Volumising territorial sovereignty: atmospheric sciences, climate, and the vertical dimension in 20th century China

Li, Andy Hanlun (2024) Volumising territorial sovereignty: atmospheric sciences, climate, and the vertical dimension in 20th century China. Political Geography, 111. ISSN 0962-6298

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Abstract

Works in Political Geography have focused on the exercise of territorial sovereignty beyond land, emphasising the voluminousness and dynamism of material forces that condition how territory is governed. In comparison, works on modern territorial statehood in IR have generally overlooked the question of materiality. By combining the attentiveness to more-than-human materiality in Political Geography with IR's focus on the role of epistemic transformations in the history of the modern international system, this article proposes a more comprehensive understanding of territorial sovereignty and modern statehood as constituted by the technoscientific management of the territory's materiality. Using the development of atmospheric sciences in the 19th century as an example of science-state entanglement in the emergence of the modern international system, this article shows that the integration of atmospheric knowledge production with state and international governance produced the vertical dimension as a realm of governmental concern. Through a detailed case study of the development of atmospheric sciences in early 20th-century China and scientific ideas about China's climate, this article demonstrates how the scientific discovery of the vertical dimension reconfigures territorial sovereignty as sovereignty over volume.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/political-ge...
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author
Divisions:	Government
Subjects:	J Political Science G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General)
Date Deposited:	08 Apr 2024 14:21
Last Modified:	01 May 2024 00:00
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122564

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