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Two related ideas that connect to territory as political space:
- Territory requires some sort of political control.
- Politics, or the exercise of power, often requires territory.
As Flint explains, territoriality is the power exercised through the construction and management of territory.
The film clip “The Magnificent African Cake” you watched in the first section (Geography & Politics) of this lesson, illustrates the messiness of sovereignty claims that highlight the tensions around the concept of territory (and territoriality) on the African continent.
Lesson 5 will explore the geopolitics of territory more fully, but, for now, it’s important to understand that “(t)erritory is both a fundamental building-block of geopolitics and something that is fluid over time and varies across space.” (Flint, 2016, p. 34)