The practical significance of the social phenomena of territory and territoriality can scarcely be underestimated. We live in a world of rooms and buildings, lots and subdivisions, districts and zones, states and federations. We live in a world of cities, refugee camps, reservations, prisons, wilderness areas and free trade zones. Our worlds of experience are carved up and made meaningful by reference to the complex territorialities of public and private. While one may be inside or outside of any particular territorial enclosure one is never outside of the complex ensembles of lines and spaces that make the landscapes within which lives are lived meaningfully. Every centimeter of the material world is invested with meaning by way of territoriality - and these meanings refer to relations of power. is also involved with economic, social, cultural and other forms of power. It conditions the workings of power orders based on class, gender, sexuality and race, among other constituents of identity. Guided by the shifting conventions and concerns of various disciplines scholars have made different kinds of sense of territorial configurations. They are of special interest to geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, legal scholars and international relations specialists. The strongly inter-disciplinary character of scholarship makes for both an extra-ordinarily rich inheritance and the potential for confusion - or, more likely, mutual disregard. strands of research on territoriality. One of its principal objectives is to convey some of the complexities associated with the term in an accessible manner so as to be useful to the full range of readers identified by the Series Editors.
