Globalisation and reflexive modernity are said to be generating new opportunities for local territorial and individual agency. As actors seek to intervene in order to ensure an equable socio-economic outcome, they increasingly employ the theory of endogenous development. However, the theory itself does not explain the nature of human and territorial agency, nor the mechanism by which such agenc...

Group living animals often engage in corporate territorial defence. Territorial group vocalizations can provide information about group identity, size and composition. Neighbouring groups may use this information to avoid unfavourable direct conflicts. Giant otters are highly social and territorial animals with an elaborate vocal repertoire. They produce long-range screams when they are alert o...

This work demonstrates the application of the distributed behavior-based approach [1] to generating a multi-robot controller for a group of mobile robots performing a clean-up and collection task. The paper studies a territorial approach to the task in which the robots are assigned individual territories that can be dynamically resized if one of the robots malfunctions, permitting the completio...

Growth machine theory has typically interpreted successful contemporary conservation efforts as rare victories of elite liberal factions to protect their own use values or, alternatively, as greenwashing for growth. By studying an elite coalition dedicated to land conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, I probe whether growth theory can be used to understand conservation as a territorial...

Scholars concerned with abuses of the "resource privilege" by the governments of developing states sometimes call for national sovereignty over the natural resources that lie within its borders. While such claims may resist a key driver of the "resource curse" when applied to mineral resources in the ground, and are often recognized as among a people's territorial rights, their implications dif...

This paper outlines the implementation of an algorithm that divides a robot’s topological map into a series of territories. It partitions this map using an algorithm based on clustering behavior in ant colonies. To perform this partitioning, the algorithm requires a specific topological map of the environment; the vertices are important features of the environment, and each vertex is connected ...

Is the demarcation problem dead, or are the rumors of its demise greatly exaggerated? ! e answer depends on whom you ask. Some philosophers of science have voiced the opinion that the demarcation project has been something of an embarrassment to their discipline and that terms like “pseudoscience” and “nonscience” should be erased from our philosophical vocabulary, wedded as they are to a naïve...

Niklas Luhmann's interpretation of modernity focuses on autopoiesis and functional differentiation as factors combining towards an unavoidable polycontextuality of modern society (Luhmann 1992). This paper aims at reemphasizing the fact that Luhmann's fully developed conceptual apparatus though provides highly relevant theoretical tools to cope with the question of intersystemic relations; and ...