Spatial Statism (Foreword)

In this Foreword, we wish to insert a degree of innovation into debates about global law and the supposed demise of state-based public law. We do so by asking how considerations of space, place and density impact the conceptualization and utilization of state power in a world of growing complexity and interdependence. In an array of key policy areas, we examine in considerable detail how state-centered public law defines, and where required redefines, space and territory in order to tame potential threats — local or global, vertical and horizontal — to the state’s territorial sovereignty. Our exploration highlights the tremendous versatility and creativity of states in deploying and stretching, through the classic tools of public law, their spatial and juridical tentacles in a new and complex global environment. Taken in conjunction, these illustrations suggest that the disregard for and dismissal of the state as a potent actor in the public law arena is premature. State sovereignty may be metamorphosing, but it is evidently not vanishing.