Shifting Grounds

International Relations (ir) scholarship suffers from a lack of historical self-awareness. Kadercan’s Shifting Grounds illuminates those limits by focusing on the impact of conceptions of territory on war—and vice versa—across time and space. Inspired by Agnew’s influential essay on the “territorial trap,” Kadercan charges his ir colleagues with “viewing ‘the territorial state as existing prior to and as a container of society’” (36).1 Taking the state and its “territoriality” for granted, they fail to grasp its historicity, theorizing in a social scientific mode about the determinants of state behavior and the properties of state systems. In response, Kadercan commonsensically asserts that “territory is what states and societies make of it” and that “to a large extent, war is what states and societies make of territory” (italics in original, 2, 3).Historians think this way, with narratives emphasizing the complexities of making territory (“territorialization” and “re-territorialization”) and state-making; ir “constructivists” also tend to think historically as a byproduct of their campaign to subvert the unexamined premises of other ir theorists, although they have yet to cover comprehensively the ground that Kadercan claims here. Touting the “promise of constructivism,” Kadercan calls for interdisciplinary dialogue between ir and political geography, offering his book as a preliminary survey of “the ‘middle ground’ between the two disciplines” (32, 231).Historians and history-minded colleagues in other disciplines have long since been cultivating Kadercan’s field but have much to learn from his abductive “comparative case study method” and the provisional generalizations that he generates on successive (and overlapping) “territorial orders” in world history (39, 41). All states are not created equal, as Agnew argued, nor is the modern nation-state the universal or terminal form (at “the end of history,” 238). By centering attention on state-society relations—and avoiding a reductive approach to regime types—Kadercan underscores the complex character of interpolity relations across (and at any) time. The very idea of “international” relations is anachronistic, the aspirational “gold standard” of a (late) modern world with distinct peoples in clearly demarked “homelands” exercising their sovereign will in recognized states (209).Kadercan instead identifies a range of polities, characterized by social composition (homogenous or heterogenous), borders (fixed or fluid), and the frequency and intensity of wars with similar or dissimilar polities, and therefore under symmetrical or hierarchical circumstances (51). His case studies compare examples of each combination in different eras in different parts of the world; Revolutionary France and isis thus displayed “virulent territorialities” as they sought sociospatial homogeneity in a world of fluid frontiers; the pre-Westphalian European state-system sought to perpetuate heterogeneous “‘mosaic’ territoriality” by securing fixed borders (51).The monolithic territoriality of nation-states is historically exceptional and far from universal in today’s world of border conflicts and conflicting territorialities. By demonstrating its emergent, aspirational, and contested character, Kadercan offers a compelling history of a particular way of conceptualizing “state space” and its implications for expanding state capacity (96). In his account, the French Revolution was the decisive moment, both in perpetuating mosaic regimes in reaction to people’s revolutions and in shaping aspirations of nationalist movements in and beyond Europe. The nineteenth century was also, not coincidentally, the heyday of empire, with dominant nation-states creating “‘zones of exception’” to justify “organized brutality” in their overseas possessions (137). Their “dual territoriality” belies the progressive assumptions of mainstream ir narrative, revealing instead enduring asymmetries in state capacity and clashing conceptions of territorial order (125).Kadercan’s constructivism is indebted to a fundamental rethinking of the premises of political geography in “direct response to the imperialist and racist leanings of the discipline of geography in the pre-1945 period,” paralleling developments in many other fields as well (262). Simply put, “race” has been “a central organizing feature of world politics,” a fundamental reality obscured by the “subliminal Eurocentrism” of the modern state system and its beneficiaries (255). For ir, recognition of this reality does not lead to predictably reductive polemical conclusions. Kadercan’s case studies instead demonstrate that there is no necessary connection between the “West” and the ways that polities conceive of space—and the reasons they make war

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