Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is global in scope, yet responses to the pandemic have varied considerably by national context, thereby reinforcing what Agnew (1994) has called the ‘territorial trap’. This commentary extends geographical scholarship by considering three territorial traps at play in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly pertaining to the governance of international travel and migration, inter-state coordination, and territorial thinking.
Introduction
Since December 2019, a highly contagious novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its accompanying disease (COVID-19) have spread globally (Guan et al., 2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020, and there were more than 4 million infections confirmed in over 180 nations and territories by May 2020 (WHO, 2020). According to the United Nations Development Programme, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most severe global health crises of our time and the greatest challenge to humanity since the Second World War (UNDP, 2020). To make matters even worse, there is still no vaccine for this infectious disease. Currently, the major interventions still mainly aim to constrain the mobility of possible or confirmed infected persons through issuing travel restrictions, imposing quarantines and isolation methods, and tracing contacts of people with known infections (Cheng et al., 2020).
Considering that these interventions are mainly territory- or space-based, we argue in this commentary that some emerging territorial traps are worth our due caution. This commentary therefore has two primary contributions. First, compared with the more-than-human approach and biopolitics theory which have been adopted to interpret human-virus relations in some geographical studies (e.g. Donaldson and Wood, 2004; Greenhough, 2012; Ingram, 2007), we argue that the territorial approach is more helpful to interpret the difficulties in, and consequences of, containing COVID-19 based on territorial control. Second, by scrutinizing the territorial traps at work in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, we can further the discussion of the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994), which remains a pressing issue in political geography and geopolitical research (Reid-Henry, 2010), yet has rarely if ever been employed to interpret the governance of public health and the prevention of infectious diseases.
COVID-19 and the territorial trap
The notion of the ‘territorial trap’ was first proposed by John Agnew (1994) when he criticized the limitations of international relations (IR) studies that predominantly take the territorial state as the only spatial organization of politics for analysis. Agnew argued that the territorial trap is based on three invalid geographical assumptions: (1) the conflation of the state with a ‘fixed’ unit of sovereign territory, (2) all actors can be squeezed into the model of inter-state competition (thereby reinforcing the domestic/foreign dualism), and (3) the state as a strict container of society. Agnew’s arguments have attracted much scholarly attention, and the territorial trap remains an intractable problem today (Agnew, 2015; Reid-Henry, 2010). He primarily discusses the territorial trap as an intellectual or analytical trap in inter-state studies; however, it can be generalized to consider the territorial traps of various forms of power at both inter-state and sub-state scales.
To better apply this view to interpret the challenges of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we broaden the concept of the territorial trap to refer to any form of paradox, dilemma, or difficulty in both analysis and practices related to territorial control. Specifically, we identify three territorial traps in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. The first territorial trap is mainly based on Agnew’s critique of the third assumption above – the state as a container of society – especially as it relates to the governance of international travel and migration within the system of territorial states. The second trap relates to how inter-state coordination has been impeded by differential political systems and inconsistent responses of different territorial states. Lastly, the third trap refers to the pervasiveness of territorial thinking in both nationalist stereotyping and geopolitical strategies, which may lead to reinforcing territorial control of critical resources and even wars.
The territorial trap in the governance of international travel and migration
The mismatch between citizenship and territory may lead to problematic reactions to international travelers and migrants during infection control. National and local governments usually make quarantine policies from a territorial perspective. However, since international travelers and migrants are not fixed in a single territory and may have multiple citizenships, they cannot be precisely placed in territorialized governance, which defines the duty of health care and authority of mobility management according to territorialized citizenship. For example, the international passengers aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship were left isolated in the ship rather than relocated to safer places in Japan mainly because they possessed multiple territorial identities beyond the control of Japan, such as citizenship of their own state; passenger of the ship registered in Bermuda, which is a self-governing British overseas territory; and customer of the Carnival Corporation & PLC, which is an international leisure travel company dually listed on both the New York Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange. Since these identities do not overlap with the territory of infection control, the responsibilities and rights to care for the passengers in the Diamond Princess cruise were unclear. The much higher infection rate on the Diamond Princess indicates the severe flaws of territorialized infection control systems to govern travelers and migrants during pandemics. While the Diamond Princess cruise passengers were special cases, similar territorial traps can still be found among the thousands of stranded migrants all over the world due to border closures and travel restrictions. Various dilemmas and humanitarian crises have emerged with the shuttering of asylums, blocking returnees in border areas, and unevenly treating vulnerable, uninsured noncitizens.
The territorial trap in inter-state coordination
The separate actions taken by different territorial states may impede international coordination and slow down the pace of containing the COVID-19 pandemic. While international organizations such as the WHO gained more powers of investigation after the outbreak of SARS, international interventions for infection control are still limited and individual states are largely independent from each other in choosing their ways to control infectious diseases. Therefore, the efforts to prevent infectious diseases, and methods adopted to treat possible infected persons, are quite different among countries according to their attitudes, calculations, and capabilities (Bowen Jr and Laroe, 2006). Considering that some national and local politics may compound reactions to epidemic disease outbreaks (Huang and Smith, 2010), the uneven country-specific responses to COVID-19 have likely led to varying degrees of efficiency in preventing the spread of the pandemic among different territories. For instance, the liberal principles adopted by the Johnson government in the UK, and the indifference and late response by the Trump administration in the US, likely contributed to the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in the UK and the US, respectively.
The individualized responses by each state to control the COVID-19 pandemic have also created a temporal trap, 1 which is characterized by viewing some countries as being ‘ahead’ or ‘behind’ in time depending on their comparative position within global COVID-19 trajectories. From this standpoint, those countries who are ‘ahead’ in time (i.e. those that experienced the COVID-19 outbreak earlier and may already be in the process of recovery) can only be protected from the risk of COVID-19 when all countries have successfully controlled the spread of the coronavirus. This is analogous to the idea of Liebig’s barrel, the capacity of which is determined by its shortest stave. For example, although China seems to have managed to control the COVID-19 infection for now, it has still closed its borders to avoid importing cases from other countries. China is also facing difficulties in fully resuming its manufacturing activities due to the fracture of global supply chains. However, the experiences and practices adopted by China do not necessarily apply universally to other countries due to different political institutions, economic situations, and group behaviors.
The territorial trap of nationalist stereotyping and intensified territorial thinking
The fears and mistrust triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the territorial responses to it may resonate and even augment territorial thinking in both nationalist stereotyping and geopolitical strategies. Similar to the racialization of H1N1 (Mason, 2015), some racists and even official governmental agents have labeled the coronavirus as the ‘Wuhan virus’ and treated overseas Chinese unequally under the fear of ‘Yellow Peril’. The crisis caused by the diffusion of COVID-19 has also led to more territorial ways of thinking. Border closures have facilitated individual states to dis-embed from global production networks, and the accompanying uncertain supply of important components from other countries has encouraged each state to build local industrial chains. The huge damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has also increased international disputes. Taking the US-China relationship as an example, the economic decline associated with the COVID-19 pandemic reduced China’s demand for, and purchase capability of, products (such as energy) from the US and thus increases the possibility of continued trade war between these two countries.
Conclusion
The three territorial traps identified in this commentary suggest that the territorial practices adopted to control the COVID-19 pandemic may yield some unexpected consequences. In particular, the territorial traps pertaining to the governance of international travel and migration as well as inter-state coordination have reduced the efficiency of territorial responses to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the intensification of territorial thinking associated with nationalist stereotyping and border closures may spark geopolitical rivalries and even wars, which may be more severe threats to global security than the COVID-19 pandemic itself. A thorough examination of the territorial traps in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic awaits future scholarship, yet even the preliminary analysis we have offered here has exposed some of traps of territorial responses to the pandemic. Future studies will hopefully deepen the theoretical discussions of both the concept of territory (Elden, 2013) and the territorial trap (Agnew, 1994) in political geography as well as their applicability to other fields such as the geographies of global health.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Reuben Rose-Redwood for his help arriving at the current version.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is sponsored by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.41601144, 41571130), ‘Chenguang Program’ (18CG28) supported by the Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities funded by East China Normal University.