Territoriality

Within the typology of archaic polities both Norway and Russia in the first half of Xth century were “inchoate early states”, but having all basic criteria of “early state”. According to our reconstruction territorial Structure of Norway typologically similar to that of Old Rus’: two centers – southen and northern with fluid periphery. The Harald’s Fairhair reign stretched along the “northern route” to the North (Nóregr). The trade route created the basis of the country of Norway, just like the reign of early Ryrikids stretched along the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks”. The trade route and connected political structure shaped each other and this process was the energy of political development. Norway and Russia in the first half of X century were not the continuous spaces of power. There were centers around which emerged “fields of force” and the spaces of power irradiation. Both Norway and Russia were typical segmental states, polities in which the “sphere of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty were not the same”.

Religious conflicts, of various kinds, were frequent in the Late Roman and Post-Roman world. However, their significance and endurance varied much depending on a number of factors. This paper compares two such controversies, Priscilianism in Iberia and Pelagianism in Britain, in connection to the scale and strength of the encompasing ecclesiastical structures in each case. The presence of a large-scale, well structured institutional Church is marked out as crucial both not only for the definition, "labelling" and prosecution of the dissidents, but even for their recognition as such. Once the "label" is created, it is often re-used to denigrate and de-legitimize other, potentially unrelated forms of dissent.

"Through a compelling story about the conflict over a notorious Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, David Correia examines how law and property are constituted through violence and social struggle.

Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists. After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation and dubious property adjudication. Nearly all of the huge land grants scattered throughout New Mexico were rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico's history, the struggle for the Tierra Amarilla land grant, the focus of Correia's story, is one of the most sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking among the state's political and economic elite and a remarkable pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth century.

Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant violence—night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico. The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a surprising and remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican terrorists, and undercover FBI agents. By placing property and law at the center of his study, Properties of Violence provocatively suggests that violence is not the opposite of property but rather is essential to its operation."

In many frog species, males defend a territory through direct male-to-male interactions and/or aggressive calling behaviour. We describe the site fidelity, vocalizations, aggressive interactions, and male combat behaviour of the glassfrog Nymphargus grandisonae. We show high specificity of males’ calling and mating sites. We then describe the temporal and spectral differences for six types of vocalizations. We link these vocalizations to behavioural observations, describing their aggressive and reproductive contexts. Additionally, we show that combat is highly variable and includes three previously described and two unreported variations. We describe injuries resulting from combat and we report the first observation of a multiple night fight between the same two males. Our observations on site fidelity and aggression provide evidence for territoriality among males. Furthermore, our results suggest that combat behaviour in glassfrogs is more complex than previously hypothesized and that hypotheses on the evolution of combat behaviour need re-evaluation.

New telecommunications are shaping social life worldwide and are bringing with them elements of rapid change and uncertainty. This article reflects on the conjunction of both dimensions of the local and the global, and offers a perscription for the progressive consolidation of a new 'cosmopolitan localism' within the meso-level of community life. References made to the European context seeks to illustrate how the interaction of multiple identities makes possible effective access for civil society to political decision-making.

"Both territoriality and welfare have too often lived separated lives. There is a need to explore more fully the links between studies and literature dealing with both fields of analysis. Generally speaking, territorial politics literature has tended to neglect the social dimension, while research on welfare has taken the nation-state for granted. This introductory chapter explores the
relationship between welfare development and territorial politics in a theoretical sense, with subsequent chapters examining this relationship in specific empirical contexts."

To what extent do boundaries shape state-centred scales of discourse and action? In an attempt to answer this question, the article delves into one of the key ambiguities characterising boundaries: their being both static markers of sovereign jurisdictions and socially produced and reproduced institutions. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of ‘productive power’, and taking as a referent the Durand Line, the paper elaborates upon Robert Sack's contribution, and proposes an analytical framework that simultaneously captures, while maintaining distinct, two dimensions of territoriality: territoriality as a strategy operating in a socially emptiable space, and territoriality as it unfolds in its actuality. It argues that such framework provides insights on the multi-scalar and place-specific power relations that define the social context in which the Durand Line unfolds, offering important tools for the assessment of boundaries' role in the reproduction of society's contradictions and inequalities. The flexible territoriality of the Durand Line is defined by its simultaneous, and more or less successful, attempt at ordering space across multiple dimensions .

While a subject of much discussion in fields such as ecology, geography, and sociology, scale is rarely theorized by archaeologists and historians. This text highlights the potential of the concepts of scale and scale change for describing social complexity and comparing early medieval socio-spatial processes.