Territory has always played a key role in the origins, conduct, and consequences of armed conflict. For territories to exist in any meaningful sense, human groups need to think of them in the first place, and then act upon these thoughts: territory is what states and societies make of it.
In Shifting Grounds, Burak Kadercan draws upon a wide variety of cases, ranging from the Thirty Years War to ISIS, to examine the relationship between "territorial ideas" and armed conflict. He argues that states and societies have adhered to different forms of territoriality across time and space, and territory, as well as territorial control, has meant different things in different time periods and regions. Building on this premise, Kadercan makes two claims. First, how state elites conceive territory within and beyond their domains affects their military objectives as well as methods and strategies for waging war. Second, adherence to different forms of territoriality leads to different modes and patterns of war, and wars themselves may affect how state elites and societies conceive territories. Kadercan then turns to the transformative roles that wars can play in shaping dominant territorial ideas and geopolitical assumptions and how the impact of such wars differs in Western and non-Western regions.
Ranging broadly across different eras and world regions, Shifting Grounds sheds light on the shifting nature of the relationship between territorial ideas and armed conflict not only in the context of the distant the past, but also in present-day global politics.
Industry Reviews
In the immediate aftermath of what was the most consequential feature of the later twentieth century, the Cold War, there was much debate in different groups within academia about whether the future portended a world in which globalization might roll over the world political map to produce a world without significant territorial divisions or one in which regional spheres of power and influence would produce a more amorphous territoriality which might in turn reproduce many of the features of the Cold War. In this pathbreaking book, a synthetic account brings together both analysis of territorial ideas and actual empirical history, Burak Kadercan provides some basic tools for rethinking how the social sciences in general, and international relations in particular, should approach understanding of the vital role of territoriality in human history. * John Agnew, UCLA, and author of Hidden Geopolitics *
Shifting Ground marks a decisive development in constructivist IR. Kadercan returns constructivism to the core of the discipline, to state-territory relations and the question of war. In opening up the variable construction of state-territory relations for inquiry, he deprives materialist accounts of their last bastion, the sovereign and territorial state. At the same time, he develops an approach to territoriality able to account for, rather than deny, historical variation in state-territory relations. More than this, unlike any other systemic account of IR, he is able to incorporate nation states and empires, as well as the global North and South, in his theory of territoriality and war. Kadercan has indeed shifted the ground with this excellent book. * Tarak Barkawi, Research Professor, Johns Hopkins University *
Shifting Grounds is a compelling dialogue of IR and political geography on territories as plural ideals and practices. With conceptual creativity and rich case studies, it brings thinking about states, territories, and war to a new level. * Gerard Toal, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech *
For much of human history territorial claims have been at the heart of armed conflicts. However, precisely because territory was so integral to most violent conflicts it was often taken for granted and has not been properly theorized. In this excellent and innovative book Kadercan offers a first systematic and multidisciplinary analysis of the complex and historically changing relationships between 'territorial ideas' and armed conflict. * Sinisa Malesevic, Professor of Sociology, University College, Dublin and CNAM, Paris *
This theoretically and conceptually rich study provides a crucial addition to our understanding of territory, conflict, and ideas in international politics. Through wide-ranging historical and contemporary case studies, the book demonstrates the mutual implications of territorial orders and warfare. Essential reading for anyone interested in the central role of territory in international relations. * Jordan Branch, Associate Professor of Government, Claremont McKenna College *
