Territories of War: A Spatial Reading of Grotius' Ius Belli

This article considers how Grotius' ideas on war have mirrored the nexus between the construction of a territorialized order of sovereign states, the emergence of a world-wide system of exchange and accumulation, and the dynamics of imperial expansion. It will be argued that in order to understand the scope and the ambivalences of the jurist's multifaceted account of the laws of war and his dealings with the traditional literature on just war, it is necessary to elucidate the spatial frameworks underlying his theory, as well as the complex and global geography of power existing in the early seventeenth century.