The globalization literature has now reached a level of maturity that allows one to distinguish between different schools of thought. Whereas the first two stages broadly dealt with the process at large (its development and manifestation), the latest generation of scholarship seems mostly concerned with its current and future governance. Saskia Sassen's latest contribution to this dialogue is similar to Andrew Drainville's recent volume (Contesting Globalization, 2004) for which she wrote the introduction. Both defend the need to situate the globalization discourse in concrete locations to gain a fuller understanding of it. More specifically, in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Sassen presents an extensively developed criticism of the globalization literature. Sassen argues that both critics and proponents of the globalization concept in its latest iteration miss crucial developments of the transformative processes captured by the term “globalization” in their focus on established actors and institutional forms. She argues for the need to situate globalization more concretely and broadly, in terms of both space and place (i.e., territory), and for the establishment of new organizing logics, which manifest themselves in new combinations of authority and rights. Even though Sassen builds on her previous scholarship, this is a novel work—and a most welcome and important contribution to this field, as she not only points out the shortcomings of existing approaches, but provides a well-theorized proposition on how to remedy them.

Sassen is mostly concerned with the failure of existing theoretical approaches to globalization to escape what she terms the “endogeneity trap” (aiming to understand globalization by confining its study to the characteristics of globalization, i.e., global processes and institutions), arguing instead for an approach that focuses on neither the Y (globalization) nor the X (global process and institutions). Instead, albeit never explicitly, Sassen argues for an evolutionary approach to the study of globalization, explaining globalization through the complex and dynamic organizing logic that binds its core elements. Evolutionary models are characterized by a focus on change, dynamics, and selection. Change in this view is constant and yet never linear in its unfolding; its pace, intensity, and impact are shaped by the environment in which it unfolds. Such change processes affect the development of environments that in turn produce “feedback effects.” The human political, social, and economic world constitutes such an environment of dynamic change and feedback effects. According to Sassen, this allows the opening of “possibility space” where potential options for change become possible.

Grasping this process requires us to “historicize both the national and the global as constructed conditions” (p. 4)—a difficult and complex task, as Sassen admits. Rather than focusing on the complex wholes—the national and the global—she instead proposes to disaggregate each of them into their foundational components, namely the establishment of territory, authority, and rights, therefore separating these processes from their “particular historical encasements” (p. 5). By studying the organizing logic driving the specific combination of these interdependent components, she hopes to better understand the formation of both the “national” and the “global,” and the “tipping points” that precipitate “particular assemblage(s) of specific institutionalizations of territory, authority, and rights” (p. 404).

The first part of the book focuses on the foundational shifts, whereby the national was constructed through a repositioning of particular medieval capabilities. Sassen then proceeds to examine a similar foundational shift currently underway, centered on the disassembling of the national and the emergence of new assemblages associated with global digital technologies and relations. Sassen's core contribution is precisely her disaggregation of “the glue that for a long time held possibly different normative orders together under the somewhat unitary dynamics of nations.” Not to be confused with a vision of globalization as a mere “denationalization” process, Sassen's approach allows for the identification of globalization as a “proliferation of specialized assemblages” with a tendency toward a remixing of constitutive rules—the shifts of the private-public division, the microtransformations of the relationship of citizen to the state and the “multiplication of partial systems, each with a small set of sharply distinctive constitutive rules, amounting to a type of simple system” (p. 422). Though not exactly mirroring the medieval world of overlapping domains of authority, territory, and rights, this newly emerging system sheds the overarching “Westphalian” logic for a new one that allows for multiple sets of borderlines (both within as well as across existing national ones), coexisting normative orders that shake up established meanings of private and public, as well as coexisting and parallel establishments of rights (and wrongs).

Territory, Authority, Rights is a call to arms for an innovative and evolutionary approach to the study of globalization. The strong emphasis Sassen puts on questions of epistemology makes it therefore somewhat surprising that she does not draw more explicitly on the existing literature in this field or even mark her work explicitly as belonging to it. We are presented with evolutionary models of a variety of creations, selection mechanisms, and path-dependencies, the establishment of systems through duplication of certain organizational arrangements (forming capabilities), yet nowhere does the author place her own approach explicitly in this literature.

Although they are slowly emerging as an analytical tool in political science, evolutionary approaches are well-established in many other sciences (especially economics). This might explain both Sassen's excitement about the possibilities of such an approach and its explanatory power, as well as her reluctance to place her work in this category before an audience largely unfamiliar with evolutionary approaches outside biology and regrettably prone to associating social scientific evolutionary studies with “social Darwinism.”

The problem of such a stealthy evolutionary approach becomes apparent when she invokes the concept of complex systems, largely ignoring the existing literature in this field. This limits her analysis of the dynamics of such systems, the core focus of what her model aims to explain. Yet, compared to the task Sassen takes on in this book, these are minor quibbles from a more than sympathetic reviewer thankful for such a well-crafted and rich analysis. Territory, Authority, Rights is endowed with a theoretical depth all too often lacking in existing approaches seemingly stuck in the endogenous trap Sassen so eloquently evades.