential critique of human rights imperialism.

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.

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.

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.

Human space is transformed into territory through multiple types of delineation, from closed limits materialised in the landscape (such as fortresses, barriers, etc.), to open and blurred limits forming transition areas, known and practised by actors. In the kind of territorial state which Egypt had been since its birth, it was essential for the rulers to spatially mark the limits of their sovereignty. During the New Kingdom, the economic and political integration of the border districts was made possible thanks to the khetem border posts and their administration. The aim was to ensure the integrity and security of the kingdom, by investing or even overinvesting in its periphery, in terms of political decision, discourse and representations. The king and his administration were well aware that the integrity of the state was at stake in these border zones. Yet, in spite of the uniformity of the discourse, and the fact that the same name was applied to all border posts around Egypt, as well as the same title to the person in charge of these settlements, it appears that the system adapted to and was intimately linked with the local situation and the specificities of each border region.

The ancient-to-modern Nile Delta has been consistently conceptualised as a coherent, distinctive region, and toponymy is one of the manifestations of this space-making process. In that regard, available evidence, which ranges from the Old Kingdom to modern times and covers a variety of scripts and languages, testifies to two partly overlapping yet simultaneously distinctive takes on the region. One adopts an insider’s, fluvial and south–north vantage point; the other, an outsider’s, maritime and north–south one. The etymology, diachronic endurance and translation of the toponyms (t3-)mḥw and Δέλτα indicate a tension between the unswerving appeal of the indigenous understanding of the Delta as a place and the long-lasting, far-reaching posterity of the ancient Greek tradition beyond and within Egypt. This chapter analyses available literary and documentary evidence of the name(s) given to what we now commonly call the Nile Delta, from Antiquity to the modern period. I propose that we consider these place names as both manifestations and vectors of stories, and reflect on their contribution to our understanding of human pluri-millennial entanglements with this territory. I first discuss the two, Egyptian and Greek, names associated with the region, before focusing on the polysignificance of the apex region.

This chapter discusses the history of the Nile Delta during the periods of Persian and Macedonian rule, as demarcated by the journey of Herodotus in the middle of the fifth century BCE and Strabo’s stay in the wake of the prefect Cornelius Gallus. The four centuries separating the two journeys were marked by a major event: the foundation and emergence of Alexandria. While Herodotus provides the description of a polycentric Delta, composed of a dozen large cities, Strabo’s description is dominated by the presence of Alexandria. Yet, however momentous, the Alexandrian history does not summarise that of the whole Delta. The development of the Eastern Delta is marked both by increased militarisation and by the strengthening of trade and economic relations between Egypt, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. Located far from the eastern military rampart but also away from the western capitals, the role of the Memphis area was gradually reduced by the development of east–west transversal routes converging on the Canopic branch, where the political nucleus of Egypt was located. Finally, the Western Delta was a political centre long before Alexandria, with ongoing connections to the history of the Libyan desert.

Like all revolutionary processes, those that led to Latin American independence were highly volatile and experimental in nature. Often accompanied by extreme violence, even open warfare, the formation of the new Latin American states in the early nineteenth century required imagining new states, institutions, and laws. The need, often urgency, to transform colonial domains into various independent units frequently coincided with the desire to end (or at least modernize) the Ancien régime. Yet the wish to supersede the past did not guarantee rupture. Instead, it initiated a period of questioning more often than answering, of experimenting more often than finding solutions. After describing the context in which the independence took place, this chapter surveys some of the questions that had to be answered, mostly by identifying debates that required settling and the difficulties entailed in achieving this goal. It examines who had the power to declare independence, how to identify the territories that would become new polities, how the national territory and citizenship were defined, how new republican structures should be formed, and elections conducted, and the legal changes all these developments entailed.

This chapter examines the relationship between collective self-defence and another legal basis for the use of force, which in scholarship is referred to as ‘military assistance on request’ or ‘intervention by invitation’. Analysing the relationship between collective self-defence and military assistance on request is crucial because these concepts are, in some respects, strikingly similar. Indeed, it has been argued that they overlap, and states often blur them in their argumentation. The chapter explores the extent to which the concepts can be differentiated at the ‘doctrinal’ or ‘conceptual’ level. It then turns to the various legal requirements (actual or, in some cases, arguable) for collective self-defence and military assistance on request, with the aim of highlighting similarities or differences, as relevant, when it comes to the operation of these two concepts.

Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the so-called “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4 provides an alternative argument for rejecting private property. While Chapter 3 derives this conclusion from the Lockean proviso, this chapter begins with the consent theory of legitimacy as its starting premise. It then argues that property ownership is a form of legitimate authority. Thus, if one accepts a consent theory of legitimacy, one must also maintain that ownership has consent as its necessary condition. However, given that no one has ever consented to such ownership, it follows that no one owns any natural resources. The chapter then considers three objections to this argument, namely, that (1) there is nothing problematic about imposing obligations on others, (2) legitimacy only requires consent when it conflicts with previously acquired property rights, and (3) there is a morally salient distinction between land and territory. It concludes with a discussion of what this argument from consent theory implies vis-à-vis self-ownership.

In this chapter, I describe how my research with Indigenous Peoples has informed my understanding and conceptualization of what ethical research with Indigenous negotiators, representatives, and researchers at environmental negotiations based on the principle of relationality entails. Following Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, I reflect on how I build relationality with Indigenous groups taking their politics at the negotiations in dialogue with their politics at the territory as part of a diplomatic effort (Indigenous diplomacies) of reciprocity between the world of global environmental negotiations, which is a world of multilateralism, and the worlds of Indigenous Peoples, which is a pluriverse of life projects. For doing this, methodologically, I look at Indigenous participation at negotiations, and in a given meeting, in conversation with how they define global environmental negotiations as both a political place and a political event that is part of a continuous political process.