The Political Economy of State Reaching Remote Areas, Expansion, and Territorial Reorganization

The book examines how contemporary states confront financial turmoil and weakened autonomy while crafting strategies to consolidate power and sustain development within their territories. Using Reach as its lens, the book traces how state expansion and private capital interact across diverse regions and territorial settings. This book spans themes such as animal ecology, tourism studies, regional development, infrastructural studies, and space exploration. Despite their thematic diversity, each chapter follows the same thread: distance as a device for organizing frontiers of state expansion and governance. From the assertion of territorialization in remote areas to the state’s increasing inability to mediate urban problems under market-driven governance, the book offers a window into the effects of longstanding neoliberal policies and the efforts of different states to double down on market-friendly, financially backed strategies to assert territorial authority. Drawing upon theoretical and empirical cases from countries like Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Finland, and Switzerland, this volume brings together focused attention on specific themes or regions to examine the contemporary territorial configurations at global, regional, and national scales. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive understanding of states, their economies, and their contemporary processes of territorialization. The Political Economy of State Reaching will be of value to graduate students and researchers in political economy, economics, geography, international relations, public policy, development studies, anthropology, and sociology, as well as an interested general public.