Unbundling territoriality in the era of real time cyberspace

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1.5, The Australian National University, language: English, abstract: 1993 when Ruggie termed the ¿unbundling of territoriality¿ was a year in which

knowledge and communication that is its accessibility and dissemination entered a

new realm of space and time. On the 30th of April 1993 the World Wide Web and its

underlying technology was made freely available to use by anyone. Today over one

billion people use the Internet, or every sixth person on the planet. A collective brain

one might say is forming in front of our eyes growing with every new person entering

three W¿s into a web browser.

While Ruggie aimed to search for, and investigate into, a fundamental transformation

of the modern system of states, he emphasized that such an analysis would find a

fruitful starting point in the [re]conceptualisation of territoriality. This paper will

utilize Ruggie¿s concept, by applying its analysis to the emerging and manifesting

space-time implosion driven by the Internet and other communication technologies.

Therefore, it is argued that Cyberspace provides a practical sphere to investigate into

the unbundling of territoriality in a postmodern world. In the first section the impact on territoriality resulting from the emergence of the

Cyberspace will be discussed. Ruggie¿s model of differentiation between systems of

rule and territory is applied to explain the transformation of territory in the

postmodern era of Cyberspace. It is followed by an investigation into the

consequences of Cyberspace on sovereignty. Showing that Cyberspace does indeed

provide a new stage in Ruggie¿s terms, facilitating an unbundling and relocation of

sovereignty away from state territory. The third section discusses the implication of

the virtual space on the rise and acceleration of globalisation. It is argued that

globalisation, could not be perceived as a postmodern phenomenon without the

Cyberspace revolution. The last part of the paper, proposes the need to rethink the

notion of movement in the age of virtual and real spaces. Cyberspace allows ¿tourists¿

in line with Bauman¿s description to choose between virtual and real movement. The

preceding discussion will finally lead to the conclusion that the conceptualisation of

Cyberspace as one aspect responsible for the unbundling of territory provides an

important explanatory insight into the transformation from modernity to

postmodernity.