At the edge of the sword: Toward a spatial theory of the frontier

Scholarly research on frontiers has exploded over the last two or three decades. ‘Frontier’ is a word with a long history, and shifting meanings with complex relations to settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. As a geographical keyword, the frontier has been put to work to understand a variety of colonial and postcolonial settings in which new commodity frontiers – land-based, oceanic, outer-space – have arisen. But the explosion of frontier talk is marked by conceptual elasticity, contradictory meanings, and a lack of precision. We ask: what makes a frontier a frontier? A frontier, we argue, marks a conjuncture, a particular moment in state time where the social and spatial outside is transformed into the inside of state and capital. The frontier is a form of social space where ‘the edge of the sword’, understood as a threshold at the limits of state capacity, articulates a liminal condition of authority, state, and capital that brings about the painful birth (and rebirth) of territory at the margins or edges of states.