Revision summary
Deterritorialisation: practices unhook from one soil, via finance, media, and migration. The nation-state’s territorial monopoly of force is strained, not abolished. Marx’s world market and Wallerstein precede the slogan; Giddens and Appadurai name intensity. Borders, nationalism, and war re-territorialise. India: remittances and IT versus Census, farms, and internal social borders.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Deterritorialisation means social practices unhook from a single bounded place. Globalisation of capital, media, and migration does that. The nation-state is a territorial claim to law and force. The statement is strong as a tendency, not as the end of territory.
Body
What deterritorialisation names
- Arjun Appadurai’s scapes: finance, media, and people move across borders faster than maps.
- Anthony Giddens: time–space distanciation; modernity already stretched relations, globalisation intensifies it.
- Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system: accumulation was never only national.
Nation-state under strain
- Max Weber defined the state as monopoly of legitimate force in a territory. Capital flight, tax havens, and platforms weaken fiscal monopoly even when police remain local.
- Karl Marx already pictured a world market. The nation is a political form inside that market, not its master.
- Human rights, trade treaties, and rating agencies add extra-territorial rules.
- Diasporas vote, remit, and fund parties: belonging without exclusive soil.
Why territory returns
- Borders, passports, and camps are hyper-territorial. Migration control is a booming state craft.
- Nationalism resacralises soil, which Emile Durkheim’s civic cult and later civil religion help read.
- War and sanctions re-territorialise supply chains.
- Talcott Parsons’s goal-attainment subsystem, politics, still needs a territorial centre to tax and to war.
Indian reference
- Liberalisation after 1991, IT exports, and Gulf remittances deterritorialise livelihoods.
- The Census still counts a territorial population. Personal law and internal borders of caste–language re-territorialise intimacy.
- Farmers and informal workers remain place-bound while prices are global.
Examination
- Globalisation involves deterritorialisation of some circuits, especially finance and images.
- The nation-state is reorganised, not erased: it competes to host capital and to police people.
- Robert K. Merton’s latent function of “global culture” can be a new local inequality.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD GLOB[Globalisation] --> DET[Deterritorial circuits] GLOB --> RET[Re-bordering] NS[Nation-state] --> FORCE[Weber territorial force] DET[DET] --> NS[NS] RET[RET] --> NS[NS]
Conclusion
Deterritorialisation is a real dimension of globalisation, especially for capital and media. The nation-state remains the territorial organiser of force, census, and most welfare. Examine unhooking and re-bordering together. Weber’s state and Marx’s world market are both still on the map.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Has the nation-state ended?
No. It has changed tasks: attract capital, police mobility, and still wage law inside borders.
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Is the internet placeless?
Content travels. Cables, moderation laws, and identity documents still sit in territories.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
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2018 · Q4(c) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
Discuss the challenges thrown by religious revivalism to a secular nation-state.
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