The University of Oregon political geographer Alex Murphy once wrote about territory’s continuing allure (Murphy 2013). In essence, Murphy posited that territorial understandings and practices that developed in lockstep with the modern state system continue to exert significant influence on how the world functions and how state-defined territory itself is conceptualised. In his memorable turn of phrase, there is unquestionably a structural “stickiness” and deep-rooted emotional power which is reproduced by several notable mechanisms. The first is spatial socialisation and how citizens and residents are educated and prompted to identify with a specific national territory (Paasi 1996). This remains an area of concern for popular geopolitics: the way in which seemingly abstract concepts such as political borders and territories (like a nation-state, region, or town) become deeply personal parts of our identity and sense of belonging. This might be inculcated through popular media sources and the celebration of cultural and geographical myths and legends. Paasi’s pioneering work examined the Finnish-Russian border and concluded that memories of territorial losses (such as ceding parts of Karelia to the Soviet Union after World War II) and collective sacrifice offered up a resilient socio-spatial consciousness amongst Finnish people.

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The second is state-sponsored knowledge production, and that would include maps, school curricula in subjects such as geography and history, and government practices that reinforce the boundaries of that nation-state’s territory. In countries that have outstanding territorial disputes and borders that are not agreed upon, the production of maps remains a highly sensitive matter. In India, for example, all commercial and public maps depicting India’s external boundaries must strictly conform to official maps published by the Survey of India, depicting disputed territories like Aksai Chin and parts of Kashmir as integral parts of the country. Finally, there are regimes of territorial legitimation, the political and legal frameworks that constantly validate and agitate state authority over a particular territory and its borders. The preamble of the PRC Constitution states that “Taiwan is part of the sacred territory of the People’s Republic of China” and calls the achievement of reunification the “lofty” (or sometimes translated as sacred) duty of the Chinese people.

In his original article, Murphy’s “allure” framing used the example of Western Sahara, which has been long occupied by Morocco, to reinforce his thesis. Another example would be Argentina and its long-standing project to recover the disputed Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas. As the late Argentine political scientist Carlos Escudé argued, Argentine territorial nationalism has reified the Islands as a “lost territory” that must according to the 1994 Constitution be thought of as integral to the Argentine Republic. Since the 1940s, Argentina has devoted considerable institutional and imaginative resources to projecting to its citizens, through various regimes of territorial legitimation and state-sponsored knowledge production, a catalogue of maps, charts, books, and popular cultural objects designed to reinforce the allure of lost territory—lost in the sense of being currently occupied by another power, the United Kingdom. In April 1982, the Argentine military regime invaded the Islands and then retreated from them after military defeat in June 1982. Henceforth, successive Argentine governments have faced a near-constant dilemma—how to recover those Islands without going to war again?

In 2011, we co-authored an article revisiting Carlos Escudé’s notion of Argentine territorial nationalism, in which we built on a coterie of work on banal (Billig 1995) and everyday nationalism (Jones and Merriman 2009), to argue that territorial nationalism needs to be understood as a diverse phenomenon. In a country as large and complex as federal Argentina, the scale, scope, and intensity of territorial nationalism vary across the country and depend on wider political events and agendas in the southwest Atlantic and Latin American region. Interviews and in-field observations, some of which involved young people in Buenos Aires, suggested to us that geographical location, personal/familial connections with Argentina’s southern provinces and the Islands played a part in that identification with territorial nationalism, as did generational differences. Whether there was lived memory of (or direct familial connections with) the 1982 conflict over the Islands was another key factor for many interviewees.

The fieldwork revealed that when asked directly about the Islands, young interviewees would readily acknowledge their importance within the Argentine geographical and political imagination. When asked about their significance relative to other priorities facing the Republic, the Islands were less likely to be described as a national priority. But what Escudé recognised in the 1980s and 1990s was that political elites in Argentina could draw upon state-directed educational indoctrination and circulation of historic “myths” to forge a public fixation on “lost geography” over and above pragmatic national development (Escudé 2008). In his view, Argentina helped to create the grounds for this indoctrination by using state education, public culture, and international posturing to highlight the importance of recovery of the Islands from the UK. Despite........

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