Terror and Territory: the Geometry of Political Theory in Contemporary World

This paper aims to demonstrate the relation between territory, state and terror in the contemporary world as concrete terms which represent the territorial aspects of sovereignty. Using a historical conceptual analysis, it tries to illustrate that sovereignty is an issue at the intersection of terror and territory because it operates as the crucial bridge between terror and state and is integral to territorial state. To this end, territory is defined as the spatial extent of sovereignty based on the “the concept of space”. Subsequently, it becomes clear why the apparently univocal national borders which serve as the absolute model of the border institution, in fact constitute only a part of the government’s institutions. These borders could never exist independent of other alignments that allow them to function on a local as well as a global level; the very alignments that delineate sovereign territories. Building on these bases, this paper endeavors to show how to control a territory is to exercise violence within the boundaries of the modern nation-state and through this tries to prove the relationship between terror and territory. In this framework, it seeks to add a corrective approach to the modern political theory which is based on geometry: the Political geometry of inside and outside. The paper concludes that the fundamental concept of political philosophy is neither freedom nor political power, but borders; i.e. the very borders that construct the territory of a country. The final aim of the paper is to determine the political space of the “refugee” within the Topos of politics; because it is he/she who reveals the main aporia of the modern political theory: “borders”.