Territory, Territoriality, and Territorialization: A Brief Outline

The notion of territory has been the subject of widespread debate within the social sciences. While the term is seemingly intuitive, it is often invoked in the absence of a concrete definition. This analytical vagueness risks conflating territory with a wide variety of other socio-spatial relations, and has led to calls for a more thorough grounding that interrogates the concept's historical and geographic specificity (Cox 1991; Elden 2013b; Jessop et al. 2008). Despite this conceptual muddling, there are some commonalities that cut through these varied invocations: territory is widely understood as a form of socially and, more specifically, politically bounded space, and it is most often discussed in relation to the modern nation-state.

In one of the earliest treatises on the topic, Jean Gottmann argues that territory describes “a relationship established between a community of politically organized people and their space” (1973: 123). Gottmann traces the concept back to Greek philosophy and asserts that beginning in the fifteenth century and culminating in our contemporary world, in which the earth is widely understood to be divided into contiguous nation-states, territory became a foundational framework of politics that developed alongside the related ideas of sovereignty and self-government. He outlines two primary functions of territory: on the one hand, it provides security and shelter against outside forces, and on the other, it ensures access to resources and opportunities for those within a territorially bounded community.

For Robert Sack, whose work builds on that of Gottmann, “territories are socially constructed forms of spatial relations” (1986: 216). They are the product of “territoriality,” which he broadly describes as any geographical expression of social power. Sack views territoriality strategically, arguing that it “is best understood as a spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area” (1986: 1). While territoriality is seemingly transhistorical, Sack charts changes in its use over time, arguing that capitalist modernity is linked to the rise of an emptiable, metrical space that helps facilitate the organization of resources and labor in a mass society. He views the imposition of this capitalist territoriality as incomplete and uneven given the “persistence of pre-modern forms” of territoriality and “strategies about space and time that have been adopted to counter the prevailing experiences of modernity” (1986: 218).

Political ecologists have adapted Sack's notion of territoriality to analyze the ways in which both state and non-state actors control people and regulate access to resources. In their influential essay “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand,” Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso advance the concept of “internal territorialization” to describe the processes through which states establish “control over natural resources and the people who use them” (1995: 385). Internal territorialization, for Peluso and Vandergeest, entails the creation and mapping of boundaries, the allocation of property rights, and the designation of resource uses by both public and private actors within state borders. All three processes represent attempts by states to impose a homogeneous, linear, and gridded abstract space, and all three have generated significant contestation springing from a lived space that exceeds efforts to draw and police boundaries. Vandergeest and Peluso systematically investigate the connection between abstract space, accumulation, and dispossession as they argue that territorialization is the process through which modern states project and consolidate power over their respective territories.

For Stuart Elden (2010), conceptualizing territory as the outcome of territoriality or territorialization elides a more nuanced discussion of the co-constitution of territory and the modern state. Elden argues that “it is territory that is logically prior to territoriality, even if existentially second. Strategies and processes toward territory—of which territoriality is but a fraction—conceptually presuppose the object that they practically produce” (Elden 2010: 803). Territory, in this sense, is not the outcome of drawing boundaries, but instead, the product of the practices and knowledges through which such boundaries can be conceived. Its emergence is linked to developments in geometry and cartography that enable the practices of “mapping, ordering, measuring and demarcation” (Elden 2010: 810). It is only once a specific conception of space linked to state governance exists that territorial boundaries can be drawn and enacted.

Elden's work is heavily inspired by Michel Foucault, who defined territory not only as a geographical concept, but also as “a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power” (1980: 76). For Foucault, power is not simply exerted negatively over a territory or population, it also produces subjects through regimes of truth and knowledge that are exemplified and reinforced in a variety of institutions and practices (Foucault 1990, 1995). The emphasis here is not on the ability for a state to impose its power over a given, bounded space, but rather, on the discourses and practices through which the idea of territory comes to be understood as a modality of rule.

Elden further explores the links between territory and modern state formation in a review article written with Neil Brenner (2009). In this influential essay, the authors use the work of Henri Lefebvre to argue that “the consolidation of a modern notion of (national) territory was inextricably intertwined with the state's mobilization of [territorial] techniques to control economic resources embedded in its land and landscape, all in the context of a rapidly expanding capitalist world economy” (Brenner and Elden 2009: 363). Here, the emergence of state and territory are seen as co-constitutive, and together play a crucial role in “maintaining a modicum of fixity, stability and predictability within the chaotic flux of economic relations under capitalism” (Brenner and Elden 2009: 370). Elden and Brenner are not only attuned to the historically specific processes and practices through which territory is produced as the reified space of the state, they also draw attention to the effects that this has in naturalizing particular forms of spatialized political economic intervention. In this formulation, the production of territory is ongoing and continues to structure state operations and political contestation alike. Crucially, however, efforts by the state and capital “to ‘pulverize’ space into a manageable, calculable and abstract grid” continuously run up against “diverse social forces” that “attempt to create, defend or extend spaces of social reproduction, everyday life, and grassroots control” (Brenner and Elden 2009: 367).

Joe Painter (2010) similarly argues that territory is an effect of “networked socio-technical practices.” Like Elden and Brenner, he views territory as an always incomplete project that must be continuously produced through mapping, modeling, economic statistics, and other governmental technologies. The emphasis here is on the relational processes through which territories are made contiguous and coherent, and territorial boundaries are delimited. Painter also underlines territory's inherent instability. He argues that “the governmental technologies that produce the effect of territory are the product of spatially extensive networks of human and non-human actors” that are shifting and contestable, making territory porous and impermanent (2010: 1113).

In parallel with Painter's emphasis on nonhuman actors, scholars have increasingly begun to contest narrow constructivist interpretations of territory in favor of approaches that take materiality seriously (Usher 2020). Calls to rethink territory materially draw attention to geophysical dynamism and the need to account for more-than-human flows. In conversation with actor-network theory (Latour 2005) and new materialism (Barad 2003; Bennett 2010), much of this work seeks to foreground the extent to which the nonhuman and more-than-human are constitutive elements of political institutions and practices (Kärrholm 2007; Valdivia 2008). Elden (2017) has recently argued that incorporating land and terrain into an analysis of territory forces us to come to grips with questions of volume and shifts in geomorphology. For others, this emphasis on “earth” does not go far enough, and we also need to consider the role of the other classical elements in the production of territory (Peters et al. 2018).

It is here that fire enters the picture. Even if at the most basic level, fire is simply another word for the chemical process of combustion, it is nonetheless inextricably linked to the development of human production and political institutions (Marder 2014). The coming together of fuel, oxygen, and heat allowed humans to spread across the earth, and in the process, helped them to remake entire landscapes (Pyne 2012, 2019). Fire is used for purposes as varied as illumination, heat, cooking, clearing landscapes, waging war, and, in the era of the combustion engine, to produce electricity and travel. Throughout history, humans have tried to eliminate fire from some places and spread it to others, often unintentionally. These efforts to wield, manipulate, and suppress fire are fundamentally spatial and shot through with power. They involve questions about who gets to brandish fire, its role in production, and which landscapes should or should not burn; governance concerns that in the contemporary world often fall under the purview of territorially bounded states. In this sense, pyropolitics are integrally linked to state formation and the production of territory even if they cannot be reduced to these processes. Dominant parties attempt to shape fire regimes through the delimitation of political boundaries and the territorial control of peoples and resources. At the same time, fire's stochastic nature sees it frequently ignore political boundaries in ways that challenge territory's stability and threaten hegemonic paradigms of governance.

Fire, State Formation, and the Colonial Frontier

The idea that territory is produced marks a key intervention in a much broader set of debates across the social sciences concerning the origins of the modern, territorial state. While the literature on state formation is far too extensive to summarize here, scholars have focused on the roles that states play in class struggle (Poulantzas 1978), the extent of the state's autonomy from civil society (Evans et al. 1985; Mann 1984), and the relationship between the development of European political institutions and the rest of the world (Wallerstein 1980). In conversation with this work on state formation, a growing body of historically grounded research has drawn attention to the important role that practices and attitudes concerning landscape fire have played in the rise of modern political institutions. This literature explores the relationship between Europe's peculiar disposition toward fire, the emergence of the idea of territory, and the uneven spread of fire exclusion policies across the world through colonization.

Stephen Pyne argues that the geography and climate of Northern and Central Europe, and more specifically its consistent humidity, shaped local agricultural burning practices in distinct ways that gave Europeans an unusual degree of control over fire (Pyne 1997a). Given the regional absence of a well-defined dry season, people were free to burn the landscape without the fear that it would lead to uncontrollable landscape fires. According to Pyne, this helped drive the idea among European elites that nature could be tamed, and fire could ultimately be domesticated. Fire came to be seen as a human tool, not part of a larger ecology, feeding the belief that it could be managed and removed from some landscapes entirely.

Nigel Clark has drawn on Pyne's work to argue that fire played a crucial role in the constitution of political modernity. For Clark, the quelling of landscape fires in Europe's countryside was bound up with new ways of governing territory that were predicated on a view of fire as a “mark of excess or disorder” linked to “social unrest or breakdown” (2011: 177). Modes of agricultural production dependent on fire were seen as wasteful and antithetical to the scientific management advanced by the emergent discipline of agronomy. These ideas were often pushed by “a new breed of agricultural experts, raised in cities and tutored in urban academies” who advocated for intensive, industrialized cultivation in lieu of the swidden practices that had previously dominated temperate European agriculture (Clark 2011: 177). Clark draws on Foucault's (2010) notion of “biopolitics” to argue that the drive to eliminate fire from the landscape in Europe was central to a larger effort to limit human movement through the state-led imposition of a spatiotemporal order intended to optimize national wealth. For Clark, this would “suggest that the definitive modalities, tactics, and practices of governing territory that crystallised in a modernising Europe had at their heart a certain orientation to fire” (Clark 2018: 73). Clark's work insightfully draws connections between fire management and a broader set of calculative techniques associated with the emergence of modern, territorial states. He links the categorization and management of landscapes to the emergence of the abstract space of the state, the control of human bodies, and the expansion of capitalism.

These connections have been similarly explored by scholars in a colonial context. Europe's particular form of pyropolitics—which downplayed the extent to which fire was essential to “pre-modern” European agriculture—spread unevenly around the world such that “Europe's fire became as much a standard of reference for fire practices as Greenwich mean time for the world's watches” (Pyne 1997a: 5). Fire was a constitutive element of the colonial frontier, where it was often was used to clear biomass and consolidate landholdings. As colonizers encountered landscapes with pronounced wet and dry seasons, however, the imposition of European biota and (non-)burning practices in these fire-prone areas led to a proliferation of large-scale fires (Pyne 1997b). The colonial bureaucrats faced with these fires, who had long since internalized the belief that fire could be tamed, sought to manage lands to prevent runaway conflagrations. This practice was concretized through the imposition of natural reserves to be managed by colonial forestry institutions. Scientific forestry was pioneered by France and the competing states of Germany in the eighteenth century, where administrations were concerned with resource self-sufficiency and maximizing timber revenues to be funneled to the state (Pyne 1997a: 481). Yet imperial forestry reached its apogee in the context of the nineteenth-century British empire—somewhat ironically, given the comparative scarcity of forests in England—where colonial bureaucrats trained by German and French foresters attempted to rationalize and remake the world's varied landscapes in pursuit of colonial plunder (Guha 2001).

Across the colonies, the management and control of landscapes was linked to the control of people. European ideas about fire and its management helped to justify dispossession, facilitate extraction, and consolidate territorial control. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan argues that under the emerging sciences of European agronomy and silviculture, “the divide between primitive and modern was instituted by the exclusion of fire” (1999: 218). Pyne claims that “fire control was as fundamental to colonial rule as military garrisons, plantations, and acclimatization societies” (1997b: 29). Around the world, Europeans sought to remake what they saw as irregular wildlands into rationally ordered woodlands through the creation of managed zones of exclusion. In barring people from these reserves, they also created a separation between land and land management, as forestry officials did not inhabit or cultivate these spaces. The establishment of these institutions of “scientific” management was predicated on the contradictory ideas that this land was empty, and therefore open for the taking, and that Indigenous and local peoples’ “reckless” burning practices were to blame for wildfires. The reality was that many of these landscapes had long been managed through controlled burns, and the creation of reserves brought about their removal, which in turn often led to more large-scale conflagrations (Pyne 1997b).

In her work on burning practices in Zambia, Christine Eriksen (2007) shows that colonial fire management tended to take one of two forms: limiting burning to the late dry season or banning it outright. Both policies were predicated on the abolition of pre-colonial fire practices, which colonizers tied to environmental degradation and framed as a threat to the imposition of private property regimes and colonial rule. Many scholars describe similar processes in their work, showing how Indigenous and peasant fire management was systematically ignored by colonial officials who overemphasized fire's destructive potential at the expense of understanding its utility as a land and resource management tool (Cahir et al. 2021; Moura et al. 2019). This Eurocentric approach, in which the state imposes a set of fire exclusion policies across its territory, persists across many regions in the post-colonial era and continues to drive conflicts between governments and rural peoples, often leading to an increase in large-scale burn events rather than their diminishment.

As Sivaramakrishnan (1999) argues, however, scientific forestry was not simply a received, uniform doctrine exported to the periphery from the core and imposed top-down. In his historical account of Indian silviculture, Sivaramakrishnan shows the extent to which colonialism was predicated on the dismantling of pre-colonial cultures and their replacement with “state forms that emphasized territorial forms of control” (1999: 81). Yet even if the doctrine of fire suppression was central to imperial forestry in India, it often ran counter to resource management goals and was widely resisted by colonial subjects. As a result, divergent forms of expertise emerged and consolidated in specific locations in ways that displayed a degree of regional variance. Sivaramakrishnan's work challenges a simplistic, diffusionist understanding of colonial fire management without downplaying the territorialized power relations that shaped environmental governance across Europe's empires.

Fire Suppression, Post-colonial Development, and Internal Territorialization

In the 1980s, scholars working in the emergent field of political ecology began to challenge depoliticized accounts of environmental degradation by drawing attention to the ways in which ecological change is inextricably linked to questions of political economy (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Hecht 1985; Watts 1983). Subsequent scholarship rooted in the post-structuralist turn built on this initial research to problematize dominant forms of environmental knowledge through a focus on power and discourse (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Peet and Watts 1996). Political ecologists drew from parallel insights in critical development studies that analyzed the practices and techniques through which states and development practitioners discursively frame and justify their interventions (Escobar 1994; Ferguson 1994; Mitchell 1988)—interventions that produce governable spaces through territorial forms of rule that seek to circumscribe resources and political subjects.

Scholars researching the governance of landscape fire employed ethnographic methods to draw a distinction between imposed models of fire suppression and the realities of controlled burning as a prevalent practice of environmental management. In doing so, they illustrated how inherited colonial-era ideas that overemphasized fire's destructive nature remained pivotal to asserting territorial control and justifying land privatization through the criminalization of local burning practices. There is a persistent theme in much of this literature: specific norms of fire management are imposed on rural spaces in the interest of protecting strategic economic sectors and combating perceived environmental degradation. Much of the research outlined below documents processes of “internal territorialization” (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995) despite not explicitly referencing territory. Attempts to restrict burning represent strategies to shape resource access within a particular geographical area, most often, but not exclusively, imposed by the state. This form of territorialization entails the undoing and replacement of existing socio-spatial orders through “the creation of systems of resource control” comprised of “rights, authorities, jurisdiction, and their spatial representations” (Rasmussen and Lund 2018: 388). Yet as states work to enforce environmental governance across their respective territories, they contend with numerous frictions stemming from variations in local ecologies, contestation, and fire's stochastic nature, rendering the imposition of fire exclusion policies an ongoing, incomplete, and uneven process.

Thomas Basset and Koli Bi Zuéli (2000) take up this problematic in the context of Côte d'Ivoire. The authors focus on the implementation of a World Bank-led initiative intended to address deforestation and desertification, arguing that this top-down, neoliberal intervention employs colonial tropes, fundamentally misreads the local landscape, and misrepresents the local use of fire. They show how a narrative of desertification is mobilized to promote a transition away from customary rights to private property under the guise that freeholders are better environmental stewards. Drawing on local accounts of landscape change and geospatial data, Bassett and Zuéli demonstrate that in certain areas, contrary to World Bank discourse, wooded landscapes have actually expanded even as local burning persists. They find that what seems to matter more in land management is not the use of fire outright, but the timing and frequency of burning in interaction with variations in vegetation and grazing pressures.

James Fairhead and Melissa Leach (1996) explore a similar dynamic in their research in Guinea's Kissidougou Prefecture, where they confront the common assumption among scientists and policy makers that the scattered patches of forest that dot Kissidougou's landscape are the vestiges of a dense humid forest that has been degraded through indiscriminate burning and agricultural expansion. Using a mixed-methods approach that includes archival research, landscape analysis, and oral histories, Fairhead and Leach (1995) show that fire has long played an important role in the management of the landscape, and that villagers are well attuned to the interplay of vegetation, soil, and water conditions in their burning practices. Yet colonial and post-colonial state interventions, which were frequently implemented to stimulate or protect Guinea's export-oriented economic sectors, remain predicated on the idea that sustainability necessitates the regulation of burning, often to the detriment of local ecosystems and systems of production.

Christian Kull's (2004) work on landscape fire in Madagascar shows how an “anti-fire received wisdom” with roots in colonial forestry justifies ongoing state attempts to restrict burning. Like Fairhead and Leach, Kull is attentive to the gaps between a discourse that sees fire as central to environmental degradation and the reality of burning's utility in local livelihood strategies and environmental management. He explicitly links the state prohibition of burning to literature on enclosure and dispossession, arguing that fire is continuously framed as a threat to Madagascar's resource base and economic development. Despite the prohibition on landscape burning, which Kull shows is unrealistic and therefore unevenly enforced, the practice persists. While some scholars have emphasized the ongoing use of fire in places where it has been outlawed as a key tool in rural protest (Kuhlken 1999; Prochaska 1986), Kull is interested in a more expanded understanding of resistance that looks at the covert, everyday ways that peasants subvert state control (Scott 1985). In Madagascar, this frequently involves exploiting the state's contradictory nature, strategically probing its weaknesses, and taking advantage of the anonymity afforded by fire.

The complications of enacting fire suppression policy have been further explored by several other scholars researching the limits and contradictions of the state. Sofyan Ansori (2019) shows how and why low-level government officials often side with local communities in their struggles to subvert restrictions on burning, even as the Indonesian state vilifies slash-and-burn agriculture in its attempts to assert territorial control and justify land conversion to the benefit of extractive agribusiness. Here, state power is understood as both centralized and performed; unevenly radiating out over Indonesia's national territory where it breaks down in peripheral zones of accumulation. Andrew Mathews (2005) documents a comparable set of state practices in Mexico, demonstrating how forest policy is drafted primarily in Mexico City by bureaucrats who do not actively need to enforce it. While field-level forestry officials pay lip service to this policy, there is a form of willful ignorance that occurs on the ground as people burn discretely in ways that are illegible to state monitoring efforts. As long as this does not challenge the hierarchy within the state, Mathews argues, the practice continues largely unabated, yet maintains a certain utility in justifying future government interventions within state territory.

Two recently published monographs combine historical research with in-depth qualitative fieldwork to help explain the persistence of anti-swidden policies in Southeast Asia, even as these policies have largely failed to achieve their stated goals. Pamela McElwee's (2016) analysis of forest policy in Vietnam dating back to the colonial period looks at how discourses about nature and environmental degradation are used to justify interventions into social life. Building on the work of Michael Dove (1983), she argues that these interventions rely on the simplification of what are actually a diverse set of agrarian practices. While attempts to limit swidden practices—and their associated reliance on fire—have changed in form over time, they remain rooted in a persistent cultural chauvinism (McElwee 2022). McElwee laments the extent to which the remaking of subjectivities through these forms of “environmental rule” has led many locals to accept narratives of their own backwardness.

This theme is also central to Will Smith's (2020) research with the Pala'wan people in the Philippines, who have come to blame themselves for erratic weather patterns driven by climate change. Like McElwee, Smith is attentive to the ways diverse livelihoods are reductively portrayed as wasteful and environmentally destructive as he charts a shift in state tactics to limit deforestation away from outright coercion. Smith draws attention to the ways the Philippine state and NGOs encourage the Pala'wan to abandon fire-dependent swidden agriculture in favor of alternative, market-based livelihood strategies, and the “routine moral logics that underlie and justify [these] interventions” (2020: 7). In doing so, he shows how struggles over environmental change, land pressures, and engagement with markets are understood by the Pala'wan on their own terms, without losing sight of the ways that these complex understandings of socio-ecological change are shaped by their historic marginalization. This has the effect of calling into question reductive analyses of culpability, unsettling hegemonic narratives about Indigenous knowledge and vulnerability in the face of global climate change.

While most of the literature on the political ecology of landscape fire concentrates on rural areas, fire suppression is not restricted to the countryside. As urban geographers have pointed out, cities are themselves no less natural than other spaces (Swyngedouw 1996), and the persistence of a binary separation between the urban and rural blinds us to the socio-ecological power relations through which nature is urbanized (Heynen 2014). The expansion of urban and suburban developments in fire-prone areas represents an additional form of internal territorialization, as the suppression of landscape fire often bolsters the valuation of property assets backed by the state.

In the seminal essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Mike Davis (1995) looks at the connections between exclusionary housing policies and landscape fire in the Santa Monica mountains. He shows how federal responses to the burning of this incendiary landscape ultimately pushed out middle-class homeowners and renters, while encouraging developers to expand home construction higher up into the mountains by promising to allocate public funds to firefighting and insurance subsidies. Burn events not only led to rising exclusivity and expansions in construction, they also provided justification for limiting the presence of outsiders in Malibu, as community members mobilized narratives of blame that pinned responsibility for these “disasters” on gangs, homeless people, outsiders, and liberals. In this sense, wildfire is linked to what Naomi Klein (2007) has called “disaster capitalism,” in which discourses of crisis and disaster are used to justify dispossession and exclusion through gentrification and privatization. Here, neoliberal territorialization takes the form of channeling state funds into the defense of segregation and the sacred right of private property, as wealthy Malibu residents exercise their “political clout” to effectively have their home values subsidized by the state.

In his book Flame and Fortune in the American West (2016), Gregory Simon uses the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm as a case study to show how urban development is increasing fire risk. He argues that we should supplement the wildland-urban interface (WUI)—a land-use category describing the overlap of primarily residential human settlements and traditionally underdeveloped fire-prone lands—with a more processual understanding of landscape change that accounts for the complex economic, social, and environmental forces that are driving both urban expansion and increased conflagrations. Simon's work responds to previous research that highlights the uneven geographies of resource allocation intended to suppress fire within the WUI (Roberts 2013). He is interested in the link between policies that subsidize fire risk and the increased segregation between poorer, urban neighborhoods and more affluent, fire-prone suburbs—the former of which often subsidizes the latter through property taxes used to pay for fire mitigation programs. Simon expands on Davis in his analysis of household risk, showing that even within communities there are variations in vulnerability. Nonetheless, the presence of a few individuals with the wealth, time, and ability to access state resources helps drive down risk and increase home values for everyone through the procuration of risk-reducing infrastructural investments.

Spatial Representations of Disaster: Documenting and Mapping Landscape Fires

Over the last three decades, social scientists have increasingly drawn on insights from the interdisciplinary field of STS as they interrogate the processes through which knowledge about landscape fires is produced and circulates. Early work in STS problematized the idea that “science” was an objective reflection of reality by situating scientific knowledges and practices in their social and cultural contexts (Haraway 1988; Latour and Woolgar 1986). Some of this scholarship drew on Foucault and emphasized the ways in which knowledge practices help to create the realities they describe, fundamentally altering them in the process (Law 2008). Arguing that the social and the natural are co-produced, Sheila Jasanoff claimed that “the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it” (2004: 2).

With this in mind, scholars have begun to analyze the socio-technical practices through which landscape fires are detected, analyzed, and “produced” as disasters, as well as the spatial assumptions that underpin these representations. As geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing are increasingly employed to study and map burn events, researchers have sought to supplement the limited, aerial view of remote sensing data with ethnographically informed ground-level data to better understand the underlying reasons for shifts in fire patterns and land use (Dennis et al. 2005; Laris 2002; Mbow et al. 2000). Others have questioned the implications of the increasing reliance on these tools in documenting and mapping fire activity, particularly given that remote sensing technology was, until recently, limited largely to states and scientists (Goldstein 2020). In asking such questions, these scholars have called attention to the ways public officials utilize these abstract spatial representations to justify top-down technocratic forms of environmental governance. This work can help us unpack the ways in which territory is reproduced as a modality of rule as it is given primacy over other socio-spatial relations in representations of fire.

Emily Harwell (2000) has argued that the Southeast Asian El Niño fires of 1997–98 captured the world's imagination due to the ways they were represented with data generated by remote sensing. While Harwell shows that GIS data can be interpreted in different ways, she points out that the El Niño fires were unique in that, for the first time, this technology had become a common language that different actors employed to advance their agendas. She outlines the ways state officials and NGOs harnessed GIS data in their competing discourses of disaster, which often came at the expense of a more “textured understanding of social landscapes and the role they play in creating fire hazards” (2000: 310). Government officials in Indonesia used this data to blame the El Niño fires on economically and culturally “backward” locals who burn the landscape out of desperation. Harwell argues that this narrative obscured the extent to which misguided development programs bear much of the responsibility for the disaster in the first place. By blaming locals, interested parties were able to claim that the solution to out-of- control landscape fires involved an increase in development funding rather than a rethinking of land-use patterns. Against this hegemonic narrative, Harwell ties the 1997–98 fires directly to processes of commodification and internal territorialization that have led to the state-backed appropriation of swidden landscapes and their replacement by large-scale oil palm plantations. This account was at least partially mobilized by NGOs who used remote sensing to show that most fires originated on plantation lands. Here, GIS does not simply reinforce the dominant narrative. It is itself the product and site of struggles to shape understandings of dynamic socio-ecological processes.

Harwell's intervention asks how it is that fires come to be framed and understood as disasters. Importantly, this involves going beyond a myopic focus on land-use change within state boundaries, as wildfires across Southeast Asia have produced a regional haze crisis nearly every year since the El Niño fires of 1997–98 (Edwards and Heiduk 2015). Smoke and particulates easily cross borders and transcend national territory. They also rise above the ground in ways that defy their portrayal on two-dimensional maps. Over the last decade, the recognition that resource exploitation and socio-ecological processes do not take place on a flat plane has forced a rethinking of territory to incorporate height and depth. These advances build on earlier scholarship in political geography (Braun 2000; Graham 2004) to argue that we need to consider territory vertically and volumetrically (Bridge 2013; Elden 2013a).

Jenny Goldstein's (2020) research on Indonesia's recurrent peatland fires heeds this call to think territory volumetrically. Goldstein draws our attention to fires that burn underneath the land's surface and produce airborne particulates that fill the atmosphere in ways that exceed the space of the Indonesian state. She argues that an overreliance on the two-dimensional mapping of hotspots through remote sensing has the effect of oversimplifying these biophysical dynamics. For Goldstein, this results in reductive narratives of blame for the burning of peatlands that obfuscate the political economic objectives of actors on the ground, a point she further elaborates in a multi-authored paper investigating how land-use change renders landscapes more flammable (Goldstein et al. 2020). This is particularly consequential given that the rapid conversion of Indonesia's forests and peatlands to monocrop oil palm plantations is often predicated on the ability of elites and corporate actors to muddle consensus through the production of alternative discourses of environmental crisis that diverge from dominant scientific narratives of culpability (Ansori 2021; Goldstein 2016).

Katrina Petersen (2014) similarly explores competing discourses of crisis in an article that contrasts two maps created in the context of San Diego's 2017 wildfires: one by county officials and the other collectively through Google. Petersen shows how the production of these maps rendered different aspects of this disaster visible. San Diego County's map was created to organize and guide the county's response to the fires. It sought to map burn events in relation to complex jurisdictional boundaries in a region without a centralized fire department. Petersen describes the difficulties the county had in incorporating the more complex, informal relationships between politically divided communities that, given the time crunch, were not easily analyzed with GIS. The collectively produced map, on the other hand, was more concerned with decentralized networks than political boundaries. It gave voice to local experiences through the ad hoc mapping of who was affected by the fires in real time. This made it more capable of documenting the ways that people experienced the fires, but less useful in facilitating a centralized response to the disaster. If San Diego County's map sought to delimit and coordinate government action across territorially bounded jurisdictions in the context of a disaster, the collective mapping project demonstrated the public's own proactive response predicated on a divergent, yet overlapping, networked spatial order.

This concern with the important and complicated role that mapping plays in environmental governance is also central to Bjørn Sletto's research in Venezuela's Gran Sabana. Sletto (2009) details the ways that Venezuela's parastatal electric agency Electrificación del Caroni (EDELCA) utilizes mapping projects to suppress fire through the “scientific” ordering of space in a zone of conflicting and overlapping governance structures. Through the logic of Western cartography, he argues, EDELCA is implicated in state attempts to turn the Indigenous Pemon of the Gran Sabana into modern citizens. Having contributed to participatory mapping initiatives alongside the Pemon, Sletto reveals how the “modern” processes of border-making that make Pemon claims to territory legible to the state are in tension with alternative spatialities. This tension becomes illuminated through the governance of landscape fire. EDELCA officials operate with the assumption that the Gran Sabana was once a dense forest that is now undergoing savannization due to “reckless” Indigenous burning (Sletto 2011). This narrative, which justifies fire suppression in an attempt to stabilize the once semi-nomadic Pemon so they can be “modernized,” stems from a fundamental misreading of local ecology. It “simplifies heterogenous landscapes by drawing overly ‘thick’ lines between conservation units” that gloss over the “much more complex, unpredictable and shifting indigenous spatialities” and their role in environmental management (Sletto 2011: 200). EDELCA officials draw a clear distinction between forest and savanna, and in doing so, they fail to grasp the fundamental ecological importance of the interstitial space of the “savanna edge” that the Pemon maintain through strategic burning. As a consequence of the state-imposed elimination of burning in this area, fuel levels actually increase and further savannization occurs due to more destructive landscape fires.

Conclusion: Toward Pluralistic Fire Management

Sletto's research echoes a common theme that cuts through the literature reviewed in this essay: while attempts to bound and restrict burning practices are typically enacted to prevent destructive landscape fires, they frequently have the opposite effect. The persistence of state-imposed anti-burning policies that have their roots in colonial fire management might seem puzzling given that these policies have largely failed on their own terms, yet as I have argued above, attempts to restrict the use of fire are interconnected with efforts to control people and shape resource access. This suggests that pyropolitics are entangled with broader struggles over development and accumulation. In the contemporary world, where efforts to shape fire regimes are primarily enacted within national boundaries, these pyropolitical struggles remain fundamentally territorial.

Reading recent social science scholarship on landscape fire through the lens of territory helps to show how fire governance is linked to a far broader set of practices that seek to circumscribe and regulate political economic activity within borders. It also draws our attention to the connections between attempts to restrict burning and the emergence and ongoing production of the abstract space of territory. And it helps us unpack the ways that this abstract space—which is both violently imposed and geographically expansive—enables “continuous, rational economic calculation in the spheres of production and exchange, as well as comprehensive, encompassing control in the realm of statecraft” (Brenner and Elden 2009: 358).

Against a tendency to collapse the totality of complex and overlapping socio-spatial relationships within the singular concept of territory (Jessop et al. 2008), Elden concisely defines territory as “bounded space under the control of a group of people, with fixed boundaries, exclusive internal sovereignty, and equal external status” that is produced through an array of techniques used to measure land as well as control and manage terrain (Elden 2013b: 18). As the literature surveyed above makes evident, a historically and geographically specific disposition to fire was central to the emergence of these techniques and their spread around the world through European imperialism. From the outset, these territorialized forms of fire management were linked to the control of labor and resources. In a post-colonial context marked by the near universalization of modern, territorial states, both state and non-state actors continue to draw upon inherited colonial-era ideas about fire's destructive nature to assert culpability for large-scale conflagrations and criminalize local burning practices in the name of national development. Yet these attempts to territorialize anti-burning policies continuously run up against diverse ecologies and dispositions toward fire that interrupt efforts to control people, restrict resource access, and simplify landscapes. For as Michael Marder reminds us, “Fire alters that within which it rages; one cannot fit it into an objective and detached representation, to which one would remain cold and indifferent” (2014: xiii).

As climate change and land-use conversion render much of the world more flammable, there has been a palpable shift in the way that fire is discussed. Scientists and policymakers have begun to embrace the idea that fire suppression can actually exacerbate the very problem that it is intended to solve (Carmenta et al. 2019; Thompson et al. 2018). This acknowledgment that one-size-fits-all anti-burning policies are not working presents an opportunity for humanity to rethink its relationship to fire. In some instances, it has already spurred attempts to reincorporate the many local and Indigenous burning practices that were criminalized and suppressed under colonial and post-colonial governments.

Attempting to pluralistically rethink fire management will not be easy, however, as it requires us to think beyond abstract models of environmental governance as we embrace the immensely complex and geographically varied ways that communities interact with fire (Fowler and Welch 2018). There are significant challenges that stand in the way of implementing alternative burning practices including societal aversions to risk (Altangerel and Kull 2013; Ryan et al. 2013), years of propaganda that have fed anti-fire sentiment (Minor and Boyce 2018), concerns over air quality (Haikerwal et al. 2015), and the recognition that industrialization, urbanization, and development have fundamentally changed the conditions in which fire management takes place (González-Hidalgo et al. 2014; Otero and Nielsen 2017). Only by truly incorporating marginalized voices and giving them concrete, material support can we avoid imposing hierarchical forms of territorial fire governance predicated on dispossession, the drawing and policing of borders, and the unequal distribution of resources.