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 (