The global expansion of markets produces frontiers of contestation over the definition and control of resources. In a frontier context, new patterns of resource exploration, extraction, and commodification create new territories. A recently published collection (Rasmussen and Lund 2018) explores this emergence of frontier spaces as transitional, liminal, spaces in which existing regimes of resource control are suspended, making way for new ones. We argue that the new territorializations of resource control in a frontier space represent a set of processes that precede legitimacy and authority, fundamentally challenging and replacing existing patterns of spatial control, authority and institutional orders.