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Interpreting Territory and Power

Abstract

This paper offers an interpretive alternative to the idea of the state as sovereign over a territory and possessing a monopoly of power. It interprets both Territory and Power (the book by Bulpitt) and territory and power (the objects studied in that book). Bulpitt’s ideas were part of a broader movement to rethink the state to (i) accommodate new behavioral topics, and (ii) to defend modernist empiricism and institutionalism from the positivism and general theories of behavioralism. Now we might adopt an alternative interpretive approach. An interpretive approach decenters territory and power, revealing them to be contingent products of struggles over meanings in which the beliefs of some actors come to dominate, obscure, and even obliterate those of others.

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