Territory beyond the anglophone tradition

Cristina del Biaggio (1)

1 UvA - University of Amsterdam [Amsterdam] = Universiteit van Amsterdam

The Francophone "territoire" is often translated by the English "place" and not by "territory", as the common sense would suggest. This detail underscores a deeper, and epistemological, difference existing between the Anglophone "territory" and the Francophone "territoire". The Francophone territoire never so strictly coincided with a bounded state territory, as in the Anglophone tradition. In the Francophone territoire the logics of agents and not necessarily state-agents, are included, and historically the concept of territoire allowed Francophone geography to become a social science in its own right. As such, territoire conceived in the Francophone way, is nowadays a powerful scholars tool to explore the contemporary world, made of a combination of borders, networks and overlapping territories. Despite the evident interest of conceiving territories beyond a state-centric view, Anglophone geographers, as opposed to their Francophone colleagues, never dare to do so. This chapter aims to present to an Anglophone audience how the Francophone tradition conceives territory and how it links it with issues of identities, projects and agents.

Mots clés: territory; territoire; place; network; bounded space; region; agent; identity; appropriation; Alps; Alpine region

Domaines: Géographie

Cristina del Biaggio. Territory beyond the anglophone tradition. John A. Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna Secor, Joanne Sharp. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography, Wiley-Blackwell, pp.35-47, 2015, 9781118725887. ⟨hal-02568063⟩