Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination

Franck Billé

Jul 2020 · Duke University Press

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From the Arctic to the South China Sea, states are vying to secure sovereign rights over vast maritime stretches, undersea continental plates, shifting ice flows, airspace, and the subsoil. Conceiving of sovereign space as volume rather than area, the contributors to Voluminous States explore how such a conception reveals and underscores the three-dimensional nature of modern territorial governance. In case studies ranging from the United States, Europe, and the Himalayas to Hong Kong, Korea, and Bangladesh, the contributors outline how states are using airspace surveillance, maritime patrols, and subterranean monitoring to gain and exercise sovereignty over three-dimensional space. Whether examining how militaries are digging tunnels to create new theaters of operations, the impacts of climate change on borders, or the relation between borders and nonhuman ecologies, they demonstrate that a three-dimensional approach to studying borders is imperative for gaining a fuller understanding of sovereignty.

Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Franck Billé, Wayne Chambliss, Jason Cons, Hilary Cunningham (Scharper), Klaus Dodds, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Gastón Gordillo, Sarah Green, Tina Harris, Caroline Humphrey, Marcel LaFlamme, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Aihwa Ong, Clancy Wilmott, Jerry Zee

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Franck Billé is Program Director of the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity and coeditor of Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World.

Debbora Battaglia is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College and editor of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces.