Along with established national states, the planet has a scatter of anomalous and/or autonomous territories whose existence is performed in various ways. These include officially recognised archaic micro-jurisdictions (such as those operating in the Channel Islands, off the west coast of Normandy, France); self-proclaimed micro–nations in various regions; territories established offshore in efforts to escape national control; rhetorical utopias that have no material existence; and territories created in traditional and new media that intersect with material reality in various ways. These entities are significant for affronting the fixity of nation states and their boundaries through their détournement of various aspects of nationality and statehood.
This issue of Transformations allows scholars from the humanities and social sciences to analyse and reflect on the histories of particular territories and the impulses and justifications that have enabled them, highlighting their idiosyncratic positions and trajectories in a world order that is – paradoxically – ever more internationalised and intractably rooted in cumbersome national entities.