In critical theory, deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a territory, has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed.
The idea has been applied to describe the shifting of social, cultural, economic and political practices, as well as of people, objects, languages, traditions and beliefs in relation to their respective originating bodies.
Paradoxically, deterritorialization also includes reterritorialized manifestations, which García Canclini defines as "certain relative, partial territorial relocalizations of old and new symbolic productions".
As Giddens argues, "the very tissue of spatial experience alters, conjoining proximity and distance in ways that have few close parallels in prior ages".
Sociologist Anthony Giddens has defined modernity in terms of an experience of 'distanciation', in which familiar, local environments are interlaced with distant forces as a result of globalization.
One important new feature of global cultural politics, tied to the disjunctive relationships among the various landscapes which proposed by Appadurai, is that state and nation are at each other's throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture.
[9] It implies that certain cultural aspects tend to transcend specific territorial boundaries in a world that consists of things fundamentally in motion.
[11][12] Appadurai writes in his 1990 essay "Disjuncture and Difference" that: Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world because it brings laboring populations in to the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state.
Naturally, these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt.