The thematic core of this book involves changes in the territorial basis of politics resulting from broader social, political, and economic changes in the domestic and global political economies. We focus in particular on changes in the territorial organization of authority in the modern state. One of the documents we read at the beginning of this project was titled “Beyond Center and Periphery or the Unbundling of Territoriality” (Ansell and DiPalma 1998). In an effort to galvanize our energies into a collective project, this paper enjoined us to examine ways in which contemporary territorial structures of authority could be “unbundled” or “unpacked” so as better to understand changing configurations of power and authority in the modern state.

In part, this guidance was motivated by an emerging literature on the “new medievalism” (Anderson 1996) as well as by persistent critiques that contemporary research in comparative and international politics was state-centric and caught in a “territorial trap” (Agnew 1994). Just as the transition to the Westphalian order involved a consolidation of rule and territory, so the neomedieval turn implies a loosening of the ties among authority, sovereignty, and territory.

The medieval model of rule was marked by three integrated properties of governance. Governance was parcellized and personalized in use and function and aspatial in its underlying conception and physical organization. Parcellization implies no overarching system of rule for all subject matters. Separate authorities existed within the same physical space, without clearly demarcated jurisdictions.