6533b825fe1ef96bd128235e

RESEARCH PRODUCT

State Without Territory: a legal-political heresy

subject

description

The sovereign, territorial, nation state form has imposed itself globally. Nevertheless, as Carl Schmitt points out: «Statehood is not a universal concept, valid for all times and all peoples». In other words, state is not the only possible way to establish a relationship between space, humanity and power. This paper intends to historicise the current geopolitical paradigm and drafting a heresy of the public law doctrine: a State Without Territory, a diasporic political community reclaiming some of the traditional government functions. In order to rethink the state concept, a pattern that shapes and affects so strongly both external reality and our minds, a methodology is needed. The author proposes the Otherwise Method: a laboratory of legal-political imagination that uses a deconstructive and operative epistemological approach. This practice aspires to enlarge the sphere of possibilities by imagining how social constructs could be otherwise.