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Inspired by the dearth of conceptual engagement with territory as an international law category, “The Rebirth of Territory”, written by Gail Lythgoe, contains a comprehensive attempt to re-define it. The scope of the book, however, is much broader. The author deploys her revisited concept of territory to also rethink-and rescue from obsolescence-territorially mediated concepts such as sovereignty and jurisdiction. Also, the thematic boundaries of the book are widened as a consequence of the very definition of territory proposed. In the book’s account, territories proliferate rather than succumb under the whirlwind of globalization. The state’s loss of normative power does not annihilate territory nor erase its centrality as a concept in international law; less drastically, it just deprives the state of its territorial hegemony. The book indeed acutely envisions a territory for each non-state actor who exercises functions that once belonged to sovereign states. The basic premise is that functions must be exercised somewhere, as no social process, including legal ones, is a-spatial. Therefore, more than just a study on territory as an attribute of the state, Lythgoe’s work is a wide-ranging reflection on international law’s changing spatiality in our globalized contemporaneity. The book’s structure reflects the deliberate intent to build a “legal theory of territory” (at 210). It appears to be articulated into two logical parts (although the author opted for a division by six chapters only), which reproduce a Baconian-like argumentative style: a negative part (pars destruens), containing a critique of the “orthodox” concept of territory, and a positive part (pars construens), advancing the book’s proposal for a reformulation of the concept of territory and its implications.
