Beyond production: Following nomadic space in IR

Abstract The burgeoning critical scholarship on space in International Relations (IR) overwhelmingly recognises space as a socially produced set of performances, practices, and discourses, converging into meaningful organisations of located experience. Drawing on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the related concepts of nomadism and the war machine, I argue that this productive emphasis betrays a continued statist methodology that proceeds by binding, or partitioning, space into finished outcomes. I present a conceptual challenge to the normative emphasis on socially produced space by following nomadism, the immanent tendency to variation in the process of spatial becoming. Working with nomadic potentials brings to the fore smooth space, which includes the continuous possibilities and intensities existing unencumbered beneath concretised productions of organised space. I follow the spatial movement of violence in Punjab during the Indian Partition of 1947 as the emergence of a war machine which deployed the nomadism of smooth space to decompose and upend striations. My objectives are first, to argue for spatial possibilities beyond the normative positivity of produced space, and secondly, to register the fundamental methodological and analytical shifts that these possibilities demand. These shifts can in turn deepen ongoing disciplinary inquiries into indeterminacy.