State rescaling in non-western contexts

Abstract

State rescaling is the subject of a continuously growing literature that provides valuable insights into our current understandings of globalization, the spatiality of the capitalist state and urban and regional development. There have been, however, growing concerns about the wider applicability of this literature. Since the bulk of state rescaling studies have focused on North American and European examples, the existing literature is limited in its conceptualization of the diverse and concrete ways in which the spatial and scalar restructuring of capitalist states takes place in different historical, political and social contexts beyond North America and Western Europe. This symposium provides the literature with a valuable opportunity to transcend this limitation. The articles in this collection discuss the processes of state rescaling in non-Western countries such as Japan, Korea, Brazil and Turkey. By providing detailed explanations of state rescaling and the associated politico-economic processes in non-Western countries and regions, they not only show that state-rescaling literature is more widely applicable and meaningful beyond Western politico-economic contexts, but also point out what is missing in the existing corpus. © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited.