Current unsettlements are breaking the cages, into which territory and time have been pushed over the last few centuries by the project of making nation-states.  This project standardizes, bureaucratizes, and nationalizes time and territory though never succeeding completely. 

As time and territory begin to seep out of these century-old cages, notions of disorder and crisis dominate debate. The current financial crisis is partly such a de-bordering of the old cages –the electronic space of finance, and the escalating orders of magnitude that digitalization makes possible, break through the time and space of the national. 

No no-man’s land
The global climate crisis is partly what was exported out of these cages into a putative no-man’s land as part of the making of capitalism.  But such a no-man’s land does not exist – it is the atmosphere that surrounds us, or poor people and poor areas of the global south, or the disadvantaged in the rich countries who have been far more exposed to toxicity than the privileged. The glaciers, once remote and immobile, are now at our door. And the multitudes of disadvantaged are becoming actors on a global stage. Neither the glaciers nor these multitudes can be kept in that putative no-man’s land that powerful shapers of this economy thought they could rely on.
 

The national and the natural
For centuries, nation states worked at nationalizing national territory, identity, security, power, and rights - all the key elements of social and political existence. When the national state is the dominant format, the overarching dynamic is centripetal: the center grasps most of what there is to be had. Those nationalizing dynamics assembled the pieces of what we now experience as the national and the natural. And what happened outside the borders of territorial states – whether the impoverished terrains of former empires or the earth’s poles - was written out of history. 

The national and the global 
As territory and time seep out of the old nation-state cages, they begin to constitute a proliferation of partial, often highly specialized assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national institutional frames. These assemblages are mostly neither global nor national. They cut across the binary of 'national vs. global' - this being the usual way of attempting to understand what is new. These emergent assemblages inhabit both national and global institutional and territorial settings. They can be localized and denationalize bits of national territory. Or they can span the globe in the form of trans-local geographies connecting multiple, often thick, sub-national spaces - institutional, territorial, and subjective. These often thick, sub-national settings are building-blocks for new global geographies. They do not run through supranational institutions that take out that thickness and generalize across differences. They resonate with Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of an altermodernity that “arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures” (from Tate Britain 2009 Triennale, London). 

Localized practices and global networks
If globalities are constituted inside the national, then the immobile  can be global actors -- their bodies do not cross the borders of national states, but that does not preclude their being part of global subjectivities and politics. And powerlessness can become complex and thereby contain the possibility of politics, of making the political.  Localized struggles by actors who are not globally mobile are nonetheless critical for the organizational infrastructure of a globally networked politics: it is precisely the combination of localized practices and global networks that makes possible a new type of power for actors who would be seen as powerless in terms of conventional variables. While geographically immobile, these localized actors and their practices are also inflected by their participation and constitutive role in global civil society. In short, even if contained within an administrative unit of a national state, they are not simply local.

Breaking bridges
Thus, the spatiality/temporality of globalization itself contains dynamics of mobility and fixity. While mobility and fixity may easily be classified as two mutually exclusive types of dynamics from the perspective of mainstream categories, they are not necessarily so. It is partly an empirical question: social practice as it develops will allow us to establish when they are and when they are not. 

Today’s  catastrophic conditions -- the melting of the glaciers, the radicalness of today’s poverty,  the violence of extreme economic inequality, the genocidal character of more and more wars--  are often seen as part of the change. But it seems to me they are not. On the contrary, they are part of that putative no-man’s land that absorbed the costs of the making of national-states and capitalism. They are floating signifiers, speech acts that narrate the current condition in a far more encompassing manner than standard narratives about nation-states and globalization. While these conditions have existed for a long time, today they are crossing new thresholds and, crucially, they become legible as the cages of the national begin to fall apart and reveal the landscapes of devastation on which they were built.  '...Our over-cantilevered bridge cannot cope with the warming waters below.'

Hilary Koob-Sassen, Serpentine Manifesto Marathon “Faith in Infrastructure,” Serpentine Gallery, London October 18, 2008;

see also http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A534986).