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The goal of this special issue is to offer critical explorations of territoriality both in historical and within contemporary special territorial designations, with a specific focus on space, place, and landscape rather than just individuals. The articles in the issue are linked by their novel application of the principal of extraterritoriality to special territorial designations of various types in a range of geographic contexts. This introduction explains how each article in the issue utilises extraterritoriality in a distinctly innovative way to help make sense of a particular circumstance that is insufficiently explained by other available theories. They are linked by their concern with space, governance and the invisible operation of exceptions to the normative order of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global space industry brings to mind the horizons of science and technology, large rockets, and heroic astronauts. The land and infrastructure used to launch things into the cosmos, however, is far less seen. Since the mid-1950s, large territories or 'fall zones' in the Kazakh steppe have been used for jettisoning stages of inter-continental ballistic missiles and other kinds of carrier rockets from the Soviet launch complex, in the south west of the country, known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In this article, I explore how land leases and use agreements between the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union have upcycled this Soviet era site into a private enclave for the accumulation of capital and waste of a now global space industry. As during the Cold War, launches from Baikonur depend upon thousands of miles of downrange land in Kazakhstan to be catchment areas for toxic fuel and rocket debris that falls from the sky during each and every launch. Here, I introduce the concept of an 'inland-offshore', to explain how post-Soviet land and infrastructure lease agreements have created offshore-like political and economic privileges and extraterritorial landscapes of proprietary governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional understandings of extraterritoriality have overlooked human consciousness as an intimate province of territorial governance. Whereas traditional approaches to extraterritoriality often adopt a modernist understanding of territory, this article expands on the concept by referring to extraterritoriality as the process and practice of discovering, reifying and intervening in new domains of territorial governance. Insofar as territorial practices adapt in accordance with emergent knowledges and technologies, the realm of human consciousness appeared as an object of governmental interest during the mid-twentieth century alongside advances in neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Through the subsequent illegalisation of psychedelic plants and fungi, in combination with the hegemonic norms established through disciplinary institutions, the full spectrum of human consciousness has since become territorialised as a new domain of governmental intervention and management. As such, this article argues that the regulation of cognition enforced through drug prohibitions and sanctions enfold human consciousness as an extended domain of extraterritoriality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the shifting nature of the concept of extraterritoriality at particular junctures in history from the Italian city states to contemporary visions of floating micro-sovereignties. Extraterritoriality is the exercise of the jurisdiction by one state or non-state actor within the territory of another state. Since extraterritoriality is a challenge to the fundamental principle of sovereignty, it is by definition an exception in relation to sovereignty. As sovereignty evolved and changed over time, so did extraterritoriality – and, in the discussed cases, it changed primarily to be able to fulfil the needs of agents of global capital. The article discusses the privileges granted to the Italian city states by the Byzantines and the Ottoman capitulations, extraterritoriality on the colonial frontier, private investments in the Middle East and the proliferation of ideas of micro-sovereignty by Libertarian politicians and Silicon Valley billionaires. The article makes three distinct arguments: first, extraterritoriality has to be understood in relation to shifting notions of sovereignty. Secondly, extraterritoriality emerged within the context of colonial and imperial inequality and any extraterritorial relations contain the echoes of these structures of inequality. Finally, extraterritoriality is often driven and shaped by the needs of global capital, trying to avoid specific sovereign structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]