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(RE)THINKING THE STATE IN THE 21
ST 
CENTURY
Abstract. In this article, we argue that social sciences gen-
erally and political science in particular are faced with 
a peculiar epistemological challenge while researching 
the state in the 21
st
 century. Namely, the state has often 
been either naturalised, seen as a static and ahistorical 
entity resistant to changes in the environment, or naïve-
ly rejected as a form of political organisation that is 
with neoliberal globalisation withering away. In either 
instance, the processes of redefining and redistributing 
of the state, and hence its de-/reterritorialising and res-
caling, have largely gone unnoticed. Our analysis reas-
sesses the hegemonic theories of state and shows that in 
the mainstream of political science research on the state 
is still anchored to the (geographical) assumptions that 
limit or even define the state and its exercise of power 
to a geographically demarcated and fixed territory. 
Drawing on recent approaches to space, scale and terri-
tory, this article calls for a heterodox and pluralist meth-
odology in further research on state as well as non-state 
spaces. 
Keywords: the state, non-state spaces, globalisation, ter-
ritory, political geography
Introduction
Throughout history political science has often suffered from the short-
sightedness of statism. Yet, in the last few decades it has witnessed a differ-
ent kind of myopia. As globalisation processes have accelerated, political 
science has, with few exceptions, completely overlooked the state. Political 
science has disregarded the state due to its apparent withdrawal from the 
new political geography or, as Kenichi Ohmae (1995) vividly put it, because 
the state is a dinosaur waiting to die. Still, political science has also disre-
garded the state by naturalising it, understanding the state as a static and 
ahistorical entity resistant to changes in the environment. At best, political 
scientists’ interest in the state has seen ebbs and flows yet has always been 
*
 
Guest Editor: Žiga Vodovnik, PhD, Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, 
Slovenia.
DOI: 10.51936/tip.58.2.249-267
THEMATIC SECTION I:  
STATE CAPACITY IN THE 21
ST
 CENTURY

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buttressed by the use of old, often outdated, theories, methodologies and 
vocabularies. If we take the title of this article seriously, we soon realise the 
social sciences generally and political science in particular are faced with 
a peculiar epistemological challenge while researching the new forms of 
statehood in the 21
st
 century. Saul Newman notes that political theory must 
still catch up with this new terrain since it “generally looks for visible, repre-
sentative identities situated on an ontological field organized by sovereign 
power; it is concerned with how we are governed, or with the normative 
principles or constitutive logics upon which political power is founded” 
(Newman, 2014: 94). 
Ever since the Ancient Greeks, issues of politics and political commu-
nity have been related to territory and borders (Plato’s Republic) or their 
relativisation (Zeno’s Republic). In particular, this kind of conception was 
strengthened by the Westphalian arrangements that developed and deep-
ened an inside/outside divide as the core of the state and our imagining(s) 
of it (Jessop, 2009). This article starts by assumption that the few decades of 
the neoliberal (better the neoconservative) project have significantly rede-
fined and redistributed the state.
1
 In our brief exploration of the hegem-
onic theories of the state and especially their limits in detecting processes 
of redefining and redistributing the state, we address a broader question of 
the state and the perspectives in studies on the state. This is a relevant and 
topical issue, even more so when we consider that the state is losing its role 
as the only centre of sovereignty and an arena in which key political deci-
sions are made. In recent decades, the state has encountered fierce competi-
tion from the rising power of (global) cities, TNCs, IGOs, NGOs and social 
movements that according to Saskia Sassen (2012) signal the emergence of 
“different territorial vectors”, where the place and role of the state is signifi-
cantly altered. 
This means the political science community must face up to the difficult 
task of (re)thinking and reconceptualising the state in the 21
st
 century. For 
this purpose, in December 2019 the Slovenian Political Science Association 
organised a conference that addressed “optical challenges” (Appadurai, 
2004) in understanding the Janus-like face of the (post)modern state. We 
tried to highlight this challenge by modifying Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece 
for Hobbes’ Leviathan from 1651 in the visuals used for the conference. 
We could say that by ‘blurring’ the crowned figure we also sought to draw 
attention to the changed ontological status of the state that often goes unde-
tected: if the Westphalian model made the state and its existence conditional 
1 
We argue that the state did not wither away as the neoliberal project emerged since it is a constitu-
tive element of its expansion. It should be clear by now that there is nothing more and nothing less of the 
state, but it is completely different.

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on relations vis-à-vis other states, even if they were unable to perform the 
main state functions, today their (non)existence is a condition of their inter-
nal capacity to be a space for autonomous political action. This fissure in 
the state system is seen in the existence of states that no longer function as 
states and non-state spaces that are becoming autonomous political entities 
and are already performing the main state functions. 
In the introduction to his over 1,600-page work entitled De l’État, Henry 
Lefebvre asks a simple question: “What is the state?”. He answers: 
Enumeration of hypotheses. The State? A conscience, the conscious-
ness of the nation? A ‘moral’ or ‘legal’ person? A ‘substance’ or a set of 
relations? A reality? A firm? A ‘subject’? An ‘object’? Or the name for an 
absence, a simulation? For ‘being’ or collective presence? Would it be the 
‘reflection’ or the result of a social structure (classes)? A sum of func-
tions? The exercise of Power? Or ‘something’ else, to be discovered and 
defined? (Lefebvre, 2009: 95)
To this end, the article attempts to repoliticise the state and show that the 
state is first and foremost constituted by political, not economic relations. 
This means the state must chiefly be understood as a political and not an 
economic entity, even if in fact it is (anti)political in its drive to eliminate the 
diversity, autonomy and differences that hinder the creation of the national 
whole or what James C. Scott terms “synoptic legibility”.
2
 We analyse how 
the hegemonic theories of state have responded to the new political land-
scape and how up-to-date and relevant they remain in helping to explain 
what Sassen (2012) calls a “new geography of centrality”, where the place 
and role of the state is significantly redefined. We explore the thesis that 
in the mainstream of political science research on the state is anchored to 
outdated (geographical) assumptions that limit or even define the state and 
its exercise of power to a geographically demarcated and fixed territory. 
Drawing on recent approaches to space, scale and territory, we call for a 
heterodox and pluralist methodology while researching the state. In other 
words, we show how novel (meta)theoretical, epistemological and method-
ological pluralism in analysing the state enables a much broader and deeper 
understanding of statehood as a process, overcoming the territorial reifica-
tion of the state.
Political science, then, should be able to understand the state in its 
respective historical mediations, while avoiding any naïve reification of the 
state or what Edward W. Soja (1978) and John Agnew (1994) describe as 
2 
We thus show the contradictions and limits of state politics and call for academic attention to the 
non-state spaces concept. 

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“spatial fetishism” and a “territorial trap”, respectively. According to Agnew 
(2005: 441, 456), political science is entrapped by the territorialised under-
standings of state that emerged from the traditional Westphalian images of 
states and were further shaped by the development of mercantilism and 
industrialist capitalism, along with Enlightenment and Romantic aspirations 
to popular rule and nationalism. 
However, since the state is at once globalising and localising, it faces 
a “multi-scalar meta-governance” challenge (Jessop, 2009) to adapt to the 
ongoing spatial and scalar restructurings. Put differently, the state continues 
to function as a form of the territorialisation of capitalism, yet the expansion 
of capitalist economy and its rescaling of territoriality call for the state’s de-/
reterritorialisation on different levels. These are complex and contradictory 
processes that should not be misinterpreted as the demise or erosion of the 
state. Saul Newman thus argues that an alternative theoretical and methodo- 
logical arsenal is required to fully explore the new terrain of politics that 
is relocating “the political relationship away from the state and its formal 
representative structures towards the movements of autonomy that increas-
ingly transcend it” (Newman, 2014: 93). This necessitates new, heterodox 
and post-disciplinary approaches to the state, an area the article explores 
in the second part. In the final part, we paradoxically shift our gaze to the 
relevance of non-state spaces and politics constituted beyond or sometimes 
in opposition to the state as a way to (un)think the state from the outside. 
The State and New Thinking
When John Keane (2009; 2015) was reflecting on the state of democratic 
theory, he concluded that one very simple thing was missing: new thinking. 
Keane argues that the development and mutual enrichment of democratic 
ideas and practices over the last few decades have completely changed the 
language, institutions and normative ideals of democracy. The old crite-
ria, like sovereign state, party pluralism, elections, representation, national 
identity, market economy etc., are today wholly obsolete categories that no 
longer have any connection to the current dynamics of democratic innova-
tions. This is why an entirely new approach is required, building on a new 
grammar, metaphors, perspectives, theories and methods themselves. We 
imagine that Keane would similarly argue for the theories of state and stud-
ies of the state; namely, that what is missing is new thinking. The hegem-
onic theories of the state continue to be dominated by territorial myopia 
whereby states are viewed as stable geographical containers of social, eco-
nomic, political and cultural relations (Brenner, 1999). 
In the mainstream of political science, research on the state is still 
anchored to the (geographical) assumptions that limit or even define the 

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state and its exercise of power to a geographically demarcated and fixed ter-
ritory.
3
 In his elaboration of the “territorial trap”, John Agnew (1994) notes 
that political science has largely been dominated by reified understandings 
of the state, that “it has been too geographical and not sufficiently histori-
cal”. Conventional state research has relied on three problematic geographi-
cal assumptions which are called into question by current developments: 
a) the ahistorical or naturalised understanding of states as fixed sovereign 
spaces; b) binary logic delimitating inside/outside or domestic/foreign; and 
c) regarding states as ‘containers’ of societies. 
In path-breaking study New State Spaces (2004), Neil Brenner concurs 
and argues that political science has lost its analytical edge by approach-
ing the state “as a preconstituted geographical unit of analysis”. The state 
is viewed “as the self-enclosed geographical container of socioeconomic 
and politico-cultural relations” and frequently as the only one, prevent-
ing researchers from seeing beyond state-centric modes of inquiry. In his 
attempt to construct “new modes of analysis”, Brenner combines fragments 
of heterodox, interdisciplinary and even post-disciplinary methodologies 
that challenge spatial fetishism, methodological territorialism, methodologi-
cal nationalism and, thus, state-centric epistemologies. What is becoming 
evident is that new territorial constellations, nexi and vectors are producing 
a new geography of strategic spaces that Sassen (2012) refers to as a “new 
geography of centrality”, where the place and role of the state is significantly 
redefined. Here it is useful to paraphrase the important, if not the key, ques-
tion Sassen considers in her analysis of the new configurations of territorial-
ity and transnational politics: Are we able to see and detect the formation of 
new political forms among the old political conditions? 
In fact, many studies have moved beyond the state-centric geographical 
assumption yet, as Brenner (1999: 41) points out, the old errors have been 
remedied by introducing a new one: mainly through the state’s conceptual 
negation. In other words, these new reconceptualisations have been able to 
perceive the emerging spatial forms and corollary new political geographies, 
but completely overlooked the state in them – i.e. the state’s new position 
and, hence, novel forms of its de-/reterritorialisation and rescaling. Brenner 
acknowledges that the state continues to function as a form of territoriali-
sation for capital, yet warns that the expansion of the capitalist economy 
continues to produce new scalar configurations of territorialisation under 
capitalism that make the state-centric conceptions outdated. Namely, the 
expansion of capitalism should be seen as a complex, conflictual process 
3 
It should be clear that the state, or any political organisation for this reason, can exercise power 
without a delimited and fixed territory and, even in this case, the state has been “unbundled” (Agnew, 
1994: 55) by formal and informal agreements, networks, markets, movements, problems etc. 

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not only transcending regulatory systems on the national scale – that is what 
we usually see and study – but is simultaneously producing the new sub- 
and supra-national modes of accumulation and (state) control needed to 
facilitate and coordinate this process. 
By referring to “scalar shift”, Brenner indicates that the current wave of 
globalisation means that the global scale depends on simultaneous reterri-
torialisation on a sub-global scale, mostly the new sub- and supra-national 
scales, and no longer exclusively on the national one (ibid.: 62). Moreover, the 
capital–state relationship is being inverted since “it is no longer capital that is 
to be molded into the (territorially integrated) geography of state space, but 
state space that is to be molded into the (territorially differentiated) geog-
raphy of capital” (Brenner, 2004: 14). (Post)modern statehood thus means 
complex and continuous rescaling “at once upwards, downwards and out-
wards”, resulting in polymorphic institutional geographies (ibid.: 67).
4
 
In recent years, an important contribution to studies of the state, which 
overcomes the theoretical/methodological Scylla and Charybdis mentioned 
above, has come from scholars who conceive of globalisation processes and 
the expansion of capitalism as a contradictory socio-spatial dialectic, con-
stantly making and remaking new configurations of territoriality. In studies 
on the emerging spatial and political forms, they observed that the contra-
dictions of neoliberalism (short term) on one hand, and the broader project 
of modernity (long term) on the other, are simultaneously: i) expanding and 
accelerating movements of goods, services, labour and capital; and ii) creat-
ing and imposing a (relatively) fixed socio-territorial infrastructure for ena-
bling and controlling these processes:
Globalization therefore entails a dialectical interplay between the 
endemic drive towards space-time compression under capitalism (the 
moment of deterritorialization) and continual production of relatively 
fixed, provisionally stabilized configurations of territorial organiza-
tion on multiple geographical scales (the moment of reterritorialization). 
(Brenner, 1999: 43)
4 
These processes not only make the Westphalian models of statehood outdated and useless, but the 
main concepts and metaphors in our categorical apparatus as well. Anderson (in Brenner, 2004: 63), for 
instance, suggests entirely new imaginings of the emerging political geographies: “A complex set of climbing 
frames, slides, swings, ropes and rope ladders, complete with weak or broken parts […] might be nearer the 
mark. The metaphor of adventure playgrounds, with their mixture of constructions, multiple levels and 
encouragement of movement – up, down, sideways, diagonally, directly from high to low, or low to high – 
captures the contemporary mixture of forms and processes much better than the ladder metaphor”.

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It is then unsurprisingly that Brenner’s novel (meta)theoretical, epistemo-
logical and methodological pluralism in analysing the state enables a much 
broader and deeper understanding of the statehood as a process, overcom-
ing territorial reification of the state. As mentioned, an alternative theoretical 
and methodological arsenal is required to explore this new terrain of politics 
(Newman, 2014: 93). This merely confirms Appadurai’s remark about research 
imagination (or the lack of it) because it reveals that our task is not simply a 
unique political and theoretical challenge is but above all an epistemological 
one. What we then need is not only conceptual clarity and theoretical thor-
oughness, but a wider epistemological transformation that will enable inter-
sectional research, freely merging previously disciplinary delimitated meth-
odological registers and approaches. Namely, many concepts and categories 
are too elusive for the traditional disciplines, classical theories and Western 
epistemologies, in turn calling for a new, more flexible epistemology.
If previous explorations of the state in political science often resulted 
in an “escape from reality”, as Ian Shapiro (2008) put it, it is still possible 
to formulate an alternative research orientation. To fully understand the 
redistributions and redefinitions of the state, new concepts, methods and 
even research logics are needed. Instead of addressing the key challenges 
and problems of (post)modern statehood, political science has fallen into 
the trap of theoretical and methodological monism in explaining the state. 
According to Shapiro, contemporary political science is thus largely defined 
by method- and theory-driven research, which are safe and attractive 
research orientations, yet also problematic for research itself as they lead to 
predetermination of the research subject itself. 
Thus, with method- and theory-driven research Shapiro does not negate 
the sophisticated use of methods and theories in research, but methodologi-
cal and theoretical monism, which necessarily results in a pre-selection of 
visible or relevant research topics, problems and approaches. These thus 
limit researchers in their perception of political reality – e.g. what is (ir)rel-
evant, what are the problems, what are the possible solutions, what is worth 
researching, who the subjects are. In other words, Shapiro points out that 
method- and theory-driven research automatically leads to the establishment 
of research paradigms (cf. Kuhn, 1962) that not only determine the selec-
tion of problems but the selection of the right methods for their research as 
well. It is a kind of theoretical-methodological self-referentiality that does not 
acknowledge the possible fallacy of the theory and method itself.
The shortcomings of method- and theory-driven research can, accord-
ing to Shapiro, be avoided by a different research orientation – problem-
driven research. It starts by realising that political science must tackle the 
critical problems of (post)modern societies, while in its methodological and 
theoretical approach allows or even demands certain levels of innovation, 

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improvisation and eclecticism, as required by the research into a given prob-
lem. In a way, it is a reaffirmation of Paul Feyerabend’s (1975/1993) epis-
temological and methodological maxim that anything goes if a particular 
problem is to be fully explored. In explaining the political reality, detecting 
and resolving vital challenges, political science must adjust its methods and 
theories to problems, not vice versa. Problem-driven research thus offers 
a radical critique of the canon of authority and authorisation which repro-
duces the hegemonic political theories, while rejecting the idea of   interdisci-
plinarity that implicitly still builds on the separation of individual disciplines 
and methodological registers. It enables and contributes to what Brenner 
describes as the “postdisciplinary” mode of inquiry, “where conceptual 
tools and methodological strategies are adopted with reference to the chal-
lenges of making sense of particular social phenomena rather than on the 
basis of traditional disciplinary divisions of labor” (Brenner, 2004: 23). 
Contradictions of/in the State
While the article principally deals with how the state may be reconcep-
tualised in the 21
st
 century, we shall make a brief detour by highlighting the 
need to explore politics that is constituted beyond or in opposition to the 
state. Our analysis of the state’s de-/reterritorialisation and rescaling should 
paradoxically also include critique of modernity and its political forms, 
including the state. These political forms face an irreversible crisis due to 
their insistence on sovereign territory and the hierarchy of power and peo-
ple. As Bookchin (2007: 93–94) argues, politics and the state are not only 
inherently different, but can be in direct opposition.
5
 As we have shown 
elsewhere (cf. Vodovnik, 2011; Vodovnik, 2012), politics has always had a 
troubled relationship with the state because it has been closer to a philo-
sophical concept of praxis as a free and creative activity in fluid polities. 
Only in our present has politics been integrated into state-making projects 
and strengthened the belief that there is no distinction between the politi-
cal and statist realms, even though the modern state was born exactly as a 
reactionary response to Renaissance humanism. As a result, according to 
Richard Day (2005: 38) the struggle to dismantle community through the 
demutilisation being waged between politics and democracy on one side, 
and state and corporate forms on the other, is indeed the struggle of the 
(post)modern condition. 
5 
We might also argue that political theory often understands politics too literally, especially when we 
note that the word real comes from the Latin word regal or king’s. This means that for a large part of politi-
cal theory only what is ‘royal’ or situated in the ontological field organised by sovereign power is real, while 
counter-hegemonic and autonomous politics are discredited as a trivial pursuit.

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Still, we should reiterate that non-state politics should not be under-
stood as a rupture from the main forms of political subjectivation, but as 
an explication of its original intent and meaning. Political membership 
beyond the state is, according to James C. Scott (2009: 3–4), the regularity 
of history, despite the nation state’s inscription on the political map and 
hence the sedentarisation or, in other words, the administrative, economic 
and cultural standardisation of fluid political entities. The concept of uni-
form, homogeneous state politics emerged as a political or depoliticising 
tool that according to Scott (1998: 32) is a poor abstraction that may be 
compared to the invention of metre, kilogram and other units of measure-
ment, standards and reforms needed for the administrative, economic and 
cultural standardisation of mixed and fluid political entities. We can thus 
understand universal state citizenship as a political equivalent to other 
‘state simplifications’ as the metre that was introduced with a revolutionary 
decree stating: “The centuries-old dream of the masses of only one measure 
has come true! The Revolution has given the people the meter” (ibid.). If the 
universal metre swept away differences in the units that it measures, then 
universal state citizenship swept away differences among a heterogenous 
and plural multitude.
6
 Scott contends the tension between modern citizen-
ship and statecraft should be understood as an “uneasy bargain”, that has 
led to completely new forms of political membership and legibility – i.e. 
the modern nation state and an abstract, un-marked citizen: 
Statecraft proved difficult in these conditions of vernacular measures 
and vernacular resistance to assessment … It is no exaggeration to claim 
that the conquest of illegibility is the most momentous achievement of 
the modern state. This required the standardization of weights and 
measures against determined local resistance. It required elaborate 
censuses and population rolls, cadastral surveys of landed property, 
and, not least, the institution of individual freehold properly adapted 
to cadastral science. The project of legibility allowed the state to “see” the 
human activity of interest to it through the simplified approximation of 
documents, lists, and statistics. (Scott, 2013: 97)
6 
Although the etymological origin of the word citizenship – from civitas, civitatus, to the modern 
citoyen – always linked political membership to smaller and more fluid polities, we still find it difficult to 
understand the relationship between citizenship and the state in societies where the equating of political 
membership with national or even ethnical identity results from a linguistic or semantic similarity in the 
two concepts. We often forget that at the very beginning citizenship was not related to the state but solely 
meant a specific ‘urban relationship’ between rights and duties in the city (Delanty, 2006: 12). Citizenship 
therefore meant political membership of a city. It is thus erroneous to talk only about a “citizen of the state” 
since we can also identify other citizenship types built on different – e.g. territorial or functional – criteria.

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In a short and very rough sketch of his massive, four-volume work De 
l-État (1976–78; On the State), Henry Lefebvre writes that the modern State 
is founded precisely on the “principle of equivalence”, which secures unity, 
identity and political integration. In his pondering on the state in the mod-
ern world, he counters prevailing Marxist theorisations of the state that also 
in the 1970s perceived the state as a form of “heavenly life” in contrast to 
the “earthly life” of civil society, where man “regards other men as means, 
degrades himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers” 
(Marx in Lefebvre, 2009: 75). Lefebvre notes:
Foundations of the modern State: The (forced) equivalence of non-
equivalents: the (forced) equalization of the unequal, the identification 
of the non-identical … The logic of homogenization and identity as the 
logic and strategy of State power. The State as reducer (of diversities, 
autonomies, multiplicities, differences) and as integrator of the so-called 
national whole. (ibid.: 108) 
Needless to say, this question calls for another excursus which, unfor-
tunately, lies beyond the scope of this article. Still, we can briefly illustrate 
the paradox of state politics – i.e. the state as reducer et integrator – that 
should be explored in greater detail elsewhere. In his recapitulation of 
Plato and Aristotle, Rancière (1995) points to the important demarcation 
between the political subjectivities of dēmos and ochlos, which not only 
entails a simple divide between the “power of the people” and the “unifi-
cation of individual turbulences”. For Rancière, dēmos is not and cannot 
become a singular, delimited subject, which explains, contrary to ochlos or 
a multitude of individuals in the illusion of the totality of One, why it is able 
to denaturalise and change the existing. Dēmos, as the “part of those who 
have no part”, is not the sum of social partners or even the totality of all dif-
ferences, like state polity is often understood, but quite the opposite – the 
power of revealing the contingency and imperfection of such counting of 
partners and summing up of differences, since a people is “always more 
and less than what it is”. 
Rancière stresses this idea gives birth to politics, even though politics 
(la politique) is too often understood as referring to problematic systems 
of distribution and legitimation, which we might define as state politics 
and lead to it being simply named the police (la police). As a self-man-
aging practice of democracy, politics only emerges when the assumption 
of intrinsic equality is realised. The “scandal of democracy” is therefore 
that it no longer involves any a priori justification of one’s adequacy 
for political life. If we place this alongside Rancière (2014: 49), democ-
racy is neither a form of society nor a form of government, it is precisely 

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the “ungovernable”.
7
 It follows that, as a practice of democracy, politics 
appears when the assumption of intrinsic equality is realised. We may 
understand politics as one of the rare examples when subjects act as sub-
jects that do not have the rights they are entitled to and hold rights they do 
not have an entitlement to and thus disturb the hegemonic (police) order. 
For Rancière, a declassification of order and political subjectivation is the 
sine qua non of politics – that is, the acknowledgement of the political 
existence of part des sans-part. That is, this is exactly the opposite of the 
“synoptic legibility” (Scott, 2013; Scott, 1998) the state-making projects are 
producing and struggle to maintain. Efforts to make state populations leg-
ible and that would enable the state effective in performing its main func-
tions – e.g. taxation, conscription, monopoly of coercion – have namely 
always called for diverse strategies and policies aimed at sedentising the 
unruly dēmos. 
Thinking from the Outside
Any serious attempt to understand recurring crises of state politics 
should build on the recent academic attention paid to the non-state spaces. 
According to Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016), non-state spaces can be under-
stood as exilic spaces because they are inhabited by communities trying to 
(in)voluntarily escape both state regulation and capitalist accumulation. 
Exilic spaces may be defined as areas in social and economic life where indi-
viduals and groups seek to extricate themselves from capitalist economic 
processes by either territorial escape or attempting to build structures inde-
pendent of capitalist accumulation and social control.
8
 
As we have noted elsewhere (Vodovnik and Grubačić, 2015), we can 
analyse non-state spaces on the “micro-political” level when we talk about 
their “infrapolitical” aspects that provide “much of the cultural and structural 
underpinning of the more visible political action on which our attention has 
generally been focused” (Scott, 1990: 184). We suggest it is necessary to shift 
our attention from the most visible – and thus the most mediatised – aspects 
7 
Hence, in his explanation of democracy, Ranciére follows Plato’s idea of a political regime that is 
not a political regime since it lacks any foundation. The “scandal of democracy” is manifested in the very 
idea that the principle of distinction according to birth, wealth and knowledge has no place in the demo-
cratic world because democracy is always a matter of the declassification of order, the process of political 
subjectivation, and the (re)counting of the political community that is “always more or less than it is”. 
8 
In her account of the occupy movements, Saskia Sassen (2012: 6) emphasises the importance of 
such projects, albeit limited in time and space, due to their ability to overcome “even if temporarily, terri-
tory’s embedded and often deeply undemocratic logics of power, and to redefine the role of citizens, mostly 
weakened and fatigued after decades of growing inequality and injustice Indeed, the occupations have 
revealed to what extent the reality of territory goes beyond its dominant meaning throughout the twentieth 
century, when the term was flattened to denote national sovereign territory”.

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of institutional, state politics to attempts at redefining democracy and politi-
cal membership which may be found in the “immense political terrain … 
between quiescence and revolt” (ibid.: 200). In its “micropolitical” sense, the 
concept of infrapolitics can help highlight the overlooked or at best mar-
ginalised aspects of non-state spaces, which “like infrared rays” are “beyond 
the visible end of the spectrum”. These spaces, communities and practices 
should therefore be understood as “hidden transcripts” since they are “invis-
ible … in large part by design – a tactical choice born of a prudent awareness 
of the balance of power” (ibid.: 201). 
On the “macropolitical” level, the infrapolitics of non-state spaces should 
be understood as a process of producing forms of place-based politics 
within the cracks of the global capitalist system. The infrapolitics of the cap-
italist world economy describe the efforts to break off from the systemic 
processes of the state and capital. It is a process of the (self-)organisation of 
relatively autonomous and only partially incorporated spaces, which then 
leads to the antagonistic relationship that emerges between exilic spaces 
and the hierarchical organisations of the capitalist world economy. It is also 
a predictable response to the enduring logic of exit and capture inscribed 
in the longue durée of historical capitalism.
 
Instead of ruptures and breaks, 
we can see a long-term, large-scale historical process of state making and 
state breaking, of state formation and state de-formation, of an ongoing and 
uneven incorporation and exilic re-appropriation and recovery.
9
 In The Art 
of Not Being Governed, a book that has changed the way we theorise state-
making projects and non-state spaces, Scott develops a provocative thesis: 
Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the 
majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms 
as ‘our living ancestors,’ ‘what we were like before we discovered wet-
rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization.’ On the contrary, I argue 
that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon com-
munities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the 
oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscrip-
tion, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. (Scott, 2009: ix) 
The politics of zones of refuge or, better, exilic spaces, is usually not 
regarded as relevant to our understanding of politics, capitalist development 
and change, which is not surprising as these territories are above all spaces 
of refuge for etceteras of societies. This is an important oversight since exilic 
9 
Moreover, by paying attention to non-state spaces we can detect and explore what Carolyn 
Nordstrom (2000) defines as the “shadows”. For Nordstrom, the “shadow powers” remain largely invisible 
to formal inquiry but enable us to rethink the established theories of state sovereignty and the state system.

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spaces should be seen as part of the economic structuring and restructur-
ing of the capitalist world economy and political power. Exilic spaces are 
always in the making, they are always being (re)made and (de)composed 
through a series of, at first glance, unrelated tactics and strategies: 
Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods, social organiza-
tion, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cul-
tures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at 
arm’s length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobil-
ity, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic 
identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effec-
tively serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from 
springing up among them. (ibid.: x) 
With a Rancièrian reading, we understand these spaces as rare instances 
of politics. With the inscription of the part that has no part (yet), the “commu-
nities of sharing” overcome the “political agoraphobia” (Dupuis-Déri, 2018) 
that defines and underpins modern representative governments.
10
 After all, 
politics arises when a (mis)count – to be more precise, “the gap created by 
the empty freedom of the people between the arithmetical order and the 
geometric order” (Rancière, 2005: 34) – leads to the assertion of equality of 
anyone with anyone else, reminding us that democracy is nothing but “anar-
chic ‘government,’ one based on nothing other than the absence of every 
title to govern” (Rancière, 2014: 41).
The depoliticisation processes that accompany etatist projects must 
nevertheless be understood as complex and multidimensional transfor-
mations which are not necessarily characterised by a lack of the political. 
Depoliticisation is hence not merely non-politics, it is instead anti-politics 
or the marginalisation of politics, especially in the case of a new political 
becoming that is being constituted in response to the trivialisation of pol-
itics in liberal democracies. In this perspective, depoliticisation is seen as 
an inhibition of politics, which rejects political subjectivities and forms of 
agency from its ontological register and merely admits the establishment of 
sovereign power. However, the state can at the same time – and especially 
in the age of neoliberal or neoconservative triumph – offer the public space 
in which people can participate, organise themselves and influence politi-
cal process, even if in limited ways and scope. Although the state is some-
times perceived as Leviathan, current events simply confirm that without 
its implications for curbing the neoliberal agenda the state could become 
10 
As Dupuis-Déri argues, republicanism hinges on an understanding of ‘the people’ as irrational, sus-
ceptible to demagoguery, factious or unable to support the common good.

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even more illegitimate, violent and unfair. In the “post-democratic” world 
(Crouch, 2004), the state can shield from the complete subjection of politics 
to the interests of capital, which is today manifested in the economisation of 
all social structures, spheres and practices. 
Conclusion
In the article, we analysed how the hegemonic theories of state are 
responding to the new political geography and how up-to-date and relevant 
they remain for helping to explain the “new geography of centrality”, one in 
which the state’s place and role have been significantly redefined. The anal-
ysis confirmed our initial thesis that in mainstream political science research 
on the state is still anchored to outdated (geographical) assumptions that 
limit or even define the state and its exercise of power to a geographically 
demarcated and fixed territory. Drawing on recent approaches to space, 
scale and territory, we argued for a heterodox and pluralist methodology 
while researching the state. In other words, we explored how novel (meta)
theoretical, epistemological and methodological pluralism in analysing the 
state enables a much broader and deeper understanding of statehood as a 
process, overcoming the state’s territorial reification.
The critical issue is therefore that any spatial/temporal fix, even if con-
venient for research(ers), in fact prevents change being detected. The spa-
tio-temporal framing in the mainstream of political science that ties state, 
politics and citizenship to bounded and generally less fixed territory has 
become a fait accompli in the field. To evoke Jessop’s musings (2016: 1), 
these postulates about the state return to the research agenda from time to 
time, only to be (re)addressed by a new generation of scholars or another 
epistemic community. Still, the ebbs and flows of scientific interest do not 
suggest the dilemmas and paradoxes these assumptions open up have been 
resolved, but often only that over time they go out of style or the scientific 
community becomes bored with them. 
As evident, the social sciences generally and political science in particu-
lar faced a peculiar epistemological challenge while researching transfor-
mations of statehood in the new millennium. Namely, the state has often 
been either naturalised, analysed as a static and ahistorical entity resistant to 
changes in the environment, or naïvely rejected as a form of political organi-
sation that in the age of globalisation is withering away. In either instance, 
the processes of redefining and redistributing the state, and hence de-/reter-
ritorialising and rescaling it, have gone largely unnoticed. Torn between the 
myopia of etatism and the naturalisation and/or trivialisation of modern 
statehood, political science is forced to recalibrate its theoretical and meth-
odological registers. 

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In a way, we sought to follow Robert Dahl’s (2004) call to reconsider 
political science in the 21
st
 century and its “state of the art”. First and fore-
most, Dahl argued that political science must overcome physics and eco-
nomics envy when reconsidering its own methodologies and epistemolo-
gies. Research ethics and goals should also be reconsidered since we must 
abandon pretentious goals of building a grand theory of politics; mecha-
nistic and econometric explanations (and even predictions) of the political 
in the past have proven not only to be a waste of time but also to hinder 
better understanding of the paradoxes of the political. Dahl also warned 
against the risks of theoretical and methodological monism, which typically 
stems from the belief that the incredible complexity of the field can be over-
come precisely by such self-restraint. Finally, we must reject reductionism in 
understanding of the political or attempts to explain the operation of com-
plex systems with a single factor.
In my view, Dahl’s account of political science is a useful recapitulation 
of the biggest deficiencies of the hegemonic approaches to the state and 
politics. Even more importantly, it can also help us develop new epistemol-
ogies that enable a more complex understanding of the state and, finally, 
a gaze beyond it: in rejecting the economic reductionism and state-centric 
modes of analysis in political science; in warning against the theories of 
(state) politics that systematically erase or trivialise vernacular political sub-
jectivities, practices and traditions; in repudiating theoretical and methodo-
logical monism in exploring the political; and last but not least, in abandon-
ing research approaches that regard the unruliness of the political realm as 
a problem to be resolved and not as a possibility to be seized both academi-
cally and politically.
Overview
The articles in this thematic issue were first presented as papers at 
the (Re)thinking the State in the 21
st
 Century conference organised in 
December 2019 by the Slovenian Political Science Association. Although the 
articles selected and gathered for this issue reflect on the state and stud-
ies of the state from different perspectives and in various contexts, they all 
share the conference’s overall goal of re-examining hegemonic theories of 
the state in the new millennium. 
In “The Political Versus the State? The Relevance of Carl Schmitt’s Concept 
of the Political”, Tihomir Cipek offers a new reading of Carl Schmitt, focus-
ing on his concept of the political and exploring whether it poses a threat to 
the state and the democratic political order. The article clearly comes at the 
right time as it should not only be read as a fresh recapitulation of Schmitt, 
but at least as much as a theoretical deconstruction of the current political 

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regressions and their ideological foundations. In Cipek’s (re)reading of 
Schmitt in a new context, he considers how Schmitt may be used to explain 
the ideology of the new “conservative revolutionaries” in Central Europe. 
His lucid analysis of illiberal democracies in the region shows they seem to 
follow the ideas of Carl Schmitt. First, their idea of the political reduces it to 
the antagonist, friend–enemy dichotomy. Second, they claim that liberal and 
democratic elements of the political order are in an irreconcilable conflict. 
Third, they imagine the state as a body of an ethnically defined nation. 
In “Nativist and Anti-liberal Narratives in Conservative Populist Agenda in 
Central Europe”, Ladislav Cabada ponders nativism as a tool of identity poli-
tics and conservative populism in the region. The author offers a detailed 
theoretical analysis of nativism and inspects the most important expres-
sions and characteristics of this phenomenon. In the second part, the article 
compares conservative populist and/or nativist political actors in six Central 
European countries. The analysis shows that nativism should be understood 
as the main ideological edifice of the neoconservative project, promoting a 
genuinely new way of political mobilisation and collective action. Although 
not so important in the early years of the political and economic transition, 
nativism today informs the conservative populist agenda of right-wing par-
ties in Central Europe and might even entail the core of their politics. 
In “The crisis of 2008 and the rise of the Slovenian consolidation state”, 
Marko Hočevar reflects on the Slovenian state’s transformations since 2008. 
He explores the rise of the debt state in Slovenia after the crisis of 2008 and 
explains the Slovenian state’s transformation into a consolidation state after 
2013, when the consolidation of public finances became the primary objec-
tive of the state’s policies. He detects the internal and external factors which 
influenced these processes. The outcomes of these processes can, inter alia, 
be observed in the form of the de-democratisation of the Slovenian state. 
As Hočevar argues, these processes coincided with the rise of technocratic 
regimes, the limitations on the possibilities of a referendum and the limiting 
of any sort of fiscal democracy following adoption of the ‘golden rule’ in 2013.
In “On Migrants with Migrants: Migrations 5 Years after the European 
Migration ‘Crisis’”, Cirila Toplak and Andrej Kurnik explore theoretical and 
methodological innovations in the area of migration studies, with the mass 
migrations to the European Union in 2015, especially migrations along the 
‘Balkan Route’, as their chronotope of analysis. The authors illustrate the lim-
its state-centred epistemologies impose on migration studies and explore 
new theoretical and methodological approaches to ‘decoding’ the migrant 
subjectivity. The ethnographic research employed offers a new understand-
ing of diverse processes and subjectivities, while the creative theoretical 
synthesis, e.g. combining escape route theory, infrapolitics, heterotopias, 
redefines the position held by border and migration studies. 

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The thematic issue closes with “Climate Crisis: Time to rethink economic 
planning by demystifying capitalism and its market(s)”, in which Blaž 
Vrečko Ilc explores the possibility of democratic economic planning. He 
claims that technological determinism and free-market solutions are insuffi-
cient to properly confront the climate crisis. Because planning in the global 
capitalist system is often undemocratic and oppressive, the article examines 
alternative politico-economic models and possibilities to democratise plan-
ning itself. This means that without radical change in the sphere of produc-
tion and distribution the problem of ecologically sustainable life on Earth 
will continue. Vrečko Ilc also discusses historical examples of alternative 
economic planning, only to highlight their failure and/or success that may 
inform our imaginings of the democratic planning that is so strongly needed 
to radically transform our societies and make them sustainable. 
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