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Geopolitics, 18:255–266, 2013

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC


ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2012.738729

Beyond State-Centricity: Geopolitics


of Changing State Spaces

SAMI MOISIO and ANSSI PAASI


Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland

This paper scrutinizes the challenges which scholars face when


examining the interconnections between the state and geopolitics
in the purported “transnational world”. By discussing the relational
perspective which “opens” the traditional state-as-a-monolith cen-
tric view of geopolitics, the paper sets a foundation for the present
special section on the changing geopolitics of state spaces. The paper
proceeds by first reflecting on the move from geopolitically “closed”
to more open state territories, and then considers some of the ways
the state has been examined in spatially sensitive research with
respect to geopolitical scholarship. Finally, the paper maps out pos-
sible horizons for forthcoming studies on the geopolitics of state
spaces.

INTRODUCTION1

As Timothy Mitchell has suggested, the state is difficult to define and its elu-
siveness should be explored as a clue to the state’s very nature.2 While the
state might be embodied by a certain institutional and functional “nature”, it
does not have a universal essence: context makes a difference. At the risk of
oversimplification, one may nonetheless suggest that the state is simultane-
ously a powerful conceptual abstraction, a keyword spanning social sciences
and humanities, a contested social process, and a transforming and histori-
cally contingent assemblage of social practices, discourses, rules, power, and
symbolic and material forms of governance and institutions.3 This assem-
blage is best understood as a process which is continually characterised by
the contextual forms of territory-territoriality which are manifestations of the
structuration of power relations across and between scales, scales which are
also produced and reproduced via this process.

Address correspondence to Sami Moisio, Department of Geography, University of Oulu,


PO Box 3000, FI-90014 Oulu, Finland. E-mail: sami.moisio@oulu.fi

255
256 Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi

The state remains a crucial category for scholars interested in geopoli-


tics. As a form of scholarship and/or political practice, geopolitics and the
constitution of the modern state have become seamlessly intertwined, but
the meaning of the term geopolitics is also influenced by the state-context
from which it is approached.
In this paper we briefly present and reflect upon the move from geopo-
litically “closed” to more open state territories, and then consider some of
the ways in which the state has been examined in spatially sensitive research
with respect to geopolitical scholarship. By discussing the relational per-
spective which “opens” the traditional state-as-a-monolith centric view on
geopolitics, the paper sets a foundation for the present special section on
the changing geopolitics of state spaces. Finally, we shall propose some new
questions and possible horizons for forthcoming studies on the geopolitics
of state spaces.

“OPENING” THE STATE TERRITORY

Geopolitics as a practice has for a long time been associated with territo-
rialisation of political space: “building” and performing states as definitive
bounded territories, constructing domestic order through different govern-
mental techniques, and constituting the “international” as the “inter-state”.
State, territory and sociospatial relations are thus reciprocally constituted.
Such techniques imply a demarcation between inside and outside, a divide
that was a long-taken-for-granted, widely accepted element in IR studies and
political geography. Respectively, geopolitics was the key spatial idea used
to depict the military and economic rivalry embedded in the imagined state-
centric world order. If a bounded state was seen as a shield safeguarding
national economies, geopolitics was the vehicle used to manage “nation’s”
relations in the wider world.
So influential has the geopolitical constitution of the state and the resul-
tant statism been since the nineteenth century, that, as John Agnew notes, ‘in
the modern political realm, lived space has been almost invariably associated
with the idea of state-territoriality’, and in this view ‘politics is about modes
of government within and patterns of conflict and cooperation between the
territories or tightly bounded spaces of modern states’.4 Another related idea
once taken for granted but challenged today is the notion that states are
separated by boundaries, and that inside these power containers states have
spread their impact, control and bureaucracy to every corner of the territory
and civil society. However, sovereignty is not necessarily neatly contained
territorially and indeed it never has been. Agnew maintains that political
space cannot be reduced to state space for two reasons: first, ‘states are
always and everywhere challenged by forms of politics that do not conform
to the boundaries of the state in question’, and, second, ‘state boundaries are
Geopolitics of Changing State Spaces 257

permeable’.5 Also Peter Taylor has earlier argued that territory/territoriality


may mean different things in a state in the realms of economy, politics and
culture.6 Agnew’s conceptualisations highlight how, particularly since the late
1980s, state-obsession and inwards-looking state-centric thinking have been
challenged in political geography and IR studies. State space is increasingly
understood as a multi-scalar, networked and relational social process rather
than a static territorial frame.
Also, the conception of geopolitics itself has changed significantly.
Today it refers to a complex assemblage of phenomena and agency, such as
geopolitical discourses as representations of space and power, or the geo-
policymaking of political actors, scientists, consultants, and the media, for
instance.7 Scholars of critical geopolitics in particular have deconstructed the
discourses of “scientific” geopolitics and geopolitical imaginations – mainly
from a post-structuralist perspective.
As many of the articles in this theme section point out, the question-
ing of state-centricity inescapably leads to a re-conceptualisation of both the
(geo-)political and the state. Previous research has demonstrated that the
concept of the political cannot be limited to the state. Rather, the state can
be conceptualised and analysed as a set of “structural effects” which are the
result of societal processes, technologies and institutions.8 The state is thus
not a distinct domain that is separable from an entity called society. In a
word, the state is a dynamic process and assemblage of practices and dis-
courses that is spread both inside and outside of state territory. The state is
not only constituted but also put into action by competing societal forces and
processes within and beyond the state’s jurisdictions. Respectively, state terri-
tories and borders can both be seen as the results of power struggles related
to economy, culture and politics. As Bob Jessop has suggested, state power
‘results from a continuing interaction between the structurally inscribed
strategic selectivities of the state as an institutional ensemble and the chang-
ing balance of forces operating within, and at a distance from, the state, and
perhaps, also trying to transform it’.9 This draws from Nicos Poulantzas, who
regarded the state as a social relation and saw that state power is an insti-
tutionally mediated condensation of the transforming balance of forces that
are not class-neutral.10
Political geographers interested in state theory have often drawn from
(strategic) relational theory.11 Various weak and strong forms of globalisation
(economy, culture, and consciousness) have forced scholars to re-think the
changing balance of forces operating within, across and at a distance from
the state, and, indeed, the whole issue of statehood as well. Respectively, the
spread of globalising political and policy practices has made the spatialities
of the state a tremendously topical issue since the 1990s. Yet there is no
reason to take for granted the prevailing ideas about globalisation replac-
ing the territorially imagined world with one of networks and flows. The
neoliberal idea of the rise of a borderless world, so popular in the 1990s,
258 Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi

declared the death of the nation-state prematurely. Globalisation is, as Saskia


Sassen suggests, partly endogenous to the national rather than the external,
and respectively the “global” can be conceptualised as partly inhabiting the
“national” and the “local”. Although state borders still have a role to play,
new borderings cut across such borders and become evident both globally
and within national territories.12 Many of the articles in the special section
scrutinise this phenomenon in different spatial contexts.
Two economic processes in particular have triggered a new interest
in the geopolitics of state space. First, the unravelling of the Fordist mode
of production resulted in a series of debates dealing with state success in
a networked world and “knowledge-based economy”. Second, the post-
Fordist world seemed to be based more on the economic prowess of the
state rather than its traditional geopolitical capacities. In other words, the
developments in global political economy and the ongoing reconstitution of
state spaces in the name of state’s international competitiveness – and the
associated discourses of entrepreneurial behaviour – can be understood as
highly interlinked phenomena which have an enormous impact on geopo-
litical practices. This fact has been partly neglected in the recent debates on
state spaces. This special section aims to address this gap and further the
debate.

STATE TRANSFORMATION AS A MULTI-SCALAR PROCESS

The transformation of the state is impregnated with conflicts, negotiations


and compromises between political groupings and is characterised by self-
serving actions and trade-offs.13 In such a view, the decline of certain
governmental interventions concerned with organising, dividing and classify-
ing state space – interventions which are usually associated with the “welfare
state” for example – indicates that a certain qualitatively recalibrated state
power is being activated through political contest and trade-offs between
political groupings. State spatiality, from this perspective, is understood ‘as
the product of socio-economic struggles and transformations’.14 The emer-
gence of ideas about a hollowing out of the state and its retreat (and filling
in) prompted new studies which took the spatiality of the state as the primary
concern.15
In particular, a “scalar” reading of the changing nature of statehood has
become a widely used approach for state spatiality over the past decade
or so. Scholars have suggested that the continuous re-composition of the
(welfare) state via new forms of economic scrutiny and control should not
be written off as erosion of the territorial state but rather as a temporally
and spatially specific re-organisation of the state (apparatus) which mani-
fests itself as a re-scaling of the state and state power.16 Scholars drawing
mainly from historical materialism have inquired into the restructuration of
Geopolitics of Changing State Spaces 259

the Keynesian welfare state, which first began to occur in the 1970s and
continues today.17 The spatial transformation of the state is conceptualised
as a gradual erosion of the Keynesian political practices which were geared
around the national as the focal political scale. Spatial Keynesianism, which
dominated the post–Second World War era, was epitomised by a distinct
geopolitical calculation that was intertwined with the emergence of the
“national” welfare societies in Europe.
One of the key messages of the state re-scaling literature has been that,
since the 1970s, the founding regulative practices of spatial Keynesianism
have been gradually replaced by a Schumpeterian competition state spa-
tiality, which is ultimately based on internationalisation of policy regimes
and the associated transfer of certain functions and responsibilities of the
“national-state” to other scales of governance ranging from supranational to
local/regional.18 The importance of this view lies in its capacity to illuminate
that the territorial formations of the state are not static or pre-given but rather
are historically (re-)construed and characterised by both relative stability and
periods of rapid change. In such a view, the spread of neoliberalism as
the hegemonic ideology across global and national spaces has brought into
existence new privatising regulatory arrangements, spatial projects as well
as forms of governance conceived around major city-regions. This, in turn,
has strengthened the role of “national champions” in state strategies and
projects, which are increasingly predicated upon the politics of economic
competitiveness rather than social equalisation.

RESEARCHING THE GEOPOLITICS OF CHANGING STATE SPACES:


KEY ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

In this section, we discuss two topics which bring together many of the
issues touched up in this special section, and which will very likely remain
central in the study of the geopolitics of changing state spaces in the future.
First, the geopolitics of city/state relations is a topic which is at the core of
current debates on the spatiality of globalisation.19 Many of the articles in
this collection emphasise that city/state (power) relations should be at the
core of any analysis of the geopolitics of changing state spaces. Second, we
will discuss the transnationalisation of state spaces.

Investigating Changing City/State Relations


It is often argued that the basic distinction that characterises modernity
is that the state can be conceptualised as a constellation of guardian
practices (geopolitics, place) whereas cities can be considered as con-
stellations of commercial practices (geo-economy, space of flows, capital
accumulation).20 Even though this distinction occupies a central role in
260 Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi

contemporary “globalising” discourses on economic growth (it has “policy


relevance”, so to speak), it may well be that scholars should now re-think
the analytical value of this distinction.
The penetration of market practices and rationalities deep into the
societal processes that constitute the state may potentially destabilise the
relationship between the guardian and commercial practices. The recent
policy practices and discourses which aimed at re-working the state/city
relationship – at least across most of the OECD world – arguably demon-
strate a peculiar fusing of geopolitics (guardian practices) and geo-economy
(commercial practices). Accordingly, as the state increasingly works as an
accumulation machine, the issue of “competitiveness” is being re-located to
the core of “state security” and “national interest”. This fusing of the geopoliti-
cal and geo-economic further increases the significance of “globally oriented”
city-regions with respect to governmental interventions and, indeed, may
potentially “disembody” some city-regions from the statist space-economy.
The power of this new regionalist discourse, according to which knowledge-
intensive capitalism requires (and makes) particular types of city-regions as
key economic units in the global economy, is that it fundamentally chal-
lenges the policy makers to re-imagine state spaces and deconstruct, rethink
and transform “outdated” spatial formations.21 This discourse is often con-
stituted and legitimated by employing somewhat fuzzy spatial terms – such
as learning regions, clusters, regional/national innovation systems, or indus-
trial districts – which have occupied a significant role in the new regionalist
lexicon. Arguably, the mobility of this lexicon has had a tremendous con-
stitutive role for policy discourses in different geographical contexts, which,
e.g., regional planners and policy makers then effectively circulate.
The new regionalist discourse on city-regions, of course, resonates
with the arguments of some of the most prominent urbanists, who already
decades ago suggested that the new geopolitical order will be based around
such units.22 But rather than replacing the state, as Andrew Jonas hints in his
article, the increasing strategic importance of city-regionalism, and the asso-
ciated city-projects and regional policies which emanate from both above
and below, may be understood as an expression of the contingent geopol-
itics of capitalism. As Jonas reminds the reader, there is a great diversity in
the national forms of city-regionalism, and these forms should be carefully
studied contextually in order to discern their impact on city/state relations.
One of the central constituents of the neoliberal global geo-economy is
that the power of the state to coordinate and generate economic growth
has not only diminished but also has led to a particular denationalisa-
tion of the state and the increasing significance of international policy
networks and regimes. This has been coupled with the rise of the dis-
course of state/national/regional competitiveness, which since the 1990s has
characterised public policy making across the globe. In a way, paralleling
military rivalry, competitiveness has become an instrument in the geopolitical
Geopolitics of Changing State Spaces 261

vocabulary of the state. In her article, Gillian Bristow studies the discourse
of regional competitiveness and inquires into how it, together with the dis-
course of resilience, has operated in the recent regional policy making in
the UK. She treats these discourses as instrumental constituents of neoliberal
governance of the state. Bristow also discusses the possibility of shaking the
foundations of the discourse of competitiveness through what she calls a
critical regionalist perspective.
As part of the ongoing attempts to foster the state’s international
competitiveness, the spatiality of the state is constantly remade through state-
orchestrated arrangements which tie different types of cities with broader
state strategies. It is therefore crucial to continue investigating the projects
and strategies that arise from cities, and how these position and construct
cities with regard to different socio-spatial processes (such as innovation poli-
cies); i.e., how city-regional processes are impregnated with unique scalar
practices and performances. The article by Anni Kangas analyses discus-
sions prompted by the recent decision to expand the borders of the Russian
capital Moscow. The article particularly focuses on the way in which the
idea of Moscow as a potential “global city” functions within the discus-
sions concerned with transforming Moscow so as to connect Russia to the
global networks of investments, people and success. Kangas approaches the
geopolitics of the global city as a circulating form of neoliberal governmen-
tality. On the basis of her analysis of the Russian discussion, she outlines
the ways in which neoliberalism becomes particularised in the context of
“Big Moscow” as it gains backing from authoritarian forms of politics or
historically rooted forms of cultural understanding.

The Transnationalisation of State Spaces


Many of the articles in this special section inquire into the new
spatial/geopolitical formulations of the state which can be understood as
bringing together transnational policy processes and place-bound political
dynamics. The transnationalisation of state spaces, which is often under-
stood as being associated with the spread of neoliberal political rationality,
has challenged scholars to rethink the often taken-for-granted distinctions
between the domestic and international or the geopolitical and the geoeco-
nomic. Consider, for instance, the ongoing competitiveness indexing and
country benchmarking which are prepared by international, specialised
organisations and companies. They can be seen as practices of global
governance which seek to govern the “behaviour” of states in the wider
geopolitical and geo-economic landscape through a particular neoliberal
rationality of government.23
The currently mushrooming research which brings together policy
transfer, the formation of global governmentality and transnational policy
processes and state spatial transformation has been particularly interested
262 Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi

in the recent processes of market-oriented regulatory restructuring in differ-


ent geographical contexts and across policy fields.24 The neoliberalisation of
the state can be considered as referring to the ongoing efforts to “re-create”
the state as a socio-economic-political institution with an enterprise form.
In his article, Mikko Joronen delves through a set of philosophical texts by
authors such as Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger, and conceptualises
the emergence of a sort of “violent” neoliberal geo-polity in which virtu-
ally all resources, whether these are “human” or “natural”, are increasingly
set under the calculative techniques of the market as if the resources were
inescapably exploitable objects.
The increasingly complex geopolitical agency involved in the opera-
tion of transnational power within states merits scholarly reflection. The
theme of transnationalisation is explicitly taken up in Jouni Häkli’s paper
which develops a Bourdieu-inspired field conceptual perspective to study
the “actually existing” transnational policy processes within which state spa-
tial transformation occurs. Häkli’s methodological paper offers conceptual
tools for those who are interested in going beyond the dichotomies of the
transnational/local/national in an empirical investigation of changing state
spaces.
The recent governmental interventions which are predicated on
neoliberal rationality associated with a particular type of political-economic
knowledge may also be read as new modalities for producing the political.
The neoliberal, or what Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi suggest is better defined
as the Porterian-Floridian political rationality, does not entail the replacement
of the territorial state by the relational economic spaces but rather a qual-
itative re-composition of the two. The authors problematise the distinction
between the geopolitical and geo-economic social against the development
trajectories of the Finnish state space. Moisio and Paasi’s investigation of
the changing state spaces in Finland highlights the process of unravelling
the inherited spatial formations of the state and how they have been con-
ditioned by place-specific political dynamics, and that the Finnish context
also displays a peculiar immunity to neoliberal pressures. The Finnish case is
also scrutinised by Toni Ahlqvist, who examines how the future of the state
is increasingly imagined as a sort of corporation-polity, and how this geo-
economic vision is predicated upon a will to generate new entrepreneurial
“state-citizens” – denoting an attempt to bring into existence new “useful”
subjectivities for the operation of the state.

THE HORIZON: STATE SPACES BEYOND THE


TERRITORIAL-RELATIONAL DIVIDE

In the final section we will suggest some possible avenues for moving
beyond the dichotomy between territorial and relational thinking that has
Geopolitics of Changing State Spaces 263

characterised much of the discussion on state, territories/regions and borders


since the 1990s. Given the space limitations, we pay particular attention to
only two themes which may help us to move forward: the issues of mundane
state spaces and policy mobility.
Relational thinking has long roots in the social sciences, where it has
given rise to a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world
as consisting primarily of substances or processes, static “things” or in terms
of dynamic, unfolding relations.25 The key issue in the early geographical
debates of the 1990s was whether the regional and territorial worlds should
best be seen as bounded or open. Initially, the territorial and relational views
were sharply contrasted so that the former was labelled as regressive whereas
the latter was regarded as progressive.26 The problem in much of the early
debates was that such divides were largely artificial when the dichotomy was
universalised as an ontological given. Such dilemma has had long roots in
political geography and has more recently manifested itself in the efforts to
abandon container-based views of state and territory, and the attempts to
overcome the ideas of borders as passive, static lines between states while
still acknowledging the continuing allure of modernist ideas of territory.27
The study of the geopolitics of changing state spaces may not only draw
on such debates but also may contribute to the understanding of the com-
plexities of contemporary political spaces and, more specifically, whether
these are best conceptualised as territorial or relational, or perhaps as a com-
bination of the two. It is easy to agree with Joe Painter and Alex Jeffrey
when they propose that it is beneficial to understand states as complex
networks of relations among a shifting mixture of institutions and social
groups, and to see states as products of their own processes of institutional
development, historical change and important “external” influences.28 Yet
we would suggest that rather than universalising certain given categories or
ontologies, the challenge is to perpetually rethink contextually the multiple
combinations of relational and territorial aspects of governing practices and
discourses on state space as part of the wider geopolitics. This may help to
progress beyond the conceptual dichotomy of territorial/relational, and help
to develop research methods and even invent novel research materials.
Inquiring into the mundane geographies of stateness is one of the pos-
sible ways by which the relational-territorial divide might be contextually
rethought. In other words, paying attention to the links between the state
and civil society, crucially mediated by citizenship, national socialisation and
other mediated forms of governance, may be worthwhile. The lack of such
mundane perspectives was obvious in the early works of critical geopoli-
tics, which often operated at the level of the state’s international relations
and leaned on research materials that characterised such relations at the
level of the state’s foreign policy elites. An increasing number of schol-
ars have become interested in the relations of state (space) to the daily
lives of citizens and non-citizens in conditions which are to an increasing
264 Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi

degree post-national or de-nationalised. The challenge, then, is to map the


“geopolitics of mundane state spaces”.
The geopolitics of mundane state spaces may draw from series of inter-
disciplinary literature. Michael Mann, for instance, famously charted the
‘infrastructural power’ of the state, which refers to the ability of the state
to penetrate the daily lives of citizens in civil society and implement political
decisions.29 Painter has taken this idea further. He speaks of a ‘prosaic state’
which refers to the mundane, unsystematic, indeterminate and unintended
ways that the state “enters” into everyday life practices.30 By challenging
the often accepted notion that the state is a separate, self-contained politi-
cal realm, he argues that an emphasis on ‘prosaics of stateness’ can reveal
the extent and limits of the ‘statization’ of social life. He proposes that this
approach highlights the openness, porosity, heterogeneity, fallibility, uneven-
ness and creativity of state practices. The prosaics of stateness are highly
important in the dynamic world in which the association of the “political”
and “geo” takes place across diverging spatial scales, from the bodies of
ordinary people to national and international contexts. Yet we should simul-
taneously also critically reflect on how the state perpetually regionalises or
territorialises the lives of its citizens in state spaces, for instance through
spatial socialisation, language or social policies.
Second, one may argue that state spatial transformation is inescapably
connected with certain policy transfers/policy mobilities. The recent geo-
graphical work on policy transfer has been particularly interested in the
extension of specific hegemonic “regimes of truth” which define pol-
icy norms and which seem to point to an internationalisation of policy
regimes31 and associated state spaces. Bringing the literature on policy
mobility/transfer and the geopolitics of state spaces into a closer dialogue
may well be one of the possibilities for moving beyond the relational-
territorial divide. The interconnections between these two themes can be
examined, for instance, in the context of supranational policy practices
which cross the domestic-international divide and which ultimately recon-
struct state spaces through mixing policies which are both territorial and
relational in nature. To illustrate, the construction of the EU as a geopolit-
ical actor has involved spatial planning discourses and practices which are
predicated upon a distinct scalar rhetoric which espouses the effort to con-
stitute a singular “EU territory” through the use of different network-based
ideas which re-group “national” places into the new European territorial
frame.32 But we know relatively little about how the territorial/relational
geopolitical practices of the EU are being negotiated, adopted and perhaps
resisted in different contexts. This would require systematic study of “geo-
policy communities” and the knowledge that circulates within and between
these communities in the European setting.
Finally, the geopolitical study of changing state spaces requires rigorous
empirical research based on creatively selected research materials. Instead
Geopolitics of Changing State Spaces 265

of associating geopolitics research solely with foreign and security policy


authorities and communities conceived in the traditional sense, researchers
should start pondering alternatives. To illustrate, although the current state
spatial transformation seems to be predicated upon a particular “business
management knowledge” and the associated authority, scholarly analysis of
this type of knowledge, its operation in political practices as well as its funda-
mental geopolitical underpinnings is virtually absent in geopolitical literature.
Bringing this form of knowledge and its association with policy mobility
under (geopolitical) investigation would potentially open up new perspec-
tives into the debate concerned with relational/territorial spaces. In this
context, interpretive and ethnographic approaches would enable a focus on
individual actors and communities as agents driving policy transfer processes.
More generally, new research materials should increase our understanding
of the geographical “situatedness” of policy mobility, its impact on the every-
day spaces of the state and the new subjectivities which are co-constitutive
of state spatial transformation.

NOTES

1. This theme section is based on a mini-conference on the Changing Geopolitics of State Spaces
which was held at the University of Oulu, Finland, in September 2011, as the closing seminar of the
project 128527; the section also contributes to project no. 140738, both funded by the Academy of
Finland. We thank all the participants of the seminar for discussion and comments. All the papers were
refereed by at least three reviewers. We are grateful for their insightful comments. We also thank the
editor of Geopolitics, David Newman, for his kind and patient support.
2. T. Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, American
Political Science Review 85/1 (1999) pp. 76–96.
3. As Painter and Jeffrey have suggested, the variety of state forms is large and the characteristics
of states are highly diverse. Respectively, they argue that it is difficult and even misleading to try to
construct a theory of “the” state. Instead, it is important to notice the gradual transformation of the state
(and, we would add, state space) and pay attention to historical and geographical differences in the
nature of states. J. Painter and A. Jeffrey, Political Geography: Second Edition (Los Angeles: Sage 2009).
The state also has different political connotations depending on the context. The contextual connotations
and the ways in which these are actualised in political practices remain important topics in political
geography.
4. J. Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press
2005) p. 160.
5. Ibid., p. 161.
6. P. Taylor, ‘The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System’, Progress in Human
Geography 18 (1994) pp. 151–162.
7. P. Reuber, ‘Geopolitics’, in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human
Geography (London: Elsevier 2009).
8. Mitchell (note 2) pp. 94–95; for applying this perspective in political geography, see J. Painter,
‘Rethinking Territory’, Antipode 42/5 (2010) pp. 1090–1118.
9. B. Jessop, ‘The Strategic Selectivity of the State: Reflections on a Theme of Poulanzas’, Journal
of Hellenic Diaspora 25/1–2 (1999) p. 54.
10. B. Jessop, ‘On the Originality, Legacy, and Actuality of Nicos Poulantzas’, Studies in Political
Economy 34 (1991) pp. 75–107.
11. M. Jones, ‘Restucturing the Local State: Economic Governance or Social Regulation’, Political
Geography 17/8 (1998) 959–988.
266 Sami Moisio and Anssi Paasi

12. S. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press 2008); C. Johnson, R. Jones, A. Paasi, L. Amoore, A. Mountz, M. Salter,
and C. Rumford, ‘Interventions on Rethinking “the Border” in Border Studies’, Political Geography 30
(2011) pp. 61–69.
13. B. Hibou, ‘From Privatising the Economy to Privatising the State’, in B. Hibou (ed.), Privatising
the State (London: Hurst & Company) pp. 1–46.
14. J. MacLeavy and J. Harrison, ‘New State Spatialities: Perspectives on State, Space, and Scalar
Geographies’, Antipode 42/5 (2010) p. 1040.
15. For an overview of this literature, see J. Shaw and D. MacKinnon, ‘Moving on with “Filling in”?
Some Thoughts on State Restructuring After Devolution’, Area 43/1 (2011) pp. 23–30.
16. For such an approach, see, e.g., J. Peck, ‘Neoliberalizing States: Thin Policies/Hard Outcomes’,
Progress in Human Geography 25 (2001) pp. 445–455.
17. See, e.g., N. Brenner, New State Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004).
18. See in particular, B. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press 2002).
19. Recent geopolitical scholarship has also approached the city as a site of violence and of increas-
ing control. Stephen Graham discusses how contemporary “states are becoming internationally organized
systems geared towards trying to separate people and circulations deemed risky or malign from those
deemed risk-free or worthy of protection”. See S. Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
(London: Verso 2010) p. 89.
20. See P. J. Taylor, ‘Problematizing City/State Relations: Towards a Geohistorical Understanding
of Contemporary Globalization’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 32 (2007)
pp. 133–150.
21. For a critique of this discourse, see J. Lovering, ‘Theory Led by Policy: The Inadequacies of the
“New Regionalism” (Illustrated from the Case of Wales)’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 23 (1999) pp. 379–395.
22. See, e.g., J. Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House 1984).
23. T. Fougner, ‘Neoliberal Governance of States: The Role of Competitiveness Indexing and
Country Benchmarking’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37/2 (2008) pp. 303–326.
24. See, e.g., N. Brenner, J. Beck, and N. Theodore, ‘Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies,
Modalities, Pathways’, Global Networks 10/2 (2010) pp. 182–222.
25. M. Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology 103
(1997) pp. 281–317.
26. M. Jones and A. Paasi, ‘Regional Worlds: Advancing the Geography of Regions’, Regional Studies
47/1 (in press).
27. A. Murphy, ‘Territory’s Continuing Allure’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers
(in press); A. Paasi, ‘Border Studies Reanimated: Going Beyond the Territorial-Relational Divide’,
Environment and Planning A 44 (2012) pp. 2303–2309.
28. Painter and Jeffrey (note 3).
29. M. Mann, ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, European
Journal of Sociology 25 (1984) pp. 185–213.
30. J. Painter, ’Prosaic Geographies of Stateness’, Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 752–774.
31. See, e.g., J. Peck and N. Theodore, ‘Recombinant Workfare, Across the Americas:
Transnationalizing “Fast” Social Policy’, Geoforum 41 (2010) pp. 195–208; R. J. Prince, ‘Policy Transfer,
Consultants and the Geographies of Governance’, Progress in Human Geography 36 (2012) pp. 188–203.
32. S. Moisio, ‘Geographies of Europeanization: The EU’s Spatial Planning as a Politics of Scale’, in
L. Bialasiewicz (ed.), Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Making of European Space (Farnham:
Ashgate 2011) p. 24.
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