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date: 27 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Starting from the presupposition that areas of limited statehood (ALS) are not ungoverned, but ‘differently’ governed, this chapter proposes a spatial grammar that analyses authority and governance as a socio-spatial relationship. This spatial grammar distinguishes four types of dynamic socio-spatial relations—territory, place, scale, and network—and enables us to spatially analyse (a) how political authority is contested, claimed, upheld, and disrupted; (b) how political life is negotiated, regulated, and practised; and (c) how these practices and their effects are spatially situated. We apply this spatial grammar to four case studies, each providing insight into one type of socio-spatial relations. These cases from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), explain how the negotiation, contestation, and disruption of political authority is spatially situated and embedded in ALS. A spatial grammar focuses on the shifting, overlapping, and contradictory practices of claiming political and regulatory power.

Keywords: spatial turn, networks, territory, scale, place, authority, regulation, governable space

Benedikt Korf

Benedikt Korf is professor of political geography at the University of Zürich, Switzerland.

Timothy Raeymaekers

Timothy Raeymaekers is a postdoctoral lecturer in political geography at the University of Zürich, Switzerland.

Conrad Schetter

Conrad Schetter is professor for peace and conflict studies at the University of Bonn, and director for research at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), Germany.

Michael J. Watts

Michael J. Watts is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (2013).

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