Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The territorialization of resource control Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Christian Lund University of Copenhagen, Denmark article info Article history: Available online 11 May 2017 Key words: frontier territoriality authority legitimacy institutions resource-struggles summary The expansion of capitalism produces contests over the definition and control of resources. On a global scale, new patterns of resource exploration, extraction, and commodification create new territories. This takes place within a dynamic of frontiers and territorialization. Frontier dynamics dissolve existing social orders—property systems, political jurisdictions, rights, and social contracts—whereas territorial- ization is shorthand for all the dynamics that establish them and re-order space anew. Frontier moments offer new opportunities, and old social contracts give way to struggles over new ones. As new types of resource commodification emerge, institutional orders are sometimes undermined or erased, and some- times reinterpreted, reinvented, and recycled. New property regimes, new forms of authority, and the attendant struggles for legitimacy over the ability to define proper uses and users follow frontier moments. The drawing of borders and the creation of orders around new resources profoundly rework patterns of authority and institutional architectures. We argue that the territorialization of resource con- trol is a set of processes that precedes legitimacy and authority, fundamentally challenging and replacing existing patterns of spatial control, authority, and institutional orders. It is dynamics of this sort that the articles in this collection explore: the outcomes produced in the frontier space, the kinds of authority that emerge through control over space and the people in it, and the battles for legitimacy that this entails. This collection explores the emergence of frontier spaces, arguing that these are transitional, liminal spaces in which existing regimes of resource control are suspended, making way for new ones. Ó 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction The frontier did not vanish when the North American settlers arrived at the Pacific coast or penetrated the Rockies, or when Argentinian and Chilean settlers reached the Tierra del Fuego. Entailed in these classic frontiers of seemingly linear movements in space and time now relegated to a distant past are core issues that are today more relevant than ever: the commodification of nature, the scramble for land and resources, the imaginaries of self and others, the erasure of existing orders, and the establishment of new patterns of governance and regimes of regulation. While the Western frontier ended in the late 1890s, frontier spaces continue to mushroom across the globe. Following a key insight from the emerging scholarship on resource frontiers, we note that frontiers represent, most basically, the discovery or invention of new resources (Barney, 2009; Eilenberg, 2014; Kelly & Peluso, 2015; Tsing, 2003). They are novel configurations of the relationship between natural resources and institutional orders that happen at particular moments in particular places. This collection explores the emergence of frontier spaces, arguing that these are transi- tional, liminal spaces in which existing regimes of resource control are suspended. A frontier is not space itself. It is something that happens in and to space. Frontiers take place. Literally. Frontier dynamics are intimately linked to their seeming oppo- site: territorialization. Frontier dynamics dissolve existing social orders—property systems, political jurisdictions, rights, and social contracts—whereas territorialization is shorthand for all the dynamics that establish them and re-order space anew. Frontiers and territorialization seem to us to be co-constitutive. We under- stand territorialization as a strategy of using bounded spaces for particular outcomes, a resource control strategy (Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995) that involves the classification of particular areas in order to regulate people and resources (Sack, 1986). In what fol- lows we discuss the concrete maneuvers to secure resource control by governing access, policing boundaries, and defining space. Understanding space in this perspective, we focus on the discur- sive, political, and physical production of frontiers as ‘‘vacant’, ‘‘un- governed”, ‘‘natural”, or ‘‘uninhabited” spaces that makes way for acts of territorialization. Territorialization, in turn, is the creation of systems of resource control,—rights, authorities, jurisdictions, and their spatial representations. However, when new resources are discovered or come within reach, new acts of frontier making http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.01.018 0305-750X/Ó 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. World Development 101 (2018) 388–399 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect World Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev