Territory beyond the Anglophone Tradition

The Francophone territoire is often translated by the English "place" and not by "territory," as common sense would suggest. This detail underscores a deeper, and epistemological, difference existing between the Anglophone territory and the Francophone territoire. Territoire never coincided strictly with a bounded state territory, as in the Anglophone tradition. In territoire the logics of agents, not necessarily state agents, are included, and historically the concept of territoire allowed Francophone geography to become a social science in its own right. As such, territoire, conceived in the Francophone way, is nowadays a powerful tool for scholars to explore the contemporary world, made up of a combination of borders, networks, and overlapping territories. Despite the evident interest in conceiving territories beyond a state-centric view, Anglophone geographers, as opposed to their Francophone colleagues, never dare to do so. This chapter aims to present to an Anglophone audience how the Francophone tradition conceives of territory and how it links it with issues of identities, projects, and agents.