New spatial readings of the state

Abstract

Combining the three words composing the name of this journal -that is, territory, politics and governance -always reminds me of the word 'state'. Even though we have to avoid any kind of state-centric approaches to territory, politics and governance, it is impossible to talk about these three words without consideration of the state. The state is always at the core of the processes through which social relations are spatially governed, political processes are territorially mobilized, and spaces and territories are politically contested and organized. In this editorial, I want to position the five papers collected in this issue in relation to recent efforts to develop spatial readings of the state.For the last decade, there has been growing literature dealing with issues of the spatialities of the state. Earlier works on state space, building on the neo-Marxist conceptualization of the state as a social relation, had been concerned with issues related to the production and transformation of state space in the context of neo-liberal globalization. In particular, there have been lots of interesting works exploring the restructuring of territorially demarcated forms of state power, the rescaling of state spatiality, and the effects of newly emergent state spaces on the nature of urban and regional governance (

When the illiberal and the neoliberal meet around infectious diseases: an examination of the MERS response in South Korea

“…Nonetheless, once we have seen how state withdrawal enables and even legitimates violence by other actors, we must expand our perspective to include more than state agency. Political geographical approaches to the state and other, variously scaled actors provide tools for avoiding state-centrism and methodological nationalism (Park, 2017) in the study of neoliberalism. Illiberal neoliberalism is driven by variously scaled actors, and the state may not be the sole custodian of ill-and neo-liberal accumulation.…”

Algorithmic Nations: Towards the Techno-Political (Basque) City-Region

“…Therefore, we might expect, then, that this metropolitanization trend is reinforcing the re-scaling of nation-states through multiple interconnected factors (Brenner 2009, Fricke and Gualini 2017, Glaeser and Steinberg 2017, Grant 2018, Katz and Bradley 2013. By examining the aftermath of the Scottish independence (Calzada 2014), the UK's continued membership in the EU (Brexit), Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election, the transition towards algorithmic revolution embodied in estate blockchain government cases of Estonia and Singapore (Kattel and Mergel 2018, Keen 2017, Heller 2017, Jun 2018, as well as the political struggle in Catalonia (Rodon and Guinjoan 2018) and the resulting territorial crisis in Spain; we can determine how metropolitanization, devolution and the right to decide have triggered wider debates on liquid and digital citizenship, changing patterns in geographies, political and democratic governance challenges, and more generally, the organization and legitimation of nation-state power institutionally and territorially as well as politically and democratically (Jessop 1990, Park 2017, Allen and Cochrane 2010.…”

Urbanitat postnacional més enllà de l’estat (pluri)nacio(nal) en la UE: comparant Escòcia, Catalunya i el País Basc

“…En particular, para centrarnos en la parte principal de este artículo, no solo necesitamos explicitar nuevas interpretaciones geopolíticas de los estados nación (Park, 2017;Keating, 2017), sino también ofrecer pruebas analíticas para esclarecer la interpretación confusa (Morgan, 2013) del concepto de ciudad-región como tal. En este artículo, el concepto de estado plurinacional (Requejo, 2015) se verá deconstruido desde la perspectiva de la administración ciudad-regional y multinivel (Alcantara, Broschek y Nelles, 2015 (Scott, 2001;Harrison, 2010;Morgan, 2013).…”