Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to GlobalAssemblages. By Saskia Sassen. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2006. 502p. $35.00.

The globalization literature has now reached a level of maturity thatallows one to distinguish between different schools of thought.Whereas the first two stages broadly dealt with the process at large(its development and manifestation), the latest generation ofscholarship seems mostly concerned with its current and futuregovernance. Saskia Sassen's latest contribution to this dialogue issimilar to Andrew Drainville's recent volume (ContestingGlobalization, 2004) for which she wrote theintroduction. Both defend the need to situate the globalizationdiscourse in concrete locations to gain a fuller understanding ofit. More specifically, in Territory, Authority, Rights: FromMedieval to Global Assemblages, Sassen presents anextensively developed criticism of the globalization literature.Sassen argues that both critics and proponents of the globalizationconcept in its latest iteration miss crucial developments of thetransformative processes captured by the term “globalization” intheir focus on established actors and institutional forms. Sheargues for the need to situate globalization more concretely andbroadly, in terms of both space and place (i.e.,territory), and for the establishment of neworganizing logics, which manifest themselves in new combinations ofauthority and rights. Eventhough Sassen builds on her previous scholarship, this is a novelwork—and a most welcome and important contribution to this field, asshe not only points out the shortcomings of existing approaches, butprovides a well-theorized proposition on how to remedy them.