Territory

The concept of territory has rarely been directly interrogated in International Political Economy (IPE) literature. Territory involves more than geography or space; instead it invokes a set of ideas and practices of political authority and control. While there are research programs in IPE that deal with spatial scale—including the study of global cities, regionalism, the size of states, offshoring, and special economic zones—there are important ways that IPE can draw on work from other fields that explicitly focuses on territory. Importantly, the literature on territory lays bare some of the territorial assumptions of common IPE models which, if further explored, have the potential to lead to better model specification and the opening up of new and fertile areas of research.