Opening questions

In the last few years increased attention has been given to the ways in which we might connect power and spatiality.(1) In particular, it needs to be argued that in a globalizing world an effective theorization of power relations can no longer ignore the significance of space. This is reflected in the fact that our understandings of the social and political are more and more interwoven with a consideration of the spatial, expressed, for example, in the analysis of borders, flows, connections, networks, fusions, and frag-mentations. One of the recurring themes in treatments of the geographies of power has been that of the relations between domination and resistance, and how these relations need to be retheorized in a context that moves away from seeing power as synonymous with domination, and resistance as a phenomenon somehow separate from the effects of power. The notion of `entanglements of power ' recently deployed by Sharp et al (2000) gives expression to this idea of the imbrication of domination and resistance and to the complex interweaving of the `power over ' and the `power to'. These authors also under-line the need to eschew conceptual undertakings that insinuate binary divisions between an accentuation of the dominant and a romanticization of the resistant. The existence of an uneasy and problematic relation between analyses of power and domination on the one hand, and movements of resistance on the other, is found across a wide range of social science literatures.(2) It is a relation that leads me to pose three questions. Other domains of democratic theory: space, power, and the politics of democratizatio