Recent work in ‘critical geopolitics’ has opened new important ways of understanding the discursive constitution of world order and the epistemic underpinnings of international statecraft. Much of this research has focused on the textual practices and strategies of actively writing the global space in a multiplicity of discursive settings. In this article I explore ‘geopolitical imagination’ within a national rather than international context. In an approach tentatively titled ‘the political geography of knowledge’ I wish to capture the effective history and geography of a particular geopolitical discourse, one promoting the idea of a natural subdivision of the Finnish state's territorial space. A reform of regional administration in Finland exemplifies a state-centred discourse based on the savoir of regions as spontaneous organic entities. I seek to demonstrate that the historical preconditions for the reform emerged together with the increasing governmentality in Europe from the 18th century onward. I elaborate upon four aspects in the process: the history of territoriality and its relation to the changing role of knowledge in state government; the role of mapping and survey in visualizing Finland and producing infrastructures for the reform discourse; the invention of ‘region’ as a field of knowledge inherent to and consistent with the liberalizing state's politico-administrative practices; and finally, the role of state committees in objectifying and universalizing the division of Finland into provinces. The article concludes with a contemporary critique of the institutional production of space in Finland, i.e. a history of the present.
Search
Reviews
[Write a review of this article]
Find related articles from these CiteULike users
